Song, by Toad

Not that I mean to make things even more pompous and portentous around here than they already are, but I just read an article about Evangelical Christians in America causing family schisms by switching their vote to the Democrats and found myself bubbling away with inane chatter once more. Sorry.

Articles like this show up human rationalism and thought for the sham that it is, if you ask me. We humans are so proud of our brains, of the power of thought, analysis and all this other shit, but ultimately even on subjects as important as political decision-making we are basically tribal.

I have never entirely understood how Evangelical Christians can almost invariably end up as Republicans, apart from the unavoidable conclusion that for a great many of them terms like ‘the love of Jesus Christ’ seems to rather oddly translate as ‘vicious, petty, small-minded bigotry’. I have my doubts as to whether that was quite what a bearded Jewish hippy would have had in mind, to be honest.

That Biblical teaching translates so directly into the policies of Conservatism, the right wing and free market fundamentalism strikes me as far from obvious. I have always tended to assume, despite my rather venomous antipathy towards devout belief, that most devoutly religious people actually do think that the teachings of their religion centre around love and kindness, compassion and generosity. Don’t they? I mean seriously? Otherwise, why not just fucking throw the whole fucking lot in the bin right now?

When you look at it that way, love and kindness, compassion and generosity are palpably absent from most of the political teachings of the politicians most such people tend to choose as their leaders. Quite how the parents in that particular article came to ask their children ‘how can you vote for abortion?’, without ever asking themselves how they can vote for a party whose attitude to its own poor seems to be to cut them entirely adrift and fuck ‘em if they can’t survive, indicates a childlike, bovine credulity that I find baffling. How exactly does ‘protecting the family’ involve attacking other people’s families? Do you honestly think that Jesus really would persecute, terrify and ridicule homosexuals? Do you really take it as a given that Jesus would hate basic socialised medicine, well-funded state schools and some form of protection for the unemployed and unemployable? I am not saying a religious person should automatically take a left-wing line these things either, but I am not convinced that trying to support the weak and the poor is exactly an anti-Christian sentiment.

This shows up on the other side as well. Most left-leaning types slaughter the Bush administration for its cheerful disregard for the US Constitution and in particular the checks and balances imposed on government therein. Those same lefties also tend also to lionise Bill Clinton, particularly after the utter debacle of the Bush years, but Clinton was just as aggressive in undermining government oversight as Bush is. He was, at heart, an authoritarian. He may have been an authoritarian whose policies we preferred and whose bungling was generally restricted to his administering of the Presidential Saucisson d’Amour, but that doesn’t excuse it in the slightest. Or at least it shouldn’t.

My mother became positively tearful with agitation when I said that I could never, ever bring myself to vote for Tony Blair, I guess because her politics are still quite firmly rooted in the partisan wars between Labour and Tory that she grew up with. I had to point out to her that voting for Blair would involve voting for so many things she didn’t believe in that it would be crazy to do so, but I doubt I entirely persuaded her.

Basically, all the article above exposes is that we vote tribally. What we believe depends almost entirely on who is telling us, irrespective of what they are actually saying, and we will not listen to arguments from ‘the other side’ even if they make sense. We all do it and it can lead to egregious mistakes.

Not one of us, I would imagine, examines our political decisions on their own merits, and free from the knee-jerk instinct to support our sort. We all tend to see only the evidence that supports our own theories and this only gets worse as we get older and increasingly surround ourselves with people with whom we agree on most matters. What does that mean? Well it means that we aren’t using our brains, doesn’t it. It’s a more gut reaction than that – it’s basically the same instinct that leads to street gangs. Human beings, in other words, are fucking idiots, despite what our species’ colossal vanity might tell us.

We really should make an effort to try and have these inner dialogues more directly between our own consciences and the actual facts at hand, rather than seeing it through the lens of these sorts of silly, falsely dichotomised tribal shouting matches.

Billy Bragg – Ideology

I am forever baffled by how the ears work. I listened to Candythief’s MySpace page a while back and was not just mildly unimpressed, I thought it was a pretty poor effort all round. Quite why, on buying this mini-album at Homegame last week, I suddenly think it’s brilliant is beyond me. How the fuck does the brain do that? And why I decided to spend a fiver on an EP by a group I thought I didn’t like is yet another question, but beer can be a perverse mistress at times.

Now that I have seen the light, what are we listening to here? Well it sits in very similar, dramatically string-doused territory to a couple of other bands you’ve read about on these pages: The Moulettes and Paris Motel. They’re perhaps a little rougher and more guttural than these bands, but they can indeed produce the loveliness when called upon.

Still, the Paris bordello aesthetic persists, reinforced by the fact that Diana occasionally sings in French, although when she sings in English the clarity of her accent makes for an odd juxtaposition. Similar to Amy May perhaps, there seems to be a meeting of French cabaret and a particular type of clear as a bell Englishness which, frankly, brings a little weakness of knee to a certain amphibious gentleman around these parts.

It’s not all dramatically dark fiddle scrapings though, as the last few tracks take a fairly novel detour – Number Five into an eighties-sounding folk-pop and then She Can Do No Harm into French-language electro-pop splendour in the mid-nineties style. Quite where that came from is a little beyond me, but there it is, and it’s surprisingly really rather good. Even closer Satellite is more pop than carnival noir, but the gorgeous strings do make a farewell appearance.

There is no actual purchase link, but swing by MySpace and drop ‘em a line and I’m sure you can work something out. If you are disappointed I will give you your money back and call you a dickhead.

Candythief – Junk
Candythief – Entente Cordiale

I read an interesting but slightly frustrating article in The Scotsman the other day, all about kids’ top ten favourite and least favourite things to read. There was a fair bit of hand-wringing about the emergence of blogs and lyrics websites in the favourites, and the inevitable presence of Shakespeare in the least favourite – not among the writers, funnily enough, but among the parents of the kids in question.

This is an age-old conservative reactionary mistake (we all have a conservative reactionary inside us somewhere, this is not a political dig) of confusing the medium with the content. There is nothing inherently good about a book, nor superficial about a website. There are some pretty shitty books out there, there really are, just as there are a massive number of pointless, vacuous websites. I have learned a lot recently from excellent blogs and sites written by the exact same professionals that write the books.

It is one of the things that people who lay into the online world as full of lies and fluff (which it certainly can be, I am not denying that) tend to forget: a lot of the time the actual, genuine experts cross media quite happily, often so they bring to bear the full weight of their knowledge and expertise unshackled by editors and sponsors with agendas and word counts. And then of course there are some very talented amateurs to be found as well.

Aside from that, the idea that books are inherently good because they are books is also silly. Have any of you seen some of the empty headed, badly written, poorly conceived, scantly characterised and just plain fucking inaccurate stuff that gets published? I have read some genuinely awful, awful books in my time.

Websites are interesting because they drive home what is going to become one of the central skills of the internet era: the ability to interpret the quality of information. Anyone who thought history class was pointless is suddenly going to have to think again, because the concept of primary and secondary sources and the ability to evaluate the agenda of the writer is becoming crucial. This always existed with books, but people tended to be less aware of it. Political and historical books in particular have always needed careful scrutiny for the bias of the author, and often the publisher as well.

This is even more the case with websites, not because they’re so unreliable, but because a lot of them are very good indeed. If it was all bollocks this would be obvious fairly quickly, but it’s actually the good ones that make the crap ones harder to spot.

There is some evidence that kids are getting pretty good at evaluating what they are reading (note lack of source: bad information) and I would honestly have more faith in the abilities of people who have grown up in the internet world than people who have not. Adults are proving particularly bad at critically evaluating what they are being fed online as well. Forming little echo-chambers of people who will never challenge your opinions is pretty easy on the internet, and even when people do use evidence to add weight to their views by linking to papers and studies, they are often able to lie blatantly about the contents, safe in the knowledge that no-one will ever follow up.

So rather than teaching our kids that the internet is bad and books are good, or that people in chatrooms are paedophiles (honestly, it’s just not that easy to pick up teenagers in chatrooms, and believe me, I’ve tried) we should instead be focussing on a lesson absolutely all of us need to learn: how to tell the good shit from the bad shit and, when someone tells you something, to make sure that it is true. When the differences can be very subtle indeed and there is always someone with a lot to gain from fooling you, it is becoming both harder and way more important.

Eels – Old Shit/New Shit
Belle & Sebastian – Put the Book Back on the Shelf
The Decemberists – Billy Liar
Gene – Truth, Rest Your Head (Live)
Fela Kuti – Truth Don Die