The Stories We Tell

Okay, I admit it – my last post was grim, grimmer than I like to be. I know I’m a born pessimist but I try to fight against it, but I guess I couldn’t help it – a bunch of political maniacs are threatening the world economy, people are getting murdered in the streets in Syria while, parallel to this, people in London are riotting so they can nick DVDs, and someone near where I live has been messing with roadsigns so that diverted traffic is getting lost. Frankly, some days it’s not worth getting out of bed.

But then I read a couple of articles, one by my friend Sudge about living life between the bookends, the other a devastating New York Times critique of Obama’s inability to promote a narrative. All this got me thinking.

We’re a storytelling people, all of us; we tell ghost stories around campfires, we watch soap operas, we testify in church and pull together 140 character storylines on Twitter. Narrative is hardwired into us, and we always find a way to paint animals on cave walls.

And so what we may have here is a complete failure to tell a story that matters a damn.

Think about it – the rioters in Tottenham and Brixton rioted for… what? Despite there being two potential narratives that coild resonate (“Community rebels against police brutality”, “Poverty-stricken youths rebel against an uncaring society”), you can’t help but think there’s no greater message than “Smash stuff up and steal things”. In the absence of a grassroots story we often turn to leaders – let’s face it, Hitler and Churchill were experts at this, even if they were at opposite ends of the World War II spectrum. We don’t have anyone with that storytelling ability – Obama’s fairly bad at it, but at least he’s present, unlike UK leaders – it’s all very well trying to weave a tale of the Big Society, but before you can do that, you need to pay your dues working with smaller societies.

Meanwhile, London is rioting, and some people are trying to figure out if Twitter or Blackberrys are the story, as opposed to the medium through which those stories are told. No-one has much of an idea of what’s going on, or why people seem to want to destroy their own communities.

No-one knows what the story is.

Maybe the reason for this is that we’ve become accustomed to people telling our stories for us, rather than us grasping the nettle and creating our own narratives. We’re told that our jobs are vulnerable, that our old age will be spent in poverty, that things like healthcare and libraries and security or optional extras rather than fundamental human rights. And we’ve either gone along with this or reacted against it in ways that undercut the good within any alternative narratives.

So how do we tell a better story? Collectively, I don’t know. I’d say it begins with treating each other with love and respect and decency, by building our communities together, by living to create and build up rather than destroy and tear down. But that only goes so far when, as we’ve seen in London, people are willing to burn down their own communities.

Yesterday saw the start of the Jewish festival of Tisha B’Av, a day on which the Jewish community remembers and reflects upon the disasters that have befallen it over the years. That seems instructive somehow, because for all we can lament everything that’s happened in the UK, we need a time to reflect on the crises we’ve seen but, more importantly, we need to uncover how we got to this point in the first place. People don’t hack mobiles or burn restaurants on a whim. And we won’t get to that point by passing laws that promote greater levels of random stop-and-search or that penalise Twitter – there’s a quote in this article from the Telegraph that goes “memory is far better than the law”.

We need our Tisha B’Av moment, to express a lament for the disasters befalling the UK at the moment – the poison of the phone hacking scandal, the explosion of rioting, the panic of the Stock Markets – and then, most importantly, construct a new narrative. And maybe that’s got to be based in loving our neighbour, because the problems that face us aren’t failures of law or economics so much as failures of a common humanity – if we marginalise people, if we see loyal workers or phone-hacked celebrities or disenfranchised young people as collatoral damage resulting from unstoppable cultural forces then we’re dead in the water.

We need a new story; one that we’re proud to tell, one that makes us not only proud to be British but that makes us capable of being in community once more.

This is the UK in 2011

This is the UK in 2011.

We riot on the streets of London, ostensibly to protest police brutally, but partly so we can loot HMV and nick some DVDs.

We hack the mobile phones of the families of murdered children.

We know this is wrong, but we still support Murdoch because the Sun has good football coverage and Sky has the rights to all the good American shows.

We go on holiday, even when the city we’re supposed to govern from erupts into violence.

We consider libraries expendable. We then moan that the workforce isn’t clever enough.

We have government, media and police colluding with each other to further their agendas, either through corruption or stupidity.

We then wonder why no-one respects authority any more.

We still think it’s a necessary evil to shoot or blow up people in another part of the UK.

We handed over the media to Murdoch, music to Cowell and our high streets to giant supermarket chains.

We then complain that they all suck.

We blame The Other for an alleged increase in crime.

We therefore support groups who hate The Other.

We then watch these groups commit crime, which should be ironic, but maybe it’s okay when white skinheads do it.

We know it must be 2011, because we’ve all got mobiles and Twitter, but we still act like it’s the darkest depths of the 80′s.

We used to make stuff, but then we realised it was easier to ship it all to places with less bothersome labour laws.

We don’t like jokes about foreigners or disabled people (unless they’re ‘ironic’, in which case they’re hilarious).

We want to make redundant those people who we once trusted to provide services that add value to our communities.

We then listen as millionaires brand this as a way of making poorer communities better.

We watch in horror as the Stock Markets fall.

We then embrace our inner materialist and say money is all that matters.

We’ve been ranked 33rd in Europe for home broadband speed, 6th in Europe for drug deaths and highest in Europe for teenage pregnancy.

We then moan about Europeans because apparently they don’t know what they’re talking about.

This is the UK in 2011.

We really need to look at ourselves.

Domesday

No, I’m not talking about the guy who thinks the Rapture’s going to happen on May 21st (Matthew Paul Turner has written the best response to that particular situation, although the 21st isn’t looking good for Mississippi for other reasons), nor am I talking about the latest Superman storyline ‘Reign of the Doomsdays’ (Paul Cornell is one of my favourite writers but I can’t help thinking that Doomsday should have stayed a one-off villain back in 1992). My spelling isn’t that bad.

William the Conqueror did his conquering in 1066; twenty years later he ordered the compilation of the Domesday Book (so called because, like God’s book of the damned and the saved on the Day of Judgement, the contents of the Domesday Book would be unalterable). This was a survey of England and Wales, effectively a census to ascertain how much money William could make through taxes.

Skip forward 900 years and the BBC decided to commemorate Domesday’s anniversary by developing their own version. This consisted of maps, videos, photographs and information submitted by the public, and was stored on, gasp, laserdisc.

That lead to a bit of a problem, because one of the ironies of the Information Age is that is probably now easier to look at the data from the 900 year old Domesday Book than its eighties equivalent. A few versions were converted to more up-to-date formats, but… Would Domesday fall prey to the Digital Dark Age?

I’ve got personal memories of the eighties version. I was on a day trip somewhere, certainly a seaside town but don’t ask me which one, and I poked my head into a camper van hosting a demonstration of The project. It was fascinating watching pictures of Dudley and Gornal appear on the screen, so much so that I ran out and dragged my mom in. I guess it’s the same fascination I get with Google Earth and the Street View – familiar places look a little different when the unexpectedly appear on a computer screen.

Anyway, I was 9 then and I’m 34 now and the BBC has grasped the nettle; Domesday Reloaded has been launched online (there’s a nice article on the development of the project here). The idea is that, by going online, the modern Domesday will survive for at least as long as we’re internetting, and for an information junkie like me, that’s kinda cool – I’ll be contributing when I get the chance.

The Gorbals Vampire (or, more wigging out about comic books)

1954 was a big year if you didn’t like comic books.

I talked a bit about Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent in this post about superheroes as role models a couple of days ago, but I’ve just come across another story that’s related, all moral panics and urban myths. This one gets weirder though.

See, 1954, in the Gorbals area of Glasgow, the children went hunting vampires.

A terrifying figure with iron teeth was said to be lurking in the area’s Southern Necropolis. It had alread killed two children (or so it was said, although no-one could say exactly who had been the victims…), and now a small army of kids, from teenagers down to four year olds, were patrolling the cemetery with makeshift weapons. Although the group was soon broken up, it would return on subsequent nights until the whole thing died down.

The story seemed to have evolved from a couple of sources; local urban myths and, allegedly American horror comics, and this is where the story crosses over with that of Wertham. EC Comics were one of the major comic books publishers at the time, but rather than the superheroes of DC, they were best known for their horror comics, some of which were pretty gory – while they were basically morality tales, there were an awful lot of entrails involved. Their best known title at the time was Tales from the Crypt, one of the books that caused Dr. Wertham to wig out, although it’s worth noting that, thanks to the politics of the time, one of their most controversial stories, and the last comic published by EC, was Judgement Day. The reason for the controversy? It featured an astronaut who was black…

Anyway, parents soon drew a link between the Gorbals Vampire and horror comics (although apparently the horror comics didn’t feature a character matching the Vampire’s description – there was, however, a World War II comic strip character called Iron Jaw who might fit the bill). This lead to cries for censorship that eventually resulted in the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955, which legislated for the imprisonment or fining of anyone selling a book or comic that may corrupt young people through portraying the commission of crimes, violence, or “incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature”. It was a bit of a waste of time, as it didn’t prosecute anyone until the seventies, and then there were just two convictions.

However, this is where it gets weird. Because the Comics Campaign Council, the group dedicated to banning horror comics, actually turned out to have been dominated by members of the British Communist Party (the story is told in Martin Barker’s A Haunt of Fears, some of which is available at Google Books); and the British Communist Party at the time had a vested interest in countering American cultural influence on the UK. It’s worth noting that the comics criticised by the campaign were often known simply as American comics (it’s interesting to note that, while Glasgow becoming a flashpoint in the campaign to ban US comics, Dundee was publishing the relatively tame Beano and Dandy, via DC Thompson – someone really should write something on Scotland’s influence on the comic industry). Somewhere along the line, comics had found themselves on the frontline of the 1950s culture wars.

Meanwhile the Gorbals Vampire passed into folklore, another case of schoolyard Chinese whispers and hysteria that fed into a much wider moral panic, all against the backdrop of McCarthyism and HUAC. Strange days indeed.

St. Andrew’s Day

Well, it’s St. Andrew’s Day. Now, Andrew’s one of those characters in the Bible who we don’t know much about and so he gets defined by the little we do know – he’s known as the guy who’s always introducing someone to Jesus and that’s put a missionary slant on his life, but it might also be a case of him being one of the problem solvers of the New Testament. After all, he’s the guy who, when a group of Greek dudes ask to meet Jesus, it’s Andrew who sorts them out. He’s the one who finds the five loaves and two fishes used by Jesus in the feeding of the five thousand. Maybe it’s one of my dumb heresies, but I figure anyone who grew up as St. Peter’s brother had to figure out how to be a ‘fixer’ – I like the idea of him being the guy who had to help sort out the mess left behind by Peter’s latest eruption…

Anyway, thinking about this made me wonder about his connection to Scotland (listen up,

sudge

!). Apparently his bones were bought there and presented to the pictish king Oengus mac Fergusa in the 8th Century, hence the source of the name of St. Andrews. All of which just makes me realise how little I know about ancient Scottish history. I know it involves woad at some point.

Oh well, off to Wikipedia again…