PU#244 - REFORMING OUR BROKEN MINDS: On Acknowledging Our Influences
I have long argued that a key problem with modern humanity is our unwillingness to acknowledge how deeply influenced we are by television and other media. Despite living in a world where we know billions are spent every year on marketing and advertising because of its known and repeatedly demonstrated efficacy on driving consumer behaviours, we still like to believe that our decisions are freely made.
Earlier last week, I went to see British comedy legend, Sir Lenny Henry, perform stand up. It is the first time I have ever seen Henry live, but I have adored his comedy since I was a young child. My mother was a journalist and one of my most magical childhood memories was the morning I woke-up (I wasn’t even ten years old yet) and found outside my bedroom door a scrap of her journalist’s notebook containing the autograph of Lenny Henry. Big love, it said, Keep trying!!! Be funny!!! She had met him the night before at some event for the BBC and had not been afraid to ask the big celebrity for his autograph for her comedy-loving son. What’s more, the big celebrity had said yes.
I still have that autograph now, and I have tried to live the advice ever since I received it: Keep trying. Be funny. Those who know me know that improv comedy has always been something I do in the background of any professional philosophy/ teaching/ writing stuff I do to pay the bills. I put my effort into every endeavour I attempt, and I try to be funny wherever I can. In fact, I have been working on a new novel for the last year which takes comedy, and the idea of bringing comedy to one’s everyday life, as one of its central themes.
But none of this is why I am writing now about seeing Lenny Henry.
Another childhood hero of mine intersected with Henry in his famous parody video, “Mad”, his comedy satire of Michael Jackson’s “Bad”. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album was the first music I ever fell in love with and as a child I was obsessed with his dance moves and every new album that came after “Thriller”. My lifelong love of horror probably stems from those hours of listening to “Thriller” and learning the lyrics off by heart before I was even five years old.
But, of course, Jackson’s legacy is one mired in controversy because of allegations of terrible child abuse. My love of his music has never waned, but it’s never quite felt right to listen to it in recent years. For incoherent reasons, never quite made entirely compelling, the possibility of the artist doing awful things in his private life has put a stain on the music he recorded entirely separately. We are not supposed to listen to Michael Jackson anymore.
Except the power of that music, and that performer, keeps preventing a total divorce, and yesterday my wife and I, like many others, went to the cinema to see the new Jackson biopic, Michael. Today, as I write this, I can’t help but listen to Jackson again as I type. The music is just too good.
Once I might have tried to justify it morally, but these days I think I am quite ok with acknowledging that it probably is morally wrong on some level to continue to enjoy the art of a person who might have abused children, but that there are lots of morally wrong things we do to get through the day in life under capitalism. From driving cars that kill the planet, to buying products made through exploitation, to participating in harmful entrenched systems (such as schools): complete moral purity is perhaps not ever the goal. A moral life might simply be the sort of life you’re happy to look in the mirror about, despite its many inevitable compromises and wrongs.
But none of this is why I am writing now about seeing the movie Michael.
Friday morning was a pretty bleak day for those of us terrified about the creeping rise of far-right fascism around the world. Major wins for Reform UK across the country suggesting that the British public have a taste for hate-speech, racism, and bigotry and want to see a lot more of it. As the polls came in, I was musing about my childhood love of Lenny Henry and Michael Jackson, and thinking how lucky I was to have been exposed to (without prejudice) black entertainers. As a white kid growing up in the West Midlands, it would have been easy to have found myself in a family where watching such people on TV or listening on the radio would have been accompanied with casual racist remarks and othering. Having none of that in my house, I was able to just enjoy what I enjoyed and, in doing so, pick up the simple and obvious lesson that skin colour didn’t matter. People were people. And also that people were different and had different experiences and backgrounds and that was ok. Whether it was being of Jamaican heritage like Henry, who incorporated aspects of that into his comedy, or being the kind of guy who kept a chimpanzee as a pet and got photographed with tigers, my young and impressionable mind became open to the idea that humans are diverse, rather than being myopically bound to only knowing people like myself.
It wasn’t just Jackson and Henry, of course. But they are two key figures of my childhood influence. And, as I said at the start, we are deeply impacted by those influences. After all, no-one who voted Reform on Thursday hadn’t seen any of their online targeted ads, their local election leaflets, or, more importantly, the decades of constant background noise in British media that sets the Reform agenda as the dominant narrative of British politics, and Nigel Farage as the figurehead of that movement. After all, the Brexit vote in 2016 was already a consequence of this. Britons voted to leave the European Union based largely on completely made up issues with the EU and fictional problems with free movement of people originating in Farage’s previous pet project, the UK Independence Party. Facts had little to do with the referendum. When you tell a population for years that everything wrong with their lives is the result of being a member of the EU, and tell them everything will get better once we leave, it’s obvious how they will vote.
Once Brexit was over, the “problem with immigration” (that isn’t really a problem) can change target from freely-moving EU members to whoever is left: refugees, asylum seekers. And as the day-to-day news media repeated the right-wing narrative that there was such a problem, the ready answer of hating “undeserving foreigners” who are “taking resources” from “us” became easy for many to digest, especially when far more specific and horrifying versions of that argument were being pumped into their social media feeds each day.
I think a lot about my belief in anarchism. The idea that self rule might be better than rule by external government and that better worlds are possible than the broken one we’ve got. I really do believe it, and have written extensively to justify the idea intellectually. But some days I wonder if my instincts for anarchism come from growing up in a world where the sort of entertainment I consumed gave me that message: anarchic early morning TV shows where the kids ran things and the adults seemed over-powered, alternative comedy breaking all the rules of convention and tearing up the script of acceptability? I always found myself watching the shows on at odd hours — lunchtime or the middle of the night — that felt sort of like they shouldn’t be on the air. Like someone had made a mistake and soon would pull the plug (and often, they did). In my everyday television viewing I saw that the old way of doing things was tired and boring, and that giving people the chance to take over who had previously been held down and silenced led to something wonderful.
Did I really come to anarchism as a sound political idea because of the idea, or because I was predisposed to the notion from what I watched on TV?
Did so many people across the UK vote for Reform because they really think it’s a good idea, or have their ideas been hijacked by the Farage barrage on their phone screens and the inescapable anti-immigration rhetoric that has necessarily been the tone of British politics for at least the last twenty six years?
Could prejudices like those fostered by Reform be defeated by the simple act of representation — showing people the humanity and talent of others not like them at an early age, before any poison drips in from their family, friends, or society?
I don’t know. But I do know that we are not a smart species, and with Thursday’s results in local elections I am seeing further signs of decline and very little to bring any optimism. Which is why, I guess, I am now self-soothing by listening to the excellent music of Michael Jackson and remembering a more innocent time when it felt like we were making progress as a society instead of moving backwards (moonwalking?) into today’s dystopia.
Certainly more children will suffer under the regressive polices of Reform UK than were ever accused of suffering at the alleged hands of the “King of Pop”.
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