This is Edition #1 of Back To The Land.
Lucky you.
In the future, this will be a priceless e-souvenir you can put next to your Mickey Mantle rookie card and your CD Single of Babylon Zoo’s Spaceman, (the one with Metal Vision on the B-side).
For now, it is a non-blog - the opposite of a blog - like if a blog were made of the stuff left over when all the facts and opinions were already threshed out.
Stick around, enjoy the view, mingle, eat some vol au vents, or otherwise, just feel free to:
THE HITCH
Peter Hitchens is against drugs. Many people are. But unlike many people, The Other Hitch has written entire books on being against drugs: The War We Never Fought.
To précis, Peter believes that the Degenerate Britain we now inhabit - a world in which missals are increasingly not being replaced upright - is a direct result of how high we’ve got.
So it was with real tension that I watched him live through every peyote-soused chucklehead’s worst nightmare: hundreds of people following you down the street, mocking your every move.
At least now he knows how the rest of us feel, all of the time.
THE CLAPTER
The word of the week is Clapter.
Clapter is the sound an audience makes when it doesn’t think your comedy is amusing enough to generate laughter, but wants to signal that it agrees with its worthy hot take sentiments.
If you’ve ever watched, say, Samantha Bee’s show, you already know clapter:
Bee: “But then again, I also know at least one big orange butt who should stop oppressing women and give more land back to non-binary BIPOC”.
Audience: Thunderous Clapter.
Like laugh tracks, it began life in the US, but is increasingly headed towards our shores.
Clapter never used to be our style. But then, whooping never used to be our style.
Do you remember the first time you heard a Brit whoop as though they were at a taping of The Arsenio Hall Show? It was one of those sounds, urgent yet pathetic, that once heard could never be un-heard - like listening through a tent wall to an elderly relative achieving full body orgasm with the handle of a bog brush.
Without channelling too much Peter Hitchens, it’s obvious that clapter is our future, just as surely as the butterball kiddies we once mocked in American culture eventually came for us too.
We might not have the same infotainment chat show culture as them, but we have much more instinctive conformity.
And I for one cannot wait to embrace our new Clapter overlords: a future of Russell Howard times Fiona Bruce, an endless mobius of clapping and laughter, until the clapping ends with laughing, and the laughter ends with clapping, until we don’t know what we mean any more, except that Priti Patel is bad, and Tesco Club Card is hilarious.
Or is it the other way round?
THE KNOWERS
Great piece by person or persons called Lenny Pier Ramos, who has opened the box marked ‘Other Ways Of Knowing’.
Long-time observers of Critical Theory will already ‘know’ that Other Ways Of Knowing’ is one of those many Critical Theory boxes that contains only more boxes.
Other Ways Of Knowing is what a postmodernist must look to, once they’ve dismantled ‘Western knowledge’. Sure, Newton knew things about light inside his own paradigm, but what if you’re Navajo-identifying?
As LPR shows:
Dr. Louellyn White is professor of First Peoples Studies—which proposes to “decolonize” light by challenging “the reproduction of colonialism in and through physics and higher physics education.”
If you’re one of those who’s spent the past fortnight wondering ‘where all this goes next’ - well, here’s your answer. Once you assume that knowledge and power are two sides of the same coin - which is pretty much the key axiom of all Critical Theory - you’re wedded to the premise that you must abolish both.
Yes, it sounds bonkers. Yes, I don’t know how laser-surgery can be improved by Professor Sitting Bear of The University Of Non-Newtonian Optics, but I do know this:
We are about to find out.
I also know that the same people who find the notion daft right now are the same ones who are spending 2020 choking down their ‘implicit bias tests’ as they scrub furiously at their ‘white fragility’.
Expect them to spend 2022 sadly wondering why their cataracts aren’t getting any better.
THE ALAN B’STARD
Perhaps it’s fitting that former Tory MP Terry Dicks has died in the same week that Katie Hopkins became the latest forced removal of an indigenous churnalist from Twitter.
In 1979 Dicks lost the Bristol South election to Labour's Michael Cocks, in a moment only bested by The Bowler’s Holding, The Batsman’s Willey.
Luckily, the story didn’t end there. In the 80s he became a standout star of his hang ‘em flog ‘em generation of Conservative right-wingers, a birch enthusiast, who suggested that an opponent of Saddam Hussein ‘deserved to be hanged’.
Among his greatest hits was asking Margaret Thatcher about Nelson Mandela:
How much longer will the Prime Minister allow herself to be kicked in the face by this black terrorist?
Arguing that anti-AIDS ads should:
Tell 'em that if you shove your willy up someone's bum you're going to catch more than a cold.
And slapping down a Somali refugee family for buying bottled water in a London supermarket:
Where they come from they're happy to drink out of puddles.
In much the same spirit as his life’s oeuvre, I trust he will appreciate me saying I hope Satan fills him full of Lucozade then stamps on his bladder till it bursts.