Dawn of the Dumb (44 page)

On a face on a book

[7 May 2007]

M
odern life is hectic. So hectic you don’t have time to think, and instead have to rely on snap judgments to do your thinking for you. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book about this in 2005. It was called
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
, and became a bestseller when thousands bought it without thinking. I was one of them.

It began as an entertaining treatise on why you should always trust your gut instincts. Mine told me this incredible book would change my life, so I read on. In the event, my gut was wrong. It was bullshit. The second half of the book argued that, hey, actually, you shouldn’t always trust your gut instincts. By the end I’d learned precisely nothing about ‘thinking without thinking’ except that in future I’d avoid making any impulse book-buying decisions. Particularly ones that benefit Malcolm Gladwell. Proof, if any were needed, that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.

It’s easier said than done. Book covers—like TV programme titles, magazine covers and newspaper headlines—are increasingly designed to draw in passers-by via any means necessary. Subtlety doesn’t get a look-in. Nor does common sense. I had first-hand experience of this several years ago when a book I’d written, a spoof version of the Innovations catalogue, was published. It was full of outrageous mock inventions, most of them electronic gadgets of some kind, apart from one: a ‘guilt-free’ Christmas turkey which lived its last days in the lap of luxury before being slaughtered (look, it seemed funny at the time). Anyway, the marketing department insisted said turkey should appear as the main image on the book’s front cover. Why? Because the book was coming out in the run-up to Christmas, and they figured that might help it sell. Never mind that it was the single most atypical item in the book, never mind that it made the front cover a confusing mess, and never mind that it instantly rendered the book redundant the moment Boxing Day arrived—some arrogant dunce had decreed the turkey might help sales, and that was that. At the time of writing, it’s ranked 239,952
^nd
on the Amazon bestseller chart. Way to go, faceless marketing guy! You rock!

Substantially higher up the sales list, currently at number 32, is a book that absolutely can be judged by its cover, largely because its cover features the words ‘Richard Littlejohn’. In fact, just for fun, let’s review it by its cover. That seems fair. So, the full title is
Little-John’s Britain
, which is spelled out in hideous red lettering with a thin white border, across two lines, spaced slightly too far apart, as though the designer were consciously emulating a cheap pizza delivery menu. It’s so ugly, it seems almost deliberate—as though they made this section of the cover as offensive and nasty as possible in a desperate last-minute bid to distract attention from the large photograph of Richard Littlejohn that hovers below it.

A noble effort. But it doesn’t work. I can’t help noticing Little-John’s picture, even when my eyes are looking elsewhere, because his face smells—or at any rate, I think it does. I can smell it in my brain. Even when it’s just a photo. It smells like someone breaking wind in a pair of cheap nylon trousers while eating a Scotch egg in a hot car passing the Tilsworth Golf and Conference Centre on the As outside Dunstable. But worse.

Fortunately, it’s not a facial close-up. Unfortunately, his whole body’s on there. Littlejohn is pictured standing astride the United Kingdom, like a colossus (or, more accurately, like Fred Talbot, the weatherman who used to do the forecasts on
This Morning
). Surrounding him are three things presumably intended to sum up the very worst of’modern Britain’: a speed camera, a recycling bin, and the London Eye—a triumvirate so utterly despicable, Littlejohn can’t even muster the will to shake a fist in their direction. Instead he merely shrugs with exasperation: his arms are outstretched, palms up, and he stares down the lens, bemused, as though saying, ‘Cuh! Speed cameras, eh? It’s basic concern for human safety gone mad! Recycling bins? Typical! And if that bloody Ferris wheel doesn’t sum up Blair’s Britain, I don’t know what does. You couldn’t make it up!’

Weirdly, they’ve chosen not to include any of Littlejohn’s other bugbears on the cover: there are no gays or asylum seekers here. Unless, perhaps, they’re crushed beneath Littlejohn’s feet. It’s hard to tell from the preview image on Amazon. I mean, I’d go into a bookshop and examine it in closer detail, but then I’d get Littlejohn on my hands, and my fingers would have that Scotch-egg-car-fart stink on them for the rest of the day.

Speaking of Amazon, the site recommends
Don’t You Know Who I Am?: Insider Diaries of Fame, Power and Naked Ambition
, by Piers Morgan, as a ‘perfect partner’ to
Littlejohn’s Britain—
presumably on the basis that once you’ve desensitised yourself with Littlejohn, Piers Morgan’s going to be a doddle. On the cover, Morgan is standing on the wrong side of a velvet VIP rope, pulling a strikingly similar pose to Littlejohn—arms outstretched, palms up, like he’s measuring an imaginary fish or grossly overestimating the size of his penis. Clearly, this is a trend. It’s the stance du jour, the latest dance craze sweeping the nation.

Anyway: covers. You can’t judge a book by them. But you can point at them and laugh.

On Facebook

[21 May 2007]

I
Wo’s company. Three’s a crowd. And whoever they are, I don’t trust them. Yes, in the ever expanding list of things I don’t ‘get’—fashion, Apple Macs, David Cameron, etc—the most crippling entry has to be people. I don’t get people. What’s their appeal, precisely? They waddle around with their haircuts on, cluttering the pavement like gormless, farting skittles. They’re awful.

As you might imagine, given my inability to relate to the rest of the human race on even the most cursory level, I’m somewhat socially inept. Slide me between two strangers at any light-hearted jamboree and I’ll either rock awkwardly and silently on my heels, or come out with a stone-cold conversation-killer like, ‘This room’s quite rectangular, isn’t it?’ I glide through the social whirl with all the elegance of a dog in high heels.

A friend once tried help by coaching me in small talk. Step one: take note of what day it is. On a Monday or Tuesday, ask what they got up to at the weekend. Thursday or Friday, ask if they’ve got any plans for the coming weekend.

‘What about Wednesdays?’ I asked, wide-eyed. ‘Or what if I meet them at the weekend? What the hell happens then?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. Just ask what they do for a living.’

That Friday, I attended a reasonably sized get-together and boldly stood in the corner, trying to avoid everyone and everything. When this plan failed, I tried out my newfound small-talk skills. But having dealt my opening gambit, I drifted off, gazing at eternity as their stupid wobbling faces outlined their weekend plans in punishing detail. I didn’t care what they were doing at the weekend—nor, indeed, whether they lived or died. Afterwards my friend asked how the party had gone. I complained that the key to small talk had merely opened a door into a world of tedium.

‘Well, duh,’ they said. ‘No one really cares what anyone else is getting up to. Why do you think it’s called small talk? It’s just shit you say to make things less awkward.’ What, just a pointless noise you make with your mouth? ‘Precisely,’ they said. ‘Cows moo.

People small-talk.’ And I thought: I hate this world. This stinking, unbearable world.

Fast-forward several years until you hit now. Then rewind a few weeks. Some of my friends tell me they’ve signed up to Facebook. It’s a bit of silly fun, they say. So I sign up too. Even misanthropes hate feeling left out. Facebook, for the uninitiated, is ‘a social utility that connects you with the people around you’. It’s like a streamlined, refined take on MySpace. No gaudy backgrounds and hideous customised cursors, just crisp whites and pale blues. You create a profile for yourself, locate other people you know, and add them as ‘friends’. You can then swap messages, share photos, invite one another for drinks, and so on. There’s also a status window you can easily update, so if your friend Dave is feeling pensive, he types ‘feeling pensive’ in and you see a little bulletin saying, ‘Dave is feeling pensive.’ For some reason, this is endlessly amusing. My friends were right: it was a bit of silly fun.

There was one drawback. Being on Facebook involves submitting yourself to cheerful, yet merciless surveillance. Your friends can automatically see more or less everything you’re doing—who else you’re making friends with, which groups you’ve joined, and so on—and vice versa. So when a girl I’d once been semi-involved with but oh-dear-that-ended-badly added me as a friend, I found myself confronted with an unrelenting, unfolding, up-to-the-minute news feed of her fantastic new life and her fantastic new man, replete with photos. It doesn’t yet treat me to an automatic update each time they have sex, although that feature can’t be far off.

Anyway, last week I mentioned my burgeoning Facebook obsession in print. This was my first mistake. By the end of the, day I had received several hundred ‘friend requests’, mainly from students so desperate to escape the tedium of revision they’d idly befriend literally anyone, including me. Probably out of pity.

When someone sends you a friend request, you’re confronted with three options: ‘confirm’, ‘reject’, or ‘send message’. Confirming all of them would make it hard for me to find my real friends among the influx of strangers. Coldly hitting ‘reject’, however, seemed far too mean. Most of them were smiling.

Instead, I chose ‘send message’, and invited them to join a group I’d set up for people I didn’t really know, but who had been kind or bored enough to send a request. This was my second mistake. After sending about thirty such cut-and-pasted invites in quick succession, my account was blocked for twenty-four hours: Facebook thought I was a spammer. Worse, people who signed up wondered what my plan was (I didn’t have one), while others refused, and instead sent me messages pointing out how pathetic it is to smugly fish for new Facebook friends, then arrogantly shove anyone who applies into a custom-made holding pen. Besides, in Facebook terms, several hundred people isn’t that many. lan Huntley could generate more friends in an hour. ‘You’re not exactly Joan Bakewell or John O’Farrell,’ rasped one irritated ex-admirer.

So, for the sake of a bit of silly fun, I’ve generated a roster of wannabe friends I can’t reply to, organised a small group of people baffled by my motives, and convinced several perfect strangers that I’m a conceited, desperate prick. In other words, it’s comforting to know my crashing social ineptitude adapts in line with technology. I can be awkward and useless anytime, anywhere. Even when pixellated, there’s no bloody stopping me.

Because we’re worth it

[28 May 2007]

S
o it’s come to this. Traffic wardens waddling around with cameras on their heads, like a 705 sitcom approximation of
RoboCop
. Miniature, pilotless spycopters hovering overhead, simultaneously fighting crime and peering down girls’ dresses. And—as mentioned a few weeks ago—CCTV cameras audibly shrieking at yobs, litter-bugs and anyone with a slouchy walk. The future’s not only arrived, it’s entered our lives with all the breezy assurance of a character from
Neighbours
popping into Harold Bishop’s kitchen and casually helping himself to an orange juice. The air is thick with magic wi-fi atoms. We’re literally breathing technology.

All of which should make us the most depersonalised generation in history, right? After all, we’re analysed and observed, prodded and scrutinised, catalogued and chronicled, twenty-four hours a day. As far as the software’s concerned, a human being is nothing more than a 3D barcode made of animated pork; a blob on the radar.

Yet thrillingly, we refuse to be beaten. We may have willingly submitted to this unfolding mass experiment in passive-aggressive suppression, but we’re not going to feel like meaningless pixels, goddammit. No siree. Instead, we’ve gone the other way and become hugely self-important. Every single one of us is the centre of the universe. Our mantra: have it your way. Because you’re worth it. Because you’re special. More special than, say, the person standing beside you—can you believe that idiot actually thinks you’re talking to them? Ha ha ha! As if! You’re the special one. Right? Don’t let anyone tell you different. Keep repeating: You are special. And if you detect a whiff of desperation in your own voice, don’t worry. That’s just part of your specialness.

Remember the time that bad thing happened to you? You know. The bad thing? Knocked you for six, didn’t it? Perhaps you were left wondering whether the universe is a godless, random sort of place which doesn’t understand the concept of favouritism. Well, you were wrong, silly! The bad thing happened for a reason. Everything happens for a reason. No, really: there’s a gigantic Department of Reason deciding these things, located somewhere between the spirit realm and the superstition junction; a shimmering celestial office where invisible civil servants plot out Your Fate and Your Destiny on an almighty chart. The paperwork involved is mind-boggling, but it’s worth it. You’re worth it. You’re special. Keep repeating: You are special.

So yes, you have a destiny all of your own, and in the meantime, while it’s slowly being fulfilled—while all these things are happening to you for a reason—you should demand nothing but the best. The greatest comfort, the tastiest meals, the widest possible choice of entertainment. It’s all about you. Look! Movies on demand! Widescreen movies, movies you can play and pause and repeat as you see fit. Hey, fast-forward the damn thing if you like! Go crazy! It’s your movie!

And we’ll adapt to your mood. You’re in control. Want chuckles?

You got ‘em! More than 200 Adam Sandier movies at the touch of a button. Want romance? It’s yours! More than 200 Adam Sandier movies at the touch of a button. Want Adam Sandier? Yes sir! More than 200 Adam Sandier movies at the touch of a button.