Tag Archives: politics

Welcome To The Jam

Each weekly edition of the “New Statesman” is currently closed by “The NS Q&A”, a short interview with a celebrity or public figure, with the same questions posed to each of them. From time to time, as a form of calibration, I like to indulge in answering the questions for myself mentally. One of the questions which has constantly come back to me of late is the simple “when were you happiest?” While “right now” is a common answer, which might be surprising if not for the fact that the interviewed individuals are typically successful and seemingly well-adjusted characters, the answer which keeps creeping back to me personally is at the age of 8 years old. It’s a specific moment in fact; late 1996, sat with my Mam during the school holidays at Teesside Park’s cinema, basked in the technicolour opening credits of the Michael Jordan-Looney Tunes mash-up “Space Jam”, one of the quintessential 90s kids’ movies. To the sound of Miami bass group Quad City DJs’ bombastic title song, the smash-cutting creds spliced with triumphant footage of Jordan at his NBA-dominating peak were a wide-eyed jamboree, the ultimate pop cultural crossover from probably the biggest sporting superstar in human history, at his very zenith. As I shall explain, this is an archetypal example of how ignorance is bliss.

In hindsight, I appreciate the function of this sequence; to the very young and impressionable as I was at that moment, this was an irresistible transmission of the soft power of sports propaganda to simultaneously obscure and remould inconvenient truths into something more palatable. Irrespective of the complicated relationship Jordan had to race, as touched upon by lockdown’s excellently watchable documentary “The Last Dance”, the entire spectacle could not be a finer packaging of the American Dream as imagined at its most utopian. To 8-year-old me, the United States was the unquestioned powerhouse of Earth and its citizens enjoyed the finest lives imaginable, and we in the UK benefited similarly from being the nation’s best friend. Moments like this were what made me understand international polarity in these terms before any history book could truly help me to dissect the way in which this information is formulated and propagated. These are the seeds which sow Western exceptionalism and also UK exceptionalism specifically, and undoubtedly contribute to explaining phenomena such as the political upheavals of 20 years later; the relationship with the US as the average UK voters interprets it undoubtedly assisting to power the turn to Brexit, built on the idea that continental Europeans are ‘not like us’. The overarching feeling I recall colouring my childhood, against a backdrop of thrilling pop music, Hollywood productions and what might selectively be described as the peak of neoliberal politics all across the English-speaking world, Francis Fukuyama’s infamous “End of History”, was the feeling that whatever darkness might be out there, everyone in the UK and US would be just fine, eternally. It was almost Heaven. 

The moment when this nascent worldview was shattered in my mind remains both with me and possessed of the utmost clarity; five years later, during the 9/11 attacks. I clearly recall coming home from school to the rolling news broadcasts and pitching out on my bike for a while, a feeling of sombre devastation prevailing, and the answers to what had happened seeming far beyond reach. It wasn’t quite an “are we the baddies?” moment in the style of Mitchell and Webb’s famed sketch, but it was that afternoon that I realised that I, and things, would never be the same. I don’t believe that even at that moment, I ever bought into the narrative which was subsequently used to justify the war-mongering which would so irreversibly undermine public trust in Transatlantic institutions. As unbearable as that roll over the cliff edge of history was, it did not feel, even to a 13-year-old me, like an unbridled evil had been unleashed upon the world. Like many, I wanted to know who would want to strike their most venomous blow against Babel, and why they would need to do it. I realised that whatever those reasons were, this surely could not be borne purely out of anarchy. Shade came into my world, as all notions of pure black and white seeped together.  

These are questions of what constitutes society, how societies think and move and how certain people are drowned by them rather than being washed along with the current like the majority. To my mind, a cabal of angry, disaffected, overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white agitators, both young and old, have recently worked as useful idiots in combination with an age-old ancien régime of press barons, financiers and their respective marionettes in politics and media (many of whom hold certain views for money) to fatally compromise the relative, communitarian stability upon which Western societies had been maintained, even if such underpinnings were in truth already reduced to a mirage by the Thatcher/Reagan axis and the unravelling of the post-war consensus, and even if electoral expressions of and support for this suicidal impulse have been enacted by a much broader range of Boomers at the ballot box. The characteristics of whiteness and maleness have also upheld among the wider support base for this politics of misanthropy, even as one scans the demographic chart for age and other variables. It strikes me that the most steadfast advocates of this model of chaos, which is nonetheless thoroughly calculated in its aims and spread at the head of this complex, socially incestuous serpent, are utterly ignorant as to the vast and powerful forces of capital, culture and ideology arrayed against them, blasting with the ferocity of a hurricane such that it is no longer possible to comprehend how those winds prevail against their own best interests as well as those whose interests they have been so effectively, mercilessly moulded to attack. It is a meticulously and expertly designed politics and public discourse of jealousy, hatred and division, and we’ve seen in recent years that it works.

On the point of gender equality alone, the sentiment is best embodied by the following quote from Scottish comedian and writer Frankie Boyle. While Boyle’s comedy once pushed at the very furthest limits of decency with jarring, blunt-force observations deployed under the guise of satirising and examining what we allow to pass for entertainment and culture, which were pitched marginally the right side of acceptability for me like so many of the very finest stand-ups have been, his subsequent blossoming into a much more trenchant and analytical political operator in the vein of his hero Bill Hicks has delightfully validated my long and exponentially growing fandom of his work. The following is likely the most beautiful and true statement I have seen him make to date, from his 2018 show “Prometheus Vol. 3”:

“I’m going to tell you honestly what I think about feminism…I genuinely think, if you’re a young guy at the moment, feminism is the only thing that has a plan for you. Capitalism doesn’t give a fuck about you, materialism doesn’t really care if you live or die. Feminism includes you, and when I see guys, particularly young guys, attacking feminism, do you know what it looks like to me? It looks like when the fire brigade go to a really rough housing estate and they get stoned. That’s what you’re doing; you’re stoning the fucking rescue services”.

So this is where we find ourselves in 2021, as the plague years rumble into their second calendar, exposing every faultline our system, constructed by design to appear teetering to the many while remaining remarkably resistant to reform or change at the expense of the elite situated at its apex, is nevertheless built so precariously atop; at the confluence of a so-called society where hoping for a progressive, meaningful, moral and righteous centring to life, envisioned and enacted in a harm-free manner, is obstructed and discouraged by virtue of its supposed and seeming unattainability, and of a capitalism whose main objective towards the average directionless young person, and males in particular, is to so aggressively sell the fantasy and ultimate objective of being a hip hop star (supplanting the previous fast-expiring rock star dream) or sports icon, despite the practical impossibility of such an eventuality (à la “Fight Club”, an often controversially interpreted movie which first informed my understanding of cinema as art, and which I have always since held close to my heart as a liberal, empathetic, philosophy-shaping, anti-capitalist lodestar, in sharp contrast to the many apparently reactionary ideologies some attribute to the film and its fans).

Compassion is an increasingly elusive quality these days, but I understand how misguided young men in particular end up in such disastrous predicaments, despite the genuinely dangerous poison spouted by the people I am thinking of, when only two potential trajectories seem to loom ahead. The first is a pointless existence slowly fizzling out, which undoubtedly drives people into the warped, conspiratorial communities which are driving contemporary conjecture and political outcomes to an ever-growing extent, especially in the US, where the homegrown “Paranoid Style” of politics described by Richard Hofstadter has barely ever seemed as prominent. The other is perishing more suddenly in some unimaginable, unanticipated, inconceivable historical event where multiple strands of our twisted, seemingly uncontrollable narratives collide so ground-shakingly. To this day I cannot gaze upon a gorgeous, cloudless blue sky without being reminded of the same New York horizon violated so horrendously that morning in September 2001.

Many people, the majority in fact, reconcile the aforementioned reality with their everyday lives and spend their time as happy and contented as they can, which I admire. Having peered through the looking glass and seen what I’ve observed, I can’t imagine ever being able to do this the way I did when I was 8 years old, under the glare of perhaps the greatest sports legend of all time, the Looney Tunes and a mighty empire of agitprop broadcasting its messages so brilliantly. That perception, to me, is the real black-pill, and it rejects all misogyny, racism, homophobia, inequality and hate of any kind, while embracing hope in the face of stupefyingly long odds. Things have flipped significantly in 24 years, and this is what “Space Jam” will always surprisingly evoke to me.  

Baths

Recently, I took a bath for the first time in a long time. Since moving home two and a half years ago, I calculate that I have graced my bathtub a grand total of five times. A casual and entirely unscientific straw poll of associates suggests that people generally lean towards showers, although not exclusively. Yet many agreed that baths are the more enjoyable, when we bother to enjoy them. A cursory glance at the Internet suggests that if managed correctly, showers are the more water and energy efficient option against baths, although this doesn’t seem to be a motivation for most people. I suspect that, much like many other vital, recharging activities such as sitting around doing and thinking about nothing and, erm, sleeping, baths are just another casualty of our contemporary, supercharged, late capitalist lifestyles. This seems inextricably tied to the fact that where bathing was once a very public affair, it is now utterly private, and therefore has little anchor in a world which demands that we let things play out in the public glow of social media. Yet like sleep, the bath is clearly invigorating and allows us to be reborn. It is literally and figuratively cleansing and seems to transform me each time I take the dip. The moments alone with only your thoughts can be reimagined as an act of resistance in this context. So exactly why are baths portrayed as locations of danger in much of our culture? I’d argue that this is evidence of their importance as a phenomenon.

Time and time again in much of our canon, the bath is a perilous spot. It seems that this is because bath-time finds us at our most vulnerable. Detached from a world from which we rarely escape, experiencing utmost relaxation and with nothing at all to hide (unless you don’t take baths naked, in which case OK), this puts us at our furthest removed from our daily demands and tribulations. It is a rare state of peace. My friend Sandra described it thus when I brought up the subject: “I believe people love baths because it feels a bit like how we felt when we were in the womb. Warm and safe…I truly believe it triggers that feeling in our brains. That’s why people get very relaxed; it reminds us of a time where there was nothing to worry about”. This fascinated me and is very much on to something, but raises intrigue since, as I shall discuss, the bath is regularly portrayed not as a haven, but a dangerous zone. There is an interplay here, a convergence between life and death which makes the bath so powerful.

“The Death of Marat” by Jacques-Louis David, perhaps the most iconic bathtub death going

One of the most evocative depictions of bathing in Western culture is a gruesome one. This is “The Death of Marat”, the 1793 painting by Jacques-Louis David, immortalising the murder of his fellow Montagnard and French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, at the height of the French Revolution, by the Girondin sympathiser Charlotte Corday. The fact that Marat was taking a medicinal bath to treat his notable skin ailments adds a layer of vulnerability, although a layer of complexity is certainly added on top by Marat’s significance during the Reign of Terror and the September Massacres in particular. This painting evidences a different convergence, of the mundane with the electrically political. This is iconic stuff for sure, and an immortal portrayal of the exposure involved in taking a bath. Corday strikes Marat at his weakest.

Contemporary equivalence might be drawn with the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror classic and seminal slasher movie, “Psycho”. Now, I know this occurs in a shower and not a bath but it delves into so many similar themes and preys on such a rich vein of contemporary anxiety that it seems churlish to force the difference. Barely a canonical American horror film has passed since without conjuring up our most horrible, shared, public fears about the yoke of domesticity and what may lurk on the other side of a (in this case, shower) curtain. By all accounts, “Psycho”, and the shower scene in particular, was considered in equal parts revolutionary and abhorrent depending on who was asked. Cinema-goers had never seen anything like it on a mass scale. The cinematography, the score, the image of trickling blood circling the plughole, are all irresistibly imprinted on our cultural retina. The scene is nauseating, features fluid but undeniable sexual elements and marks the point in Western culture when violence, preferably with added sex, became an essential form of both entertainment and commerce. This is the epicentre of a head-spinning sociocultural vortex. What makes the scene even more significant for me is an often overlooked fact. Earlier in the scene is the first occurrence of a toilet being flushed in American cinema. This shattering of a, in hindsight rather weird, taboo is usually understandably forgotten, but clearly incorporates the bathroom as a whole into the stage on which Hitchcock orchestrates an insurrectionary unchaining of mass repression. Every theme involved is just as relevant to the bath, that other porcelain motif of the ideal home. The theme continues to be recycled for less stellar horror films, such as in 2000 flick “What Lies Beneath” and its accompanying promotional material.

This poster for “What Lies Beneath” effortlessly invokes the bathtub as a Hitchcockian symbol of domestic terror

Those are just two of several of our most prominent examples of how the bath intertwines with mortality. Doors frontman Jim Morrison, countercultural prophet and one of the most notable members of the 27 Club, was found dead in a Paris bathtub in 1971. More recently, Whitney Houston was discovered in a similar position, in Beverly Hills in 2012. Kanye West paid a reported $85,000 to adorn the cover of Pusha T’s 2018 “Daytona” album with a picture of Houston’s fatal bathroom, a crass and tasteless act on one hand, but also suggestive of the fact that West understands and channels controversy as well as ever and also appreciates the narrative undercurrents involved in the circumstances. The shot is morbidly fascinating as a twisted photo negative of David’s aforementioned painting and plays with the same horror in a modern context. Musical giants are our modern revolutionaries and like Robespierre, Saint-Just and indeed Marat, they seem to desire a temporal agelessness which currently remains out of their reach. As pleasurable as it can be for each of us, the bathtub is an inglorious enough rock on which to dash the ships of their otherworldly dreams.

Some 400 years earlier was the time of Hungarian countess and alleged serial killer Elizabeth Bathory, who reputedly bathed in the blood of her virginal victims in order to preserve her youth. Although this slice of yore is reportedly in fact a timeless fiction, at least so far as the bloodbath element of the tale goes, it is as evocative a form of cultural myth-making as the deaths of Morrison and Houston. Besides, it is easier to be seduced by such a folkloric yarn when it would make Bathory arguably the best ever example of nominative determinism (run close for me by the American Football cornerback Buster Skrine!). Nothing better summarises how the bath edges us closer to rebirth and death simultaneously than Bathory utilising murder in pursuit of vitality. When we bathe do we yearn to return to the womb as Sandra suggested, or do we surrender ourselves to forces which may undo us in the hope of emerging even better than when we plunged? The thrill of not knowing is part of why we should make the exploration more regularly if we can.

The cover of “Daytona” by Pusha T, which channels Whitney Houston’s death scene at the behest of Kanye West

Not all of our touchstones on this topic are as doom-laden or as leaden. In the 2010 comedy “Hot Tub Time Machine”, after travelling back to the 1980s via a time-travelling hot tub (come on, it’s a form of bath!), one of the protagonists witnesses his own conception in the most existential of the examples I am listing here. The gravitational pull of the thematics surrounding water appliances on the psyche of writers is seemingly very strong. When Alan Partridge looks to help listeners to his Norfolk Nights radio show relax in “I’m Alan Partridge” during his laughable ‘Alan’s Deep Bath’ segment (“brought to you by Dettol”), he can’t help but qualify his mindful instructions with the caveat “don’t fall asleep and slip under; some terrible statistics about that”. Although obviously played for laughs, and successfully, Steve Coogan and Armando Iannucci cannot help but spike the idea of an inviting, soothing bathing experience with a shot of danger and impermanence.

How should we read all of this? If we all take more baths, could we change the world? Are cultural markings of the bath (and wider bathroom) as a hazard a form of unconscious, or even conscious, propaganda? Perhaps not quite, but British governments presumably only reach for the hosepipe ban in drought conditions because a bath ban would be practically unenforceable. I take the evidence of the bath as an icon of potential disaster and of the venue of a complex dance between forces of life and death in popular culture and beyond merely as proof of the state of deep and profound reflection it allows us to access. This places us uniquely in a position of exposure as discussed, which is fertile staging ground within cultural frameworks for the navigation of issues of politics, society, the impossibility of immortality and an incessant striving to recover a childlike sense of contentment. When we bathe, we unplug from the matrix, we care for our mental health and we grant ourselves an essential rejuvenation. In doing all of these things we rebel, which is why we should bathe more.