(First published on Kiltr Mar 2015)
Writing a blog piece isn’t the same as writing anything else for me, as I guess it is for many others but for wholly different reasons. It’s the only place I allow myself just to write. And in every other area of life, I have to do far too much writing which is prescriptive in nature, so it’s a joy, the cathartic release I always imagined it should be, just to write.
So, I will have gathered a heap of notes, paper and digital, aids to a failing memory and mostly worked up as cognition exercises, around a theme or themes, and then I write. And I go tangential and I ramble sometimes but I think I get to the point, evidenced and worked through.
Its just about the only personal interaction with social media I do. The feeding frenzy of Twitter, the potential for completely unnecessary impact on a condition which even neurologists without appropriate specialities don’t, wouldn’t try to, understand fully is highly unlikely to be given much consideration by many in the overwhelmingly self propitiating impulse of 140 characters or less, so is best just avoided. It’s been over five years now since the creeping realisation that any personal connectivity positives of Facebook were far outweighed by the algorithmic data harvesting, ad targetting negatives, turned me away from its nefarious charms, or lack thereof, too.
If we’ve learned nothing else from the recent referenda and election cycles on either side of the Atlantic, if we didn’t know before, it’s that the internet, and in particular social media, is not the democratising space it once held so much promise to be. The curation of personality, of a life, that is a Facebook profile, is at best a one step remove, a parallel reality to the physical, actual world we all exist in. Likewise, so often, the restricted word count of Twitter doesn’t lead to purported thoughtful (sic), summarised, succinct expression or debate. It spirals downwards in ever reductive reasoning, end of, period, as it might say. They all, social media networks, rely on bubbles, depend on tribalism and easily corralled opinion curves.
It’s not that I don’t understand the mediums or their benefits. I work with them and produce metrics and tangible results for our customers @sa4creative every day. Our clients and the people with epilepsy, who depend on the revenue we raise, rely on that. I just know they, social media fora, or the manner in which they have encouraged people to communicate (not the act of communication itself), are highly unlikely to hold the key to our communication issues as a species, or to our media issues as a culture.
I’m not saying blogging necessarily does either. But at least it encourages a fuller form and range of reasoning. There is no overarching, standardising, accepted format, no overall normalisation process of acceptable behaviours. It encourages a broader base of thought, a freer range of expression. That’s a good thing, surely.
With all of that said and me taking my time, as ever, about saying it, kind of proving its own point, I wanted to make a wee addendum to my ‘The President’s Brain Isn’t Missing Pt1’ post. It’s an interstitial addendum, not Pt2.
You see, I’m just as incensed, just as fearful, just as fucking angry as the next person as to how the world appears to be progressing and it’s recent acceleration towards the abyss. If 2050 was revised to 2018, what are we looking at now? The apex predators in the landscape of fear we inhabit will only grow more bold as resources dwindle further and their behaviour becomes more normalised. A daily part of Whitehouse briefings now seems to be to validate and extend their influence.
But attending a single march or protest now, with all the attendant impacts, would still find me clustering in related seizures weeks later. It would be detrimental to my ongoing ability to support and provide emergency assistance to some of the most vulnerable people in our communities, to run the company, organise the non-profit arm, be the main marketing and revenue generating force in the subsidiary arms, to make sure it can continue to provide a safety net when before there was none. So I don’t protest, even though every fibre of my being wants to express that same rage, that same howl of injustice.
I vowed to myself, on returning to Kiltr, I wouldn’t be reactive to events or opinions, there was too much at stake. I would try to be measured in all things and write what I was going to write anyway. If for nothing else, because I had gathered way too many notes in my absence. My exercises in cognition didn’t, couldn’t stop, they helped far too much.
It’s also dangerous and unwise for anyone with Frontal Lobe Epilepsy (I’d say there should probably be a consideration of it for anyone who is neurodivergent at all too), particularly where it is not responsive to medication and careful preventative management of GABA levels according to impacts is the only way to ensure clustering towards the higher ends of seizure counts does not occur, to spend too much time reacting emotionally to any situation, keeping synaptic responses, electrical activity in the Frontal Lobe, ‘the seat of emotions’. So I try not to act with too much anger, abhorrence, fear, anxiety, though I feel them all, at what were the telegraphed actions, new hallmarks of the fledgling American regime (how are all those folks, centrist or soft left, thinking now who urged caution and said ‘It’ll be different after the election, he’ll calm down, be more presidential, give him a chance!’?) or Westminster’s apparently choreographed ineptitude over the whole Brexit farrago, life, the universe and everything.
Because of all this, I try to be as measured as I can whilst still saying what I think or feel, I know it doesn’t make for good, bite size reposts on other social media, but, you know, I kind of covered that earlier. That’s why my two posts about the Trump administration have been about undoing neurolinguistic programming as a reaction to it and the nefarious connections of its philosophical base. And of course, this last is the main reason why I set out to write this addendum.
I am utterly convinced that the new regime in the US is absolutely counting onand has allowed in its planning and strategy for ‘protest fatigue’, on the streets and in networks around the world. How quickly did our news cycles and feeds, our social media timelines move on from indignation over the ongoing refugee crisis on Europe’s shores? How many people won’t say it loud but act like Aylan Kurdi is ‘old news’ after declaring ‘not in my name’? When his little discarded body should still remain as potent a symbol, a reminder of our failings as human beings, as it ever was until there are no more circumstances which could allow the same to happen again; his family should not regret sharing his death with the world, it was FOR something! It was for every death we don't get to hear about, isn't all over every news feed, as much as it was for Aylan's. How many people subscribe to ‘Charlie Hebdo’, can genuinely still say ‘Je suis Charlie’? How many virtue signals have come undone, passed through the dying of the light?
That nature of social media I spoke about earlier, hitched to the pace of communications, to technology, the news cycle and consumption of information, like all consumerism, always wanting ‘next’ and ‘more’, allows this to happen. Instead of overwhelming guilt when people realise how they’ve been manipulated, moved on, nothing to see here, a cognitive dissonance translates it into a fatigue which can only be assuaged by ‘next, more’.
So, instead of raging about the ‘Fanta-faced falangist fuck-puppy’, much as I admired the translation of anger into alliteration and while the old post punk in me couldn’t help but also admire the lyrically inspired twist of the protest sign which read 'God save the Queen from the fascist tangerine!', and many others besides, the avowed, inveterate republican in me couldn’t bring myself to sign a petition worded the way the main UK anti-Trump one was; do the noises coming from the Donald’s Maggie’s government sound like, even if it is debated in parliament, it will result in a cancellation of any state visit? What was the end-product of the last debate on banning the then odious candidate from entering the UK? We can't, just in case he becomes President was about the long and short of it.
We can 'rest easier' in Scotland knowing that our First Minister, acting swiftly, dutifully and rightfully, has made it clear there will be no such thing as a Trump state visit in this country as long as ‘the ban’ remains in place, as it should be. Beyond these things, further to these considerations and hand wringing, I found myself so hyper-aware of the decades long undermining of how the debate is framed and the devaluing of its means of expression, I was almost at a loss. Thankfully, Kiltr is here and I tried to write.
Perhaps lost somewhere in the words of before, when I pointed out the situation regarding Steve Bannon and the US National Security Council, which facilitated the enactment of the Executive Order on immigration, was the fact I considered it overall far more dangerous than the ‘Muslim ban’ as a single act, reprehensible and more direct to act against though that is. This was 'just' a test, a pushing at boundaries and for the regime it was an unmitigated success. I have written far too much here for what was supposed to be a short addendum but Jake Fuentes has covered the implications, what it may have been a test for and the false catharsis of protest, more succinctly than I could.
Now, George Orwell was absolutely spot on about the general slipperiness of both actual and defining fascism as a term, as well as in summarising aptly how successive UK governments or ‘establishments’ have become most adept at further greasing that pole when they have deemed expediency required it. To me, as I tried to point out in my ‘President’s Brain’ piece, the manner in which our current, increasingly further right-wing, UK government has pursued the process of first the campaign, then the vote and now the approach to negotiation and triggering of Article 50, in the Brexit process, is a similar pushing at those boundaries of acceptability Jake Fuentes describes.
History, political science, sociology, cultural anthropology, have all taught us a distilled lesson. It was one raised amid much furore back in 2007, by Naomi Wolf, in relation to the George Bush administration, in 'The End of America:Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot', which saw the early 2000's as being parallel to the early twentieth century and the rise of fascism then. It is derived from the study of the evolution of fascism throughout the ages and can be broken down into a relatively simple formula which can be ‘reverse engineered’, can be seen to apply to the institution or development of fascist regimes throughout time and geographical space. There are ten simple points to it. They have been expressed or re-interpreted differently by various commentators before and after Wolf, but I’m going to give them here in a re-postable form, a little something I knocked up earlier with double sided sticky tape and fuzzy felt.
You can decide for yourself if or how you think the check list is looking for the UK or US, or any other state for that matter, and how far along any are on the road to fascism. Assessment isn’t, of course, an exact process and interpretation is subjective. It is largely indisputable though that fascism follows a universal pattern. It has been the same in Bosnia, Germany, Rwanda, Argentina, the list goes on; why would it be different here?
It depends on that. It depends on the arrogance and complacency of ‘It can’t happen here!’, ‘It wont get that bad!’, and in its more contemporary form it has more tools to distract you into believing those things. It requires our insistent denial and the impotence of social media protest. If we cannot acknowledge its potential in ourselves, in our countries, our communities, we become complicit in it's possibility, helping it become probability. So, in acknowledging the complacencies of history, in saying at the very least, ‘Maybe it could happen here!’, how many can you check off on the list? (just off-hand, then if it worries you, do some more research and see how much more it worries you, no matter how well informed you are, vigilance is necessary when the wolves prowl!):
Maybe they don’t ‘self-identify’ as fascists, Ur-Fascists, Nazis, neo-nazis, white supremacists, or as Aziz Aansari puts it, 'lower case kkk'. Maybe it hides under the guise of alt anything it likes, or Neo-Eurasianism, a Fourth Political Theory, which even tries to say it denounces the failings of fascism, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck? Finding a need to end on a positive note when so much feels the exact opposite, I’ve found myself in recent weeks referring again and again to the recent words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:
‘Now is the time to counter lies with facts, repeatedly and unflaggingly, while also proclaiming the greater truths: of our equal humanity, of decency, of compassion. Every precious ideal must be reiterated, every obvious argument made, because an ugly idea left unchallenged begins to turn the colour of normal. It doesn’t have to be like this.’
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