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Men Like Joe

Life's rarely fair. Take the case of Mr. Daniel Ware: picked out of nowhere because a passerby shared a picture of his chez res on social media and before the ink is dry on his contract with The Sun he's standing in front of the media as the representative of an entire class. He hadn't asked to be judged and it would be wrong of anybody to try to understand his soul simply by looking at him.  So, let's not make this about Mr. Daniel Ware who, according to his neighbours, is simply a 'gentle giant'. I really don't want to talk about Mr. Ware. I really don't care about Mr. Ware.

Instead, let's talk about people who look like Mr. Ware. I'm sure you won't have to look very far.

In the early hours of yesterday, Emily Thornberry resigned from the shadow cabinet (or, according to some reports, she was sacked) because she had been resorting to stereotypes about the working classes. How dare she judge a man by the flag he waves... Or so the argument begins. There's nothing wrong with people who are proud of their country and, if a man (not Mr. Ware, just a man who looks like Mr. Ware) just happens to drive a white van, then he's one of many tens of thousands who take to our roads every day in vans painted white. Maybe they represent the national average in some obscure but meaningful way. Maybe, if you wanted to take a snapshot of Britain on the 21st November, 2014, you would come away with a portrait of a man who looks very much like Mr. Ware but, obviously, isn't Mr. Ware. Let's call this lookalike Joe Anybody. Joe looks just like Mr Ware and, lucky for us, has a very similar biography.

For example, Joe just happens to sport a skinhead and have that fold of flesh at the back of his head that always makes me think of Grossberger in Stir Crazy. It makes me think of violence and warehouses late at night. Unlike Grossberger, Joe also sports a few tattoos. But there are probably thousands of men who are like Joe: heavily tattooed and also supporters of West Ham United. And just because Joe supports West Ham and has a skin head, it would be wrong to mention that English football hooliganism began with West Ham's 'Bovver Boys' of the 1960s or that they were sympathisers of the National Front and characterised by their tattoos and skin heads.

Joe also reads The Sun but so do lots of men. They enjoy looking at the women with the big tits but lots of men enjoy looking at women with big tits. He deals in cars which is a legitimate business and great for the economy. The nation thrives because of wheeler dealers. And if he happens to enjoy climbing into a cage and beating other men up, he's not breaking any laws. He simply needs to relax after a head day's wheeling and dealing.

Critics of Emily Thornberry would say that none of this matters. And they're right because clearly, none of this has anything to do with the real person Mr. Daniel Ware. Her tweet about him was reductive and crude.

However, had Emily Thornberry tweeted a picture of the house belonging to our entirely imaginary friend Joe, would we think that her stereotype was at all inaccurate?

Maybe the very worst thing you can say about Joe is that if you were casting a role for a brutish modern thug with far right sympathies, he would land the role on £120 quid a day and everything he can eat from catering. Perhaps if you were interested in modern British culture, you might also say that Joe is an example of a current and deeply troubling phenomenon. Men like Joe are the epitome of the new moronic Britain. They are the stuff of our most moronic TV, usually hosted by our favourite Joe lookalike, Ross Kemp, and with titles involving the words 'hardest', 'meanest', and 'most dangerous'. They are familiar because they're loutish and loud, muscle bound and steroid thick. They are the cretins who smash bottles on our high streets on a Friday night. You want to indulge in cheap stereotypes, then how about muscle vests, medallions, sovereign rings, ethnic tattoos, names of their numerous kids trailing up their vein-thick necks. How about pitbulls and rottweilers, broken noses, gold teeth, four by fours, road rage, gang culture, drug wars, English nationalism, football terraces, racism, hatred, violence, lad culture, pornography, rape...

Or perhaps there's another story here. Perhaps we should be more worried at the way the media rushes to appoint a skin-head tattooed West Ham supporter who happens to be a cage fighter as the sole representative of the working classes.

Is this what we've come to as a nation?

The media are cowardly stepping around the story. We live in an age when it's so easy to cause offence. Yet nobody asks if it's right to cause offence. Maybe we need to go on the offensive against men like Joe because, if you met a man like Joe in the flesh, what would you really think?

And yet in asking this, I know I could be accused of being elitist and sneering towards the working classes. Perhaps I am but I think I have the right because I am pure bred working class. Men like Joe and Mr Ware are standing as proxy for me.

But let me be clear. I don't mean that I'm working class in some kind of exotic way. I don't 'identify' with the working classes because that's a cool thing to do. I'm pretty well educated but I don't have a middle class upbringing. I'm not suddenly finding a kitsch appeal in the working classes. I see myself as working class because I am working class. I am born of working class parents. My grandparents were all working class and one of them was a Lithuanian (or possibly Russian, there remains some confusion) immigrant whose parents fled the Bolshevik revolution. I live in a working class town, surrounded by working class people and everybody I meet each and every day is working class. And what might sound strange is that not all of them are inarticulate or lazy or socialist or angry or loud or violent or tasteless or dumb or any of the stereotypes that are routinely thrown our way. Not all of us keep the brown sauce on the dining room table or wear slippers to the corner shop or eat fish and chips every night before taking our teeth out in order to suck on a bottle of Newkie Brown. Not all of us have tattoos or skinheads or gold chains or enjoy cage fighting. Of course, there are some that do a few of these things and there are people I see every day who obviously do a great many of these things. However, the majority of the people I know would simply look at Joe and give the sniff we all give to men of that type. They're the type we know only so well because the rarely whispered secret is that nobody hates the working classes more than the working classes. We know our ranks. We know our archetypes. We know the bad types.

They're found in every neighbourhood and in every neighbourhood they express the same thoughts and feelings and communicate in the very same loud boorish ways. You don't need a degree in sociology to identify them and you don't need extensive research to reach the conclusion that the type is neither typical nor average. I live next door to a fine example of the breed. I hear the anger, the shouting, the arguments that spill out into the street. I see the money they have, the success they find in a world that rewards their type. There's another up the road who looks the same, walks the same, and has exactly the same political outlook, the same hugely expensive 4x4. I could walk you to the homes of a dozen of their type and never lose sight of my own doorstep. In fact, from where I write this, I look out over a gym that is a second home to dozens upon dozens of men who all look like Joe. The town is filled with men who look like that. But are they typical? Can they represent us in any meaningful way?

This is what ultimately galls me about the coverage this story has been given this morning in the media. The most insulting part of this story isn't the shadow minister's tweet. It's the Labour leadership and, in turn, the newspapers who would defend men like Joe and hold him up as something good and noble. The insult to the working classes is to say that we're all somehow like that. And how bloody dare anybody equate me to a bald tattooed West Ham supporting white van driving cage fighter who drapes himself in the flag of St George.

Maybe -- just maybe -- Emily Thornberry's tweet was succinct and meaningful. Maybe stereotypes exist not because they're a lazy way of thinking about the world but because they're a handy way to spot the modern archetypes that exist in the real world. Maybe Emily Thornberry's tweet said something profound about England on the 21st November, 2014, a nation that abandoned boxing because it was simply too tame and took up cage fighting which is as repellent as it is bloody and brutal. The ultimate insult to the working classes is that we're not having a debate about tattoos, and muscles, and the culture of macho violence and, ultimately, the kind of men who wave the flag. What does it say about British politics when a political party is happy to damage itself and disown its own over a slightly misguided tweet, simply in order to reach out to that kind of man?

Vegetable Slicing and the Symbolic Castration of Ant & Dec

Men of the world unite! Either Ant or Dec has chopped off the top of his thumb and, oh, what a fine time it is to be a man, when the best among us has done what we all aspire to do: sing a song of manhood replete with sharp kitchen gadgets and a willful disregard for reading the instructions.

But you might have already grimaced over this story and know that it was actually Ant who suffered the injury whilst using a vegetable slicer to prepare dauphinoise potatoes for Dec. I only typed ‘Ant or Dec’ because I can’t honestly tell one receding hairline from another standing a foot to the right. In my mind, it’s the high-foreheaded hydra that’s one thumb down on the day and has only three thumbs remaining.

It’s a strange world where this story features so highly in the news. It’s probably why, as I gazed over the morning papers, I wondered why I continue with this sad pretence of blogging. The truth is that had I not written a piece about ‘Flappy Bird’ in the past week, traffic to this blog would be at an all-time low, with today setting a chilly record. Meanwhile, The Guardian promotes Jack Monroe like she’s the incarnate truth of blithe poverty; the happy-clappy survivalist and expert prepper for a country that’s just about getting by on one Ryvita a day and the occasional shapeless grape we find squashed beneath our empty freezer. That’s not to say I don’t like Jack Monroe, her backstory, or how she’s passionate about eating cheaply. It’s just that she’s so different to me that she constantly demonstrates how I’m doing everything wrong…

So, here goes. Aim for the mainstream, David. Aim for the mainstream…

How to cheaply feed a family of four with one thumb joint taken from popular TV presenter, Anthony ‘Ant’ McPartlin and some bloody-stained veg sliced unreasonably thin… First, take one TV presenter (£20 million a year, available at your local broadcaster), wash his thumbs, and apply one sharp blade to the top knuckle…

But I have to stop this sham right there. It would be fine if I could but I just can’t carry on and I’m increasingly tired of newspapers that can. It’s not just The Guardian that does it, of course. They all twist stories to fit their particular narratives. The Guardian just happens to have the best free web presence and politics I don’t totally object to, so I’m still drawn to reading it and feeling dismayed and utterly disappointed by the predictability of their content; how they try to link every celebrity story into a restatement of their perpetual themes of the surveillance society, poverty, gender politics… Especially gender politics…

Perhaps it’s just these jaded eyes but journalism seems to have become home to every third-rate academic willing to add another floor to the elaborate Babel that stretches skywards towards a feminist utopia that really isn’t up there. But perhaps a tower is far too phallic, no matter how much my metaphor might droop. Let’s make it a deep cave disappearing down towards some core dark truth.

Yet what surprises me the most is that I’ve never been entirely hostile to gender studies. I never thought it a paradigm shift to realise that gender is not absolute. Gender study is very prevalent in literary theory where it has become an often repeated observation that a writer such as D.H. Lawrence had a feminine sensibility. Once you accept that kind of distinction, the rest of it follows fairly easily. Even if I never thought much of Kristeva’s work (a writer who clearly hates to be understood), I’ve always quite liked Hélène Cixous’s way of making her point.

I write this as a woman, toward women. When I say "woman," I'm speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history.

If Freud could argue that we are defined by our childhoods, it seems only reasonable to conclude that the things we do, the words we choose to write, might also be influenced by our bodies, hormones, the very way we respond to the base urges of our gender.

The problem is that some places aren’t ready for the reconstituted male, men who agree with the broad arguments of feminism and simply wish to move on. We have to continue to play the role of the proxy bastards, out to keep women down and establish the patriarchal order. It’s not a part I wish to play but I’m doomed by my place in the patriarchy.

Last week’s Question Time was a perfect example. Tessa Jowell was on the panel with Dr David Starkey, George Galloway and others. They were debating whether the accused should be given anonymity in rape cases and Jowell was generally against it lest it discourage more women to come forward. It was a strange argument but typical of the ‘two wrongs do make a right’ logic that sometimes passes for progressive thinking. Rape has been under-reported for centuries and it’s only relatively recently that the law has taken the proper steps to recognise its severity. Yet should centuries of abuse, mainly by men, now justify a new kind of injustice that overlooks the rights of the individual if they just happen to be male? Even when acquitted, the accused are never cleared of the suspicion of guilt. Rape is a sentence that is handed down as soon as an allegation goes public. Does a belief in ‘innocent until proved guilty’ make me a typical man or simply somebody who believes in equality? Sometimes, in wanting justice to be blind, it feels like I’m not demanding the fashionable bias.

To me these things seem logical but perhaps logic isn’t as important playing the gender game where everything hinges on what we have between our legs. I expect articles in the papers this week explaining why Ant shouldn’t be mocked for losing his thumb, how it either reveals the emergency of a new masculine identity or reinforces the old stereotypes that says that men are useless around the kitchen. Brighter folk might even tell you that Ant didn’t chop off his thumb but symbolically took off the top inch of his penis. Perhaps they’re right. I really haven’t thought about it enough to disagree except to say if Ant was slicing vegetables with his penis, then he was asking for trouble. By now, I’m just confused. Perhaps his thumb is or really isn’t his dick and I don’t know my arse from my elbow. I nearly didn’t blog today and tomorrow I might not even bother.

The Hairy Cornflake Effect

I shouldn’t eat cheese late at night, though it's rare that I do. I can’t recall the last time I did eat cheese so close to my bedtime but around 10pm last night I was offered a quality cheese and I couldn’t resist. It was a lovely crumbling Wensleydale flavoured with cranberries, though I shouldn’t wax too lyrical about the creamy texture. My accent already makes me sound like an extra from Wallace & Gromit  without my mentioning my cheese fixation.

I’d heard, of course, all the myths about what happens when you eat cheese late at night. ‘Don’t have nightmares!’ I was warned but, like the fool I am, I laughed it off. I had a couple of hours of cartooning to do before I’d go to sleep. The cheese would have worn off by then. But an hour later, I was restless. I couldn’t finish the cartoon. It hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped (right). I’d wanted to draw Dave Lee Travis as one of those storms on a nautical map but it didn’t look quite right. I was also enormously tired so I gave up, sure that nothing would disturb my solid seven and a half hours.

Yea gods! How wrong could a man be? I woke up in the middle of the night plagued by a large hairy man dressed as Donald Duck chasing me through a Nigerian housing development. I escaped thanks to the intervention of Tony Soprano and the adventure rapidly moved to the home of the Boston Red Sox where my blog had been taken over by venture capitalists and I was swamped by boxes containing everything I’ve ever done on The Spine: all the files, the words, the pictures... The whole thing was a fiendish mess of half-recognised associations – cartoons I intend to draw, people I know but in unfamiliar places, jobs I need to do or have recently finished. But all of it was given a sick and powerful twist by the late night Wensleydale flavoured with cranberries.

Why is it that you can wake up from a bad dream, shake your head and think ‘Wow! Glad that was only a dream’ yet no sooner do you put your head back down to your pillow than your brain resumes the horrorshow as though you have no control over it? That was my night. Waking relieved and then falling back into the same tormented dreams.

Now I’m awake the whole thing seems ridiculous and every part of the riddle makes complete sense. The thing I wanted to blog about this morning seems almost trivial by comparison with  dream. The hairy man chasing me was clearly meant to be Dave Lee Travis and he was dressed as Donald Duck because I have to draw a cartoon today about a duck. The dream moved to the Boston Red Sox because their owner, John W Henry, also owns Liverpool and today I also have to draw a cartoon for the fanzine and the deadline is tomorrow.

None of which is significant to the point I wanted to make which was this: I know next to nothing about Dave Lee Travis. I know he’s a DJ, bearded, known by his initials or by the nickname ‘the Hairy Cornflake’ and he’s a favourite of Burma's pro-democracy leader and Nobel Peace laureate, Aung San Suu Ky. He’s just been the latest celebrity to face trail relating to allegations of a sexual nature. In the case of Travis, he faced accusations of groping women and yesterday he was found not guilty on 12 counts and it’s not yet known if he’ll face retrial regarding the remaining two.

What I find astonishing is the media’s response to the story. Over the last few days, thousands of people have suffered from the storms and have been forced out of their homes by floods. Some of our most valuable historic buildings are now under water (though that has given rise to this stunning picture). Trees have fallen on cars and power lines have been damaged leaving whole communities without power. Trains from north to south of the country have been forced to stop and it’s impossible for travelers to get to Cornwall by train. Another storm is meant to hit today and the government is struggling to keep on top of the whole sorry mess which might (or might not) have been made worse by funding cuts to the Environment Agency. The country hasn’t seen a national emergency like this is perhaps half a century or more and the government has been hit by infighting and the worst kind of political gamesmanship. Could this be the most obvious example of Global Warming or is it just one of those freak winters that might hit us once a century? Questions haven been asked and the country awaits the answers…

Yet all it took was the acquittal of a radio DJ to bump the national story from the headlines.

DLT was the lead on most newspaper websites as I went to be last night and you only need look at the morning newspapers to recognise the power of celebrity in this country. A celebrity name is even more powerful than that of Mother Nature herself, who sadly, never had her own game show or got her tits out on Channel 5, otherwise we might listened to what she had to say long before now.

Cartooning Hell: Even A Rejection Would Be Nice

Plenty of outgoing emails this morning and, so far, only one automated response suggesting that I’d managed to hit the nerve feeding raw photographs from field reporters straight into a newspaper’s command centre. My cartoon will clearly find the wrong person. I need to try again another day with another cartoon. Meanwhile, I'll have to throw last night’s effort away now that its moment has passed.

One of the biggest struggles I seem to face is simply finding the right person to talk to. Newspapers don’t list the contact details of the cartoon editor and newspapers increasingly don’t publish any email addresses of their staff. It’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed as the separation of them and us gets ever larger. It’s as if news operates at a level above that of your common man; a conviction that grows stronger every day as the people who make news always seem to know the people who report the news.

The paradox is, of course, that the media continually tell us that they’re listening. They go to great lengths to throw up their Twitter handles and to tell us to get in touch, but that’s one of the problems I realised about Twitter a long time ago. Behind this supposed utopia where everybody is equal is a great publicity machine working against our ultimate emancipation. Because social media feeds the media with free content (‘Hey! Send us your photos of the storm [whispers] but don’t expect to be paid’) it allows them to stop listening, stop seeking professional services, and to keep the controls inside a very tight circle in the heart of London.

I come from a family of news obsessives and once 24 hour news started, we rarely watched anything in the day followed by the BBC News at 6pm, 9pm and Newsnight on BBC2. Sky News used to be the best news channel but they reduced their service to a rolling 15 minute cycle of perhaps 3 news items and the BBC has become our regular source of information. It’s a shame. Sky News used to be something compelling and really special; as special, in fact, as Sky’s sports coverage or their 3D service, which I’ve had chance to glimpse a few times and is amazing at its best. They also had some of the best young journalists and come the day that the BBC retires the great John Simpson, Sky News have his ideal replacement in the even greater (in my opinion) Tim Marshall.

But I digress. Sending cartoons, articles, and books away in the hope that somebody will be willing to take a moment and look at them can be a shocking business for your self-esteem. I’d always been prepared for rejection. I’ve had enough in my time and I welcome rejection when somebody actually tells me what I'm doing wrong. However, nothing ever prepared me for the reality of the silence.

To break into the news circle as either a cartoonist of writer is extraordinarily frustrating. I end up sending work to vague sounding inboxes such as ‘the news’ or ‘tellusabout’ or simply ‘contact’, which probably aren’t read by anybody .

I thought writing books hard work but nothing was like the hard work of trying to get somebody read the damn things. It’s the same with writing essays and drawing cartoons. Selling them is the horrible side of the business when it should really be the easiest. I started last night cartoon’s about 5pm, worked on it at a relaxed (dare I saw blissfully happy) pace through the night and started to apply colour about 9pm. I was finished about 2am. It sounds like a long time and result isn’t going to set the world alight but then, I’m still learning and the time I take is time I put aside to learn this craft. Last night I also discovered that I can do a couple of things with my technology that I previously thought impossible. I wish my craft could make two breakthroughs a night. I should do some night school course on how to draw, though the thought of having to sketch some local hobo in his posing pouch doesn’t fill me with excitement given that very few of our local hobos look are as sexy as Kate Upton. But then again, neither are many cartoonists… It’s a cruel world.