About Trump

I know the best thing would to be ignore him, but two recent items must be flagged up.

First, his deeply strange appearance on Usha Vance’s podcast, which is supposedly about encouraging literacy. He admits that he mainly reads about himself, misremembers the title of a book from his childhood, then goes off into a freeform stream of banalities about past POTUSes. I refer you back to Trump pretending to have read a Tom Wolfe book in 1987.

And a deeply weird video of a far-right group called Patriot Front arriving at the Trump-fronted Fourth of July events in Washington, DC on Friday, apparently to show off their mime skills.

PS: And while we’re trying not to think too hard about the most powerful man on the planet being functionally illiterate, here’s James Marriott on what the Labour MPs of 1906 tended to read (and an eye-roll at the thought of what they read now); and, in a rather more positive frame of mind, Naomi Alderman actually comes up with a practical plan to turn non-readers into readers.

About June 2016: And then Brexit

Brexit was the inevitability that nobody (including a number of its high-profile supporters, apparently) saw coming. I was out of the country for most of the run-up so maybe my excuse for missing the surge of contrarian fuck-you that propelled the Leave vote over the line is more plausible than that of those who were supposedly leading the campaign to stay. But I was in London on polling day itself and awoke to the news the following morning that, as I put it at the time: 

...my country, the land of Shakespeare and Churchill and Bez out of the Happy Mondays, is regressing into a 1950s-style suburban dystopia where people run away in terror at the sight of subtitled movies, and are turned to feral rage by the merest sniff of balsamic vinegar. 

I was sad, but not yet angry. What changed that was the contribution of someone who hadn’t voted to leave but clearly thought leaving was a very good idea (even if “clearly”, “thought” and “idea” are concepts that don’t exactly settle easily on him.)

Donald Trump, at that time best known for cosplaying a successful businessman on a reality TV show, arrived in Scotland and tweeted that everyone was delighted after they “took their country back” despite the fact that those north of the border had voted two-to-one to remain. For many people, not just Scots, this explosion of idiocy (mild compared to his later episodes, granted, but we had no idea) just added to the sense of hurt. And we took to Twitter, because in those days that’s what Twitter was for. And I called him a “witless fucking cocksplat”.

And then it all kicked off, to be honest. I was lumped in with something apparently called Scottish Twitter, which was nice because they were even ruder, calling him among other things a “knuckle-brained fart lozenge”, a “degenerate corned beef face syrup wearing wankstain” and a “hamster heedit bampot”. And, for the first and only time in my life I went properly viral and David Tennant read out my tweet on American telly and it was all lovely and Brexit was still a thing but, hey, at at least Trump wasn’t going to become President, was he? I mean, the world couldn’t go *that* mad.

PS: AI airbrushes me from history once again...

About Obama

In the light of the strangely half-assed military parade in Washington over the weekend, here’s something I wrote 17 years ago about how the American populist right perceives even a passing interest in anything foreign as weird and dangerous. The names have changed but very little else has.

Obama's weakness is not that he's black, or young, or left-wing, or that he used cocaine; it's that his background is dangerously cosmopolitan... Why would any sensible person go abroad, where they talk funny and you can't get Cap'n Crunch? What is he? Gay, or French, or something?... And this would explain the paradox by which the supposedly patriotic American right consistently attempts to undermine Vietnam veterans (John Kerry, Max Cleland, even John McCain), while lauding those who avoided serving (Bush, Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, the egregious Saxby Chambliss, et al). These guys weren't cowards, you see: unlike Obama, they just loved America too much to leave it...

About Trump (please God for the last time)

A splendid essay by Matthew Walther on the appeal of Trump – it’s camp, daahling:

Trumpian aesthetics is a catch-all of the great artificial modes in Western art: rococo, Art Deco, vaporwave. It is above all anti-pastoral. (Like the denizens of Versailles, Trump can only encounter the natural world third or fourth-hand, in a tweet about the imminent signing of the 2018 farm bill embedded with a clip of him singing the Green Acres theme song at the Emmys.)

Also this, my favourite ever clip of the man, in which he pretends to have read a book:

  

About Greta Thunberg

Two thoughts. First (prompted by a Facebook exchange), what would Roland Barthes have made of this photograph? And then, Paul Morley’s analysis of a famously ill-tempered edition of Juke Box Jury: “How Johnny Rotten looks at Noel Edmonds is eventually how an entire nation would look at Noel Edmonds.”

About German magazines

“

In the past few days, two German magazines have put out covers depicting two right-wing foreign leaders in highly unflattering guises. That said, the difference in tone suggests that one of the countries in question, as awful as its current boss might be, still needs to be taken seriously. The other, perhaps not so much.

PS: More stuff:

PPS: “...how the others must see the faker...”

PPPS: And, by David Foldvari:

About university

The whole sorry Brexit saga is at once tragedy, farce, soap opera and an interminable lecture about Parliamentary procedure, so sometimes it’s worthwhile to get an outsider’s view on the whole bloody mess. Here’s sometime Dubya aide David Frum’s version of articulate, informed sighing. He points out what I’ve said all along, that very few of the votes on either side were really about the EU per se; the leavers on both right and left were touting their own flavours of nostalgia, and those who wanted to remain pushed against that. He also trots out the statistic that a very important indicator of voting intentions was whether or not you’d been to university, with graduates voting two to one to remain and high-school dropouts (do we have “high-school dropouts” in the UK, David?) offering a similar statistical profile in reverse.

Which suits both sides nicely, since remainers think leavers are thick and leavers are sick and tired of hoity-toity experts. Except, of course, the idea that being a university graduate, even from a so-called elite establishment, imbues you with any particular level of cleverness is utter bollocks. I’ve known many people – a disproportionate number of them privately, expensively educated — who learned nothing at school or university bar a misplaced confidence in their own talents that, paradoxically, became a marketable skill in itself.

And on that note, we read about the lengths (and depths) to which rich Americans will go to get their moronic spawn into the best schools. Donald Trump has been unusually Trappist on this story, for some reason; and I don’t know whether this is any reflection on his own college days, because he got Michael Cohen to force the institutions to keep his grades secret. The only inference I can draw is that his marks were astonishingly high and he doesn’t want the fact to leak out in case it damages his credibility with his base. I mean, clever people are the problem, aren’t they?

PS: In related news, the Ivy League-educated son and grandson of millionaires, whose entire career has been in his dad's companies, tells us how bad the elites are.

PPS: More on the university entry scandal, by Amanda Hess in the New York Times:

You sense, in some of the stories to emerge from these fraud charges, an odd form of intergenerational class conflict, in which wealthy people who did not grow up pampered... are now trying to impose middle-class values (a good education is important) on superrich kids who see little use for them... Many kids compete for elite college slots in an attempt to gain access to a higher social class, but some of these parents are surely seeking the opposite effect — a degree that suggests their kids are not simply coasting on their inheritance while cultivating vanity careers. They are heaping money on their progeny in an attempt to correct for how rich they are.

About getting it right/wrong

I’ve just come across an article I wrote for the BBC website in 2009, as part of a retrospective of the decade that was drawing to a close. Pretty uncontroversially, I picked the 9/11 attacks and the collapse of Lehman Brothers as the two events that would be emblematic of the Noughties, but also pointed out that they took place within a few minutes’ walk of each other, and people who live thousands of miles from Manhattan might have a different perspective on what’s important.

And then I took a bit of a punt and wondered if, in years to come, the most important development of that decade might turn out to be the launch of Wikipedia, because of its potential to disrupt the hierarchy and control of knowledge itself:

Along with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, blogs and the other manifestation [sic] of Web 2.0, it meant that the final judgement as to what was significant would never again be left to a self-appointed elite of media professionals.

Yay! One in the eye for the so-called experts, the big media tycoons, the smug commentators in their ivory towers! The only difference is, in 2009 I thought that might turn out to be a good thing...

PS: The book I wrote about the Noughties is still available, packed with observations I got horribly but justifiably wrong.

About writing

I’ve tried so hard to ignore him, but this. This. Everyone’s seizing on the “pour”/“pore” thing but I’m more concerned that he actually believes he wrote those books, despite his ghostwriter going public a couple of years back.

After having written many best selling books, and somewhat priding myself on my ability to write, it should be noted that the Fake News constantly likes to pour over my tweets looking for a mistake. I capitalize certain words only for emphasis, not b/c they should be capitalized!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 3 July 2018

PS: It gets better. The ghostwriter comments, and is ordered to read the book he, er, wrote:

About Trump/Amis

Toby Litt on The Orange One as a fictional construct with a very specific heritage:

The reason I’m writing this now is that President Trump (I’m sure it’s been said elsewhere a hundred times) is – for me – an Amis character rather than an any-other-fiction-writer-in-the-world character. It’s Amis’s novels – yes, Money – that were on the money about this ludicrous, strutting, wad out, greasy kind of masculinity. Others had stopped taking it seriously, or investing it with pathos and power. It had no future, why bond with it? But for Trump (the name is 1980s Amis) to be up there, in government, using the phrase ‘warmest condolences’ in referring to the Las Vegas Shooting – I feel the need to acknowledge Martin Amis here, to bow in his specific direction. Yes, you were right. This is his reality, as surely as Princess Diana’s death was J.G.Ballard’s, pre-scripted. In that phrase, and in every murderously clumsy verbal gesture and grandiloquent self-serving parp, Trump has been pre-scripted by Amis. Amis pre-understood him. This suggests it’s time to re-read.

About Lazarus

So I went to Lazarus, which was great. And yes, it is a jukebox musical, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. The London run is almost over, so most of the things that need to be said about it have already been said, but what surprised me is how filmic it is — not just the inevitable back projections but the wide box in which all the action takes place, as if everything’s being shown in Cinemascope; the actors seem there but not there, flickering images on your retina. And yes, Michael C Hall is Thomas Jerome Newton from The Man Who Fell To Earth but not Bowie, and he’s not trying to be.

And inevitably I thought about what and who else is here but not here and what’s happened between the show opening in New York at the end of 2015, when Bowie was alive and would never die; and now, when a pantomime villain, a malevolent space beast has Fallen To Earth. 2016 happened, of course, and all the wrong people died.

And I thought about what art is going to look like in a world with the Bowies dying and the Trumps in charge, the people who fused Newton’s eyes still pulling the strings; and I went home and drank cold gin (I didn’t really) and ran my fingers over the scars that can’t be seen and read this depressing article in the FT about culture under Trump and this even more depressing article in The Quietus about the commodification of the alternative, not to mention the fact that his people don’t seem to think that hip-hop is properly American, and then I read about the government’s bright idea to turn the UK into a sort of cold, porridge-coloured Singapore (I went there once but it was closed) and all the stars that never were will try to sell mortgages to the stars that never will be and the only theatre will be jukebox musicals, but not like Lazarus. And there will still be music, but not like Bowie’s, more like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

About this year

About America

About Donald Trump and fleeting fame and cocksplats

(WARNING: CONTAINS SWEARS)

I’ve neglected this blog terribly over the past year or two, for a number of pathetic and avoidable reasons, including work pressures, general lack of inspiration and the rival lure from other forms of social media. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say — it’s just that it seemed quicker and easier to  let rip with a succinct gobbet on Twitter or even some deadpan picture caption on Instagram. Blogging — at least the way I do/did it — requires some sort of considered structure, the right word in the right place, spelled correctly if you’re lucky.

So it seems appropriate that my belated return to Cultural Snow is prompted by Twitter. What happened is this. Donald Trump, a man who might stop being funny in November, appeared in Scotland on Friday, shortly after the result of the European Union referendum was announced. He, or one of the social media gnomes who live in the yellow depths of his hair, tweeted thus:

A number of people responded that, although the UK as a whole had chosen to cut ties with the EU, Scotland as a whole was very much in favor of hanging around. One or two of them probably expressed this sentiment in sober, cogent, reasoned form. I wouldn’t know, because their tweets were lost in a maelstrom of abuse, some of it colourful and imaginative, some of it puerile and profane, plenty of it occupying both spheres. And, yes, I joined in. And, no, I wasn’t in the cogent camp.

No, it wasn’t big and it wasn’t clever but, hey, Twitter, who cares, right? Well, some people do, apparently. I went off to do something vaguely useful, somewhere with lousy phone connections and forgot about my little vent. I only checked my phone a few hours later (I normally do this far more regularly, a habit that has led my 13-year-old niece to describe me as anti-social, but yeah, whatevs) and discovered that I’d gone properly viral. The tweet was liked and retweeted around the world: the current stats, if you’re interested are 2,301 likes and 1,219 RTs, which is modest by Taylor Swift standards but not bad for a balding, middle-aged curmudgeon the focus of whose career has drifted from writing about Pet Shop Boys compilations to writing about fish soup. But it was the messages that made it such fun, especially the awe-struck Americans thanking me for encapsulating their own inchoate thoughts about Mr Trump in such elegant prose and vowing to incorporate “cocksplat” into their vocabularies; a couple of them even proposed marriage. Many of them seemed to think I’m Scottish, which is odd, but not a problem. Of course, there were some naysayers as well. Apparently I’m a “low life liberal dirtbag” which can be the title of my autobiography, if @17762point0 hasn’t copyrighted it already, and, according to one Keith Bishop, “the worst kind of ignorant moron” which makes me wonder what the best kind might be.

But these things don’t just stick to Twitter either, do they? The online barrage that The Donald had suffered was picked up my other media, most prominently on Buzzfeed but also here and here and here and here. And my little cocksplat got its time in the sun, alongside other delicious epithets, from old reliables such as “gobshite” and “tit” to relative newcomers like “cockwomble”, “jizztrumpet” and “tiny fingered, Cheeto faced, ferret wearing shitgibbon”. It was like being at a convention of Malcolm Tucker impressionists. No, change that. It was like being at a convention of Malcolm Tucker impressionists and I was one of the best Malcolm Tucker impressionists there, and lots of people were queuing up to tell me how much they enjoyed my Malcolm Tucker impression and could I sign... but sign what? What would I sign? My own Twitter account?

It wasn’t only strangers. Some of my friends who aren’t on Twitter saw these articles and posted them on Facebook, a few of them very sweetly and generously declaring that they are proud to know someone who said “cocksplat” to a man who may end up as the next President of the United States. One friend came across my contribution during her grandmother’s funeral and she said that sharing it with her family brought some welcome relief to a sad day. Which is lovely.

And people are still saying nice things as I type this, but the compliments are coming at a far less  ferocious pace and pretty soon they’ll fade away. I realised that digital, viral fame is very nice, but it rarely lasts. I suspect the people we’ll remember in all this are the man who handed out swastika golfballs and this lady, who clearly decided that good, old-fashioned analogue communications would do the trick better than anything:

And while all this was going on, the pound was slumping to a 30-year low and the Prime Minister resigned. But, y'know, hee hee. Cocksplat.

PS: And then this happened.