You can understand why his press advisers keep shoving him in front of the microphones and cameras. They want the voting public to get to know him. The trouble is they’re getting to know him as ‘that drippy guy’. It’s not his fault. He’s burdened with an inherently drippy demeanour. Image shouldn’t matter, but it’s impossible to blot out.
Rather than making Ed more accessible, his PR team should be doing the opposite. He’s never going to come across as ‘one of us’, so why not actively go in the other direction? Make him unknowably distant.
Here’s an idea: get Ed to seal himself inside a featureless metal cube and insist on conducting all political business from within it. And vow never to be seen in public outside the box. No nerdy face for us to judge, no wet mannerisms to chortle at. Nothing to get a glib critical foothold on. Just cold, blank steel. Ditch the name Ed Miliband and insist on being referred to as ‘CUBE DX-9’ instead.
CUBE DX-9 wouldn’t speak, either. It would communicate exclusively via typewritten messages, each about the length of a fortune cookie prediction, which would come whirring out of a tiny slot on its front. Crucially, these would be brief, gnomic proclamations about sensitive issues that would a) be open to interpretation and b) provoke intense debate. And once any debate had started, CUBE DX-9 would refuse to be drawn into it. CUBE DX-9 never clarifies its position. It simply issues a contentious statement, maintains an enigmatic silence, and trundles away, leaving argument in its wake. Did I mention CUBE DX-9 has wheels? Well it does. It also has an ear-splitting siren that goes off whenever someone tries to touch it.
Admit it. You think it’s a stupid idea. But think again. Picture the first Prime Minister’s Questions in which David Cameron finds himself going up against CUBE DX-9. For one thing, he’d look pretty desperate arguing with a box. Also, the agonising delay between responses from CUBE DX-9 would remove the element of pantomime jousting and turn the whole thing into a tense psychological thriller. Sometimes CUBE DX-9 would fall silent for a full forty-five minutes, emitting a low hum or possibly the odd bit of smoke. Will it issue another statement? Is it broken? What’s it going to say next? Every time you saw it, the surrounding aura of mystery would be irresistible.
Furthermore, since the public would never get to see what’s inside CUBE DX-9, there would also be intense debate over whether Ed Miliband was actually in there or not. Naturally, CUBE DX-9 would simply ignore any inquiries on this subject, or shrug them off by issuing a statement such as ‘CUBE DX-9 CONTENTS NOT YOUR CONCERN’, then firing a laser bolt over the interviewer’s head as a warning not to proceed with that line of questioning.
I’d vote for the sod. And in the aftermath of CUBE DX-9’s inevitable election to the highest office in the land, political leaders worldwide would be clamouring for an inscrutable impersonal shell of their own. Before long there’d be a Chilean mayor who rolls around inside a gigantic onyx egg, and a German chancellor who consists of nothing but a runic symbol flickering on a monitor accompanied by a vaguely menacing drone.
And we’ll all feel much better about our elected masters. Yes we will. Stop lying. We will.
What they talk about when they talk about Muslims
14/02/2011
Tory chairman Baroness Warsi recently complained that Islamophobic chatter had become acceptable at dinner parties. I hate to break it to you, Baroness, but if they’re saying anti-Islamic stuff while you’re sitting at the table, imagine the kind of thing they come out with when you nip off to the loo.
A few weeks later, David Cameron delivered a speech on multiculturalism, and Warsi’s notional dinner-mates doubtless nodded in agreement, even though the very word ‘multiculturalism’ has so many definitions it almost requires translation. It’s not black and white. Which is ironic.
As a result it was possible to draw almost any conclusion from Cameron’s speech, from ‘segregation is unhelpful’ to ‘send ’em back’. Cameron is many things – including an android, probably – but a racist he is not.
So he was doubtless dismayed that his speech went down well with the BNP’s Nick Griffin, who interpreted it as a ‘huge leap for our ideas into the political mainstream’. When I read that, my sense of hope took a huge leap into a shit-filled dustbin.
The speech was also welcomed by Tommy Robinson of the English Defence League – and Stephen Lennon of the English Defence League. Who are both the same person, Robinson being Lennon’s pseudonym. Mr Robinson–Lennon claims he’s opposed only to extremist Muslims, not moderate ones, although how he hopes to tell them apart when he seems unsure of his own name is anyone’s guess.
But then certain elements of the EDL seem confused by names in general. Several of them have been heard chanting ‘Allah, Allah, who the fuck is Allah?’ If they don’t know who the fuck he is, perhaps they ought to read that book they want to ban.
Robinson–Lennon recently appeared on Newsnight, up against Paxman. Not a classic battle of wits, but nonetheless the EDL’s man came out on top: while middle-class viewers may have chortled at Robinson-Lennon’s relative inarticulacy, others may have seen a member of the establishment sneering at a working-class white guy. Admittedly, Paxman sneers at everybody; he can’t catch sight of his own reflection in the back of a spoon without asking who the fuck he thinks he is. But it reinforces the view that the white working classes are marginalised and looked down on by the media.
Not the entire media, mind. Some tabloids do little else but speak up for the white working classes – the Daily Star in particular. Which would be great, if the Daily Star didn’t patronise its readers by repeatedly publishing lies.
Sometimes they’re daft lies. Take the lie about the company behind Grand Theft Auto planning a game called Grand Theft Rothbury, inspired by the Raoul Moat saga. ‘We made no attempt to check the accuracy of the story before publication … We apologise for publishing a mock-up of the game cover, our own comments on the matter and soliciting critical comments from a grieving family member,’ read part of the paper’s subsequent grovelling apology.
Sometimes they’re visual lies. Take the time it Photoshopped a bald scalp and headscarf on to an image of Jade Goody in a wedding dress, to make it look as though she’d posed for the picture during chemotherapy.
Sometimes the lies appear on its front page, in a way that might alter a reader’s view of Muslims. When not furiously recounting whichever grotesquely offensive stunt professional button-pushing irritant Anjem Choudary’s come up with this week – stories which are not lies – it gets worked up over other ‘Muslim outrages’ with little or no basis in fact. Take the story ‘MUSLIM-ONLY PUBLIC LOOS: Council wastes YOUR money on hole-in-the-ground toilets’. Weeks after that appeared, the Star admitted, ‘the loos may be used by non-Muslims and were paid for by the developer’.
And sometimes it doesn’t quite lie, but misrepresents by omission. Take the story on 8 February ‘WE’LL STAND UP AND FIGHT FOR BRITAIN’S BRAVE WAR HEROES’, in which it is reported that ‘The English Defence League is planning a huge march after two Muslim councillors snubbed a British war hero given the George Cross’. It refers to an incident in Birmingham where two Respect party councillors remained seated while more than 100 other politicians gave a soldier a standing ovation. Nowhere in the article does the Star mention that there were many other Muslim councillors (Tory, LibDem and Labour) present at the same event – all of whom did stand and applaud.
In other words, the Daily Star is either grossly irresponsible in its sloppy representation of the facts, or engaging in overt anti-Muslim propaganda.
On the same page was a phone poll: ‘DO YOU AGREE WITH THE EDL POLICIES?’ Ninety-eight per cent of the respondents did. If I read the Star every day, and believed it, I’d join the EDL too.
Not that you have to be a dedicated reader to be exposed to its influence. Just pop into W. H. Smith’s. There they are, those headlines, the steady drip-drip-drip: ‘MUSLIM-ONLY LOOS’ and ‘BBC PUTS MUSLIMS BEFORE YOU’ and ‘MUSLIM SICKOS’ MADDIE KIDNAP
SHOCK’ (No, I haven’t made that one up). Drip drip drip. Bullshit or exaggeration masquerading as fact. And to what aim?
On 9 February the Star ran a front-page headline claiming ‘ENGLISH DEFENCE LEAGUE TO BECOME POLITICAL PARTY’. Even that turned out to be dubious – their leader had merely said ‘we aren’t ruling it out’. Inside, another phone poll asked whether readers would vote for the EDL. Ninety-nine per cent said yes.
Do they believe what they read in the Daily Star?
I believe this is a wonderful country. All of it. The people are inherently decent and fair-minded. All of them. We should resist crude attempts at division, wherever they come from. Because we deserve better. All of us.
A bite of the Apple
28/02/2011
In 2007, I wrote a column entitled ‘I hate Macs’. I call it a column. It was actually an unbroken 900-word Applephobic screed. Macs, I claimed, were ‘glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy-cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work’.
In 2009, I complained again: ‘the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them … I don’t care if every Mac product comes with a magic button on the side that causes it to piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead … I’m not buying one, so shut up and go home.’
The lady doth protest too much. A few weeks later, I buckled and bought an iPhone. And you know what? It felt good. Within minutes of switching it on, sliding those dinky little icons around the screen, I was hooked. This was my gateway drug. Before long I was also toting an iPad. And after that, a MacBook. All the stuff people said about how Macs were just better, about them being a joy to use … it was true, all of it.
They make you feel good, Apple products. The little touches: the rounded corners, the strokeable screens, the satisfying clunk as you fold the MacBook shut – it’s serene. Untroubled. Like being on Valium.
Until, that is, you try to do something Apple doesn’t want you to do. At which point you realise your shiny chum isn’t on your side. It doesn’t even understand sides. Only Apple: always Apple.
Here’s a familiar, mundane scenario: you’ve got an iPhone with loads of music on it. And you’ve got a laptop with a new album on it. You want to put the new album on your phone. But you can’t hook them up and simply drag-and-drop the files like you could with, ooh, almost any other device. Instead, Apple insists you go through iTunes.
Microsoft gets a lot of stick for producing clunky software. But even during the dark days of the animated paperclip, or the infuriating ‘.docx’ Word extension, they never shat out anything as abominable as iTunes – a hideous binary turd that transforms the sparkling world of music and entertainment into a stark, unintuitive spreadsheet.
Plug your old Apple iPhone into your new Apple MacBook for the first time, and because the two machines haven’t been formally introduced, iTunes will babble about ‘syncing’ one with the other. It claims it simply MUST delete everything from the old phone before putting any new stuff on it. Why? It won’t tell you. It’ll just cheerfully ask if you want to proceed, like an upbeat robot butler that can’t understand why you’re crying.
No one uses terms like ‘sync’ in real life. Not even C3PO. If I sync my DVD collection with yours, will I end up with one, two, or no copies of Santa Claus: The Movie? It’s like trying to work out the consequences of time travel, but less fun, and with absolutely no chance of being adapted into a successful screenplay.
Apple’s ‘sync’ bullshit is a deception, which pretends to be making your life easier, when it’s actually all about wresting control from you. If you could freely transfer any file you wanted onto your gadget, Apple might conceivably lose out on a few molecules of gold. So rather than risk that, they’ll choose – every single time – to restrict your options, without so much as blinking.
Sure, you can get around the irritating sync-issue, but doing so requires a degree of faff and brainwork, like solving the famous logic problem about ferrying a load of foxes and chickens across a river without it all ending in feathers and death. And even if you find it easy, it’s a problem Apple don’t want you to solve. They want you to give up and go back to dumbly stroking that shiny screen, pausing intermittently to wipe the drool from your chin.
Apple continually attempts to scrape even more money from anything that might conceivably pass through iTunes’ tight, leathery anus. Take ebooks. Apple’s own iBook reader app may be nauseatingly pretty, but it’s not a patch on Amazon’s Kindle, which, far from being just a standalone machine, is a surprisingly nifty cross-platform ‘cloud’ system that lets you read books on a variety of devices, including the iPhone and iPad. It even remembers what page you were on, regardless of whichever machine you were reading it on last. (It does that by ‘syncing’ – but we’ll forgive it that, because a) it happens seamlessly and b) you never, ever lose any of your purchases.)
Now Apple, typically, are no longer content to let people read Kindle books on their iPhones and iPads without muscling in on some of that money themselves. So they’ve changed their rules, in a bid to force Amazon (and anyone else) to provide in-app purchases for their products. What this dull sentence means in practice is that Apple want a 30 per cent cut each time a Kindle user buys a book from within the iPhone Kindle app.
So 30 per cent less for authors and publishers, and 30 per cent more for the world’s second-largest company. And that’s assuming they’ll let any old book pass through the App store: given their track record, chances are they’ll refuse to process anything they consider objectionable. Still, if they start banning books, never mind. Winnie the Pooh looks great on the iPad.
Every Apple commercial makes a huge play of how user-friendly their devices are. But it’s a superficial friendship. To Apple, you’re nothing. They won’t even give you a power lead long enough to use your phone while it’s on charge, so if it rings you have to crawl around on your hands and knees, like a dog.
So I no longer hate Apple products. In fact I use them every day. But I never feel like I own them. More like I’m renting them from Skynet.
50 ways to Libya lover
07/03/2011
A huge source of frustration for any performing artist is that you can’t choose your fans. And the more popular you get, the more likely it is you’ll attract people you can’t stand. Kurt Cobain so disliked the uncool non-underground types who began showing up at Nirvana gigs after the release of their debut album Bleach that he wrote the song In Bloom, which attacks an unnamed moronic jock type who dares to enjoy Nirvana’s music: ‘He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs,’ goes the chorus. ‘And he likes to sing along, and he likes to shoot his gun – but he knows not what it means.’
Yeah! Take that, you mainstream douchebags! Feeling pretty stupid now, huh?
Well, no. They weren’t. Partly because they knew not what it meant, but largely because Cobain foolishly gave the song a catchy melody, and then compounded this error by including it on an album of other catchy melodies called Nevermind, which became such a massive mainstream success that he never truly lived it down, at least in his own head. And it soon turned out the despised jock fan wasn’t the only one prone to discharging the occasional firearm.
Still, if Cobain was tortured by the presence of the occasional macho numbskull at his gigs, imagine how awful he’d feel if he looked out and saw a member of the Gaddafi dynasty moshing to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Chances are he’d have beaten himself to death with his own guitar right there and then.
But many of the planet’s current pop stars are clearly made of sterner stuff. They’re so unconcerned about the suitability of their fans, they’ll put on a private show for the Gaddafi clan at the drop of a hat. A hat full of money.
Now the blood’s started flowing they’re getting contrite about the whole thing. First Nelly Furtado outed herself, announcing on Twitter that in 2007 she’d been given $1m to perform for the Gaddafis, and was now donating the sum to charity.
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nbsp; Other stars who attended Gaddafi dynasty parties include Mariah Carey, Usher, Lionel Richie, and Jay-Z – who, thanks to the bad publicity, now has 100 problems.
Mr Z’s wife, Beyoncé, reportedly received $2m to perform at a New Year party thrown by Hannibal Gaddafi, but subsequently gave the money to Haiti. ‘Once it became known that the third-party promoter was linked to the Gaddafi family, the decision was made to put that payment to a good cause,’ said her publicist. Fair enough. She probably didn’t realise the Gaddafis were behind the bash, although her husband reportedly attended an identical party at the same venue the previous year – at which, it is claimed, Mariah Carey sang four songs in exchange for $1m. The Gaddafi link was exposed in the press at the time, but only in small-circulation newspapers such as the Sun, so it’s fair to assume Beyoncé’s advisers had no idea where the cash was coming from.
Libya would be a good growth market for Beyoncé, incidentally, as, thanks to the Gaddafi regime, it now contains far more Single Ladies than it used to.
Another famous star who reportedly performed for the Gaddafis is notorious pussy 50 Cent, the crybaby pant-shitting wuss whom I could definitely have in a fight. (Did you know his real name is Fifi Millicent? Don’t tell him I told you, because he’s terribly sensitive about it, and weeps huge cowardly tears out of his gutless baby eyes whenever it’s mentioned.)
Fifi was paid an undisclosed sum to sing and dance like a fey little puppet in front of Mutassim Gaddafi at the 2005 Venice film festival. But while the other stars have been embarrassed by their (possibly unintentional) connection to a despotic regime, Fifi seems to have used his as the inspiration for a startlingly violent video game called 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, released on the PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2009.
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