But I Digress ... Read online

  In Thailand, that consists principally of the same overpitched game show that followed me about like a hungry mutt. Wherever there was television, there was that green and purple stage design, those seven Thais in animated conversation, that cheering, whistling audience. I spent many hours trying to puzzle it out, but I still haven’t any idea how the game is played. All I could gather, by the succession of groans and crumpled facial expressions, was that no one had yet triumphed. Finally, after 10 days of such torture, the grand prize was won. I wasn’t watching when it happened, I’m happy to say, but Dam, my driver, told me it had been a motorbike.

  Dam was a font of invaluable information. When buying cobra’s blood from a street vendor, he cautioned, always make sure it’s fresh. “Watch the snake be kill,” said Dam earnestly, “with own eyes.” Apparently unscrupulous cobra-blood merchants will substitute the pre-packaged blood of the more common tree snake. Dam tutted at the depths of man’s depravity.

  Two days later I stood in a narrow Chinatown alley, carefully watching as my cobra was sliced open. The blood was decanted into a small plastic packet, such as you would use to wrap your child’s sandwiches for school. I looked around eagerly, savouring the exoticness of the moment, but the vendors weren’t watching me. They were peering through a half-open door at a flickering TV screen. I looked over their shoulders. A Barbara Cartland movie was showing.

  Hugh Grant stood proud in Regency wig and ruffles. He appeared to be defending, or perhaps defiling, the honour of a simple country lass in blonde curls. He said something in Thai, and the snake vendors hissed approvingly. I sighed and sipped my blood. Everyone wants to be a critic.

  White male TV columnists overthrow the world

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 6 FEBRUARY 2000

  THERE ARE MANY ways of insulting someone. One way that is surprisingly common is to give them a bunch of carnations on Valentine’s Day. (Don’t ask why, buddy, just don’t do it.)

  Another popular means of insult is to call someone nasty names. “Shane” is a nasty name, and so is “Gary”, and I’m not crazy about “Dwayne” either.

  The important thing about insulting someone, if you want the insult to sting, is to ensure that it is accurate and to the point. “You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things” has pleasing iambic pentameter, but it is not going to cause a roomful of Simunye presenters to burst into tears.

  Similarly, when Steven Kenton the class bully took to calling Lance Denman “Four-Eyes” when we were all cruel youths, it caused more puzzlement than pain, since Lance Denman never wore glasses. Steven Kenton tried to explain that he was referring to Lance Denman’s stammer, but once you have to explain an insult, you are lost.

  “I-I-I-I don’t know what you mean,” Lance Denman would simply say smugly, and Steven Kenton would be nonplussed, if nonplussed is the word I’m looking for.

  An ill-directed insult causes more mirth than soul-searching. Just the other day, for instance, someone hissed, not without venom, that I belong to something called “the white male media conspiracy”.

  Unless you’re white, male and working in the media, it is hard to understand just how funny this is. Take a good look at the next white male media worker you bump into while returning your empties down at the bottle store – he can scarcely co-ordinate his own clothing, far less a sinister counter-revolutionary movement. We can’t even put together a Sunday league cricket team, let alone conspire to overthrow the world with our white, male TV columns.

  On the whole, conspiracies require a great deal more application, intelligence and energy than most human beings (white, male or otherwise) can bring to the job. If we have learnt anything from the past century, it should be that history unfolds not through planning and co-ordination, but through the unravelling of chance and circumstance, and the relentless dialectic of opportunity and opportunism.

  The Nazis: A Warning from History (SABC3, Sunday, 9pm) should be compulsory viewing for everyone who complains there is nothing decent on television, and everyone who likes to abnegate his own responsibilities by pointing an indignant finger outwards. The idea of ordinary people being helpless before the hidden face of implacable power is perversely comforting, but it is a myth.

  The West has long been made uncomfortable by the very fact of Hitler and his Nazis. How could such a man, and such a machine, exist in a civilised world? The easiest answer is to accept, at least partially, Hitler’s own publicity: the Nazis must have been supermen, or supermonsters, cold-blooded and calculating, working tirelessly to achieve their diabolical masterplan.

  The truth, as A Warning from History so strikingly demonstrates, is less dramatic and far more frightening. With extraordinary research and dazzling footage, the show brought Hitler snuffling and harrumphing to life. He emerged not as the dynamic Führer of legend – sleepless, burning with the inner flame of an infernal mission – but a lazy, rather stupid opportunist, who slept late, liked a pint, and even during the height of the war was most enthusiastically exercised by the prospect of a good meal and a movie.

  Hang about, I realised with a lurch, watching footage of Hitler dozing on his couch while outside all the world was ablaze. Take away the comical moustache, the jodhpurs and Nazi convictions, and that could be me.

  The machinery of Nazi government, which in retrospect looks such a model of fascist order and discipline, was revealed to be a bumbling and uncoordinated hive of jealousy and insecurity. Hitler was portrayed as a vague dreamer of bad dreams, an inspirational leader with scant grasp of the pragmatics or technicalities of dictatorship, who would speak aloud his visions for his squabbling acolytes and toadies to seize on random thoughts and half-ideas, and bring them to terrible fruition.

  Worse, the documentary revealed the German people not as a brutalised, brainwashed people in the grip of jackbooted power, still less a community of Aryan devils with murder in their hearts, but as that sight so familiar to local eyes – a nation of ordinary people whose darker urges were encouraged by authority.

  In a powerful piece of television, one Rezi Kraus, now a sweet-looking old lady of gentle habits and tender disposition, was confronted with a letter she had written to the Gestapo 50 years earlier, which had helped send a neighbour to the camps. She recognised her signature on the statement, but she could remember nothing of the letter itself.

  She brooded awhile then burst out: “You know, I didn’t kill anyone! I didn’t even join the BDM, the girls’ Hitler Youth!”

  “Oh?” said the interviewer, expecting some burst of ideology, some impassioned self-defence.

  “No,” said Rezi Kraus, “there was no way my father would let his daughters travel all the way into town after dark to go to the meetings.”

  This is how the history of the world and of individuals lurches forward through a mixture of the political and the recognisably human, the horrific and the domestic. It is not the paranoiac world of conspirators and powerful cabals that we need fear in our dim apprehensions of power, but the libidinal world of power allowed to flow free, following the fault lines, seeking the low ground like water rushing toward the sea, our baser nature given space to flex and exercise and find its own path. In the history of the modern world, more harm has been done by weakness than by strength.

  Fridges and fantasies

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 22 OCTOBER 2000

  HAVE YOU EVER bought a fridge? Well, of course you have. If the readership profile of the quality Sunday newspaper is to be believed, you are probably an educated, employed professional with a respectable income. Congratulations. Such pillars of society as your good self generally do buy refrigerators. Indeed, I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that you have bought more than one refrigerator in your time. Perhaps even several, which seems a little profligate, but no doubt you had your reasons.

  I raise the subject because, like a saint going marching in, I have recently joined your number. Not so much the “employed professional” part; more the fact that I have myself recently bought a f
ridge. No big deal for you perhaps, but a harrowing experience for a man who has never given much more thought to the refrigerator than to wonder how to move it closer to the couch without damaging the carpet.

  Refrigerators are substantial items. They represent many things. Food, mainly, and ice for the bourbon, but also a home. More than that: a home you are making for yourself. My previous fridges have been other people’s fridges. They have just been there, white and humming and uncertain of origin, like an ageing folk musician. This one is all mine.

  There is so much to consider when buying a refrigerator. Top freezer or bottom? Sticky-out handle, or handle recessed into the door? What is a crisper? And most agonising of all: should the egg caddy be built-in or detachable? The egg caddy conundrum haunted me through umpteen department stores and too many late-night conversations, even after I had recovered from the discovery that egg holders are officially called caddies.

  I don’t eat eggs, but a fridge is for life, or if not for life at least for the length of an average marriage, and no man wants to lie awake for the next seven years wondering if he was too hasty in the egg department.

  I have plenty to say about my fridge, and indeed my new home, but I shall confine myself to this announcement: I welcome all house-warming gifts, with the firm exception of those rotten magnet-poetry sets, in which small magnetised words are scattered about with the implied invitation to visitors to arrange them in bursts of lyric poetry. No such set shall sully my fridge. No limply suggestive soft-porn phrases shall insult my eye when seeking morning milk for my coffee; no grisly metaphors or vapid aphorisms shall arrest my appalled attention while dashing for another six-pack at half-time. There are few things more loathsome than other people’s ideas of poetry. Fridges are for making beer run cold, not my blood.

  That is quite enough about fridges. Forgive me, dear reader, but I have been lingering with good reason: firstly, because instead of watching television this week I spent my evening with hammer and ratchet and grease-stained overalls, trying to repair the little light inside the fridge. (It went off when the door was opened, and on when it closed again, and don’t ask me how I know.)

  Secondly, because buying a refrigerator, or perhaps reading about one, is precisely the kind of domestic drudgery that drives a certain kind of reader into the arms of fantasy fiction.

  Gormenghast (M-Net, Tuesday, 8pm) is a remarkable series, but it is not my cup of mead. The kind of perfectly realised alternative world that underpins Mervyn Peake’s trilogy, as with Tolkien and to a lesser extent CS Lewis, is immensely attractive to many people.

  They find comfort in it, and freedom. A world limited only by your imagination (actually, someone else’s imagination) is just what they’re after. And I am not only talking about the losers at university who wore capes and organised role-play games and drank mulled wine at their parties. There are perfectly decent citizens who find pleasure in fantasy. Not me.

  Well-wrought fantasy fiction arouses in me a sensation approaching terror, a feeling of being perched on a ledge at a sheer cliff face above an abyss in the howling darkness. The opening hour or so of Gormenghast captured the experience. Gormenghast is a kingdom somewhere, sometime. It is big enough to be everything, or so it feels when you’re inside it. On screen it throbbed with the terrible quality of a dream – the colours too vibrant, the scale too impossibly huge. “Welcome to the vastness,” murmurs the mad Earl of Groan to his new-born son Titus, and the words sent a dark echo through me.

  I dislike dreams because I am always small in them. Not in the svelte sense (those are waking dreams), but in the sense of the world being too big, beyond my ability to understand or be understood. So it is with Gormenghast.

  Early in the episode the hero-villain Steerpike escapes from the purgatory of the castle kitchens and scales the roof of the world, walking along a narrow rooftop with his head in the sky, seeing Gormenghast for the first time, aghast. It exhilarated Steerpike; it horrified me.

  The sets and costumes are a clutter of styles and artefacts from all cultures and times, thrown together without outward order or logic, as in a dream: Siamese wats and Viennese frock coats, Ottoman drapery, moustaches from the Raj, Copernican beards and Dickensian libraries, a throne from the Versailles court of Louis XVI … together they seem to make a sense that can’t be apprehended: the most frightening sense of all. I am fearful of worlds I cannot understand.

  Gormenghast has its conventional weak points. The acting at times is too broad – all shouting and facial expressions and accents so thick you could cut them with a bicycle, as though the Two Ronnies were performing Alice in Wonderland, or the cast of Big Okes had wandered onto the wrong set. But the vision is whole and complete. It is vast and strange.

  It makes me want to curl up and read a crime novel by the soft light of my fridge.

  Missouri’s living dead elect one of their own

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 12 NOVEMBER 2000

  I HAVE NEVER BEEN to Missouri, but it has always fascinated me. One of my heroes, Mark Twain, was born and raised there, and his finest novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is largely set along the banks of the mighty Mississippi. In recent years, though, my interest in Missouri has become more appalled than admiring.

  Missouri, like most states in the United States, has its own slogan. In the US a state is sneered at by its brothers if its essence can’t be captured in two or three words and emblazoned on a motor car licence plate. Missouri is officially called “The Show-Me State”. Why show me? It is from a speech made by one Willard Duncan Vandiver in 1899. “I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs,” said Vandiver proudly, “I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.”

  Which is to say: native Missourians are actually proud of having the regional characteristic that they will not or cannot understand something unless it is practically demonstrated. The Missourian takes as his defining feature that he is incapable of abstract thought.

  It was Missouri that in the 1990s passed a law requiring that Biblical seven-day creationism be given equal teaching time with the new-fangled heresy of evolution. Schoolchildren in Missouri spend half an hour learning about fossils and the adaptation over millennia of hominids to their changing environment, and the next 30 minutes learning that men and women were made from a handful of dust and a spare rib.

  Missouri once had a state law prohibiting women from driving a vehicle without displaying a sign warning other motorists. Ah yes, Missouri. As Bill Bryson once wrote: “It is worth remembering that Mark Twain got the hell out of Missouri as soon as he could, and was always disinclined to come back.”

  Why this disquisition on the Show-Me State? Because I am still marvelling at the fact that on Wednesday morning the good folk of Missouri elected to the US senate a man who had been dead for several months. Of course, in 1980, the American people elected as president a man who was dead from the neck up, and in this election have had to choose between two men dead from the eyebrows down, but still.

  It was just one bright spot in a marathon session of viewing that is the highlight of my television year so far. Election 2000 (CNN, all Tuesday night and Wednesday morning) was pure anarchic viewing pleasure.

  Ross Perot set the tone in an interview with Larry King. “You know, Larry,” Ross creaked reflectively, like Norman Bates’s mother in a ruminative mood, “the Republicans and the Democrats are just like the Palestinians and, you know, them other group over there.”

  “The Israelis?” guessed Larry.

  “Sure, the Israelis,” agreed Perot. “Just like them, only, you know, not as violent.”

  With such an intro, it could hardly fail. Breathlessly I watched as events unfolded like a one-day cricket match. I cheered as the Democrats won Florida. I hissed as the Republicans won it back. I gave a happy hoorah as the recount was announced.

  “We’re going to be here a long time,” said Bernard Shaw in the CNN studios. I poured bourbon on my cornflakes and leaned forward happily.
>
  What made it the more enjoyable is that Bernard and his presenters were in for the long haul with me. Everyone in the studio had their own turf: Bernie and his team were on the Big Desk, Wolf Blitzer was looking lovably bristly over at the Balance of Power Desk, and one Hal Bruno was forced to stand beside what looked like a weatherman’s synoptic chart.

  “How you doing, Hal?” asked Bernie at around 10am our time.

  “I’ve been standing for the last 10 hours, how do you think I feel? Back to you at the Big Desk, Bernie,” said Hal through clenched teeth.

  As the broadcast entered its 13th hour, Bernie and the gang veered between hysteria and downright prickliness. One Ed Kast – some manner of Florida state election official speaking to the team from ground zero – seemed personable enough, but as far as information went, he may as well have been a Missouri voter.

  The Big Desk was not amused. “How long will it take to recount the votes, Ed Kast?” asked William Schneider.

  “We’ll start as soon as we can,” Ed Kast assured him.

  “Yes, Ed Kast, but how long will it take?” snarled Schneider.

  “Well,” said Ed Kast, “that will depend on how long it takes to recount the votes.”

  In between the election coverage, CNN provided all manner of interesting news from around the world. I learnt that Truck Expo 2000 is currently being broadcast live on Romanian television. A man wearing a paste-on Eastern European moustache appeared in front of a poster of a truck to tell us that it is a great day for Romanian television.