Springtime For Joseph

"We shall not conceal from my lord that the silver has run out and the animal stocks are my Lord's! Nothing is left for our Lord but our carcasses and our farmland! Let us not perish before your eyes, both we and our farmland! Take possession of us and our farmland in return for bread, and we and our farmland will be slaves to Pharaoh. And give us seed, that we may live and not die! And that our farmland not turn to desert!" 

And Joseph took possession of all the farmland of Egypt for Pharoah, for each Egyptian sold his field, as the land became Pharaoh's. And he reduced them to servitude, town by town, from one end of the border of Egypt to the other.

The Book of Genesis, Ch. 47 

In primary school, our Headmistress would tell us stories from the Old Testament with a fair amount of pizzazz (I also enjoyed anecdotes about her colonial experiences - shooting elephants, 'house boys' and all). Although obviously religious, she wasn't insistent that we accepted those wild tales (or British hegemony for that matter). To my impressionable mind, they were as believable as Marvel comics; but no less interesting for that. All that domestic skullduggery, apocalyptic punishment, imperial cruelty and confusing morality was just what the doctor ordered after an hour of maths. The stories were often a cue to work on some DaDa-esque mural, or papier mache installations soaked in glitter, red paint and PVA glue. Being an 'arty' kid, that part was easy. It was the 'moral' of the stories that was the tricky part. As we cut out fuzzyfelt Assyrians or sellotaped a Tower of Babel together, my mind would wander; frequently confused about God's peculiar hang-ups and hissy fits. Like if He was so annoyed with "the wickedness of the Human creature", why did He have to drown all the other creatures too (even the kittens? A bit harsh, surely...)? And if building an Ark was so urgent, why did He make old Noah do it by himself? Or, why were those angels so incensed about the Sodomites dropping by, merry and keen to 'know them'? Talk about unfriendly! Unfortunately, our Headmistress ruined my mental picture of Jacob's wrestling match - he didn't look like Giant Haystacks in the book, and he was definitely wearing the wrong boots. That said, it didn't prevent some of us from chanting 'the countdown' when it sounded like Jake was on the ropes.

Anyway, my mind's wandering again; so I'll get to the point. The Bible character who irritated me the most was Jacob's son, Joseph. He of the Incredibly Boring Coat; whiny spoiled brat and apple of his father's eye, fulfilling his part of the bargain by snitching on his fellow shepherds. Frankly, I don't blame his nasty brothers for throwing him in a ditch. His 'righteous' career made Jacob's youthful con-jobs appear benign in comparison. After being sold into slavery, he ingratiates his way into his master's affections by behaving like the most irritating prefect to ever patrol a bike shed. Piously rejecting his master's wife's sexual advances as an "offense to God", she promptly has him thrown in prison; where he follows a supposedly inoffensive trajectory of back-stabbing and arse-kissing: "... and God was with Joseph and extended kindness to him, and granted him favour in the eyes of the prison-house warden" - he's definitely not Spartacus. Joseph manipulates his fellow slaves with some tabloid horoscope mumbo-jumbo, while driving up their productivity as an unpaid foreman ("are not solutions from God?" - do any recruitment agencies use that motto, I wonder?). He even gets a hapless inmate impaled, currying favour with Pharaoh. In short, he is the ultimate scab.

After Joseph brown-noses his way into being Pharaoh's personal trouble-shooter, reassuring his neurotic boss with further mumbo-jumbo, he emerges as a Biblical prototype of Milton Friedman. As the populace suffers devastating famine, Joseph seizes the opportunity to expropriate the 'best value' from the plight of Egypt and Canaan; a hostile takeover to consolidate a rentier monopoly and accumulate maximum surplus value from widespread starvation. Financializing the livestock, stockpiling the grain to increase its market value, demanding all the silver the starving populace can carry, enslaving the entire labour force, bonding them in inescapable debt, and confiscating their humble means of production: He's God's own 'shock doctrine' neoliberal. Even on his own terms he's a shitty economist. "Seven years of plenty" followed by "seven years of famine in all the lands" would make Norman Lamont look competent. Correctly predicting further famine doesn't let him off the hook either. It only confirms his insufferable smugness (making another nice little earner from it, it's his fault famine returns!). His claims to 'divine guidance' are dubious from the outset. His 'prophecies' have the smarmy, scheming, empty humility of a Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. The Big Guy Himself is tellingly muted throughout these chapters. Which may be why Joseph makes a point of keeping the Priesthood sweet, despite fucking over everyone else. They probably had the fraud's number before his balls dropped.

After gaining even more power from his trans-national 'shock treatment' solution, Joseph goes on to play creepy emotional games with his desperate, starving father. Then, as Jacob and kin hit absolute rock bottom, Joseph has the sheer gall to expect a grateful hug from them, and a blessing from the ailing father he's humiliated to exhaustion. I was disappointed the legendary wrestler didn't remind his son that he wasn't too old for a world-class ass-whuppin'; giving him something to actually cry about (Joseph's ostentatious tears of self-pity occur quite regularly). If Jacob 'got Biblical' on his son's ass, instead of rewarding him with a colourful coat, he could have saved the Egyptian working class years of agonising poverty. To add insult to injury, our 'hero' dies at the ripe old age of 110; surrounded by wealth, slaves, and needy relatives - decades after dramatically asking them "I'm not God, am I?" Did he even make it to human? For a character from Genesis, Joseph is curiously asexual. One can only hope it was due to him being a eunuch. With a career like his, the little shit definitely had it coming...

So, despite being a junior 'Bible-buff', I can't say Joseph was worth my crayon labour. Besides his odious character, it was quite a boring saga anyway. Why does Genesis devote twelve whole chapters to this twerp - more column inches than the creation of the universe? As people, moralistic business gurus are hardly interesting. They could sum themselves up in three sentences: I'm rich. I'm a cunt. The end. Which brings us to the 1980s. Along with my 'unorthodox' (?) appetite for Bible stories, I was also partial to musicals; an apparently rare taste among heterosexual males under 60. For all the film-buffery of the male blogosphere, you'd think the history of Hollywood was largely made up of cowboys, gangsters, noir, sci-fi or horror. But that merely reflects an outlook of frogs and snails and puppy-dog tails. As a child, I'd lap up any movie on TV; and back when very old movies dominated schedules, quite a few show tunes embedded their way into my consciousness. However, by the 80s, the musical - be it stage or screen - was in the doldrums; and no one was more responsible for this degradation than Baron Andrew Lloyd Webber: Anti-Christ Superstar, Vampire of the Opera. Even 'West End' became an ominous term following its conquest by the most tone-deaf songwriter of the late 20th century. He turned the most Utopian of genres into the stuff of nightmares.

In between celebrating Fascist regimes (from a country then having thousands 'disappeared' by another Fascist regime), and vandalising modernist poetry or The Greatest Story Ever Told, Baron Webber was quite vocal in his support for Mrs. Thatcher. Like any number of plutocratic creeps, claiming "she did wonderful things for this country" easily translated into "she did wonderful things for me". His generous Conservative Party donations are his own grateful tribute to Pharaoh. This of course was honoured in kind with a peerage, though as one of the richest people in the UK that would be inevitable. It's not just Tory tax policies he represents. Rupert Murdoch's recent problems remind us of the cultural 'contribution' that Thatcherism (and moreover, neoliberalism) made to society: The lowest common denominator for the maximum amount of profit, floating on a bubble of empty hype, inherited privilege, labour oppression, lazy conformity, market terrorism, and aggressive self-importance. Their class wouldn't settle for anything less. 

Loath as I am to judge a society according to taste, it's unavoidable considering Baron Webber's astronomical success. From the mid-70s onwards, his 'songs' were everywhere. Even people who could sing did versions of them. During the 80s, they flooded our ears like a Biblical deluge; as though we were suffering divine punishment for privatization and the Miner's Strike. That his cheap, nasty exploitation spectacles could be sold as a 'big night out' (on both sides of the Atlantic), laden with Tony and Olivier Awards, hundreds of millions in (tax-free) profits, and still turn big moolah via that most powerful medium - television - is too depressing to contemplate. Now he's maintaining theatrical hegemony via the sadistic bread and circuses of 'reality' TV, it's positively Dystopian. Those who wouldn't go near a theatre can watch desperate wannabes vying for his approval, as he sits in solemn judgement, upon a throne funded by regressive taxation. Theatre might be dying, but Baron Webber's tat certainly isn't. He too may make it to 110, surrounded by weeping slaves and the spoils of ill-gotten Empire; with the BBC's Grovel Correspondent tearfully reporting the funeral proceedings of a Great Briton.

Baron Webber's definitive 'boffo' sensation was Joseph's Technicolour Dreamcoat: An idiotic title for an idiotic show, about the most frigid creep to worm his way into the Old Testament. A character so tediously craven and sanctimonious, we can forget how ruthless he actually was. Dreamcoat sung to a decade when enclosure, neo-primitive accumulation, cronyism, profitable famine, illusory prosperity, financial imperialism, self-help snake oil, labour subjugation, legislated dispossession, moral fraud, and devotion to power for its own sake became openly celebrated from corner to corner. And make no mistake - like Baron Webber, it's still being celebrated. Somewhere right now, the career of the God's first management consultant is being reproduced with gaudy lights, tacky costumes and sub-literate hymns sang to packed auditoriums. It's happening in quite a few schools too (over 20,000 school and amateur productions); even in those too overworked for any other kind of storytelling. The show has proven to be so profitable, its institutionalization may be more assured than that of health, welfare, libraries, or any other public utility.

Lavishly depicting the authoritarian - but sycophantic - acquisition of power and wealth, paying lip service to dynastic 'family values' as an afterthought, Dreamcoat is the ideal tableau for an ideology drunk on its own bankruptcy; representing a class that encloses farmland into deserts and forces the peasantry into 'grateful' servitude. Render your wealth, resources, dignity, community and autonomy unto Pharaoh. If you're lucky, you can get a matinee, a hotel room and a ride to Oxford St. for a hundred or two. Who cares if you actually 'enjoy' Baron Webber's senile, inert pantomime? His side served it up; so consume it or go hungry - it's there. No Utopia on (or at) this stage. With bigger fish to fry, the ruling class washed its hands of any 'cultural responsibility' decades ago. That was just another pretension they downsized in the name of productivity. Let them eat Webber, Tory soothsayer of stage, screen and sickbag. The market's knackered 'invisible' hand carries on regardless, with a masturbation marathon of its own spectacle. They have no need to justify their mess either. Any dream will do.

The Black Book of Fleet Street

Chapter 14. The Thoughts of Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of Britain’s biggest selling newspaper the Sun, 1981-1994.

What Kelvin wanted
“... He rushed off, leaving one of the newsdesk minions to explain the new rules of the game patiently to other startled hacks who were standing around. ‘When will you lot get it through your heads that Kelvin’s not interested in whether things are true or not,’ he told them. ‘What you’ve got to do is give him what he wants.’”

On his readers
“... Mackenzie rapped out his picture of the Sun’s older reader. ‘He’s the bloke you see in the pub – a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and weirdoes and drug dealers..."

On violence
"'I’ve got a story about someone who’s confessed to seventeen rapes,' MacKenzie had said on 13 June. ‘Is that a record? If it’s a record I want it on the front page.’ ... His management style was revealed in his offering a knife to an elderly worker on the art desk and advising him: ‘Do us all a favour, you useless c***- cut your throat.’"

On race
"... ‘Well, Botha has said the days of white power are over in South Africa. What he doesn’t say is what’s going to happen when the darkies come down from the trees,’ was one of MacKenzie’s choice remarks. ‘No, I’m not having pictures of darkies on the front page,’ said deputy editor David Shapland ... the night an Asian man won Sun Bingo, ‘That’s the last things our readers want – pictures of blacks raking it in.’"

On AIDS and homosexuality
"A report in the paper in February quoted an anonymous ‘psychologist’ at an AIDS conference in Washington DC as advocating mass killings of gays. ‘All homosexuals should be exterminated to stop the spread of AIDS. It’s time we stopped pussyfooting around,’ he supposedly said.
MacKenzie responded to hacks expressing mild concern about the paper’s approach to the subjects with jeers like ‘Come out, have we eh? One of them, are we, eh?’ followed by a shout across the editorial floor: ‘Watch out, folks! There’s a botty burglar about!’"

All quotes from Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie, Stick It Up Your Punter! The Uncut Story of the Sun Newspaper (Simon & Schuster, 1999. Revised edition.)

Iron Age

The Icon Lady

Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.

- Marina Warner Monuments and Maidens  

"Thatcher’s visual staying power in political and pop culture is as great as her impact on oppositional music. The face of Thatcher most often called to mind is that of what Angela Carter termed her ‘balefully iconic’ post-1983 premiership: encased in true-blue power suits, wielding a handbag, her hair lacquered into immobile submission, her earlier style solidified into a heavily stylized femininity bordering on drag. Paul Flynn, in a fairly tortured discussion of Thatcher’s status as a gay icon, put it down to her ‘ability to carry a strong, identifiable, signature look… an intrinsic and steely power to self-transform’, and a ‘camp, easily cartooned presence’. The startling evocative power of this look, its ability to summon up its host of contemporary social, cultural and political associations, is why I jump when Streep’s replication of it intrudes into my vision. It’s like being repeatedly sideswiped by the 1980s, which is something the last UK election had already made me thoroughly sick of.

The iconic capacity of Thatcher’s image has been compared in articles and actual mash-ups with that of Marilyn Monroe and Che Guevara. The artist Alison Jackson observes that all three ‘had what it takes to become a modern icon: big hair, high foreheads and a face that would allow you to project your own fears and desires on to it.’ Conversely, subsequent political leaders – including both Blair and Cameron – have had their own faces conflated with Thatcher’s, usually as part of left-wing critiques meant to signify the closeness of their policies to hers. Thatcher’s image is here used as an instantly recognisable political signifier, communicating a set of ideological ideas in a single package, as well as a self-contained political warning sign. 

Although the kind of passive objectification associated with Monroe might seem at odds with the idea of Thatcher as a great historical actor with narrative agency in her own right, the images of both women are used in a cultural tradition in which the female figure in particular becomes a canvas for the expression of abstract ideas (think justice, liberty, victory). The abstract embodiment of multiple meanings, and the strategic performance of traditional ideas of femininity, constitute sources of power which Thatcher and her political and media allies exploited to the hilt in their harnessing of support for the policies she promoted."

(More here)

Archaeology and/or Apocatastasis

In the closing years of this century we are being given the opportunity, under the aegis of pax atomica, to examine in some detail our naive notions of good and evil, of peace and violence, and of life and death. Sentimental notions of peace and love simply will not do. Man is, and forever will be, a microscopic zoo containing snakes and eagles, lions and lambs, fish and frogs. It may be alright for lambs to eat grass, but for a lion - a proper one - grass will not do. Human consciousness is now being presented with new symbols and new meanings. We have not come to terms with the inner animal; therefore, its countenance has become quite fearful, like a charging tiger. This time around we are not confronted with a "babe wrapped in swaddling clothes", which is easy enough to accept, but with a "rough beast, its hour come 'round at last", that slouched to Alamogordo to be born.

Dennis Stillings Meditations on the Atom and Time: An Attempt to Define the Imagery of War and Death in the Late 20th Century. Collected in Apocalypse Culture

Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the post-literacy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself. In this situation parody finds itself without a vocation; it has lived, and that strange new thing pastiche slowly comes to take its place. Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs: it is to parody what that other interesting and historically original modern thing, the practice of a kind of blank irony, is to what Wayne Booth calls the "stable ironies" of the eighteenth century....This situation evidently determines what the architecture historians call "historicism," namely, the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion, and in general what Henri Lefebvre has called the increasing primacy of the "neo." This omnipresence of pastiche is not incompatible with a certain humor, however, nor is it innocent of all passion: it is at the least compatible with addiction - with a whole historically original consumers' appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself and for pseudoevents and "spectacles" (the term of the situationists). It is for such objects that we may reserve Plato's conception of the "simulacrum," the identical copy for which no original has ever existed.

Frederic Jameson Postmodernism: Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 

America in the movies is both mighty and weak, never safe for long. On the one hand, smug triumphs, banal rhetoric and globalising hubris conclude most of these films. But the fears which begin the films are of American weakness in the face of global hostility. America is rarely represented with interests to secure in the third world; this is much less explicit celebration of the benefits of imperialism than, for example, British imperial culture of the late 19th century. The only transnational economies seem to be drugs and guns; America brings rock and roll... and death. Often America is represented only by the 'democratic' military group or super-heroes. Like the ambivalence about the state, the simultaneous reduction of American presence and celebration of its global reach addresses a contradiction in ideology: it tries to square isolationism with the demands of super-power imperialism. It dramatises the extremism of contemporary international inequality, but also shows some hesitation or confusion about its appropriately benign or democratic costume.

Scott  Forsyth Hollywood's War On The World: The New World Order as Movie

History, Nostalgia, Hauntology: The Uses Of Fantasy

"Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate." 

- Edward Said Culture and Imperialism 1993

"Then I looked behind me and saw the city. The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things To Come, but squared everything, soaring up through an architect's perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance), mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters...

I closed my eyes tight and swung around in the seat. When I opened them, I willed myself to see the mileage meter, the pale road dust on the black plastic dashboard, the overflowing ashtray. "Amphetamine psychosis," I said. I opened my eyes. The dash was still there, the dust, the crushed filtertips. Very carefully, without moving my head, I turned the headlights on. And saw them. They were blond. They were standing beside their car, an aluminum avocado with a central shark-fin rudder jutting up from its spine and smooth black tires like a child's toy. He had his arm around her waist and was gesturing toward the city. They were both in white: loose clothing, bare legs, spotless white sun shoes. Neither of them seemed aware of the beams of my headlights. He was saying something wise and strong, and she was nodding, and suddenly I was frightened, frightened in an entirely different way. Sanity had ceased to be an issue; I knew, somehow, that the city behind me was Tucson a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era. That it was real, entirely real. But the couple in front of me lived in it, and they frightened me.

They were the children of Dialta Downes's `80- that-wasn't; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world."

- William Gibson 'The Gernsback Continuum' (collected in Burning Chrome) 1981

"He thought, We can only hope. And try. On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components."

- Philip K. Dick The Man In The High Castle 1962

(...)

Brian Walden (Weekend World, ITV 1983):

"All right, now you know, when you say you agree with those values, those values don’t so much have a future resonance, there’s nothing terribly new about them. They have a resonance of our past. Now obviously Britain is a very different country from the one it was in Victorian times when there was great poverty, great wealth, etc., but you’ve really outlined an approval of what I would call Victorian values. The sort of values, if you like, that helped to build the country throughout the 19th Century. Now is that right?"

Margaret Thatcher:
"Oh exactly. Very much so. Those were the values when our country became great, but not only did our country become great internationally, also so much advance was made in this country. Colossal advance, as people prospered themselves so they gave great voluntary things to the State. So many of the schools we replace now were voluntary schools, so many of the hospitals we replace were hospitals given by this great benefaction feeling that we have in Britain, even some of the prisons, the Town Halls. As our people prospered, so they used their independence and initiative to prosper others, not compulsion by the State. Yes, I want to see one nation, as you go back to Victorian times, but I want everyone to have their own personal property stake."

"Finally—and this is not limited to this analysis, though it seems especially relevant—there is the evidence of just how ideological transformations and political restructuring of this order (ascendancy of the New Right) is actually accomplished. It works on the ground of already constituted social practices and lived ideologies. It wins space there by constantly drawing on these elements which have secured over time a traditional resonance and left their traces in popular inventories. At the same time, it changes the field of struggle by changing the place, the position, the relative weight of the condensations within any one discourse and constructing them according to an alternative logic."

- Stuart Hall 'The Great Moving Right Show' 1979

Last Words

From Philip K. Dick's final interview, 1982 (via here, continuing from here):

"We’re not seeing the clock turned back to 1912, before the graduated income tax was enacted; we’re seeing it turned back to Imperial Rome, where I think it was Seneca who said, “There’s no use giving food to the starving. It’ll just prolong their miserable lives.” Rabbi Hertz quotes him. The Roman attitude was that being hungry, poor, and sick, you deserved to die anyway. Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, Seneca and all of these people, don’t even include it as a virtue — they actually include it as a vice, that you would help the needy. We’re now seeing a return to the old imperial system of, “Let the disadvantaged sink to the bottom, let ‘em die.” This is so tragic and so inhumane.

“But I can’t work up any animosity toward Reagan. I see him as caught up in historic trends that are so powerful, he was literally brought to power, the way Hitler was, which was legally and by a very large majority. And look what happened last week with Tip O’Neill’s fight against Reagan’s budget cuts. Did you see Tip O’Neill standing there at that microphone? The guy was ruined. His face was sagging, he was shaking. You didn’t even have to have the sound on.

“There is one thing in Deuteronomy where he says, “You must always pay the hired man before sunset. For he is poor and has his heart set on it.” And in the notes Rabbi Hertz has for that, there is: “The workman is so poor that unless he is paid by sunset, he will not be able to buy food for his family.” I just lay there thinking about that, “For he is poor and has his heart set on it.” It is so incredible that we have fallen away from something that was so basic to our civilization, for maybe as many as 2,000 years.

“We are in a time when there is a cruel spirit across the land, and it seems to be gathering momentum. I have some very close, personal friends who are showing symptoms of great cruelty…”

To Be, Or...

The structural similarity between much advertising and much modern art is not simply copying by the advertisers. It is the result of comparable responses to the contemporary human condition, and the only distinction that matters is between the clarification achieved by some art and the displacement normal in bad art and most advertising. The skilled magicians, the masters of the masses, must be seen as ultimately involved in the general weakness which they not only exploit but are exploited by. If the meanings and values generally operative in the society give no answers to, no means of negotiating, problems of death, loneliness, frustration, the need for identity and respect, then the magical system must come, mixing its charms and expedients with reality in easily available forms, and binding the weakness to the condition which has created it. Advertising is then no longer merely a way of selling goods. It is a true part of the culture of a confused society.

- Raymond Williams, 1980

Straight Dope