Label gun to the head.

I’ve tried to develop a rule. A rule about getting angry with people. One that sounds nifty and sensible, but which I find falls over immediately when it comes face to face with a particular group of people. Or my actual moral capacity.

Bankers.

Now, before embarking on my rank banking rant, the real detail of interest here is that, whatever I may think, I evidently feel the need to deploy the phrase ‘group of people’.

Ah, nothing feels better when you’re on your inexplicably high (and presumably wobbly) horse than to herd a group of people together and jab a finger at them repeatedly.

“THERE! THERE they are. THEY. THEM. OVER THERE. LOOK, LOOK AT THEM, all there with their, their… bloody whassnames and their, their… ruddy THINGS. JEER. JEER AT THEM.”

>CONTENTED SIGH<

It’s just so much simpler.

—

Somewhere in the honest light of this, my clever and upright-sounding rule about losing one’s rag with someone clears its throat and meekly says this: that I should, in the heat of disagreement, take care not to label the disagree-ee with my accusations and colourful judgements.

Whuh?
I mean, to me there’s a difference between shouting at someone that they have been acting like something unmentionable, and shouting at someone that they are something unmentionable. Despite the fact that you’ve clearly mentioned it very loudly.
Really?
If you’ve gotten to the stage where you really are actually shouting at someone, then you’ve probably already entered the taped-off room labeled Academic Arguments, when it comes to exactly how you’re framing the tense of your abuse as you pick up the chair.
But it’s a detail of internal perspective that seems important, because it may govern how you or I see and therefore treat those around us.
..And then. JUST when you think you have those around you treated jolly well – with a friendly hello in the baker’s (if you’re in the mood), or an occasional Big Issue purchase (if you haven’t already crossed the street because you didn’t want to break a tenner), or an effusive thankyou to a friend who’s just cooked you a free slap-up meal (after moaning before arriving about having to turn out that night) – along come some bloody, ruddy, depraved, soulless, evil, murdering bankers.

Arrived with the sole purpose of upsetting your nice moral equilibrium. The bastards.

—

Why I’m so hot under the collar about the banking system I have no idea. I can barely work Sage or send the occasional invoice. It’s not like I understand a thing the markets are going on about. And our household and business has fared okay over the last year. I have not a thing to actually complain about.

But really. With so many millions of people across the world in debt up to their receding hairlines because we’ve all been encouraged to keep spending like the dialysis machine will implode if we don’t, the corporate banking sector seems willfully disconnected from the rest of humanity.

Ah. And there. How stealthy is the private human urge to segregate – to create Them and Us. We can so nearly blame The Bankers for segregating themselves. Can’t we? Can’t we?

In a year of calamitous financial cock-ups that bared to all the wildly childish level of responsibility that the current, laxly-regulated global banking culture seems to stimulate, the Clever Chaps At The Top Who We Desperately Need To Retain With Reasonable Incentives – and who incidentally CAUSED the apparent near-collapse of all we pinned our fiscal hopes to – decide to keep paying themselves EXTRA payments on top of their bulging salaries. In the full glare of the media. Of us little people judging them. Jabbing our bony, underfed fingers at them.

They don’t appear to care. Or they really don’t see. Which are sort of the same thing.

Or, I suspect more realistically, none of the people closely involved in this whole tedious drama quite has the courage to challenge things so fundamentally. I’d be nervous. And selfishly so.

I mean, here’s the point: Mercs are like, really comfortable in the back. And nicely soundproofed. You can really feel lulled to slumber in there. I’m not sure I’d want to be woken up. Would you?

—

I found myself ranting on Twitter this morning in the sort of annoying way that ruins your followers’ feeds with endless repetitions of your tedious icon. For the record, here are those tweets:

I’m not in Davos, just to be clear. Much as the banking heads of Earth implored me to come and tell them again how angry they make us all.
Eloquent as my Davos speech would have been, peppered with colourful oaths and gathering purpleness of face, I fear pearls to swine.
If a group of vulgarly well-paid adults with saturated access to 24hour news media can’t sense the need for SOME symbolic gestures…
ONE year. Just ONE year without bonuses. Everyone in banking – one year. The one where people are losing jobs and businesses are folding.
Is it so hard – to give up one year of EXTRA money? Is solidarity or just seemliness incomprehensible to senior banking culture? Apparently.
Use one year’s bonuses across the banking sector to wipe the debts of others. Go on. Try to get your heads around that. Just ONE year.
“We must retain the brightest talent with disproportionately, offensively large additional payments.” Really? Go on, really?
Banks want to attract and retain soullessness, do they? What else would a clear dependency on bonus cash at any cost do to people?
Sack the top tier of bankers. If they can’t function for a humble year – a year now gone already – without bonus, lose them. Why not?

Well, yes – why not? Have a spring clean. Promote from within. Warn the new guys not to break the banking system this time, but let them have a go. A healthy step up for these chaps could still cost way less than the bloated funds pouring through the coffers of some top individuals at the moment, and they might have a few new ideas. Make the generation above sweat a little. That’s capitalism, baby.

I’m an idiot. Which means I not only do not understand these things, I am also far too comfortable with failure. So, y’know – do not take my advice about anything.

But a wise-sounding wit I used to work with once said something to the effect of this: When a task you’re hopeless at gets taken from you, it’s just a relief, isn’t it?

Ah, how I sit in the studio and soberly ponder this every day.

Anyway.

Don’t strike the Banking Bastards from society. Don’t write them off as humans. Invite them back into the group. Coax them back from There to Here. Relabel their foreheads from Them to Us. Then lower the label gun.

Just, for the love of all that’s sensible, make some of them stop banking.

The Trojan white elephant in the room.

It’s getting rapidly to the point where I can’t turn back. There will be no hiding. It will be out there. It will be exposed.

Now, they say that when something giantically obvious but awkward exists between people, their mutual or group instinct to not mention it to eachother is like having an elephant in the room. But I doubt this. I think it’s probably a poor analogy.

I think that even if you and your fellow awkwardees did instinctively swear an unspoken pact to not mention the inexplicable presence of a three-and-a-half metre tall, eight-ton African land mammal in your kitchen diner, as it casually overturned your pine dresser with an inadvertent tusk swing, the direction of your conversation would eventually slide.

I think that your noble English understatement would be somewhat undermined by the fact that your floor’s integrity suddenly would be.

And anyway, I think that the elephant would be too smart to play along. I think it would politely but firmly clear its throat. And prod a trunk at the pile of letters from the WWF asking you how you intend to look after it.

—

It makes me wonder though. If the ancient Trojans had adopted this marvelously oblique and English attitude, would Troy have turned out differently – “What big horse?”. Or is this attitude exactly how Troy was allowed to be finished and put on theatrical release in the first place?

I mean, surely only an unnaturally developed ability to ignore the bleedin’ obvious could have gotten some of the film crew through some days of that film production, screened again lastnight on Channel 5.

You can hear the execs talking about the idea in pre-production meets and all slavering in agreement: “a huge cast of absurdly pretty, famous people, supported by a secondary cast of respected elder voice-over actors, all dressed to the nines in ancient world finery, with a bunch of epic battles and a couple of shots of Brad Pitt’s butt – what’s not perfect? What?”

Yeah. Right. Nothing. Except for the small detail that the whole thing’s a stinking embarrassment of an idea.

Really, it’s a howler. Watch it again sometime. You won’t make it as far as the ruddy horse. We didn’t. It’s clearly a very slow horse.

And what we’ve learned is that the easiest elephants in the room to ignore are clearly the white ones.

—-

Now. You may be wondering why I’m pondering the subject of epic ineptitude.

Well. Glad you ask. And you’re there ahead of me, obviously. Because it won’t be long before I’m quietly rolling out the red carpet to the premier of an epic production of my own.

Inviting the stars along. Gurning smugly at the paps outside. Winking at the reviewers. Straightening the sleek bow tie. Making the lovely first lady of Momo slip on some preposterously expensive evening wear. As if that’s different to usual.

Because I have begun the final, unnerving, dispiriting process of doing the final mixes for The Golden Age of Exploration.

And I’m wondering if it’s possible to hide behind the massive bulk of a white elephant when the rotten cabbages start raining onto the stage.

—

Now, now. I’m not being disingenuous. As I step back in the studio and try to take one more honest look at the canvas, like most artists, I vacillate between thinking I’m looking at a masterpiece and wondering if I’m actually staring blankly at Aphrodite at the waterhole, by that famous Parisian sculptor, Tony Hancock.

It’s neither, of course. I’m exaggerating for comic effect. Really – I do that from time to time. True story. It’s a collection of tunes that are, I suspect, cheekily likable.

But, as someone of a more effortlessly hip demographic might put it with withering efficiency, likeable ≠ credible.

The last time I rolled out the red carpet for a production of mine was August 2001. Just a couple of weeks before 9/11, I happily invited all and sundry down to Cranleigh’s church hall for the launch event of a little ‘space opera’ all about an unexpected terrorist attack on an Earth of the future. Whole thing starts with a massive explosion sound. Friends came. A handful stayed and listened to the whole darned two-and-a-half hours of electronica and drama – a kind of loving cross between Jeff Wayne’s musical version of The War of the Worlds and Blake’s 7. Which, be honest, you secretly think sounds brilliant. And if I’m secretly honest back, I think was kind of groovy. It was also, after four toiling years of my life, essentially a very long bedroom demo, featuring many of my mates in lead roles, and a lot of very inadequate recording techniques, plus a number of shaky moments in the script.

I had a blast, of course. And was crushed because Chaser was basically pointless, of course.

Well, I wasn’t really. But imagine the pressure now, after seven years of prep. Especially given the fact that I’m claiming The Golden Age of Exploration as more than just a worthy creative demo this time, but in fact A Musical Product That Will Actually Be Released For Purchase. All be it via iTunes to a fan base that doesn’t exist beyond the Thinking Juice studio and a single inexplicable but friendly chap in the Czech Republic.

I’ve mixed three tracks so far. Spent most of Friday working on one enormous song near the start of the album that I’m trying to convince myself is not a wildly ill-advised bit of pop melodrama.

Dear me, three tracks in and I’m wondering if I’m wasting my time. Or whether I’ll do what I always do and press on, finish it, invite people and pray they don’t mention the giant white elephant in the room.

Thankfully, most of my close friends are English. Doubt they’ll have the heart to say anything.

Thaw and theodicy.

Fifteen days in, as the snows at last begin to subside across the treacherous, inconvenient winter wonderland of the UK, it’s still hard to accept the fact that Christmas really is over and it’s now 2010. After all the digging out and mucking in and helping hands and freezing feet, it’s the future. We’re here, living in it. Officially.

This week, however, the people most on our minds must surely be those in the Caribbean who have been blasted back to the middle ages. Of all the places to suffer a natural catastrophe of such magnitude, Haiti was perhaps the least prepared in the western hemisphere to cope with Tuesday’s earthquake.

With at least 50,000 people dead as a result of that 30-second 7.0 magnitude shock, horribly close to the centre and surface of Port Au Prince, further millions have been practically displaced around the dense capital.

Think about those figures. That’s like half the people of Bournemouth gone – just gone. And at least three or four times as many people who live in the entire Christchurch, Bournemouth and Poole area made homeless. Imagine every street around you shaken apart like that.

Well, you can’t. Probably. Either because you don’t live in Bournemouth or because you do and all you can think about at the prospect of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hitting the town is that at last the bloody Imax might fall down. Or possibly the BIC, if you’re still holding that grudge.

And I’m certain that you’re unlikely to be reading this from a city with most of its inhabitants living in shanty shacks trembling their way up the surrounding hillsides in the hope that one day millions of jobs will magically appear for everyone who moved there from the deforested, flooded, wrecked economies of the countryside.

So we can’t realistically imagine what’s going on over there, despite all the footage. Bodies piling in the street do not look the same on the telly as they do at the junction of Arnewood and Paisley Roads.

—

It’s been a country of poverty and revolution, of sorts, for centuries.

The island now divided into western Haiti and eastern Dominican Republic was ‘found’ by heroic imperial land-nicker himself Chris Columbus in 1492 – a year in which he seemed to pack an inordinate amount in, given the woeful lack of international travel and broadband speeds at the time – and became a Spanish settlement. Everyone in Haiti today speaks French you’ll notice observantly, however, because the Spanish sort of gave away the mountainous end of the island to the French near the end of the 17th century. Probably lost it in a card game or somesuch over coffee.

Interestingly, it was the first place on Earth, it seems, to have been overthrown by black slaves and to have subsequently abolished slavery. Napoleon’s own brother-in-law couldn’t retake the country and it became fully independent in 1804. Though why being Napoleon’s brother-in-law should be any gauge of military competence is anyone’s guess; Lord knows what some blokes have to do to keep their wives happy. Especially potty, pint-sized despots – they’re bound to attract some high maintenance skirt.

The sad truth is that Haiti seems to have been defined by dictatorship, coups and political instability ever since. And that ALWAYS leads to financial stability and a healthy middle class, right? Especially when there’s American money sewn up in the interests of the country somewhere too.

After some twenty years of military take-overs vying with fledgling democracy on and off, Haiti was famously hit by a particularly severe hurricane season for the island in 2008. Floods killed hundreds. Mudslides from the bare hills and mountains stripped of their meager wood value just slooped into the roads and towns, wrecking infrastructure. The DEC and other overseas aid agency alliances together raised some $1billion-worth of support at the time.

And today they’re launching another appeal. Because today, Haiti is on its knees.

—

Interesting turn of phrase that.

It’s not long before you hear the G-word somewhere in the face of such rampant, apparently very precisely unfair suffering. God. And two and a half centuries ago was no different, with one particular debate about divine purpose and suffering flaring into comedy. With absolutely no reference to Dante.

Rapier French wit, Voltaire – so cuttingly funny the French kicked him out and sent him to live in the more satirically-minded London – lampooned and lambasted Enlightenment-tinged theology of the day in his bawdy tale of Candide, published first in 1759. The absurd Dr Pangloss in this rip-roaring cross between Tom Jones and Private Eye was famously a caricature of Gottfried Leibniz – a right brain-box, polymath and contemporary rival of Newton, who also rather smugly invented the word ‘theodicy’.

Nice, isn’t it? Theodicy.

I imagined it was spelt theodyssey and pictured a glittering, disco gospel supergroup. Google thought I was looking for information on Homer.

Most appropriately of all, perhaps, it doesn’t half sound like theo-idiocy and it’s not to be confused with theodolite which was then an emerging tool of engineering, of sorts. Which is interesting because theodicy concerns itself with divine engineering, of sorts.

Put overly simply, it’s the idea that God – if he is, after all, God – must know what he’s doing and that therefore: “if you think THIS world’s shite, you should see the ones he discarded, mate. Sheesh.”

In other words, as Dr Pangloss keeps saying throughout Voltaire’s biting little book, we are, dear fellows, living in the “best of all possible worlds.”

..It’s an argument from a very different age to ours philosophically, of course. It has, I suspect, rather lost its debatory heat for the average Celebrity Big Brother watcher.

But it still resonates a theme that is, I think, eternal – ie: “God, WTF?!”

—

As I’ve sat and watched the inconsolably hard images from Port Au Prince this week, lost for words, a detached, academic little part of my head has imagined countless people of faith this week trying hard once again to, as Voltaire often put it, ‘let God off the hook’ on this one.

The 9.0-factor Lisbon earthquake and subsequent tsunami of 1755 was the disaster that resonated for him; how could God allow such carnage? And how could posh blokes in Europe straighten their wigs calmly and try to explain away the theological injustice of it?

Interesting then, that so many of the top UK aid agencies, represented by the DEC, are faith-based, like Christian Aid, Cafod or Tearfund.

I don’t know about you, but I wonder whether a little bit of anger about such horror is sort of the point. I wonder if the person who wants to shout at the sky and to prove their concern gets on a plane and goes to pull people out of the rubble and clear away the countless dead and feed the countless hungry and try to find out what human cock-ups made the situation far worse, is actually articulating God.

As perverse as it sounds, while we’re sincerely tackling the intellectual pain of being alive in radio studios and online forums, God may well be out there with his sleeves rolled up, tending to the survivors.

It is perverse. In my head. But something about that idea warms the freezing cold idea of suffering in my heart. ..Which still misses the point if it doesn’t warm all the way to my hands and feet; they are, I suspect God might say, the best tools to articulate love with.

And how many people need that of us today, whatever we believe.