The news as zombie apocalypse

(Andrew Calcutt is away in the sun this week - this is a guest post by Mark Beachill)

“Quick, on Radio 4. The news said there was a zombie apocalypse.”

My girlfriend has a fascination with all things zombie. Myself I'm too squeamish to watch The Walking Dead with her. Had she misheard, imagined?

A quick search on Google News led me to the story of a traffic accident in the USA brought on when a parade(?) of people in zombie costumes mobbed a car and the driver, panicked, knocked over a passer-by.

"No! It was in the UK and it said zombie apocalypse."

Back to Google News. It turned out the railway station announcer in Brighton had bizarrely declared a zombie apocalypse over the tannoy. This was his description of the torrential downpour after several months’ rain fell in the space of an hour or so, flooding the station. Even more bizarrely BBC Radio 4 picked it up for their hourly national news bulletin.

When we get freakish weather nowadays it is not usually zombies that are invoked. More commonly the living are said to be out of control: reckless consumption brings energy use that warms the globe and increases the likelihood of “extreme weather events”.

The threat of ecological and meteorological catastrophe means consumption must be reined in, goes the argument. In less secular times the Biblical flood that put Noah on his ark – with God’s plan to cleanse past sins and start again – might have been invoked. Today it is through is our sins against Gaia through over-consumption that are said bring warning storms. So sure are the BBC, for example, that they now limit air-time for any with an alternative view or even an alternative solution.

But, weirdly enough, perhaps the zombie metaphor is not all too distant from the orthodox explanation. Contemporary zombies are a child of the 1970s, their endless hunger a metaphor for our endless consumption prompted by critiques of mindless consumerism that first emerged in the seventies. It was no coincidence that George Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead, the film that re-launched the zombie, had most of its action set in a shopping mall.

The witty announcer reached for the wrong end of the world scenario and so made us laugh resonating way beyond drenched travellers. And perhaps humour is at least part of what we need to negotiate the many millenarian settings that seem to crowd the imagination today and still carry on – in our “mindless” pursuit of a better life.

Stephen Hero

‘Hi! My name’s Stephen and I am pretty much like your average teenager – except for the last three years now I’ve been battling cancer.’

This is how 19-year-old Stephen Sutton introduced himself on the Just Giving internet page which he set up to raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust (TCT). Sadly, Stephen himself died of bowel cancer in the early hours of 14^th May 2014. Later that day, charitable donations pledged via his site reached £3.6 million – more than the TCT knew what to do with.

Stephen’s mother Jane announced on Facebook that her ‘inspirational’ son ‘had passed away peacefully in his sleep.’

In a Press Association photograph featured in the Daily Mail’s coverage of Stephen’s death, she appears as a strawberry blonde wearing a strawberry-print blouse, half-smiling (her lips have managed the right shape but her eyes are struggling), standing next to her emaciated son.

Not that long to go now. His jaw too big for a frail neck, arms much thinner than the arm cuffs on the hospital crutches he’s using (lightweight walking forearm crutches, approx £50 a pair).

In Stephen Sutton’s eyes at that moment, I think I can see something not much noted: a touch of what might be adolescent anger; just a little bit Liam (LG); echo of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, declaring ‘a pox on both your houses’; in this case, the living and the dead.

To do anything at all in the face of death, while looking down the barrel of the last syringe, surely calls for a do or die attitude; even a touch of the impious attitude of James Joyce’s Stephen Hero, who refused to re-enter the Church despite his mother’s pleading – and she on the point of dying of cancer. Likewise, our new Stephen Hero keeping death waiting for his dominion, must have been something of an act of teenage rebellion.

A mother who survives her son’s death from cancer must be entitled to say whatever she likes about him – or, if she prefers, nothing at all. He will have been her inspiration for as long as she carried him. In the womb, in her arms, toddling through schooldays and holidays all the way to his death bed. Now she will have to carry his not being there to see her grow old.

Stephen’s mother’s grief can hardly be straightforward; its complications could last her a lifetime. But many of those who hardly knew him, or not at all, who’ve rushed to find him ‘inspirational’, seem to have simplified Stephen Sutton to suit themselves.

In their rendition of him, the last few weeks of Stephen’s life were a saintly progress of smiling through adversity; his death, nothing but a course of morphine – letting go, letting go, letting go.

It’s as if they are laying him out in clothes they’ve had the cheek to choose for him; and in the act of finding, defining him so, while acknowledging Stephen as hero, aren't they also pursuing a claim on him, their ticket to today’s Priority Area?

Of course I may be guilty of same. But I simply can’t believe that n-n-n-n-nineteen was ever that simple.

Welcome To WorldVision!

Barack Obama became a drag queen yesterday in a new effort to secure the 2014 WorldVision title.

The United States president appeared as ‘Michelle’ in a heart-felt performance of #Bring Back Our Girls prompted by the abduction of more than 200 female students from a boarding school in north-east Nigeria.

Produced by the White House (rumours that Apple Inc is poised to take over the visionary production company, are completely unfounded), the ‘first lady’ sampled Malala, the award winning women’s education campaigner who first came to public attention when she was shot in the head by the Taliban – and survived.

Michelle/Obama also re-worked some of the best known tunes in American culture, e.g. realising your full potential in the land of equal opportunities, giving these a new twist – pro-women’s education, anti-terrorism – in response to the kidnappings and bombings carried out by militant Islamist band, Boko Haram (rough translation: ‘Western education is forbidden’).

White House Productions are thought to have launched Barack Obama’s alter ego Michelle, in order to re-assert themselves at the top of the WorldVision rankings after their Ukrainian foreign policy number failed to chart successfully.

There have been complaints that the Whites imposed their traditional House style on a supposedly new performer (the word ‘unconscionable’ jarred with the otherwise conversational tone of Michelle’s lyrics); nonetheless the Washington version of #Bring Back Our Girls has met with widespread approval.

Wearing a powder blue top and sitting atop an antique chair with the Stars and Stripes in the background, Michelle put in a deliberately understated performance – in contrast to the Shirley Bassey-style torch song which last night won the Eurovision Song Contest for Austria’s ‘bearded lady’ Conchita Wurst (real name Tom Neuwirth).

Michelle’s #Bring Back Our Girls was restrained even by her own standards: she previously gave an energetic performance of Let’s Move, an anti-obesity campaign which served as the White House white label in advance of yesterday’s official WorldVision release.

In Africa earlier this week, from far up country where Nigeria’s oil wealth does not run to (northern Nigeria is now poorer than it was 50 years ago), the leader of Boko Haram (or perhaps a stand-in) released an hour long video of riffs and raps about selling the kidnapped girls into slavery.  (The heirs of Ronald Reagan would no doubt disown his use of the world famous chorus, let the market decide.)

As a band, Boko Haram is so far removed from the international performance circuit it will do anything to gain precious nanoseconds in the global attention economy. Instead of the pantomime leer of ‘a brown eyed handsome man’ singing ‘Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl’, or the mythical depiction of the Rape of the Sabine Women, this group is actually acting out everyone’s worst nightmares. Not only piling on the hyperbole but also doing rhetoric for real. (Imagine Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan and The Dead Kennedys all rolled into one).

Members of Boko Haram such as the gangly youth photographed in custody wearing an Arsenal football top, are acting out of desperation. As if their lives depended on it; not least because the West has created a media-centric way of life which does indeed depend on being uploaded, becoming part of the performance circuit, not being left to rot in the dark, dungeon of the invisible, unheard of, the non-existent.

Being in the medium by any means necessary – that is the message of the current, Western-led WorldVision rendered by everyone who is anyone – from Lady Gaga to Michelle/Obama and even Conchita Wurst (Tom Neurwith currently enjoying his best 15 minutes).

The appalling irony is that heartless Boko Haram has already taken this message to heart.

Man's Inhumanity To Man: towards a more humane explanation

‘A unique concept for senior living in beautiful surroundings’. This is how the Old Deanery residential care home describes itself on its website. It’s a bit rich, coming from the Essex home where ‘care’ workers were filmed abusing residents. Undercover footage of their heartless actions featured prominently in the BBC Panorama programme on residential care in the UK, broadcast on Wednesday 30 April 2014.

Cue national scandal – and not for the first time. After successive revelations over the past few years, the horror, the horror of residential care has become a dog bites man story. That is, the latest revelation that care workers are slapping elderly residents and calling them bitches, is hardly more surprising than a dog bite on the postman’s bum.

I am not saying – not for a nanosecond – that ‘elder abuse’ is on the same level as the postie’s posterior. I am saying that since we already know it goes on, also that the goings-on are more than isolated incidents, discovery of a further, furtive episode is no grounds for sounding like Cilla Black on Surprise Surprise! Moreover, feigning surprise is as unhelpful as the official response – the Department of Health announcing plans to test workers on how much they care, as if those capable of violence towards the elderly are not also capable of acting, playing the role expected of them, for the duration of the test.

Some may find my comments callous. I disagree. It seems to me that for those not immediately involved – whose relatives have not been abused in residential care homes, who have no direct role in the immediate prevention of abusive behaviour, the first line in a truly humane response is NOT to be caught up in the rush to say how disgusted we are. Instead we should be looking around for an explanation. It is not for us to give vent to our emotions; moreover, the whole Shock! Horror! routine, on the part of those who have no business performing it, can only obstruct the level of circumspection which must be arrived at in order to address the wider problem.

So what is it about current circumstances which prompts some people working in care homes to treat other people as if they are non-people – like beasts to be prodded and pushed around? Stock responses to this searching question include: low-paid workers are not paid enough (their low pay is effectively an insult which some of them pass on to the people in their care); and, bearing down on care workers, time pressures prevent adequate care and create tensions which cannot be taken care of, so that some care workers end up taking it out on the people they are meant to be caring for.  

There is something to be said for both these observations. On the other hand, care work never has been highly paid; and throughout history it has often been performed in straitened circumstances – seemingly without recourse to the level of abusive behaviour which, in its frequency and intensity, appears to be a distinctly recent phenomenon. Hence, if such behaviour is indeed increasing and increasingly virulent, it can only be accounted for by reference to something – something peculiar, something different – in the way we live now.

Could it be that some people are now treating other people as non-people because, according to current definitions, those other people hardly qualify as people, and the task of looking after them is not something that any proper person should be seen doing? From this perspective, people, i.e. ‘care workers’, who are paid to look after persons who do not qualify as people, i.e. elderly care home residents, are also being called upon to destroy or at least negate their own personhood, as currently defined, throughout their entire time at work. In which case, every hour spent doing care work, is also an hour of being an un-person ‘caring’ for non-persons; with predictable results.

But surely only a Nazi nutcase would take the demented position that those suffering from dementia do not count as human beings? Unfortunately, something akin to this position is not such a rarity. While ‘master race’ eugenics have been consigned to the nut-house of history, the cultural equivalent of eugenics now occupies centre stage.  The dominant culture of the day is narcissistic – we have to keep looking at ourselves; and heavily aestheticised – to participate, you have to be good-looking enough to be looked at. Moreover, if you fail on either of these counts, under present conditions there is little or no justification for your existence.

However sketchy, this outline at least draws on how our sense of who we are and what we should be doing, has changed considerably in recent years. We have only recently arrived at a version of the self which is defined by the selfie. According to the current definition of selfhood, I am only myself as and when I am doing something which I would like to see photographed and uploaded as a selfie; on all other occasions I am something less than myself, not a real person under the terms of the current definition.

There is clearly no place for washing old men and cleaning old ladies according to the selfie definition of selfhood; although there may be a place for me (and my narcissistic sense of selfhood) next to the old codgers when they are photographed trying to blow out the candles, preferably a hundred of them, on their birthday cakes.

Seen in this light, a care worker slapping an elderly woman is the barbaric realisation of today’s culture of narcissism. The terrible irony is that being inhuman to the elderly conforms to the emerging definition of what it means to be human: manifesto ergo sum – I show myself, I upload myself; therefore I am.   

It is fitting, then, that the latest residential care scandal involves a care home in Braintree, Essex, better known as the home base of the reality tv show, The Only Way Is Essex (TOWIE). In TOWIE, a cast of photogenic people play themselves in a series of semi-scripted scenes. Of course everyone knows that ‘reality tv’ is largely artificial. But no more so than our real lives are supposed to be, according to the current definition of what it means to be human.

On a day-to-day basis, if you do not do anything which is up-loadable, which is comparable and compatible with the kind of actions and facial expressions on show in shows such as TOWIE, then, according to today’s definition, you are not living the life of a human being; you have failed to meet the minimum requirements of being human; you are not so very much more than a piece of meat.

Of course this is a grossly fetishised interpretation of our common humanity; there is no room for the terrible mess of contradictions that we really are, which being human really is. In particular, it cannot encompass the continuous contradiction of growing old and feeble, of slipping inexorably away from what we were in our prime, yet not going gently into that good night (pace Dylan Thomas, whose 100 candles would have been lit this October).

The fetish deals only in icons and their antithesis: the iconic version of self – the selfie, versus that which prevents me from living in the iconic world of selfies, e.g. my job cleaning up after the elderly. Ironically, this is the iconography which the Old Deanery website is still trying to ingratiate itself with (‘a unique concept for senior living in beautiful surroundings’). In a further irony, even the Shock! Horror! response to elder abuse accords with the flattening out of our contradictory humanity into a set of up-loadable icons. Here the horrified response becomes the inverted image of the horrifying events which prompted it; in their current appearance, both of them are equally one-dimensional.

More disclaimers: I am not claiming that TOWIE made them do it; rather that TOWIE reflects a culture disposed towards a particularly narrow, fetishised definition of humanity. I am not absolving the guilty parties of individual responsibility for their actions. Again, I am trying to account for the disposition to behave in this way, which is not the same thing as explaining why some people give in to this disposition while most others succeed in resisting it.

For myself, as someone trying to live by a spirit of inquiry rather than the culture of narcissism, I see it as my responsibility to arrive at a more humane description of the current, historically specific iteration of man’s inhumanity to man.

Pope's Wedding

An earthy man with jumbo, Dumbo ears. Even as he raises the unleavened bread for it to become God incarnate, the body of Christ, it is not hard to imagine him at table – enjoying his food; also at stool afterwards – with similar satisfaction.

Pope Francis is performing a miracle – bread into body. Don’t be surprised: he does it all the time. Another one will be along in minute – wine into blood; and here are two he prepared earlier – the dead popes (John Paul II and John XXIII) which he transformed into saints before going on to celebrate mass.

Yes, it is easy to reveal the pope and his retinue for what they partly are: men with feet of clay and an appetite for repairing the sullied reputation of the ‘holy’ Church, host to all their privileges.

And then there is that gesture, performed by popes and priests alike, held throughout the process of consecration except when the celebrant is required to fiddle with bits of bodily bread and the carafe of bloody wine.

They all do it – this gesture; and no one else is allowed to. Elbows tucked in; hands raised to shoulder height, held sideways on; palms open – facing each other.

In the space between the celebrant’s two palms – about the length of his forearm, there is room for all the men and women in the world. With all of us included in this space, there is God – in the instant. There is God, the moment all humanity is here.

Then again, not. Nothing but a rhetorical posture which grossly distorts the universal relation between human beings – you and me and anyone who reads this and everyone who never does, never did, never will. But by trying and even by failing to formulate this relation in the prescribed gesture of a designated individual, at least the relation itself is acknowledged.

It’s not heaven – we must know that; but surely better than the interpersonal purgatory in which nothing exceeds networking.

Two months before the World Cup opens in Brazil (and three months earlier and four months before that), an excess of violence. In Rio, what else would they do but riot? N.B. In the relation outlined above, ‘they’ is really some of us. Denied entry to the forthcoming festival of futebol; pacified – occupied – by military police presence. Meanwhile the Catholic mass – the holdall – is simply not big enough to hold them all, all the time.

Of course we always knew as much: that is why football in the first place, and why it matters more than mortal life.

One night in Rio, a few blocks from the Maracana, a man hurls a long wooden pole at police lines, his body a perfect arc of strength, movement, completion. But Robocop is a long way off; the missile will fall far short. Between its trajectory and the line of police, a middle aged woman walks unperturbed, carrying her shopping.

The woman is solid, earthy: she might be the pope’s sister…….or his wife.

XXXXX XXXXX Has Left The Club

Forlorn, fatalistic, farewell. Just the one hand raised – splayed fingers, flat palm facing camera – says all of these. A gallery of many, further images shows him variously driven, distraught, rueful, resourceful, far-sighted, near-sighted.

Clear blue eyes surely clouded with regret? Doesn’t show; you wouldn’t know. No mean face – Glasgow-born; leafy suburb – labour aristocracy. Built to take hard knocks and stay in shape (composure’s for keeping not losing). Regular features; teeth now more regular than they ought to be, going by early photos from playing days. Winning smile – that’s a laugh – may always have lacked conviction; or this may be reading history backwards.

Was there a moment when you lost them; more accurately, when you lost yourself and couldn’t keep hold of the squad? I know nothing of your sort of dressing room. Showers and towels and all kinds of shenanigans back in the 1970s – stock pictures are all I’ve got to go on. On stage I know it can happen in the space of a drum beat, all because you didn’t leave enough space between one beat and the next. But even the instant – the moment of failure – is not simply instantaneous. Ever the before and after: continuously unfolding; never predetermined.

None of them pre-set, a series of defeats beat David Moyes, former Manchester United manager as of 8.30am Tues 22 April 2014. 

The Magician's Moustache

David Axelrod’s moustache is much the same as Peter Mandelson’s, as worn by ‘Mandy’ in the pre-New Labour days when he was trying and failing to turn Neil Kinnock into the stuff of legend.

Axelrod, the communications strategist who helped Barack Obama win two US presidential elections, has just signed a consultancy contract with current UK Labour leader Ed Miliband – a boyish figure who hardly seems old enough to grow a moustache.

Mandelson, you may recall, was Tony Blair’s secret weapon in his successful bid for the Labour leadership in 1994. Mandy disguised himself by shaving off his moustache and going by the name ‘Bobby’. Re-re-named ‘the Prince of Darkness’, he led New Labour’s team of spin doctors in the run-up to the 1997 general election landslide in which he himself was elected MP for Hartlepool; he went on to be a controversial cabinet minister and European commissioner.

Although Axelrod is the man most closely associated with Obama’s successive election victories, even his moustache bristles with the stuff that sloughs off successful candidates. In Blair and especially in Obama, the electorate saw and identified with an ethereal quality which both connects with the world and leaves worldliness behind. Exactly the kind of contradictory magic which a moustache is made to dispel; as Marcel Duchamp must have known when he drew one on the Mona Lisa.

Not the Mother of God, but (damaged) God himself: in post-ideological politics, the electorate consecrates its favoured candidate, who is both put on a pedestal and prepared for crucifixion later. The reason for this is straightforward: without a meaningful battle of substantial ideas, there is no other way for politics to rise above horse trading.

The real mystery is the role of men with moustaches. How do they fit in to a quasi-religious experience? Perhaps part of their achievement is to keep all incoming out of the way, so that nothing need impede the moment of transcendence which is variously described as Hope, Change or Social Justice. Acting as feet of clay they also drain their candidate of responsibility, leaving him gravity-free to exist as proto-holy spirit.

Without his man of the moustache, Obama could never have seemed so clean shaven; would not have been deemed acceptable to so many white voters.

Will Axelrod now enable Miliband to become equally magical – who knows?