Monday 23 July 2007

Who's Who?

If you think you lead a hectic life, you should see mine: “David Watson, 49, was grabbed by members of a Warner Robins police special response tactical team who swept in when he was distracted by a robot deployed inside his home.”

This from the Macon Telegraph in Georgia, US. And it doesn’t stop there –

I’m in trouble all over the place: in Florida for having insufficient permits for my wallaby, in Norwich for murdering Paul Cavanagh, and back in the US for “failure to obey an order or regulation, damage, destruction or wilful disposition of military property and wrongful use of amphetamine”.

My busy life of crime however, is a side-show. I've built a multi-faceted career, as a barrister in Liverpool, executive director of the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition, head of trade at Pfizer, superintendent at Napoleon Area Schools and head of Hortapharm, an Amsterdam-based company licensed for research and development of cannabis for pharmaceutical use.

In the academic field I’m professor of psychology at the University of Iowa and professor of education at the Institute of Education (in which role I've been knighted). Keen to keep my hand in, however, I’m soliciting essays for a volume that aims to contribute to a consideration of the politics and aesthetics of transnationalism, and collecting dream-recall reports from 193 undergraduate students.

In my limited spare time I play rugby in New South Wales, table tennis in New Zealand and cricket in England.

I try to keep up in the arts too – I’ve translated Simenon’s The Hotel Majestic, penned a book called Fear No Evil, and written software which will produce 200 different versions of an article in 14 seconds. Musically I've gone for broke, with critics describing my work on highland bagpipes as the first major furtherance of Yoshi Wada's concept of psychedelic bagpipe minimalism.

I should never have googled my name, but with our government hell bent on compulsory ID cards, I thought I’d better find out about some of the people I’ll eventually be confused with.

ID cards will switch our relationship with government through 180 degrees – instead of reporting to us, they will force us to report to them, ending a democratising process begun in 1258 with the Provisions of Oxford imposed on Henry III. This issue is only simmering at present (visit www.no2id.net) but it will, I hope, become a major problem for our leaders.

Sadly, I will not be available to man the barricades, since, as it happens, I died recently having been decapitated by a dolphin in Florida. The beast was reported to be making “funny noises” shortly before the attack, presumably as it checked through its address book to make sure it had the right bloke.

Monday 16 July 2007

Empty Vessels

We knew Blair’s government would be for airheads from the moment they decided to proceed with the Millennium Dome. This monument to British Lite Culture was supposed to attract visitors from around the world (apparently a benefit) by, er … well, that was the problem.

We instantly spotted the empty dome as a metaphor for Blair’s Britain, which at the time was just a massive election win with no content. Of both we asked “what are they going to put in it?”

The government began by using the Emperor’s New Clothes strategy – telling us that, whatever it was they put in the dome, it would be utterly fantastic. Then they switched to the Exception Ploy, announcing things which were not going to be in it, and checking our reactions.

Our collective poker face held firm, so they flew to Disneyland on a fact-finding mission, a move which told us 95% of what we needed to know.

From the moment it opened, in a blitzkrieg of overwrought security, it was a disaster, losing eye-watering amounts of taxpayers’ money and thus continuing the government metaphor.

The thing was divided into zones, designed to answer big questions, such as:

WHO ARE WE? This is a good question as it happens, especially in an era of increasing immigration, but one unlikely to be resolved by zones dedicated to Body, Spirit and Learning and based on what our leaders learned during an afternoon with Donald Duck.

WHAT DO WE DO? This was answered by zones which tackled work, rest and play, which is all we ever do here apart from sleep, so there’s not really much point having a display about it – you might just as well look at us in real life, without zones. Obviously you’d have to pay us for the privilege, but that’s what tourism is all about

Another zone, which didn’t get quite so much PR fanfare, was the No Car Zone, which prevented anyone parking within two miles of the place.

The dome has been closed for years until now, when business has taken over. Now it’s the O2 – a venue for pop concerts. Simple. The government and the PR business obsess endlessly about sending signals and delivering messages. But content is the point.

When the first of our millennium domes was built, at Stonehenge, there wasn’t so much debate about what to put in it. Over here a display of grass. By the altar an exhibition of axes. See the sun rise at dawn on the Solstice. Just pop the white robe on and lie down on this slab. Goat rides. Face painting by the main entrance. Woad available. Toilets wherever you like.

We’ve lost a lot.

Monday 9 July 2007

Guilt-edged marketing

Scooter Libby did wrong, got caught and had his punishment cancelled by friends for whom he did a good turn. This kind of sleaze is scarcely new although in marketing terms you need look no further back than 500 years when the Catholic Church sale of indulgences peaked.

At its most bare-faced this wheeze offered remission of temporal punishment for sins committed, in return for cash. However, its main outcome was not consumer cynicism but Protestants.

Nowadays, in the UK at least, we’re a fairly godless bunch and thus two of our major atavistic needs have to be addressed differently.

First, we want answers to the big existential questions – how did the universe begin, where did we come from, where’s the nearest pub etc. In the old days (and in much of the US today it seems) we asked our priests, and they told us stuff which has turned out to be bollocks.

Second, we need something to anchor our ethics: our sense of what’s fair and right; how to decide in moral conflicts; who deserves our understanding and who we ought to hang.

Our priests have had a better track record here but even so we now turn increasingly to agony aunts and lawyers, while politicians (of all people) try to get in on the act.

Of course our need for ethics is wrapped up with our need to feel guilt and then assuage it through atonement. In the 21st century though, instead of worrying about original sin and the Ten Commandments, which are now more likely to be Reality TV formats than moral paranoia triggers, we have poverty, hunger, genocide, animal extinctions, disease and climate change to feast on.

It’s taken the marketing industry a while to catch up but they’re beginning to hit their stride, not only with Live Aid, Live Eight, Live Earth and other such narcissism, but more deeply with cause marketing.

Thus, welcome to Freetrade, Greenpeace, Carbon footprints and Organic food. In the UK hens’ eggs are classified by the amount of suffering the hens are going through to produce them. The less pain the higher the price.

So, at the secular confessional we gladly take away our punishments of tree-planting, environmental taxes, recycling, ethical stocks and free-range eggs. We know we have sinned and we need to feel the lash.

And the PR business continues to take all this further, seeking an edge from altruism everywhere. A recent PR Week article was devoted to “cultural collusion” – in which companies strip out guilt via paying money to the arts. I’d like to think the PR people were being up front about their deceit (“collusion”: secret agreement or understanding for purposes of trickery or fraud – OED), but in fact it just shows how vapid all this can be.

Bring back hell.

Monday 2 July 2007

One Man's War

It is more than 40 years since I personally declared war on the United States of America in a brief note to the ambassador. For added gravitas I wrote it on proper paper with a fountain pen. Obviously I wasn't entirely sure of the rules, and imagined a possible scene in the Grosvenor Square Embassy mail‑room:

A: Uh oh, we've got a declaration of war here

B: Who's it from?

A: Some kid called David Watson

B: Is it in fountain pen?

A: Yes

B: Does he have any weapons of mass destruction?

A: It doesn't say

B: OK, file it under "Won"

I can't remember what prompted me to this dangerous course of action, but for several weeks afterwards I kept an eye open for strike bombers over our house, and travelled to school as if moving through enemy territory – keeping to the shadows, zig‑zagging across open spaces and wearing a false moustache.

I wondered how the official reply might read – eg:

Dear Mr Watson,

Thanks for your note of the 15th inst. declaring war. We accept, on condition that you sign the Geneva Convention.

Yours sincerely,

The US Ambassador

I mean, when countries declare war on you is it essential to write back to make things official? Or is it enough simply to have a flight of stealth bombers attack your TV station?

Anyway, at least such a reply would have given me a way out. I mean, where do you go to sign the Geneva Convention? Geneva? The Post Office?

However, they never wrote back, leaving me in limbo. When you're entirely on your own, war can be fairly time‑consuming and, what with homework, piano lessons and puberty to deal with, I didn't manage to extract as much value from it as I'd have liked.

With the prevailing level of pocket money, finance was obviously my biggest problem. With more resources I could at least have had some of the paraphernalia – an espionage operation, secret passwords, propaganda, medals, etc.

Of course it says something about the Special Relationship between our countries, or perhaps the embassy filing system, that I had no problem getting a US visa 15 years later. However, the fact remains that I may still be technically at war with America, which is a slight worry.

However, while it has been a rather lonely struggle, there have been no casualties and no problems with reconstruction. In addition, I get to write the history of it, so when I’ve nothing better to do …

In the UK we’ve been tempted, rather unfairly, to see Iraq as one man's war also – Tony Blair’s. But he didn’t so much declare war on Saddam’s Iraq as commit to solidarity with Bush’s US. His real one man’s wars were in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, where he came out on top, so I’m glad I didn’t declare war on him.

If he hadn't finished me off by now he'd have handed me over to Gordon Brown last week - a man who's been at war with me, and most other people, for 10 years already. And I think he's winning.