The Shit Sandwich Conundrum

Perhaps a strange title to today's blog but all, I'm sure, will become clear soon. "The Shit Sandwich Conundrum" is the name I give to a scenario when you have two choices and both of them are unpalatably bad. Its like having the choice of a shit sandwich to eat or a shit sandwich to eat. Whichever you choose both are shit sandwiches. "Why is this relevant to anything?" I hear you cry. Well that's what I have to explain now.

My primary motivation for this blog is political and this is because it seems to me that there have been a number of scenarios recently where the shit sandwich conundrum applied. Our American friends have a choice between a moronic, self-aggrandizing fool and a corrupt, corporate liar which is all very "shit sandwich". Here in the UK recently we had the choice of the corrupt EU or the boorish "Little Englander" mentality. The latter won. But, of course, it doesn't matter who wins in the "shit sandwich" scenario because, either way, you're going to be chowing down on shit.

What are we to do in such a scenario? It seems that a lot of people think we should accept our fate and start munching. I notice that yesterday comedian Sarah Silverman, formerly a supporter of Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee for President of the USA, now thinks that those who cling to their beliefs that Bernie was the man for the job are, and I quote, "ridiculous" to argue that it should be "Bernie or bust". Their refusal, like her, to give up on Bernie and, instead, fall in behind Hillary Clinton, one of the afore-mentioned shit sandwiches, provokes ire and insults from Ms Silverman. It seems that she thinks that even though some Democrats may have been demonizing Mrs Clinton for a year and saying all the bad things they could think about her now, somehow, they should just forget about all that as if it had never happened. Ms Silverman prioritizes expediency over principle. No doubt, if asked, she would argue that the Clinton shit sandwich is slightly more palatable than the Donald shit sandwich. But its all shit Sarah!

Of course, for the shit sandwich conundrum to be a genuine and real problem, which I think it is, then the stakes have to be real. With my American example I think that's very much the case and I, an outsider to that spectacle and merely watching the depressing show, cannot see a single redeeming factor about either candidate. In a similar way, there wasn't much redeeming about either choice in the Brexit debate. Its not as if the EU is some repository of goodness or that British politicians are any better or worse than European ones. Either side, from my perspective, was equally as shit. And the idea of slightly less shitty shit is a thoroughly shit argument. If that's what you find yourself reduced to then you surely must realize that something greater is wrong. And that is that politics itself is shit from top to bottom. Even in the rather parochial confines of the debate surrounding the leadership of the British Labour Party, a party currently riven with splits and arguments, the choice is between a lifelong left wing oddball, Jeremy Corbyn, (who is the Bernie Sanders figure here) and a man who barely seems to be from the Labour Party at all, Owen Smith (the Hillary Clinton). The former has spent his life disobeying his party and espousing left wing causes whilst the latter has suddenly found lots of reasons why he supports Labour causes yet mysteriously never seemed to before. The first has popular support from the party's members but would probably never win a General Election, the latter is all spin and PR and enrages many party members because he is so obviously a fake. So that's a double dose of shit all round.

I find myself asking how things come to this and I think the answer is that politics has become disengaged from what it ideally is and from what it actually should be. "Politics" comes from Greek and is, in so many words, "the business of the city". The Polis was the Greek city and so politics is how you run such places. It is, ideally, something that each citizen, the people who live in cities, is involved with. Except in our modern societies it isn't. So many of us have abdicated responsibility for this to so-called professional politicians. These professionals, however, are widely open and exposed to corruption and so the people charged with the business of the city become people channelled into serving other interests. British members of parliament yearly claim all kinds of ridiculous expenses as a privilege of their supposed service which, in the past, has been channelled into providing comfortable horse stables for a member's horses, moats for expensive houses or payment for the employment of family members. Some British parliamentarians also feel the need to claim money for taxi journeys of 100 yards or a pair of socks. On the other hand, Government contracts are awarded by politicians to companies who then, mysteriously, become the employers of the same people when they leave office. I'm only scratching the surface here.

My fundamental point here, and it depresses me that it might come as a shock to some people, is that real politics is about me and you, adults with the right to vote. But its not just about voting. In fact, that's almost the least important thing here. Its mostly about taking an active role in society and recognizing that its actually your responsibility as a citizen that is important here. I always say to myself whenever any unpopular policy is passed that if 10 million people stood in front of the building concerned and refused to move until the policy was changed then it would change immediately. Because people DO count and they DO matter but when we get apathetic and just let it pass because we have life to live or things to do or its not worth the hassle well that just let's whoever is responsible off the hook. And that's mostly what happens in our societies. We let those responsible off the hook. We imagine that there are "other people" whose job it is to run the place. We let slide the notion that, as citizens, its our responsibility to hold every politician and political decision to account. Gandhi did not let this responsibility slide. His movement of peaceful protest, in effect just sitting in the street until the change came, freed India from the British Empire. 

Gandhi's example is quite startling. His example is that any change worth making will take an effort. Nothing comes easily. Gandhi's campaign did take years to achieve its end. But, of course, you can sit back and do nothing. Well I don't know about you but I'm finding it increasingly difficult to choose between this shit or that shit. I don't personally want to have to chow down on either. And in the current situation with the professionalized political class that we have this is all we will ever get offered for you can bet that the other interests in society will keep wanting to push their stooges forward. Of course, there are men and women of conviction and principle in politics. But they are few and far between. My point, however, is that real politics is not about people who call themselves politicians. Its about citizens and being an active one rather than a passive one. Because, it seems to me, if you're happy to zone out and let everyone else get on with it well then what motivation have those that do got to take any care or concern over your needs?

Now in the Star Trek universe there is a famous scenario called the Kobayashi Maru. It is a test designed to test all prospective Starfleet Academy cadets in that fictional world and the point of the test is that it is a no-win scenario. Whatever is done during the test destruction (for some) is sure to follow. I mention this scenario here because it seems to me to have some similarities with the shit sandwich conundrum. In my conundrum we all have to eat shit. In Star Trek someone is going to die. The Star Trek scenario tests character and I think that the shit sandwich conundrum does too. This is not necessarily because I think that in real world human politics everyone is going to die (or eat shit) anyway. To be honest, if we think that then why bother? No, to act politically at all is to believe that things can change, can be different and can be ordered better. That's what Gandhi thought, its what Nelson Mandela thought and its even what the original founders of the USA thought. The shit sandwich scenario tests character because it addresses each citizen individually and asks them if they are going to take responsibility for their habitat, their city, their world. If no, then oh well. You handed over your future. If yes, you still may fail but at least you have a stake and you make yourself heard and, thus, noticed.

My ultimate point here is that real politics bypasses politicians. Real politics isn't professional. Its people, just people. Its people coming together with a common mind about things beneficial to them all. Maybe its a bit hippy or sappy. Maybe you find it all just a bit emotional of me. But its true. Politics is just the expressed will of the people, of any people who deign to take part. There are many who will laugh and smile if you choose not too. It makes their agenda that much easier to bring into effect. So next time you blame a politician for something ask yourself what you did to effect change politically recently. Because it all really starts and stops with the person in the mirror.

A Mentality I Just Don't Understand

I've been agitated recently and in more ways than one. You may have noticed this if you follow my tweets which often give a clue as to what is currently animating me. But now it seems to me like several different thoughts actually turn out to be related. 

First of all, being from the UK, there is the current debate over if the UK should leave the EU or not. Like a number of notable cultural commentators on this (random picks: writer Irvine Welsh and comedian Frankie Boyle) I take the view that this is not necessary about those in charge of both the EU or the UK. These people are clearly equally as bad and equally as unpalatable. This is like asking yourself if you want a bad person from another country in charge or a bad person from your own country. Of course, you'd rather have a good person. But good people don't seem to go into politics and they certainly don't rise to the top. Yes, I'm a cynic but with good reason to be cynical.

I have steered clear of the public farago around this event with its stage-managed addresses and bullshit arguments. We have the spectre of leading government politicians, who are routinely impoverishing people and taking sides with the "haves" as opposed to the "have nots", people who think nothing of claiming thousands on their own expense accounts but will snatch a few pounds from the disabled that they need to survive in something that can barely be described as comfort, suddenly saying they are on your side and that the "elites" (a useful bogey term for whoever the bad guys are meant to be this week) are on the other side. You don't want to be siding with the elites now do you? By the way, these now apparent men of the people were all very well and privately educated and are all millionaires. But, hey, they still care about the little guy, they say. Sweet.

As many people have observed, the EU debate in the UK has been a lot of shouting about increasingly ridiculous and unsupportable claims and very little facts or genuine information. I doubt you could find 10 good British people who could even explain what is at stake. The OUT people don't seem to have any clue as to what they would do if and when they were out. They just know they don't want some foreigner making the decisions. The IN people don't necessarily even believe we should be in but they think they might be richer if we were. Compromises abound.

Yesterday, like many in Europe, I woke up to the news of Muhammad Ali's death. Ali was a star when I was but a boy. I was only born at the end of the 1960s and, until yesterday, was blissfully unaware that at the time I was being born Ali was actually banned from boxing altogether because he had refused to be drafted in the Vietnam War. I learned about this only yesterday as I delved into his life story and found out that Ali wasn't just a prodigious boxer with a knack for amusing witticisms but a man with beliefs who was prepared to act upon them to his own personal cost. The best years of his career taken from him by his refusal to be drafted, he spent time making speeches and became a civil rights figure. I saw many gushing tributes to Ali yesterday but not many of them pointed out that Ali was three things that some of these gushing tributers don't normally seem to be too fond of. Because let's tell it straight: Ali was BLACK. Ali was a MUSLIM. Ali was against war. As a number of black and Muslim tributes to Ali pointed out yesterday, don't let them sell you anything else.

Now the question is should we forgive someone like presidential nominee, Donald Trump, when he tweets about how Ali was a great champion and a great man? This is the same Trump who, a year before this tweet, had called out President Obama for talking about great Muslim sports stars. He seemingly thought there were none. Trump has had a lot to say about Muslims in the last year and most of it can be summed up as "Go away!" Is Trump aware that Ali was a proud Muslim, one who, so I read, regarded Islam as a faith of peace? What does Trump think about that? What do all these anti-Islam people in America who think Muhammad Ali (an arab name) was "a great man" think about that? What do they think about the Ali who said he refused to fight the Vietcong because they had never called him nigger (implicitly, unlike the many white men he regarded the war as being fought for)? What do the muslim haters and the black haters think about the Ali who refused to be defined by other people and who seemingly ignore the fact he was proudly black and proudly Muslim? I saw one Fox Sports reporter yesterday who actually tried to completely gloss over the fact that Ali was these things. But how can you do that when Ali himself did not? It seems to me that if whitewashing is anything then this is exactly what it is. Ali was not some generic human being. He, like everyone else, was a set of very specific things. And you can't ignore or brush over those things without attempting to erase or deny them. These are POLITICAL moves. I don't know if Ali ever spoke about the Black Lives Matter campaign but even a brief study of his life shows that he certainly believed it and he was far from ignorant or uninvolved in racial and religious matters. So if you discriminate against blacks and think Muslims are heathen killers trying to destroy your way of life do you get to call Muhammad Ali a "great man"? 

There are other things I could talk about here but I don't what this blog to get too long or complicated. Save it to say that it all seems to come back to something that I tried to compose as a tweet a day or two ago. This is to do with the mentality of some people that I just don't get. There seems to be an idea abroad with some people that the only people you have common cause with are what we might term "people like you". This can be defined in many ways and its not always obvious. Feminists have this mentality just as much as do rabid racists, for example. In the UK's EU debate we see this attitude manifested in that some people genuinely seem to think that only people who were born on the same piece of land as you are, in this sense, "like you". We shouldn't be ruled over by people from over there because we are from over here. Is it only me that finds this kind of thinking completely absurd? Does everything come down to a factor which, let's face it, none of us could ever have influenced anyway? No one decides where they get born but on this basis it is decided that my interests and Jean's from France or Jörg's from Germany or Michal's from Poland are different? This is baloney.

Those who think this way seem to have a very warped sense of reality for as I look out I can see very many people just like me in a political sense even whilst being different socially and culturally. But all too many people get these things mixed up. Yes, people from different places have different cultural traditions and different social understandings. But politically they might have exactly the same needs and politically they might be very much the same as each other. In fact, the differences politically may be more between themselves and the elites above them than between each other. Lines on a map do not stop people have common interests or aligned needs. Far from it. They don't even need to be from Europe. All the nasty foreigners (as some would see it) who are grabbing on to anything that floats and trying to reach our Promised Land have political needs the same as the rest of us who, through no fault of our own, were already born here. They need stability and security so that they can have a means to survive. Should anyone begrudge them trying to achieve it? The ultimate answer may not be that everyone lives in the same space. Indeed, it certainly won't be. But while the lights are on and fires burn to cook food in one place do not look down on those who have none of these things and head towards those who do. It was through no credit of our's who have that we are where we are. No god decided to bless us and curse the suspicious foreigner.

And so for this and other reasons I find the "pull up the drawbridge" mentality confusing. It all comes back to this "people like us" mentality and this is always the heart of most political issues. Our identity is focused too narrowly whether what we care about is the rights of women, a particular race, an ethnic grouping, a religious body or anything else. The focus always seems to be on the differences and not the similarities. These differences divide and determine who is to be heard and privileged and who is to be ignored and who deserves nothing.

So allow me to be radical enough to say that this is all bullshit. Its the differences that kill us, start wars, empower enmity and generally add to the shitty pile of miseries that we have to endure in life. Like the American philosopher, Richard Rorty, I see human betterment as a matter of every human being, not a few. I see the direction of human travel to be in forever WIDENING the category "people like us" so that whoever is in trouble or has a problem is a matter for us, so that everyone ends up being "like us". I see that if one person is in trouble then that is a problem for all of us. I say that no one should go to bed perfectly peaceful while anyone else cannot. I say that my good is bound up with everyone else's good. And theirs is with mine. I say imagine what it would be like if everyone actually believed this. I say that human beings need to get beyond tribalism, need to get beyond thinking that the good of me or those like me is at the expense of the them or those like them. So, sorry Mr Trump, the future is not in walls to keep all the good stuff for ourselves and to keep out the filthy foreigners. The truth is that building worthwhile lives everywhere for people so that lines on a map become irrelevant, so that life in not a lottery of where you were born or who you know, is what we should do. And, sorry UK people who want to leave the EU, the future is not in thinking that where your birth certificate says you were born says anything genuinely important about you or your politics. We are all citizens of the world. We are all cast adrift on the same planetary lifeboat.

So, sorry, I don't understand the mentality that says differences count and similarities, the most profound similarities of all, we are all human, don't matter. I say what are you thinking if you think this? I say that life does not have to be cast as a battle or a competition for resources. I say think differently, change your mind, wake up. I say that the fact we are different is one of the things that makes us who we are but it is NOT a reason to draw lines. I say that we can be different within an understanding that recognizes we are all basically the same. I say that we need to stop being lazy and simplistic.

Is anybody listening?

PS Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, is a useful guide here. In Star Trek the world has no countries and, incidentally, no money. Both innovations would solve a lot of Earth's current problems and be for our common good, common meaning everyone and not just the next privileged group. If we are to advance, Roddenberry seems to sense, we must end the tribalism and come together as one. People in many walks of life need to hear this message and take it to their hearts.

Economically Unproductive People Don't Matter!

There is a General Election underway in the UK. The thing that strikes me most is how desperate everyone is (not least the two parties most likely to be involved in government) to be seen as the party of "working people". It seems that "working people" are where the votes are. There has been precious little to hear about the disabled, mentally ill or other disadvantaged groups. Everything seems geared to making "working people" happy with their lot.

This profoundly depresses me. This is why people, and sometimes I'm one of them, say that there is no genuine choice in the election. All the parties inhabit the same ideological ground. They are all fighting like pups for the same teat to suck on. They all want to appeal to the same section of society and harvest their votes. All this is deeply conservative (with a small 'c'). It seems that our greatest political minds have one idea of what life is about and its mapped out for all of us. You might call that the idea that we are all to be economically productive capitalist drones.

The message I'm getting loud and clear from all the policy back and forth is that economically unproductive people don't matter. They are seen as a burden, a problem, something that costs us (or probably "working people") money. So they are regarded as scroungers. People are encouraged to begrudge their existence, not least by the press barons who usually vote to the right. Their misfortune is regarded as their fault and their problem. After all, the whole ideology of "working people" is a very individualistic one. You are meant to succeed by your effort alone. And if you can't then that is your fault. And your problem.

So where are the people who ask what happens to the people who need a food bank to eat? Where are the people who ask what happens to the mentally ill person who cannot work because they are locked inside a prison of themselves? What about the people who suffer from crippling physical ailments? Any society is always going to have people like this within it. Does it say something fundamental about us in looking at how we regard and deal with such people? The only answer today's politics offers is that you become an economically productive capitalist drone too. But not everyone can.

The message I'm getting from this election is that most politicians just wish they would disappear. And some do. Because they die.