Two in a week. In fact in four days. Just me? Or is the country groaning under the weight of tons of flimsy umbrellas? Two. TWO! From charities. One fighting diabetes, the greatest threat to us all. The other for 'the children' of 'Africa' the most put upon people on the face of the earth. So I smelled a rat, and got a score of one out of two rats detected.
Well, what would you think when the second little white sausage of guilt appeared on the door mat, and upon unwrapping revealed a small, paper-thin made in china umbrella, of the type that would be crushed by any casual raindrop bent on spoiling an April day. Worth 50p? Tops. Suggested donation to 'Feed My People'? £15. Yeah, feed away guys. My people is exactly right. If you wish to banish all thoughts of potential dishonesty then get a less freudian slippy handle. Pay my family, I think it is with the Stewarts, David and Kent, father and son, the shadowy money grubbers behind Feed My People, at least according to the recent Charity Commission investigation into the affairs of this high minded free restaurant.
I found out a number of interesting bubble bursting details when I googled that ambiguously charitable name printed on the heart strings torpedo. I found a US 'site' consisting of some pictures and a side bar of links all of which led to 'page not found', clearly an ally in their good work. I followed the UK web address on the package to find another site full of pictures of smiling black faces. And no details of anything at all. I even rang their direct 0870 number last night but only got an indirect nightwatchman on a paid answering service. The Google list turned up several stories which led me to understand that I am not the first person to find them difficult to speak to.
So perhaps this is what Google is really for. Listen up, all you owners of letterboxes and any tendency towards uncritical charitable impulses, but not so much that you send off money without a minimal search for confirmation about a world wide charity you've never heard of.
Feed My People. Under investigation. Frequently complained of. Secretive, unaccountable. On first reading of their brochure I was convinced that they were bogus. So badly written and unspecific, so manipulative that it seemed indistinguishable from a con trick. What else? It struck me as unscrupulous, cynical, deceitful, manipulative beyond the usual code of charitable begging.
Suddenly I had an idea. I could use my website to write tearfully about children in 'Africa' huddling under trees, clustered orphans in ditches, their little tear stained faces turned upwards towards the merciless sun. Send me money, I too am sorry for people in all sorts of places. I will send it on to them. Honest.
Where in Africa, Kent? What have you ever done for them? No details, no testimonials, no references. And no mention of your religious purposes. None. Did you buy them Bibles? No pictures of that. Or of any food being given. Just bags of flour somewhere. Nor any mention of how your father was caught paying your mother a six figure sum to do FMP's own PR.
What a nasty exploitation of Third World children. I've had fliers through the door asking for new shoes and perfume, allegedly for the poor people of eastern Europe, but this affronts me in a quite different way, on a wholly different scale. Seems that these charities do not write their own blurbs necessarily but they must commission them and then approve them at some point. I've been offered lucky heather in car parks and tube stations, I've been asked for a fiver for a cup of tea. I've been asked "Wharrazuurra-burglaburgaly-arubaflaazzgg bus fare". I felt free to refuse, and did. But this is so contemptible. Vague, mawkish, self serving. Diabetics I feel some sympathy for but they have a health service out there for them. Pity the poor children of Africa with only this shower to look after them, this lot who can buy umbrellas with some other sucker's contribution then send it to me. What contemptible nonsense.
And I'm going to take both umbrellas to a charity shop. Where they might actually do some good. Kent Stewart, mahatma and world soul, I nominate you as charitable in name only.
Guys, guys, guys. Let's get this straight before you start. I have no idea what Stevie Wonder's parents' names are. Good luck with the homework/quiz/assignment. Sorry I can't help.
Update: the above disclaimer has now risen to No 2 out of 5,290,000 chez Google. Fame. Odd, because the the abstract even says I don't know the answer. And still they click.
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So Leo Sayer is No 1 in our super duper consumer survey we fondly call the Pop Charts. I haven't heard the remix and I don't remember the original. Which puts me in a small club, judging by the amount of radio play/bigness of national readoption of permy 70s icon that all the papers have been talking about for the last five days or so.
Leo has a small place in my heart, and membership of another very exclusive club, as one of only two people ever to have put Carlisle into a pop song. We all know about the glamorous nature of American placenames and how silly English equivalents would sound - "If you're going to Blandford Forum..." "Show me the way to Milford Haven/I've been squawking like a raven..." etc etc - but as a teenager with regional sensitivities I felt Carlisle was under-represented in the canon of folk-rock-pop. I took this as a personal slight and was not prepared to accept that it was because 'Carlisle' didn't really rhyme with anything. Writers of superior skill would not find the task beyond them, I thought. And Leo came up with the goods.
I'd love to run a competition for who the other one is but what with the web and Google and so forth that would be about as much fun as looking for the names of Stevie Wonder's parents. So I'll tell you. Morrissey. Just shows you how the world is made up of tiny perspectives and miniscule sensitivities. I thnk the entire blogosphere (no link) is ample confirmation of that.
Incidentally I now see from the parent's eye view that this feeling of being left out of the media can be acquired at an early age. My daughter, when aged about seven, heard the word 'Peckham' on a television report. "Hah!" she crowed. "At last we get a mention!" She turned and smiled at me. I beamed back. Somehow I didn't have the heart to tell her it was part of a report on a triple shooting and an increase in violent crime.
Much will be written about Dick Cheney's inability to point a gun in the right direction. Vice Presidents, quails, Quayles and failure to shoot the right people will be used for years as premises for a generation of radio jokes. Spiro Agnew, Nixon's (first) VP, only used golf balls to hit members of the public (13-02-1971). If ever Mr Cheney wanted proof of his hard line credentials then here it is. My question is whether Mr Whittington, the hapless collector of Mr Cheney's friendliness of fire, will stop shooting tiny birds now that he knows a little of what it feels like. Or whether he will continue to blast away in a classic illustration of right wing avoidance of universal principles.
10 a.m. yesterday. A ring on the doorbell. Who could it be? The man to read the meters? No, I sent him away not three weeks ago, telling him, truly, that the way to the cupboard under the stairs was blocked. A jolly Geordie in a white coat selling fish? Perhaps. It has been known. Could be Jehovah's Witnesses, but they generally come on Saturdays, which means they probably all have jobs. Like attending Jehovah's Identity Parades. Or is it that they expect me to have a job and they think that they're more likely to find me in then, all ears? How come the JWs haven't figured out, like all those people who ring me during the day with “Hello Mr Preene, it’s just a quick courtesy call, Mr Preene, to talk about your account, Mr Preene...” that ringing people up is a better way of getting their attention than randomly knocking on their doors at 10 a.m. on Saturdays and then not knowing who they are when they finally open the door? Over reflective behaviour is a bad habit of mine, and after some further reflection I remembered this. So in the end I decided just to open the door and find out, empirically, who it was.
It was our opposite neighbour. He had a spare ticket for the Chelsea Everton game that (last) night. Would I like to come? I sized up the situation, which took some time, what with my negative mental preparation for refusing all offers of fish or repelling charity workers with clipboards, children wanting sponsorship for fantasy swims in non-existent swimming pools, salesmen from rival electricity suppliers who tell me I would be better off with their company but who never give me a rate card etc etc.
“Yes,” I replied eventually, not being able to see a catch in the deal. This, I figured, might in many ways be my ideal football game, a chance to vaunt my well known non partisan attitude to life. And so it came to pass that later on that evening I was installed in the chilly East Stand at Stamford Bridge with ten zillion quids’ worth of football talent laid out in front of me. And Everton as well.
The much advertised wit of the Scouse contingent was in full effect. “Where were yoo-oo-ou, where were yoo-oo-ou, where were you when you were shit?” they sang to taunt the home fans, without really waiting for a reply before chanting “Chelsea rent boys” a few dozen times, as if somehow the insult got better, more wounding, with repetition.
Where all the Chelsea fans were when Chelsea were shit is an open question. Quite a lot of them were at Stamford Bridge regularly - I know a few - but somehow I had a feeling that the Evertonians were not really awaiting a detailed reply. Nor were they following the old barrister's rule that you shouldn't ask a question unless you know what the answer is. Which is an exam setter's maxim too. Whatever, but the question was raised repeatedly through the evening and, as the Pensioners (ha!) pulled effortlessly away from the struggling Toffees, as the shots rained in on the away goal, as the score progressed comfortably to 3-0 by half time, specific answers seemed increasingly redundant. Persistent the travelling contingent were but I suspect they were seeing themselves less as Jeremy Paxman and more as Cicero.
Rhetorical football chants are not common - it’s “You’re going home in a comfortable ambulance” not “Who could it be that is going home ...” - but this one seemed to assume a particularly plaintive air as it came round for the sixtieth time. In a kind of inner voice that spoke to the very core of my humanity the Everton faithful seemed to be saying, “We ARE here now while we ARE shit.”
This has the authentic football supporter’s mentality running right through it, courage in the face of your own side’s appalling performances is part of all fans’ cardinal virtues, but I began to feel uncomfortable, wondering what it might be doing for their team out there in front of them. It was potentially a message more mixed than Marks and Spencer’s nuts because it also seemed directly to imply of the opposition “You lot are not shit now”. I can only fear for the morale of any team whose supporters start effectively complimenting their opponents instead of demanding their evisceration. Damning with faint praise is what sports writers do to England managers, it’s not really designed as a communal activity.
My Chelsea contacts tell me that the visits of Merseyside clubs in the 80s were greeted with mass holdings up of twenty quid notes and chants of “You’ll never work again”. They didn’t seem to be doing that last night. But perhaps fielding Essien, Cole, Lampard and Crespo amounted to much the same thing.
Anyway the real football story of the moment is the arrival of Carlisle United at the summit of Coca Cola League Two. Which proves that there is life after relegation to the Conference, and that Coca Cola doesn't help with your counting skills. It's actually League FOUR there, lads. But I have not allowed that to diminish my enjoyment one little bit.
By far the greatest beneficiary of modern belief tolerance has been the conspiracy theory. By far the greatest beneficiary of conspiracy theories has been the independent publishing industry. If one develops a taste for breathtaking leaps of logic and cases of serial special pleading then there are years’ worth of good reading awaiting you.
As a genre it sticks to a trusted formula. Facts, meaning lowly established existing historical facts, are discredited, to be replaced by new facts, previously hidden from view by malice and cunning but recently prised away from their evil keepers by plucky warriors for Truth. Fresh witnesses, hidden diaries, lost documents, suppressed accounts have newly been uncovered. The rules of evidence are reversed. Everything we know, or think we know, or can see, or think we can see is replaced by different, contrary readings of all the same body of evidence. So a good few dead people are alive (Elvis, Tupac, Diana), and the occasional live person is dead (Paul McCartney). Alien reptiles rule us all. Everything looks normal, which might be reassuring, but it isn’t. The world we can see is not the world as it really is. Somebody somewhere is up to something and wants to lull us into thinking that everything is as dull as it seems on the unexamined surface. The theorist is of course not fooled, like the rest of us have been. The theorist is too clever for that, immune to the wiles of these invisible people. The distance between conspiracy nuts and nuts is rizla thin.
To believe in conspiracies is to believe in bad people in positions of power doing bad things. So there were no moon landings, the US Government has developed time travel, Kennedy was shot by everybody, the Catholic Church runs everything. Or is that the Templars? To get near the truth is to risk death. The world is run by somebody completely invisible to the casual observer. As in the perception of magic, a powerful hidden agency connects superficially disparate events. The weakness of this connection in the eye of reason is tacitly admitted by the way theorists usually credit the dark forces involved with either special weapons, alien technology or the help of Satan.
A major technique of conspiracy building is to narrow down possible explanations for any one event. This is in order to place that event immovably as part of a pattern, as a link in a chain. Do enough linking of unsure facts, turn enough crossroads and bifurcations into straight lines and you have a conclusion based not on one misapprehension, which could easily be spotted and refuted, but on dozens, leaving a sceptic with a ‘where do I begin’ problem. A weary shake of the head will not deter any committed conspiracy spotter. Resigned silence in a listener is taken as a victory of persuasion.
Only one explanation is allowed per event and that will unfailingly be the most frightening and portentous, and incidentally the one which most coincides with the most basic belief of the interpreter. So these are not links of logic but of dread. Unsurprisingly the logical content of what results is quite dreadful.
Here is a list of propositions one needs to accept to get started as a proper conspiracy theorist.
You need an enemy, a plot, and a piece of revealed, dangerous knowledge which puts you in an elevated position of judgement.
You will need to combine the most passionate forms of belief on trust with the most persistent kind of scepticism.
You will need a sophisticated tool of some sort which can help you distinguish which unfounded assertions to believe and which to reject. This will, in practice, be the conclusion you wish to draw from the whole thing.
You will need to assess evidence in such a way that: if it’s not there now it’s been hidden; if it is there now it’s fake: if it’s contradicted by written evidence you know for sure that it’s true; if nobody ever mentions some person or thing, you can insert them or it at will wherever you like without fear of contradiction: if the Masons aren’t in it somewhere then they should be: if it looks like a mobile phone microwave mast it’s actually a mind control device shortly to be used by the New World Order Illuminati Zionist eugenicists to enslave us all and take away our guns.
So, when it comes to putting a good theory to the test, evidence against is evidence for. Lack of evidence is evidence for. Evidence for is evidence for. Tara! Proof to go. If you enjoy this state of confusion you can actively make this sphere a hobby. Never mind Join the Dots, try Join the Blanks.
I don’t mean to suggest in any of this that governments do not get up to dirty tricks, that powerful people do not have agendas they would rather keep secret or that all media reportage is squeaky clean, but I am more impressed by the Chomsky style of detailed approach citing public documents and showing how the issues they relate to were not reported, or the efforts of investigative journalists who actually risked life and limb to expose corruption around the world than the writers of wildly speculative meta narratives that generate a sort of credibility field effect by their very complexity. Look at the links, how many, how close, how supported.
There is an infinite supply of facts in the world and not all of them will fit together neatly on a grand scale. Some people will find that worrying, others will not feel the need to resolve every fact neatly into a whole. The worriers have enough material to select any two events and connect them, while ignoring other events which resist connection. After God, conspiracy is the second most popular forwarding address for incongruous facts.
No amount of common sense argument will deflect a proper conspiracy theorist. No amount of experience of the incompetence of governments usually touches them either; if it did they might not be so convinced of the power of governments to do evil. By contrast we do actually have a considerable amount of evidence about at least one shadowy organisation dedicated to ruling without responsibility or visibility - the Mafia. The history of the Cosa Nostra and other gangster organisations around the world seems to demonstrate quite amply that organisations in secret are just as fractious and incompetent as any above board organisation. Secrecy does not foster agreement, which is the entire rationale behind conspiracy theories. The exact opposite seems to be true. Given wealth, power, secrecy and a habit of violence what we get is not domination but vicious internecine warfare of a ruthless and persistent kind. Secrecy, in this case real secrecy surrounding real power brokers, does indeed shelter an illi intentioned cabal from public accountability but what follows is not efficiency but competition oiled with duplicity, disloyalty and a good deal of straight forward, visible killing.
So what is it with all these conspiracy addicts? Do they want to see these things, like getting permanent free entry to a horror movie or are they forced to see them by superior insight? What are they engaged in here? Are they all deluded? What is the process behind their arrival at such extraordinary, and often vastly contradictory, claims? The Vatican cannot simultaneously be in the hands of Communists, Satanists, Baal worshippers, Masons, Illuminati and ultra-orthodox Jesuits.
Is this the same process as belief in ‘respectable’ things, more time sanctioned ideas, more socially acceptable, less apocalyptic beliefs? Are the rogue believers merely awaiting the validation of time, science and social approbation? Or are they just nutty? What would a Roman Proconsul have made of a Christian in 100 AD? Would he have thought of the person in front of him as deluded? Or would he have thought that time would validate the strange beliefs he was confronted with? Are there any parallels in process between those times and now? Is Christianity inherently more believable than Mithraism, the Mysteries of Eleusis or Zoroastrianism?
Or put another way, is this just the difference between marbles and snooker, or is it more like the difference between horse racing and knitting? I suggest that conspiracies share one major feature with traditional belief systems, which is that their appeal is not connected with the evidence that supports them as such but quite simply with their conclusions. In the end, the rush to conspiracy as explanation is the triumph of the interesting over the boring.
A conspiracy is a secret, and a secret confers status on its possessor. Ask any five year old. Erectors and maintainers of hierarchies also know this. Priesthoods and professions absolutely rely on this effect. Conspiracy theories both create and confer status in exactly this way. The difference is that the secrets are worthless. Their owners have no wish to confront this truth. They began by believing them for a set of personal reasons not directly rooted in reality and end up clinging to them for fear of the wreckage of so much investment.
For all that they seem big, conspiracy theories are actually incredibly small and narrow. They are vastly top heavy, with huge implications stemming from tiny, obscure events, noticed only slightly by the world, whose consequences have yet to be worked through. BUT THEY WILL!
There are a great many books out in the world which purport to show how the puppet masters of Secret World Governments from here on Earth to Alpha Centauri are controlling us all. These books change hands for money. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, but they also require a few quid to read them in full. The fact that books like that do not receive much mainstream attention is not actually further proof that some evil power has gripped the world and is suppressing the poor beleaguered truth tellers. It’s actually proof that books like that are fantastical nonsense and have no place in serious discussions of the problems facing the human race. In support of this wild eyed assertion I ask: how come not just some of them, but virtually all of these serious revelations get ignored? If the conspiracies named and shamed are so powerful then why hasn’t their exposure been suppressed? Or is there one master plot we haven’t heard of which has carefully concealed the evidence of its own existence and is letting all the others through, to throw us off the scent? Or, as the survival of the books might imply, is there an enormous double bluff going on and THEY ARE ALL TRUE?
Perhaps the popularity of conspiracy theories merely indicates that there is a widespread perception that the information we receive on a daily basis is not pure, unsullied or unbiased, a general feeling that the intelligence laid before us is infected by official agendas and the profit motive. What can we believe from a news relay system which is so often an open conduit from the mouths of governments, which can only follow events passively and so often does so little to question the sources of its information? Which has increasingly lost the concept of assumed veracity? Fox News and Pravda are as responsible for the madcap ideas that pass as suppressed secrets as the failure of traditional religions. If there’s a spectrum here, from proper to unlicensed, then where does the central point lie? How much creativity is required to produce coherent, world level explanations? How close is that process to the foundations of our major belief systems?
In a news drenched world it is not the willingness to believe that has failed us. On the contrary it has run rampant in the absence of truly believable information.
Three things. After which you will feel nowt.
1. All you ambitious blogsketeers out there, if you want traffic, and loads of it, then hang around at Jonny B's at around midnight. That way you catch his next day's post VERY early. That way you get LOADS of visitors.
No comments though.
*experiences chagrin at not having as good a site as JB, a man who can be funnier than three weeks of my stuff in just ONE reply to ONE comment*
Respec'.
2 and 3. A mensh for my friend Chris's site. New and lovely.
An ubermensch for Terry Ravenscroft.