Low-maintenance voters

With all the desperate flag-waving and public displays of jingoism, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Boris Johnson's UK is a tribute act to the Thatcher years. But it occurs to me that one thing has changed fundamentally; aspiration. 

Right through the Thatcher years and beyond, the Conservatives and New Labour, made a very conscious electoral pitch to "aspirational" voters. Way into the noughties, pundits were referencing the upwardly-mobile "Mondeo Man" and his ilk as the demographic groups that were key to gaining and maintaining power.

The canny shift the modern Conservative Party and its media enablers have made seems to be to mobilise an entirely different* set of voters. After a decade of austerity and stagnant wages, like Trump, they've identified a new group of voters to woo. People who don't believe in aspiration any more, because they don't see it in action, but are furious and want to punish somebody for what their lives have become. 

Angry people, made too cynical to believe that either own lives, or the lives of their kids will ever get better, but who'll vote for anybody who can turn their anger on an external enemy; migrants, minorities, the "woke."

It makes sense in its own warped terms. In a post-austerity, post-Brexit, post-Covid world, it's going to be tough to appeal to aspiration. If you feed aspirations you will eventually be expected to actually fulfil aspirations. If you mobilise voters with no aspirations beyond seeing somebody else worse off, then you literally don't have to do anything except make the designated hate groups' lives shittier. Which is way easier to achieve than actually making people's lives better.

You have to hand it to the UK's post-Trump Trumpists - by finding angry people with low expectations and keeping them angry they've built themselves the ultimate low-maintenance political base. People so cynical that they no longer expect their lives to get better, but will vote for anybody who'll take their pain out on somebody else.

By weaponising spite, they've brought a whole new meaning to the phrase "the tyranny of low expectations" and come pretty damn close to actual political genius.

 Efficient sadopopulism. Mondeo Man didn't see that one coming.

 

 

* I say "entirely different, but it's quite possible that many of todays angry and disillusioned voters may be formerly aspirational Mondeo Men or Worcester Women for whom the idea of upward mobility has become a sick joke.

 

Update

 Synchronicity:

The Ford Mondeo has reached the end of the road, the company announced today.

The saloon car that became a byword for ‘Mondeo Man’ – the middle-ground voter that could swing elections – has been killed off by the rise in popularity of sports utility vehicles and the push towards electrification, the manufacturer has confirmed today.

More here.

 

Banging your head against a brick wall, AKA Twitter moderation

 

I've just been taught a slightly annoying, but worryingly instructive, lesson.

Contrary to my New Year's resolution, I'm probably still spending more time on Twitter than I ought. Then I got this message:

Hi Andrew King Your account, *******, has been locked for violating the Twitter Rules. Specifically for: Violating our rules against promoting or encouraging suicide or self-harm.

Oh boy. What terrible message had I posted? Well, here's my offending tweet, in all its gory glory:

I guess deciding to *stop* repeatedly banging your head against a brick wall doesn't actually count as a policy. 

But it would sure feel better than continuing to repeatedly bang your head against a brick wall.

OK. Well, you could argue this was a facetious reply (judge for yourself: screenshot in the context of the tweet I was replying to at the bottom of this post).* And, sure, it's a clichéd metaphor, so I should definitely hand myself in to the style police.

But "encouraging suicide or self-harm?" Seriously? Even if you were totally unfamiliar with the idiom and took those two sentences literally, the literal sense is that banging your head against a brick wall is a bad thing and stopping this activity would definitely feel better.

Anyway, I was given the options of deleting the offending tweet or appealing against the suspension, so I appealed. After all, I figured, some key words had probably been picked up by an algorithm, so if I appealed, presumably an actual human would look at the tweet and realise that it had been flagged in error?

 Wrong, apparently:

 Hello,    

Thank you for your patience as we reviewed your appeal request for account, *******, regarding the following:

Our support team has determined that a violation did take place, and therefore we will not overturn our decision.
 
You will not be able to access Twitter through your account due to violations of the Twitter Rules, specifically our rules around:

Violating our rules against promoting or encouraging suicide or self-harm

In order to restore account functionality, you can resolve the violations by logging into your account and completing the on-screen instructions.
 
Thanks,

Further violations will lead to suspension of your account.  

Twitter

So I ended up deleting the tweet to get back on the platform. Annoying and slighly worrying, in the sense that another innocent metaphor could see me banned from the platform, which would be irritating, given that I've done nothing wrong, but I'll live.

But what makes me slightly more than irritated and more like angry and concerned, is the context. Moderation, after all, is there for a reason. There are genuinely anti-social, threatening, harrassing, violent messages, hate speech and, yes, actual messages which really do promote or encourage suicide or self-harm.

I know that because, like almost everyone else on Twitter, I've seen some pretty unpleasant stuff.  For example, one of this individual's tweets popped up in my timeline the other week:

 Yep, a real life, out and proud white supremacist Nazi, praising George Lincoln Rockewell, an actual, if clownishly ineffective, Nazi. I had a look it this account's feed and reported a few genuinely dodgy tweets. With, as far as I can tell, no result at all. 

Twitter may be cool hosting white supremacists and Nazis, but props to Linktree, a social media landing page which, old fogey that I am, I hadn't heard of before, but which at least has the gumption to kick creeps like this off its platform. Here he is whining about it:

Sadly, Blogger and YouTube, like Twitter, apparently still seem to think that this sort of content is OK (Odysee, like Linktree, is a thing I'd not even heard of but, as for Gab, we all know that like Parler it's just a sewer of conspiracy theories and far-right wingnuttery).

 So there we are. Use a perfectly normal English idiom on Twitter and risk having you account permanently deleted. Be an actual Nazi-supporting white supremacist with an account that exists to direct hate against minorities and your political opponents and Jack Dorsey's minions apparently see no problem at all (ditto the people at Google who run YouTube and Blogger). Something is very much not OK here.

What's going on? Is it that, for all their "community guidelines", social media platforms have a vested interest in keeping extremist clickbaity accounts alive, because controversy drives engagement and grows the platform? That would explain why it took so long for multple breaches of community guidelines by individuals like Katie Hopkins to build up to a Twitter ban, much engagement and hate having already been generated before any action was taken.

Apparently, all it takes is provocation-driven engagement and the brass neck to deny what you quite obviously are to keep the Twitter police off your back:

Anyone with eyes, and/or ears and a functioning brain?

Hmmm...

*Context of my tweet:

 

It was 60 years ago today...

To mark a friend's 60th birthday, and because why the hell not, I'm taking a quick step 60 years back in time. 

It's Wednesday 22 February 1961, and Rubber Ball by Marty Wilde is at the top of the UK singles chart. Wilde (born Reginald Leonard Smith), is one of Britain's foremost American-inspired rockers, along with those other young Turks, Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard.  Here's a vido of Marty performing his hit with Cliff Richard on the 23rd of February 1961 (look out for the Buddy Holly-inspired vocal stylings):

As of now, Marty, like his more famous partner in that duet, is still with us. As his Wikipedia entry notes:

On 9 October 2020, Wilde entered the UK Albums Chart at number 75 with Running Together. It was released on his own Pushka label, and featured his daughters Kim and Roxanne Wilde, with input from son Ricky. Wilde thus has the distinction of UK chart success, as either a singer or songwriter, across eight consecutive decades.

Hint: it's never too late...

The UK's Conservative, old Etonian Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan has just completed four years in office, having taken over from Anthony Eden as a result of Eden's failing health and fatally damaged reputation after the national humiliation of Suez. 

As in February 2021, the USA has a new Democract with Irish ancestry in the White House, although JFK is a sprightly 43 years old when taking office, a contrast with Jo Biden's venerable 78 years. The world didn't know it on February 22nd, but the new Kennedy administration already had a mini Suez-style fiasco of its own in the planning stage, as Kennedy and his advisors weigh up the options for the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion (spoiler; none of the options are good).

 Also in the States, February 22nd sees the release of the biopic The Great Impostor, starring Tony Curtis as the serial impostor Ferdinand Waldo Demara, whose career of deception ncluded faking the identities of a doctor of psychology, a civil engineer, a sheriff's deputy, an assistant prison warden, a hospital orderly, a lawyer, a child-care expert, a teacher, a monk, an editor, a cancer researcher, and a naval surgeon.

The real (?) Demara had some interesting tips for aspiring rogues:

"...if you come into a new situation (there's a nice word for it) don't join some other professor's committee and try to make your mark by moving up in that committee. You'll, one, have a long haul and two, make an enemy."

Why try to rise up through the existing committee structure, Demara reasoned, when you can start your own committee?

"That way there's no competition, no past standards to measure you by. How can anyone tell you aren't running a top outfit? And then there's no past laws or rules or precedents to hold you down or limit you. Make your own rules and interpretations. Nothing like it. Remember it, expand into the power vacuum!"

Which is quite an interesting take from a couple of angles. Firstly, the notion of moving into vacant ecological niches clearly has wider applications than just con artistry; from starting a business venture to chosing an area of academic research, to your chosen form of artistic expression, it's a legitimate strategy.

Secondly, it's interesting to look back at the career of a genuine outsider from 2021, a historical moment where even our impostors are fake. Demara came from a formerly prosperous family which had fallen on hard times due to the Great Depression by the time he ran away from home aged 16 to become a Cistercian monk. To succeed as an impostor, Demara had to use his wits to practice his deceptions.

In contrast, our highest-profile contemporary rogues, from Donald J Trump, to Nigel Farage (currently running an investment grift which recycles his old "take back control" schtick), to pro-virus activist and professional whiner, Laurence Fox, tend to come from firmly establishment, often elite, backgrounds.

Caveat emptor.

Our most notorious contemporary deceivers aren't outsiders, shrewdly taking advantage of gaps in the hierarchy which others weren't smart enough to spot. They're insiders, born to privilege, leveraging their connections within existing power structures, rather than adroitly spotting and exploiting gaps in those structures. Their biggest, and most successful, con is to convince their dupes that they're the plucky outsiders taking on the establishment, when they are the establishment.

Perhaps the most egregious example is Alexander Boris de Pfeffle Johnson, a man who couldn't be more part of the establishment furniture if he was one of the leather armchairs in White's of St James's. The problem with these fake impostors, as opposed to real rogues like Demara, is that there's no selective pressure on them to have any actual talent. Where your deceptions succeed or fail purely on the basis of your own sharpness of wit, you gotta be good to be at the game. 

Whatever his morals, or lack thereof, Demara was smart, and not just at being an impostor. For example, while pretending to be a naval surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy he actually managed to be a pretty competent naval surgeon:

What Demara did possess was a strong intellect, plus a phenomenal memory. Posing as [Dr Joseph] Cyr, he performed numerous minor surgeries, including dental work on the infected tooth of CAYUGA’s commander, Captain James Plomer. Demara apparently studied up on the necessary techniques by reading text books and relying on the help of his Sick Berth Attendant, plus generous supplies of anesthetic and antibiotics.

Following a commando-style raid off the west coast of Korea, three seriously wounded casualties — all South Korean guerillas – were brought aboard CAYUGA. Cyr aka Demara is said to have removed a bullet from a man’s chest and amputated a foot. His patients not only survived, but Cyr’s fellow officers were so impressed with his coolness that they planned to put his name forward for a medal. Talk of such an award, and the attention surrounding his Korean exploits, was probably Demara’s undoing.

The Canadian Navy apparently discovered Demara was using a false identity after the real Dr. Cyr’s mother spotted a news report in her local paper. War correspondents had picked up the story of the CAYUGA medic and broadcast it far and wide.

Source: The Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt Naval and Military Museum web site.

You can fake a lot, but you can't fake that level of basic competence. 

But fake impostors like Boris "not really my first name" Johnson don't have to keep it real, relying on contacts, wealth & more general social capital, rather than quickness of wit. When a fake impostor buys his way into power, what you can end up with is someone without the basic competence or work ethic to carry out the role he's blagged his way into. 

It would be a stretch to imagine Boris Johnson rising to the occasion, as Ferdinand Demara did in the medical bay of HMCS Cayuga, when Johnson, even with the combined resources of the Prime Ministers' office, the Conservative Party and mostly compliant meda behind him, struggles to rise to the level of impersonating a guy who can successfully operate a mop:

Mop top in mop flop.

That's not to say that Demara was some kind of hero,  a Robin Hood figure. He described his own motivation as being "Rascality, pure rascality." But most of us have a sneaking regard for the exploits of the cheeky rascal, hence the box office draw of Tony Curtis, or Leonardo de Caprio retelling the stories of real-life tricksters like Demara, or Frank Abagnale. 

But it still stings to see not-very bright establishment insiders fraudulently appropriating the persona of the clever rogue and visiting the fruits of their incompetence on the rest of us.

tl;dr: inequality of opportunity tends inevitably towards kakistocracy. Grow your talent pools, people.

In 1961, in the UK, the talent pool was on the shallow side in other senses. After being recuruited into a wide range of responsible and challenging jobs in the war, the 1950s was somthing of a low point where either low-status work or low-status housewifery was seen as the default social position for half of the population. 

The introduction of the birth control pill with its upside of greater reproductive autonomy (and downside of assumed sexual availability) was still the best part of a year away in early 1961. It wouldn't be until 1964 that a revision to the Married Women's Property Act gave married women the right keep half of any savings they'd made from the allowance paid to them by their husbands (bear in mind that, in many workplaces, it was still the norm for women to be forced give up work on marriage at this time). And, as for abortion this wasn't legalised until 1967 and, in Northern Ireland, abortion rights are still a high profile battleground in 2021. 

As in sexual politics, racial politics was also a story of systematic exclusion for a whole section of society. 1961 was the year when Mahesh Upadhyaya arrived from Aden (now south Yemen) to a UK where minority citizens looking for lodgings were still routinely greeted by signs reading "No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish." 

There was nothing particularly remarkable about Mahesh when he arrived in the UK, but he would go on play his part in the history of his adopted nation in 1968, when he became the first person to bring a racial discrimination case under the newly-introduced Race Relations Act. Mahesh related the following story:

After I found a job with a regular salary I set about searching for a suitable home for my family. We found one on Penistone Road, at the edge of Huddersfield, close to my employer’s transport routes.

 I arranged an appointment and everyone, my parents, brother, my wife and myself, went along. We found no problems at all with the house, a spacious three-bedroom semi, and wanted to make an offer. So I rang the developers, George Haigh & Sons, later that day.

The person on the phone said, “Are you the coloured family who had a look around earlier?”

I said that we were.

The person on the phone said, “Our policy is not to sell to coloured people because that will jeopardise the sales of our other properties.”

Sadly for Mahesh, he had to face hostiity at work for having the temerity to bring his case to court at all and the outcome of his case was to be dismissed on a technicality. But Mahesh remains proud of his decision to speak out, saying "I’m proud to have been a part of such an important milestone in the UK’s evolution towards being a fairer society."

For LGBTQ citizens it was a similar time of limbo, with equality still a distant dream, but with hints of the first stirrings of a move away from automatic prejudice and exclusion. At least it was for gay men, still suffering from the effects of Nineteenth legislation which their lesbian peers had been spared, thanks to Victorian prudery (the prudery didn't come from Victoria herself, contary to popular belief):

The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, better known as the Wolfenden Report, was published in 1957, three years after the committee first met in September 1954. It was commissioned in response to evidence that homosexuality could not legitimately be regarded as a disease and aimed to bring about change in the current law by making recommendations to the Government. Central to the report findings was that the state should focus on protecting the public, rather than scrutinising people’s private lives.

It took 10 years for the Government to implement the Wolfenden Report’s recommendations in the Sexual Offences Act 1967. Backed by the Church of England and the House of Lords, the Sexual Offences Act partially legalised same-sex acts in the UK between men over the age of 21 conducted in private.  Scotland and Northern Ireland followed suit over a decade later, in 1980 and 1981 respectively. The Sexual Offences Act represented a stepping stone towards equality, but there was still a long way to go.

 From A Short History of LGBT rights in the UK by Steven Dryden.

Over the last sixty years, the general direction of travel in terms of equality in terms of gender, race and sexuality has been clear and encouraging. Which is a cause for modest celebration, rather than the noisy wailing coming from those noisy, well-connected fake outsiders:

"When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

 I don't go for nostalgia in a big way. Sometimes the familiarity of the past can feel reassuring, but it's always worth remembering that there are bits that were bad, have got better and can continue to get better if we live in the present, not the past. 

But, when it comes to pretenders, the modern ones really are rubbish and some of the old ones really were great...

 

 

*Update: Now I've seen it and cannot unsee it, it would be remiss of me not to add this clip of Boris Johnson disinfecting a chair, set to one Richard Attenborough's wildlife narrations, to that picture of him ineffectually moving a mop around:

Can’t stop watching Boris Johnson being narrated by David Attenboroughpic.twitter.com/CcQr9U1WHr

— Gregory Bufithis 🇬🇷 🌊 (@GregBufithis) February 20, 2021

Paper bear; a real conspiracy between frenemies

 

I just heard a passing reference to something which reminded me that everything you (think) you know really can be wrong. Hugely and dangerously wrong. 

Back in the Cold War, specifically in the late 1950s and early '60s, the Missile Gap was a thing. The idea that the Soviet Union had an overwhelming numerical superiority in nuclear missiles. It was a notion largely kicked off by some boastful comments of Khrushchev's which were probably intended as an unsubtle bluff to warn off the US. 

 The US media and military-industrial complex picked up Khrushchev's ball and ran with it:

 "Over six columns starting on January 23 [1960], [US journalist Joseph] Alsop laid out the case for believing the Soviets were well ahead in missile development. He built his argument on Power's premise that with 150 ICBMs and 150 intermediate-range missiles firing on European targets, the Soviets could destroy all of NATO's nuclear weapons. He then set out to explain that if the Soviet missile factories were as efficient as the factory that produced SAC's Atlas rockets, then Khrushchev would have 150 ICBMs in ten months. Alsop charged the Eisenhower administration with playing Russian roulette in refusing to accelerate the arms race because of lack of firm proof that the Soviets had as many missiles as they could have."

"The public controversy was actually only the tip of the iceberg, for the real sparks flew within the American intelligence community, particularly between the US Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency. Air Force analysts claimed that there could be hundreds of Soviet ICBMs, whereas CIA analysts argued that there were no more than a dozen.

We now know that there were only four."

It's worth pausing to let the weight of that fact sink in. A nuclear arms race fueled by a public and military perception that other side had hundreds of ICBMs when, in fact, it had four. 

Eisenhower was damn right to speak up about the malign influence of the military-industrial complex. 

There are two aspects of this story which seem to illustrate more general truths:

1. There are plenty of flat-out insane conspiracy theories swirling around these days, which deserve to be mocked and rejected. But the example of the illusory Missile Gap shows that sometimes, some  groups of insiders really can engineer real conpiracies against the laity

2. Sometimes, the aggressive interests of deadly enemies coincide in ways which make the world a far worse place for the majority who are just trying to get on with their lives without harming anybody. Khrushchev wanted to signal strength, in order to make his enemies fear him and leave him alone. The US military-industrial complex needed a credible threat in order to maintain its power, influence and funding. In a sense, both frenemies got some of what they wanted, while an emergent threat to the entire human race, in the form of a nuclear arms race grew out of both sides' attempts to bolster their own positions. 

There's a similar symbiosis between, for example, violent terrorist organisations, trying to provoke states into a backlash which they hope will validate the terrorists' cause and recruit more followers, and states' military-industrial-security complexes, which grow and become more powerful, the greater the perceived terrorist threat.

Sources: Dwayne A Day at The Space Review and Eric Alterman at Media Matters, reviewing Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali.

Counter-Reformation 2.0

After the high drama of the Trumpists' attempted putsch, there's a temptation to think that putting the violent, heavily-armed minority back in its box will solve the problem. And certain direct, specific actions would be good. Identify all the perps and their enablers, then ensure that they face legal consequences, to publicly demonstrate that people who indulge in this sort of violence and intimidation don't get to be above the law. 

And, probably most important, disrupt the violent far-right and white supremacist networks which have self-evidently infiltrated various police departments. Black folks won't have needed the wake-up call of the attack on the Capitol to alert them to the fact that this shit has been going on for far too long.

All of this is necessary, but not sufficient. Firefighting this outbreak of violence is good, but it won't solve the underlying problems which got America into this mess. A thought-provoking post on the Minor Heresies blog (no less immediately relevant for being posted last September) views the state of early 21st Century America through the historical lens of Early Modern Europe, the Counter-Reformation, and what happens when an established order loses power and tries to claw it back:

"First, I’d like you to imagine yourself as an average peasant in Western Europe in 1516, the year before Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. The Protestant Reformation is not yet even an idea. There is no “Catholic Church.” There is just “The Church.” It permeates personal, family, economic, and political life. For someone living in Koln, or Naples or Lyon in 1516 there is nothing else. Sure, there are a few Jews about, and you’ve heard, perhaps, of Muslims and Hindus, but these are oddities. Tuck this idea away for later; there was a time when, for the people of Western Europe, there was only one spiritual option, and no concept of any other.

Then, after 1517, there were other versions of Christianity. Lutheranism, of course, and Calvinism. John Knox took Luther’s ideas to Scotland and founded the Presbyterian Church. Suddenly, there were options. The Catholic Church did not tolerate this loss of power and preeminence.

The century between the mid-1500s and mid-1600s is the era of what is now known as the Counter Reformation. It was fought on an array of battle fronts:  political, legal, military, theological, and organizational. The Vatican engaged in diplomacy, cracked down on dissent, and fomented wars. It also formed new organizations, such as the Jesuits, set scholars to work clarifying its theology, and actually engaged in some internal reforms. I won’t dig too deeply into this, since the Counter Reformation has filled a stack of books. It is enough to say that it got brutally violent, with torture and executions, and was finally ended by a vicious war, now known as the Thirty Years War. The terrorism and starvation partially depopulated northern Germany by its end in 1648. Catholicism didn’t yield power quietly, and the aftershocks of that fight persist to this day.

Now imagine yourself as a heterosexual Christian white man in 1947. Perhaps you are working in a unionized factory job or farming. Perhaps you are going to college on the GI Bill, preparing yourself for the white collar world. Whatever your path, your place is analogous to the peasant of 1516, in terms of your demographic identity. Desegregation is in the future. The heyday of the civil rights movement hasn’t arrived. Women’s rights aren’t a thing. Likewise LGBT rights, or even their existence. Secularism is a fringe idea, and psychotherapy is for rich kooks. Like a fish not understanding water, your preeminence in American society isn’t something you even consider. It’s just the way things are."

Read the whole thing here - it's well worth your time, especially for the way it draws your attention away from the immediate fireworks of the ragtag army of MAGA chuds, their disturbingly hilarous mid-rampage selfies and their touching faith that their transgressions will be wiped clean by a personal pardon from The Donald. 

These people and their actions are just the symptoms of a deeper malaise, in particular the general powerlessness of voters of all persuasions in a nation where both major political parties have, to a greater or lesser extent, been captured by the money of oligarchs & corporate interests, to such an extent that they don't represent the people who vote for them (or those disillusioned people who don't vote, for that matter).

Know the enemy and know yourself

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

 In this week's installment of history repeating itself first as tragedy, then as farce, Mango Mussolini's Squadristi descended on the capital and metaphorically, if not quite literally, tasered themselves in the balls.

In common with most far-right rallies/insurrections, there were flags. Lots of flags. So many flags.

America's Swastika, AKA the Confederate Flag was a popular choice among the flag-shagging Trumpist ultras because of course it was:

Image credit Reuters.

Now the thing about this "Confederate Flag", as  quite a few people know, is that it wasn't the national flag of the Confederacy. The reason that this now-established and instantly recognisable symbol of white supremacy differs from the national flag(s) of the Confederacy is an interesting one. It's all to do with identity, and not just in the obvious, ideological sense of political identity, but in the direct, practical sense of distinguishing friend from foe.

 When the Confederate States seceded, like every new state, they wanted a flag of their own, and this was what they came up with:

As you can see, it's inspired by the flag of the USA, but with fewer stripes and a Betsy Ross-style circle of seven white stars in the blue canton, representing the original seven breakaway states (more stars were added to the original design as the number of rebel states joining the Confederacy increased). 

Can you see what's wrong with this picture? Well, if you were a Confederate soldier, going into battle under this banner, you soon would have. It looked way too much like the opposition's flag, especially in the heat of battle, or when the wind dropped so the design of the flag wasn't clearly discernible.

By the end of 1861, the Army of Northern Virginia had come up with a solution. A flag (based on a previously rejected proposal for a Confederate national flag) which looked nothing like the ones the Yankees were carrying in to battle. It was a square battle flag with a dark blue saltire on a red background, outlined in white, and bearing the Confederate states' stars on the arms of the saltire:

The rectangular variant of this flag, as carried by the Trumpist in the first picture started life as another  battle flag inspired by the North Virginian version, namely the Battle Flag of the Army of Tennessee.

As for the original national flag, the unfortunate symbolism of it looking like the other sides' flag, plus all those friendly fire incidents, made it unpopular and the Confederates decided to go for a rebrand.

And, boy, was this one a doozy. 

One part of the redesign actually made rational sense. The new flag design took the USA-like stars-on-a-blue background design out of the canton & replaced it  with the dissimilar Confederate battle flag. 

But the background colour of the flag was pure ideology, with zero concessions to common sense. Out went the red and white stripes of the previous versions, replaced by a pure white background. 

 

And, just in case you were in any doubt what that white background was all about, on April 23, 1863, Savannah Morning News editor William Tappan Thompson and William Ross Postell, published an editorial championing a design of a battle flag on a white background, later called 'The White Man's Flag:'

"Our idea is simply to combine the present battle-flag with a pure white standard sheet; our Southern Cross, blue on a red field, to take the place on the white flag that is occupied by the blue union in the old United States flag, or the St. George’s cross in the British flag. As a people, we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause."

So the ideology was there, right in your face. Something you couldn't say about the practicality of the redesign. OK, you couldn't mistake the bearer for a damn Yankee on the battlefield. What you could easily mistake his flag for was a white flag of truce, with hilariously tragic consequences.

White supremacists, folks. Shooting themselves in the balls since 1863.

The mainly-white flag (AKA the "Stainless Banner") was such a tactical self-own that a third major redesign of the Confederate national flag was inevitable from day one. By 1865 the Confederates had got their shit together sufficiently to design a national flag that didn't signal surrender to the enemy, by adding a vertical red identification stripe to the design (this iteration was nicknamed the "Blood-Stained Banner"):

Unfortunately for the Confederates, by this stage time was running out for both the Confederacy and for recognition of the final version of its national flag to become embedded. Which is why the only flags of the insurrectionist South that are widely recognised today are variants of its distinctive battle flag.

I'm indebted to the folks at Snopes for the straight dope on the flags of the Confederacy.

 So now that we're all up to speed with Confederate vexillology, we're also better equipped to engage in the battle of ideas with those inevitable apologists who claim, falsely that Confederate iconography has nothing to do with white supremacy and racism, and that the Civil War wasn't a war to defend slavery and white supremacy, but "States' rights" or some such nonsense.

So, if you're some alt-right wannabe edgelord hanging around waiting to "destroy" me with BS talking points like this, come at me, bro. I'm so ready for you.

I know the enemy.

Update: Rebecca Watson gave a great summary of the probably apocryphal auto-tasered testicles story:

 

Zoom book club recommends...

 

寧為太平犬，不做亂世人">寧為太平犬，不做亂世人

A slightly late Happy New Year to everybody out there in Blogland. How are we all enjoying living in those interesting times the Chinese (allegedly) warned us about?

Like most people, I've spent most of the past year doing whatever it takes to get me through the day. Like reading books, then meeting up with friends to talk about them ... only with an extra helping of everybody being on the other end of a Zoom call and a side order of silently screaming "You're on mute!" Happy days.

Apart from the social interaction, however degraded by Zoom fatigue, reading groups have two great features. They introduce you to books you wouldn't otherwise have read, and reading a more diverse selection of books means that some of those books will fulfill what those old Heineken adverts used to promise, and refresh the parts other books cannot reach.

Our last two books were good examples. Both fiction, but each one refreshing completely different parts:

Exhibit A: Fifty-Fifty by Steve Cavanagh.

Exhibit B: Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler.

No significant spoilers ahead.

On different levels, I enjoyed both books, although they're chalk and cheese. Of course, opinions differed, but I'm not here to debate whether any specific book was "good" or "bad." I am here to say that your reading diet, like your actual diet, is healthier if it's varied. 

Fifty-Fifty is a plot-driven courtroom drama and thriller, which kicks off with the discovery that a colourful Italian-American former mayor of New York has been brutally murdered in his own home.

Yikes! Be careful, Rudy!

The central mystery is that, when the ex-mayor was murdered, the only other two people in the house were his grown-up offspring, Alexandra and Sofia Giuliani Avellino. In this whodunnit, each sister accuses the other one of the murder and there seems to be no conclusive evidence to show which one of them actually did it (or, for that matter, whether the two sisters conspired together to do their old man in).

Enter hard-boiled criminal lawyer Eddie Flynn, defending the sister who, his gut instinct tells him, is the innocent party. Is Eddie's instinct right? Expect the classic whodunnit menu of red herrings, the killer(s) covering her/their tracks with acts of ruthless brutality and twisted ingenuity, unexpected plot twists and startling revelations.

Fifty-Fifty is your classic airport thriller done well (in my opinion). The part of me it reached was the part that wants straightforward entertainment, puzzles and distraction. It's not going to change me on a fundamental level. Now that I've read it and know how the mystery gets solved, I've no particular desire to re-read it, but it passed the time pleasantly enough.

But it does what it does pretty well. It's easy to dismiss this sort of genre writing, especially when, like Fifty-Fifty, the book gets singled out as a Richard and Judy Bookclub pick of the week, the literary equivalent of getting kissed by your mum at the school gates and for ever blowing your chances of hanging out with the cool kids.

But, literary snobbery aside, think about these facts. It's easy to write. Almost all of us leaned that stuff at school. But it's hard to write well enough that people want to read what you've written, and carry on reading it for several hundred pages. Even if you have this talent, it requires a pretty special blend of talent, determination and luck to actually get published. Most books which make it into print don't sell that well. Fifty-Fifty did pretty well and, although it reads well enough as a stand-alone novel, it's only one of a series of books that Steve Cavanagh's written about the reformed con artist turned criminal lawyer Eddie Flynn, showing that the guy's not just a flukeish one-hit wonder.

But it's also a work of genre, which stands at a remove from the real world. It contains several tropes of the crime genre. Eddie Flynn, for example, is an instantly recognisable type - the dogged, incorruptible, rebellious, maverick outsider hero with a troubled personal life. The same goes for what he's up against - out there, there's a devilish plot, an elaborate game being played against law enforcement and natural justice, planned by a brilliant, but warped, mind (or minds - you'll have to read to the end to find out which). We've been here before, from the evil schemes of Professor Moriarty and Hannibal Lecter, to the elaborate mind games of a TV series like The Bridge. 

Now I'm no expert on crimes and solving crimes,* but I'm pretty sure that, in real life, this isn't generally how it works. From what I gather, solving crimes is a team effort and most stuff gets solved by following established, tested procedures, at least in functioning systems of law enforcement. Where there's systemic corruption, incompetence, or even just institutional groupthink, some team members need to stand up and go against the flow but, in real life, I don't think most crimes end up being solved by some Eddie Flynn or Philip Marlowe type going rogue and kicking doors open.

As for violent crimes, yes, in a lot of real-life cases the victim and perpetrator are known to one another, so that's like the crime scene in Fifty-Fifty. But that's where the similarity ends; in real life, these sorts of crimes are mostly unplanned or poorly-planned and easy to solve. Even in those very rare cases of ruthless, high-functioning game-playing killers who plan and carry out their crimes methodically, the offenders rarely turn out to be warped geniuses of the crime fiction trope, but exceptions who fall through the cracks due at least partly to luck, or to an outbreak of the groupthink. incompetence or corruption I've already alluded to on the part of the authorities.

Although the rules of the genre are not the same as the rules of real life, Fifty-Fifty does a pretty decent job within the conventions and limits of the genre. Most of what happens is internally consistent and believable within the world of the book. The police and court procedure stuff sounded convincing and well-researched to me and, though it was a work of genre fiction it also touched on real-world social issues from unequal access to justice for rich and poor, to sexism, which gave it more of a feeling of heft and believability than many less accomplished crime novels.

Redhead by the Side of the Road is a different kind of novel altogether. From the opening, I had a sinking feeling that this book wasn't going to be a barrel of laughs:

"You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer. He lives alone; he keeps himself to himself; his routine is etched in stone."

Sure enough, it turns out that Micah is a self-employed tech guy, living the proverbial life of quiet desperation, just about getting by with very few limited and unsatisfactory relationships with his fellow humans, scraping just enough of a living to afford a rented apartment which he keeps spotless with an unvarying cleaning routine. In his rented box, Micah writes notes to the other residents of his block, complaining about their persistent failure to flatten their cardboard packaging when the recycling goes out on bin days. 

At this point, I cheered myself up by checking the page count. Only 178 pages? Phew! At least it looked like I wouldn't be spending too much of my down time with Micah and his rather bleak little life.

So I stuck with it, and was very surprised at how much I ended up enjoying this book. Unlike the event-packed Fifty-Fifty, nothing much happens for most of the book. Only once does something fairly major, dramatic and unexpected happen to Micah, But what does happen turns out to be surprisingly compelling.

Unlike Fifty-Fifty, the entertainment here isn't straightforward. There's lots of everyday miscommunication and conflicts, especially between orderly, routine ways of living and messy, spontaneous lives, observed in a way that can be simultaneously sad and hilarious (there are points where both you're seriously willing Micah not to innocently say that wildly inappropriate thing he's about to say to his semi-detached girlfriend and can't help finding it funny at the same time).

There are puzzles here, too but, again, they're not the slightly detached clear-cut "It was Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the billiard room" puzzles of the whodunnit but as messy, ambiguous and often unresolved as the ones from everyday life.

As for distraction, there doesn't seem to be a lot of it. Except that, by a chapter or so in, there is. It's just a change of mental gears from Fifty-Fifty, slowing down and seeing the universe of small detail you miss when you're speeding, pedal to the metal, through the big, noisy world of the plot-driven thriller. 

That's a wonderful thing about books. They're fractal - you can zoom in or out to any scale and still be drawn into a dense, engaging landscape where you can uttely lose yourself. 

I don't think I've done justice to how well-written and unexpectedly absorbing Redhead By The Side of the Road is, but just take my word for it and give it a go. After all, what have you got to lose? It's only 178 pages and, if you're stuck in lockdown while the world around you burns, you might as well try something new.

Anyway, as the omnishambles that was 2020 lurches into the existential horror show of 2021, have a good one and stay safe, everybody. I don't know about you, but after a weird and terrible year, I'm starting to feel a bit more chipper about life. There are obvious reasons to be more cheerful (we have vaccines, alleluia!), but I'm sensing another sort of shift. 

Maybe it's just me, but I'm getting a feeling that we're pretty damn close to rock bottom and the only way is up.  The abject failure of the Trump putsch only heightened a sense that a toxic boil is bursting and change is coming. It feels like a time for reflection, a time to take stock. So, after sharing a couple of literary discoveries from the last year, I'd like to close by sharing my piece of music of the year which, I think, perfectly captures the zeitgeist.

It's not celebratory, in fact it's downright mournful. But it's also spine-tinglingly powerful, beautiful and utterly appropriate. Ladies and gentlemen, sit back and enjoy the legend that is Annie Lennox and the socially distanced London Voices Choir, totally smashing it with this awesome rendition of Dido's Lament from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas:

"We have always been surrounded by terror and by the beauty that is an inseparable part of it."

The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Škvorecký.

 

 

*If you are, examples, corrections and clarifications are welcome in the comments (comments moderated by me, but I'm happy to publish any reasonable feedback).