Roy Hodgson's Monkey

Roy Hodgson has put his tongue in it again. Or rather he hasn’t but some people are acting as though he has and all the way down to his boots... What he did do is tell an old joke about NASA sending a monkey into space alongside an astronaut. The monkey is asked to perform all manner of technical operations and the astronaut is dismayed to find himself with nothing to do. He asks NASA if he can do something important. They reply: ‘you can in 15 minutes when you feed the monkey’. Bum bum tish. Or perhaps not…

Most right minded people (and Wayne Rooney) have said that Hodgson had nothing to apologise for but Piara Powar, the executive director of Football Against Racism in Europe, used Twitter to complain that: "Hodgson used very silly term within a diverse team environment. He should know better. Assume it wasn't a Freudian slip, no evidence to suggest it was. Some players will see it as reflection of the crude language still used by some coaches and attitudes that still prevail."

We are meant to infer that ‘crude language’ in this instance is the word ‘monkey’, which, I could easily point out, insults my distant relatives by turning their species into a term of offense. We can assume that given the modern climate, nobody involved in football can ever use the word 'monkey'. So there’s no use of that old polite saying about being a ‘cheeky monkey’, no PG Tips in the dressing room, not even the sportsman’s favourite bananas to replace energy during the game…

Of course, it’s an utterly stupid, reductive, and tedious story which I would normally ignore had Hodgson not issued a statement.

‘I would like to apologise if any offence has been caused by what I said at half-time. There was absolutely no intention on my part to say anything inappropriate.’

This kind of apology has become commonplace these days. People apologise if offence was caused even if it wasn’t intended. I’d like somebody to explain the thought process that leads to this kind of specious reasoning. Who decides if offence was caused? Who decides if the offence was justifiable offence? What would happen if the person feeling offence was a rabid right-wing loon, spouting nationalistic nonsense? What if they’re offended by the colour of a person’s skin or their speaking the wrong language or with the wrong accent? Who is to judge what is righteous offence and what is intolerant rubbish? I personally find Hodgson’s apology offensive and I’d like an apology for that, except I doubt if one will be coming.

The problem with this kind of utterly dumb media-driven story is that it distracts from the real problems of racism in our culture. It gives ammunition to people who want to dismiss every aspect of PC culture. Of course, I’ve argued before that PC culture is self-defeating and it is for precisely the kind of problems associated with Hodgson’s non-error.

A teacher friend told me just the other day of something that happened in her classroom. A student was asked where they’d put their homework. ‘I put it in the box,’ he said. ‘Which box?’ she asked. ‘I can’t tell you, Miss. It would be racist.’ It turned out that he’d put the homework into a black cardboard box but was frightened of using the term ‘black’ lest it offend.

It reminded me a similar situation that happened to me. A few years ago I used to teach a basic course on structuralism to university undergraduates. One of the things we’d discuss is why bad guys always wear black in movies and, occasionally, somebody would try to argue that associating the colour black with evil was terribly racist and we should now know better than that. Of course, the only racism evident was their associating blackness with the colour of a person’s skin. The correct answer was that bad guys wear black because our ancestors undoubtedly feared the night and dark places. Evil would have been thought to lurk in dark places. It's why ancient mystery rites always used to take place in deep dark caves. It means that our horror stories are rarely set during the daytime. Nobody is ever frightened of entering the old well lit mansion. Ghost don’t wander the graveyard after the church bell has tolled noon. Simply put: it's more frightening not to be able to see where you're going than when you have a clear path.

What does this have to do with Roy Hodgson and his monkey? I suppose it just shows that we live in ridiculously fretful yet hypocritical times. Hodgson is in trouble for telling an utterly benign story about a monkey going into space whilst Grand Theft Auto 5 continues to be sold by every high street retailer whilst teaching our youth (most of whom aren’t even old enough to legally buy the game) the most vile kinds of racial stereotypes and is littered with the very word that has effectively be stricken from our language, edited out of our great literary texts.

With such idiots supposedly on the side of the angels, is it any wonder that bigots prevail?

The Sanest Evil and the Death of Akram Raslan

[caption id="attachment_3216" align="alignright" width="252"] Cartoonist Akram Raslan, murdered in Syria.[/caption]

Among the many hand-sized clichés we often reach for is the one that says that evil is beyond our powers to describe. Yet the phrase ‘I really don’t understand how they can do that’ is surely one of the most cowardly in our language because what it really means is: ‘I really don’t want to understand how they can do that’. We play linguistic games in order to find that easy path out of difficult areas. We resort to words like ‘madman’ to describe Hitler when his motivations and actions were based in a cold realm of logic taken straight from Nietzsche who argued that pity weakens us all.

It’s in this sense that Kurtz in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ is not a mad man. He is man who has gone utterly sane. Kurtz has stripped back the layers of culture, behaviour, and morality to locate himself in a simpler world free from values. ‘There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it,’ says Marlow. ‘He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces.’

The message of Conrad’s book is that civilisation must maintain a state of partial insanity in order to continue. In one of the great final chapters of literature, Kurtz’s intended asks Marlow if Kurtz mentioned her before he died. Marlow makes a profound choice, choosing to tell a lie because the truth – that Kurtz died expounding ‘the horror, the horror’ – would give her no solace. It’s like the many lies we tell ourselves: that our governments are benign, that politicians care about every single one of us, that good guys win, that talent triumphs, and that owning an iPad is the thing to do and totally without consequence. The truth is that we in the West live the lives we live because we exploit people in other countries. The even larger truth is that we are fighting the same battle for survival that has gone on for ten thousand years, only our tribe no longer slaughters the woolly mammoth outside the cave. We no longer see our fathers, brothers, and sons killing the rivals who covet our resources.

Reason taken like this to its logical extreme is ultimately nihilistic. We are just lumps of cells bound to a planet we might never escape before our civilisation is doomed by the death of the sun. Yet even if our far decedents find other planets to colonise, it will merely be a pause before the ultimate heat death of the universe. There is no greater meaning against that backdrop. Good and evil are relative temperatures; morality merely a state of warmth between something being hot and then becoming cold forever or until time itself comes to an end.

Such talk should rightly be offensive to our sensibilities. To paraphrase the advice given to the young Alvy Singer in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: the entropic decay of the universe doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do our maths homework. Similarly, we want to leave the problems of ‘evil’ in some dark corner while we instead consider the things that make life worth living. In this sense, we all would be Kurtz’s bride. We don’t want the truth. We need lies in order to survive.

Call it habit, behaviour, tics, prejudices, programming, instinct or conditioning: we are all ‘mad’ in some small way and we should be glad of that. Cartoonists in particular are bred to exploit that madness. Their humour warms us because it’s borne out of the friction caused by our fractured subjectivity rubbing against the cold sanity of the objective world. It is the job of the cartoonist to revel in our human faults, fragilities, pretentions, delusions, and, yes, the madness that is sometimes needed to keep our blood pumping. The alternative is to succumb to the rising power of reason, systems, and programming. The sane act is to dress all our window cleaners in the same uniform. It’s to make call centre staff adhere to a corporate image and respond to every call by mechanically following a flowchart. Such things strip away our humanity, the unique eccentricity that comes from being living breathing people. The postman no longer cracks jokes as he does his round because he’s now a professional. We’re told it makes sense, that it’s surely the rational thing to do… Yet it’s the cartoonist who points out that none of this actually makes life better. The cartoonist points out that conformity is only a short step from the police, the army, and, eventually, the secret apparatus of a repressive regime. It is the cartoonist’s job to remind us that Hitler was not mad. He was sane. Criminally sane and the same is true of the tyrants butchering innocents in Syria.

Today I read that the cartoonist Akram Raslan has been murdered by the Assad regime. The full report is here but, really, what needs to be said is that Raslan’s only crime was to lampoon the President of Syria. Raslan stood up when others cower down, an act braver than anything I can imagine. Perhaps he is one of the very few really worthy of the honour of calling themselves ‘cartoonist’ because the true cartoonist defends the madness of our culture, our society, our manners, our faiths, beliefs, prejudices, pretentions, and hopes. The cartoonist maintains the humour that fires the human spirit in the face of those cold, rational, and deeply corrupt minds that routinely calculate that millions can die so a barbarous few can survive. True cartoonists do that regularly. It is their job to stand up and speak mad truths. It’s why the best are so very few and the rest of us merely scratch around in the dirt hoping to find significant meaning in the dust.

I suppose Akram Raslan wasn’t what every cartoonist should aspire to be. He was what every human being should aspire to be. You might say that it was an act of madness to defy a government ruled by cowards and thugs but surely it is the same madness that defines the noblest among of us. Sometimes our finest accomplishments make no rational sense but are supremely meaningful because of that: Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Michaelanelo’s Pietà, the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. Rationalists rightly attack religion and accuse it of being the cause of much of the world’s trouble but we should not forget that the alternative they offer is one step closer to the gas chamber than anything found in scripture. The last century’s most notorious genocides were perpetrated not in the name of God but in the name of Nazi and Stalinist ideology where God had no place.

That isn’t to defend religion but to simply point out that sometimes we, as human beings, need the mystery of the established lie. Freedom is non-conformity, rule breaking, individual expression, and a love of things that make no sense. It sometimes makes us an enemy of the state but that is as it should be. Some call it anarchy but we never choose that entirely or, at least, never choose is entirely for very long. Civilization is founded upon the compromises we always make between order and chaos, truth and lies, silence and laughter. Cartoonists explore those compromises for the purposes of humour and sometimes enlightenment. Akram Raslan explored it to express the most important statement any person can make. He dared to laugh and then some coldly rational bastard silenced him for that and in the process they kicked the very earth to pieces.