(Source: http://www.videogamer.com/pc/assassins_creed_unity/news/no_female_leads_in_assassins_creed_unity_unfortunate_but_a_reality_of_game_development_ubi.html)
So, the first thing to note on l'affaire Ubisoft is that it came about because a journalist actually bothered to ask a games developer just why they hell they still aren't putting a playable female protagonist into their multimillion-selling flagship series. That alone is fairly staggering; you're a games journalist, man, you're not supposed to ever ask difficult questions, let alone call someone on their obvious bullshit! The piece is, of course, currently rocketing its way across the channels and byways of the internet, giving lie to the oft-repeated claim that these questions aren't asked because people aren't interested in this sort of thing. We are, of course. Especially when it's a question-and-answer which cuts to the heart of the problems with representation in the games industry.
A female character was, we are told, on a "features list" for a long time, but simply had to be cancelled owing to the unfortunate exigencies of developing games to tight budgets and schedules. They'd have had to do different animations. Costumes. This would have doubled the dev time on those things, so unfortunately, the lady got canned. Sorry! And besides, they're doing history, and women were all in cupboards or something back then...?
All of this is nonsense, and it's hardly worth spending time on debunking. Ubisoft are a big company; the Assassins' Creed franchise sells millions of copies every year; the biggest expense as far as I'm aware wouldn't have been costumes or animations at all (there's female characters in the multiplayer mode) but rather in voice-acting, and so it's possibly telling they don't mention it.
No, the core of the problem here is that a woman was not conceived of as a credible focus for the story Ubisoft was trying to tell from the get-go. Despite their protestations to the contrary, it's clear that they started off with a male character to tell a man's story. The female counterpart was never a core part of the experience but a feature to be jettisoned. The woman is peripheral from the start: she is not integral to the experience except as an ancilliary character in the orbit of a man, deployed to chide, harden or propel the male character's adventure. Men get to be free-running sexy assassins; women get to be rescued.
It's not like Ubisoft are exactly alone here, although the Assassins' Creed, Watch_Dogs and Far Cry releases are all prominent offenders in perpetuating the utterly ubiquitous bestubbled-meaninglessly-angry-loner-male protagonist known and reviled as Doomguy. It is, as I said at the top, a problem the games industry has: because it's still male-run, male-driven, and creating for a notional audience of awkward teen boys (despite the large and ever-increasing numbers of women who play games), it is an industry utterly accustomed to putting a man at the centre of things and viewing women as a peripheral, an added extra: a feature.
When you're relegating half the world's population and a good section of your own audience to the level of a gun -with-some-flames-on-it DLC, something's badly wrong.
The maddening thing is that there are examples out there - good, successful ones - of how to do this sort of thing, and have been for years. I'll glance briefly at two here - Mass Effect and Dark Souls.
Mass Effect, as well as offering a broad palette of character customisation in terms of name, appearance and background, was constructed around a character-driven narrative that could be altered (within limits) at the player's discretion. If the character was male or female, the world subtly shifted around them, as it did with many of the choices the player could make. This kind of agency reached its zenith in the third instalment, where the character could choose to pursue a relationship with basically any of the main supporting cast. Want a chaste, do-gooder male space marine with stubble? Go ahead, you boring fuck! Want a remorseless black lesbian space-racist? Knock yourself out! Whatever you choose, you get to be the hero or heroine of your own story - and the gender choice, from the perspective of running around blasting fuck out of galactic bastards, is entirely arbitrary. It is still a masculine story and structure (ultraviolence in space; the loner against those who doubt him) - it's just that the game developers cared enough to give the player some level of control over it.
Dark Souls offers the character customisation but does something quite different with the narrative: which is to say, Dark Souls doesn't actually have much of a narrative as such, and as a result the player is given remarkably free reign to put his or her interpretation on it and, indeed, to construct their own character's story as they traverse the world. The silent protagonist is a perfect cypher for whatever the player wants them to be (with the stricture that the player has to want them to be a mouldering undead who batters monsters with a club).
There are plenty of other examples out there, of course, which just makes it all doubly maddening. Nintendo's ever-more-androgynous Link and the prospect of a Zelda game where you get to play as Zelda (!) are tantalising glimpses of progress, even if the company will have to do more than that to atone for its shameful handling of the Tomodachi Life fiasco. People who self-identify as "gamers" are constantly anxious that people aren't taking the medium seriously enough. There's something of a point there. But I expect that the Ubisoft news story will be met with the usual calls from the gamer grognards that attempting to have this discussion is somehow "injecting politics" into something that's meant to be fun, oblivious as ever to the fact that this sort of thing means games aren't fun for a lot of people. Until game-players, developers, producers, journalists - in short, the industry - get a grip on its problems with women, minorities, and all the wondrous variety that is human expression and experience, then games don't deserve to be taken seriously.
Showing posts with label Rants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rants. Show all posts
Wednesday, 11 June 2014
Sunday, 25 May 2014
Misogyny Kills
We live in a society that hates women.
Cards on the table before I get into this: I'm a white, middle class heterosexual man who attended what I'm obliged to refer to as an Elite University. I'm about as privileged as it gets without actually being rich. As such, there's plenty about women's experience of this world that I don't feel I'm equipped to speak to, or at least that I don't feel it's my place to do so. I don't want to talk over anyone, I don't want to prejudice my voice over others. I don't think my Real Important Words have an inherent right to be heard over other people's real, lived, day-to-day experience. But as I see it, unless men are coming to grips with this vale of tears we call the world and our own place and role within the generation of human misery, nothing's going to change. So.
In light of this: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/25/elliot-rodger-suspect-california-mass-murder-shooting-stabbing
We live in a society that hates women, and I take it as evidence of the very most compelling kind that when a young, privileged white man takes it upon himself to say: "I hate women, the women who have rejected me, who have not provided the sex and affection that the owe me, as a man, and that I will now make them pay - indeed, "bring them to their knees" - with horrific violence," and then acts upon it in a murderous rampage, that a lot of people react by trying to show sympathy with him - oh, he's so lonely! - or to ignore his own explanations for his own violence by resorting to store-brand justifications like nebulously defined mental illness, or, perhaps, violent movies, or in some other way reaching for an excuse or justification which does nothing to understand the root causes of why these things happen and has everything to do with trying to turn an atrocity into an argument for your own personal bugbear.
Misogyny is so much the flesh and bones of our society that we can't - won't - even acknowledge it when things like this happen.
Using the mental illness explanation is lazy, and, worse, it tars people who genuinely do suffer from mental illness and distress as violent and dangerous. Most people who become ill (and very many people will experience some mental illness in their life) are not violent and do not hurt anyone. But so long as words like psycho and the association with killings goes on, people will continue to be victimised and afraid of seeking help.
What is more, as far as I'm aware, this young man showed no signs of being disturbed as such. We know - we know - that people don't actually have to be mentally damaged, disturbed, or ill, to commit atrocities. We know this because of the evidence of the World Wars, among other sources. The Einsatzgruppen who lined up Eastern European Jews and shot them, band by small band, in their hundreds until they filled a mass grave, were not mentally ill. They simply did not believe that their victims were fully human, and so they were able to rationalise away their death. This young man did not believe that the women he killed were fully human. They were a kind of sub-species; a sub-species that owed him. We know this because he said as much, over and over again, in his video and on the forums where he shared his poisonous little ideology with the friends and supporters of that ideology.
And a lot of people - a lot of people - believe the sorts of things this young man did. Not just within the pathetic "Men's Rights" community, but in society at large. Masculinity is defined in opposition to femininity as its superior. A man is held to be reasonable, powerful, right, where a woman is judged to be irrational, weak, and not worth listening to. Our daily lives are full of actions and activities that are gendered and policed along gendered lines. You don't have to look very hard to find this dynamic playing out in every strata of our society. It manifests in the casual cruelties of catcalling and shaming to denial of work or workplace rights, and up to the most vile and inhumane of acts imaginable. It's everywhere to the extent that to claim you can't see it is an active act of un-seeing - of refusing to acknowledge reality.
Misogyny is intrinsic to the society we live in; by which I mean that hatred and oppression of women is not merely an incidental part of our quasi-democratic capitalist society that could be safely and comfortably excised, but rather that it is crucial for our current social setup to continue. Consider the ways that domestic work has been - and still is - considered women's work; consider how crucial this unpaid, unheralded labour is to maintaining a capitalist workforce. Consider that acquisitiveness, ambition, ruthlessness, and all the wonderful entrepreneurial traits that "lean-in" feminism, which is not actually feminism, is asking women to adopt, are defined as male traits. Consider that Margaret Thatcher knew that power is a thing that is gendered male, and adjusted her behaviour and speech to be as masculine as possible. Consider how hard it is - still - to get authorities to believe a woman who has been abused. Consider the tone of all the arguments that are used against her.
If you're a man thinking: "I'm not like that! I'm a nice guy! I share domestic labour! I don't benefit from this!": well, good for you, but unfortunately, you do benefit from it, and you probably have more internalised misogyny than you realise. As a small example, how many times have people you know and love resorted to arguing that "women are crazy", even in jest? You may, however, also realise that the same systems which hurt, degrade and oppress women also have deleterious consequences for men; that the same gendered social roles are used to drive male behaviour and crush male dreams in other ways: in the prison-industrial complexes or the expectations of male violence. In which case, congratulations! You're on the first step to realising that our society, currently constituted, is the problem. You can do some reading on this; there's plenty of literature out there.
I call myself an anarchist these days because more than anything I believe that the only society truly worth living in is one founded on respect, equality, and above all, consent in all our relationships, whether at work, in love, wherever. There is no excuse for treating people as if they are not fully people. Furthermore I do not believe there are any excuses for justifying, explaining away or otherwise ignoring the systems and ideologies which cause us to hate and to hurt one another. Misogyny kills; misogyny oppresses; misogyny is a fact of our society as sure as racism, homophobia, and all the other systems and ideas that keep us from living as equals. Our world may be a vale of tears, but it doesn't have to be: we all have a duty to share our world peaceably with others, to accord everyone the respect and dignity they deserve, to see to it that everyone can live their life to the fullest, and to fight to stamp out injustice wherever we find it - especially if we are the beneficiaries, unwitting or otherwise, of that injustice.
Cards on the table before I get into this: I'm a white, middle class heterosexual man who attended what I'm obliged to refer to as an Elite University. I'm about as privileged as it gets without actually being rich. As such, there's plenty about women's experience of this world that I don't feel I'm equipped to speak to, or at least that I don't feel it's my place to do so. I don't want to talk over anyone, I don't want to prejudice my voice over others. I don't think my Real Important Words have an inherent right to be heard over other people's real, lived, day-to-day experience. But as I see it, unless men are coming to grips with this vale of tears we call the world and our own place and role within the generation of human misery, nothing's going to change. So.
In light of this: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/25/elliot-rodger-suspect-california-mass-murder-shooting-stabbing
We live in a society that hates women, and I take it as evidence of the very most compelling kind that when a young, privileged white man takes it upon himself to say: "I hate women, the women who have rejected me, who have not provided the sex and affection that the owe me, as a man, and that I will now make them pay - indeed, "bring them to their knees" - with horrific violence," and then acts upon it in a murderous rampage, that a lot of people react by trying to show sympathy with him - oh, he's so lonely! - or to ignore his own explanations for his own violence by resorting to store-brand justifications like nebulously defined mental illness, or, perhaps, violent movies, or in some other way reaching for an excuse or justification which does nothing to understand the root causes of why these things happen and has everything to do with trying to turn an atrocity into an argument for your own personal bugbear.
Misogyny is so much the flesh and bones of our society that we can't - won't - even acknowledge it when things like this happen.
Using the mental illness explanation is lazy, and, worse, it tars people who genuinely do suffer from mental illness and distress as violent and dangerous. Most people who become ill (and very many people will experience some mental illness in their life) are not violent and do not hurt anyone. But so long as words like psycho and the association with killings goes on, people will continue to be victimised and afraid of seeking help.
What is more, as far as I'm aware, this young man showed no signs of being disturbed as such. We know - we know - that people don't actually have to be mentally damaged, disturbed, or ill, to commit atrocities. We know this because of the evidence of the World Wars, among other sources. The Einsatzgruppen who lined up Eastern European Jews and shot them, band by small band, in their hundreds until they filled a mass grave, were not mentally ill. They simply did not believe that their victims were fully human, and so they were able to rationalise away their death. This young man did not believe that the women he killed were fully human. They were a kind of sub-species; a sub-species that owed him. We know this because he said as much, over and over again, in his video and on the forums where he shared his poisonous little ideology with the friends and supporters of that ideology.
And a lot of people - a lot of people - believe the sorts of things this young man did. Not just within the pathetic "Men's Rights" community, but in society at large. Masculinity is defined in opposition to femininity as its superior. A man is held to be reasonable, powerful, right, where a woman is judged to be irrational, weak, and not worth listening to. Our daily lives are full of actions and activities that are gendered and policed along gendered lines. You don't have to look very hard to find this dynamic playing out in every strata of our society. It manifests in the casual cruelties of catcalling and shaming to denial of work or workplace rights, and up to the most vile and inhumane of acts imaginable. It's everywhere to the extent that to claim you can't see it is an active act of un-seeing - of refusing to acknowledge reality.
Misogyny is intrinsic to the society we live in; by which I mean that hatred and oppression of women is not merely an incidental part of our quasi-democratic capitalist society that could be safely and comfortably excised, but rather that it is crucial for our current social setup to continue. Consider the ways that domestic work has been - and still is - considered women's work; consider how crucial this unpaid, unheralded labour is to maintaining a capitalist workforce. Consider that acquisitiveness, ambition, ruthlessness, and all the wonderful entrepreneurial traits that "lean-in" feminism, which is not actually feminism, is asking women to adopt, are defined as male traits. Consider that Margaret Thatcher knew that power is a thing that is gendered male, and adjusted her behaviour and speech to be as masculine as possible. Consider how hard it is - still - to get authorities to believe a woman who has been abused. Consider the tone of all the arguments that are used against her.
If you're a man thinking: "I'm not like that! I'm a nice guy! I share domestic labour! I don't benefit from this!": well, good for you, but unfortunately, you do benefit from it, and you probably have more internalised misogyny than you realise. As a small example, how many times have people you know and love resorted to arguing that "women are crazy", even in jest? You may, however, also realise that the same systems which hurt, degrade and oppress women also have deleterious consequences for men; that the same gendered social roles are used to drive male behaviour and crush male dreams in other ways: in the prison-industrial complexes or the expectations of male violence. In which case, congratulations! You're on the first step to realising that our society, currently constituted, is the problem. You can do some reading on this; there's plenty of literature out there.
I call myself an anarchist these days because more than anything I believe that the only society truly worth living in is one founded on respect, equality, and above all, consent in all our relationships, whether at work, in love, wherever. There is no excuse for treating people as if they are not fully people. Furthermore I do not believe there are any excuses for justifying, explaining away or otherwise ignoring the systems and ideologies which cause us to hate and to hurt one another. Misogyny kills; misogyny oppresses; misogyny is a fact of our society as sure as racism, homophobia, and all the other systems and ideas that keep us from living as equals. Our world may be a vale of tears, but it doesn't have to be: we all have a duty to share our world peaceably with others, to accord everyone the respect and dignity they deserve, to see to it that everyone can live their life to the fullest, and to fight to stamp out injustice wherever we find it - especially if we are the beneficiaries, unwitting or otherwise, of that injustice.
Thursday, 22 May 2014
Your Radical Voting Guide, 2014
Politically radical but unsure how to mark your ballot in this, the most stupendously amazing and important European Elections ever? Well, have no fear! I, your good pal, have taken it upon myself to prepare this, the Radical's Guide to Voting Radically, 2014 Edition. Read on, fair reader, and know just how, when, and wherefore to strike your Blow For Democracy!
Your exciting options include:
-Write-in vote for Full Communism! Do we even have write-in votes here? Isn't this just a longwinded and naïve form of spoiling your ballot? Might you not have bothered to vote at all for all the good it does? Suppress these, the voices of False Consciousness, comrade! All power to the Soviets!
-Dissatisfied with the major parties? Summon powers more fell than they can comprehend! Clad in your finest black robes, carrying only the most perfectly scented dribbly candles, conduct your very own black mass in the safety and security of the voting booth! Teach Westminster to fear your most secret of ballots! Rejoice in the knowledge that to die first in the hateful embrace of The Dread Powers From Below is an election promise that won't be reneged on - not like those Lib Dems!
-Suck it up and vote Green! I mean, they're not going to get within spitting distance of power, and there's still a few too many people who go on creepily about industrial society and our ancestors and the pure bloodlines of the ancient races, but they're good for a laugh, Caroline Lucas is a fine person, and helping them beat the Lib Dems would be slightly funny for almost a whole day!
-Don't vote! Maybe you've been hanging around with anarchists for a bit and you've cobbled together a justification in your own head; maybe you honestly can't be arsed - stick it to the man by not bothering to show up at all! I mean, it's only the European fucking Elections, and who gives a shit? You're not going to vote for a fascist, so why are you to blame? Why is everyone giving you crap for the failures of a broken, unrepresentative, and hopelessly corrupted political system? All you've done is eat Weetabix in your pants! You didn't campaign for the Reich! Bonus points for causing Liberals nationwide to froth at the mouth and inveigh tiresomely about civic duties and the martyrs of the suffrage movements of yesteryear, who would punch them in the face for doing so!
-Vote for one of three flavours of neoliberal tyranny or some actual fascists! In which case, I don't know why you're even here. Leave me alone.
So there you have it folks! I hope that makes your options clear. Now go out there, and get some democracy right up you!
Your exciting options include:
-Write-in vote for Full Communism! Do we even have write-in votes here? Isn't this just a longwinded and naïve form of spoiling your ballot? Might you not have bothered to vote at all for all the good it does? Suppress these, the voices of False Consciousness, comrade! All power to the Soviets!
-Dissatisfied with the major parties? Summon powers more fell than they can comprehend! Clad in your finest black robes, carrying only the most perfectly scented dribbly candles, conduct your very own black mass in the safety and security of the voting booth! Teach Westminster to fear your most secret of ballots! Rejoice in the knowledge that to die first in the hateful embrace of The Dread Powers From Below is an election promise that won't be reneged on - not like those Lib Dems!
-Suck it up and vote Green! I mean, they're not going to get within spitting distance of power, and there's still a few too many people who go on creepily about industrial society and our ancestors and the pure bloodlines of the ancient races, but they're good for a laugh, Caroline Lucas is a fine person, and helping them beat the Lib Dems would be slightly funny for almost a whole day!
-Don't vote! Maybe you've been hanging around with anarchists for a bit and you've cobbled together a justification in your own head; maybe you honestly can't be arsed - stick it to the man by not bothering to show up at all! I mean, it's only the European fucking Elections, and who gives a shit? You're not going to vote for a fascist, so why are you to blame? Why is everyone giving you crap for the failures of a broken, unrepresentative, and hopelessly corrupted political system? All you've done is eat Weetabix in your pants! You didn't campaign for the Reich! Bonus points for causing Liberals nationwide to froth at the mouth and inveigh tiresomely about civic duties and the martyrs of the suffrage movements of yesteryear, who would punch them in the face for doing so!
-Vote for one of three flavours of neoliberal tyranny or some actual fascists! In which case, I don't know why you're even here. Leave me alone.
So there you have it folks! I hope that makes your options clear. Now go out there, and get some democracy right up you!
Tuesday, 6 May 2014
Picket Piketty
Thomas Piketty hasn't read Das Kapital, because it was too hard for him, apparently. I've not read Piketty either, so here's what I think about his book.
It's a 700-page fart by exactly the kind of asshole who won't accept people's real, lived experience or the evidence of his own eyes as valid unless there's a page of charts and tables next to a dust-dry digression by some prick with a PhD. The condition of the poor isn't real unless we can display it in a chart! You may not be able to feed yourself, but is that really data? And what are your policy prescriptions? Where did you go to school? And so on.
What do all these meticulously-collected and displayed data amount to? Why, some truly staggering insights. Did you know that wealth accumulates and concentrates, and that the ensuing inequality produces deleterious political and social outcomes? How could we have known! Why did nobody say anything!? And - make sure you're sitting down for this - what can be done to alleviate this situation? Well, you can, uh, tax the rich a bit more, I guess, or something. But not too much! We don't want to go too far, here! Wouldn't want to be a radical!
It takes - and this is worth repeating - 700 fucking pages to get to this.
Everyone but everyone is talking about it, of course, because there's apparently nothing like a 700 page book by a French academic stating the blatantly fucking obvious to finally concentrate the self-appointed Vox Populi's minds on certain realities of our Piss Hell Garbage Nightmare world for five minutes. Piketty's only useful function is to allow the bullshit-left media to continue to position itself as the Voice of Respectable Leftism without actually saying or doing anything that might actually make the world a less grinding, less miserable place. In the current formulation of our cult of expertise, it's only people like Piketty who are allowed to say, in essence, that shit is fucked, that capitalism is bullshit, and failing in its own terms, and the world is actually horrible for a lot of people, because Piketty can be trusted not to go overboard. He can be trusted to coat this bitter pill in respectable language, and of course to supply lots of charts. A normal, actual person who tried to say some of these things would be laughed out of the newsroom - I mean, come on, what are you, some kinda fuckin' anarchist!? Meanwhile, because Piketty's analysis and proposals come pre-neutered, they can be safely ignored. The news cycle rolls on.
And that's the punchline: Piketty doesn't matter. Piketty is going to be ignored. He's saying nothing we didn't already know (but now with charts!) while proposing next-to-nothing as a response, and it's still going to achieve the square root of jack shit except to launch a million shitty blogposts. This is one of them. Do you see?
Summary: Too Long, Didn't Read.
It's a 700-page fart by exactly the kind of asshole who won't accept people's real, lived experience or the evidence of his own eyes as valid unless there's a page of charts and tables next to a dust-dry digression by some prick with a PhD. The condition of the poor isn't real unless we can display it in a chart! You may not be able to feed yourself, but is that really data? And what are your policy prescriptions? Where did you go to school? And so on.
What do all these meticulously-collected and displayed data amount to? Why, some truly staggering insights. Did you know that wealth accumulates and concentrates, and that the ensuing inequality produces deleterious political and social outcomes? How could we have known! Why did nobody say anything!? And - make sure you're sitting down for this - what can be done to alleviate this situation? Well, you can, uh, tax the rich a bit more, I guess, or something. But not too much! We don't want to go too far, here! Wouldn't want to be a radical!
It takes - and this is worth repeating - 700 fucking pages to get to this.
Everyone but everyone is talking about it, of course, because there's apparently nothing like a 700 page book by a French academic stating the blatantly fucking obvious to finally concentrate the self-appointed Vox Populi's minds on certain realities of our Piss Hell Garbage Nightmare world for five minutes. Piketty's only useful function is to allow the bullshit-left media to continue to position itself as the Voice of Respectable Leftism without actually saying or doing anything that might actually make the world a less grinding, less miserable place. In the current formulation of our cult of expertise, it's only people like Piketty who are allowed to say, in essence, that shit is fucked, that capitalism is bullshit, and failing in its own terms, and the world is actually horrible for a lot of people, because Piketty can be trusted not to go overboard. He can be trusted to coat this bitter pill in respectable language, and of course to supply lots of charts. A normal, actual person who tried to say some of these things would be laughed out of the newsroom - I mean, come on, what are you, some kinda fuckin' anarchist!? Meanwhile, because Piketty's analysis and proposals come pre-neutered, they can be safely ignored. The news cycle rolls on.
And that's the punchline: Piketty doesn't matter. Piketty is going to be ignored. He's saying nothing we didn't already know (but now with charts!) while proposing next-to-nothing as a response, and it's still going to achieve the square root of jack shit except to launch a million shitty blogposts. This is one of them. Do you see?
Summary: Too Long, Didn't Read.
Thursday, 17 April 2014
Damascene Ad Absurdum
The Prime Minister is a sweaty man who reeks of advertising. His one discernible quality is that he never seems quite comfortable in any situation he finds himself in. Suits don't fit him. Casual clothing looks ridiculous. His holiday pictures all look forced and unnatural. He is a scarcely credible leadership figure. The ghost of a moustache on his lip makes him look like nothing so much as a provincial bank manager, always worrying that someone will find out about the petty cash. His greatest fear is that he has gone through life assuming that he is the perfect man for the job he now occupies, but that the reverse is true. The reverse is true; he now simply hopes that nobody notices.
The Prime Minister wants to talk to you about Religion.
He wants to come across as sincere - sharing his faith, in a friendly, honest manner with you - but this is a problem for the Prime Minister. He cannot be sincere. He cannot even fake sincerity, like some of his predecessors. The Prime Minister's version of "sincere" consists of fixing you with an unsettling stare while lowering his head, like a charging bull, and hectoring you. He reduces himself to a shiny, sweat-slick forehead and shaking jowls. There is no invention in the words, no craft to what he does.
The Prime Minister always comes across as a crap advertising man, which is what he is.
He wants to talk to you about Religion because the man he is most afraid of in politics has been talking about Religion also. The man the Prime Minister is most afraid of went so far as to use the term "Judeo-Christian heritage", which is as sure a mark as exists that the opinion thus expressed may be safely ignored, for the speaker knows not the fuck of which he speaks. But the Prime Minister is concerned. He fears that the man he fears most has opened a Religion gap, and that members of his own party will continue to desert him if he doesn't close the distance.
So the Prime Minister talks about Religion. There are problems with this. As already noted, the Prime Minister cannot be sincere. His timing is all wrong. His delivery is poor. The message is muddled. Worst of all, in this case, the Prime Minister isn't very religious, and this is obvious. And having never before made an issue of his alleged faith - having serially played it down, even - he now looks like an opportunist, forever tugged around by whatever the zeitgeist seems to be that day - which is exactly what he is, and what he does. The reason he fears the man he fears most in politics so much is that the man he fears, despite exercising no real power and little direct political influence, is actually good at this game. The man he fears is good at politics, although his policies and positions are self-contradictory, idiotic and spiteful. He is forever stealing a march on the Prime Minister, dragging him around in his wake. He does this to make the Prime Minister look like a weak, silly nonentity, which he is.
The Prime Minister will keep talking about Religion until the man he fears most in politics decides that this has been jolly good fun, but that he'd like to make the Prime Minister twist in another direction, and go charging off after another talking point.
The Prime Minister will continue to tie himself in knots. Sweating, leering.
The Prime Minister wants to talk to you about Religion.
He wants to come across as sincere - sharing his faith, in a friendly, honest manner with you - but this is a problem for the Prime Minister. He cannot be sincere. He cannot even fake sincerity, like some of his predecessors. The Prime Minister's version of "sincere" consists of fixing you with an unsettling stare while lowering his head, like a charging bull, and hectoring you. He reduces himself to a shiny, sweat-slick forehead and shaking jowls. There is no invention in the words, no craft to what he does.
The Prime Minister always comes across as a crap advertising man, which is what he is.
He wants to talk to you about Religion because the man he is most afraid of in politics has been talking about Religion also. The man the Prime Minister is most afraid of went so far as to use the term "Judeo-Christian heritage", which is as sure a mark as exists that the opinion thus expressed may be safely ignored, for the speaker knows not the fuck of which he speaks. But the Prime Minister is concerned. He fears that the man he fears most has opened a Religion gap, and that members of his own party will continue to desert him if he doesn't close the distance.
So the Prime Minister talks about Religion. There are problems with this. As already noted, the Prime Minister cannot be sincere. His timing is all wrong. His delivery is poor. The message is muddled. Worst of all, in this case, the Prime Minister isn't very religious, and this is obvious. And having never before made an issue of his alleged faith - having serially played it down, even - he now looks like an opportunist, forever tugged around by whatever the zeitgeist seems to be that day - which is exactly what he is, and what he does. The reason he fears the man he fears most in politics so much is that the man he fears, despite exercising no real power and little direct political influence, is actually good at this game. The man he fears is good at politics, although his policies and positions are self-contradictory, idiotic and spiteful. He is forever stealing a march on the Prime Minister, dragging him around in his wake. He does this to make the Prime Minister look like a weak, silly nonentity, which he is.
The Prime Minister will keep talking about Religion until the man he fears most in politics decides that this has been jolly good fun, but that he'd like to make the Prime Minister twist in another direction, and go charging off after another talking point.
The Prime Minister will continue to tie himself in knots. Sweating, leering.
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