I am starting work on a new Sci-Fi novel. It brings together a number of ideas concerning reality and the purpose of life.
It features a group of aliens centred around a film maker. He makes tridee pornographic films. The planet he lives on is heavily sexualised. A movement has started up to ‘clean up’ the media and desexualise society.
The novel deals with many themes – is sex ‘dirty’? Should there be censorship? Who should decide what needs to be censored?
Meanwhile, on Earth, an individual begins to suspect he is living in a film set and being controlled.
I have the general lay of the book, a beginning and end. I have many of the characters and an outline of the plot and intrigue.
I am now starting to write the draft. The ideas are flowing and I am full of enthusiasm. I am sure that, as usual, it will start to develop in extraordinary ways as I start writing the draft and the characters take over.
This is a story of aliens, sex and human civilisation. Very exciting.
Who can you trust? The answer appears to be nobody.
Many people have stopped listening to mainstream news programmes on TV because they believe they are thinly disguised propaganda. They are probably right.
I lost all faith in the BBC when they deliberately inverted the sequence of events at the Orgreave Coke Plant in the Miner’s Strike. It was a deliberate editorial policy that was intended to misrepresent what had happened and place a pro-government slant on events. It was a lie.
Sky is even worse and as for Fox and most American news networks – they are blatantly biased.
Newspapers all have a distinct bias and slant the news according to their editorial policy. Most of the tabloids are atrocious, lying establishment scandal sheets. Some of the rubbish they come out with is so blatant propaganda that Goebbels would be ashamed. Even the more serious ones have their establishment bias – they are owned by wealthy people who want to express their own views.
The whole news machine drip-feeds the messages that the establishment want the population to believe. Seemingly Socialism cannot possibly work, Corbyn is a lunatic, Russia is the enemy, Assad is a monster, ISIS was not set up and financed by the West, North Korea is a monstrous place, Iran is behind much of the terrorism in the Middle East and wants a nuclear bomb to blow up Israel. But who knows?
What are the messages that they want us to believe?
Well one thing is certain – the system is set up and works for the top 1% at the expense of everybody else and they mean to continue this grossly unequal system. They want us to buy into the narrative they put out through the TV and newspapers. The establishment owns the media and controls what we think. A lot of what happens around the world is a profit-making project for rich people.
So many people put their faith in other sites on the web which they believe provide an unbiased view of world events.
I do not believe that those sources are unbiased. I believe they too have a bias and an agenda. They are as much propaganda as anything else. We are attracted to the views which reflect our own and reject all others. There is great danger in that.
So where do we turn to?
I do not think there is anywhere. What is best policy is to access a broad selection, weigh it up, think and keep an open mind – above all THINK and don’t buy into any one view.
Early years in teaching, William Burroughs and censorship
When I went into teaching I was determined to approach it in a different manner to the experience that I had imposed upon me in schools. A lot of my teachers were tyrants and I hated them. I refused to have the distant hierarchy of teacher and pupil. I insisted the students called me by my first name. For me teaching was a privilege. I was not there to force-feed reluctant kids with turgid facts; I was there to enlighten and expand minds, to promote thinking, questioning and discovery and turn on kids to the awe and wonder of the universe.
It did not quite work that way.
The world was not ready for me. The teaching staff thought I was a rebellious nutter and the kids thought I was being weak and played up.
Over my first year or two I had to adjust to find the balance. It was a lesson in life. People liked order and to be told what to do. The kids preferred a strict vicious teacher to a weak one. They felt safer. They knew where they were. That’s why we elect psychopaths and sociopaths; they are strong, clear and black and white. You know where you stand with fascism.
I found a middle way.
At lunch-time I shunned the staff table and sat with the kids. I ran clubs, played sport and got to know them.
I believed teaching was not about power but more about relationship. That learning was not about knowledge so much as the skills and qualities necessary to experience life. I still do.
The students found me interesting and we developed good relationships. They asked me to contribute to a student magazine. I wrote a piece for them. The Senior Team thought it was not appropriate and banned it. The students published the magazine with a space where my story should have been with ‘CENSORED’ written over the pages.
Great stuff.
One of the brightest of the young rebels, a certain Stephen Ellis, won a prize for speech day. That meant that he received a sum of money towards a book of his choice. He came along to me and asked my advice as to what book might be a good one to purchase.
Without too much thought I said that probably something by Kerouac, Ginsberg or Burroughs might be good. He bought a William Burroughs.
The day before Speech day, when the prizes were to be distributed, the lads took their books in. The Religious Education teacher went apoplectic when he saw the William Burroughs book. He took it home to check.
The next day he brought it back. He had painstakingly cut out all the offensive bits. Now anyone who is familiar with Burroughs will know that he is renowned for his straight talking offensiveness. The book was a colander of holes. There were as many holes as words.
I thought all those cut out bits were right up William Burroughs street. He was famous for using the cut-up technique. That would have been something – to make a new book out of a rearranging of all the offensive bits!
Stephen was marched off to the Headteacher to explain why he had chosen such an extreme book. I thought my short career might be on the line. Stephen did not mention me. He feigned innocence. He seemed delighted at what had happened.
I think he went on to become a solicitor. I hope he still has that book.
I was made to think quite hard yesterday when I was reading an article about the 72 year old artist Graham Overden.
Overden is a quality artist who has work displayed in the Tate and other galleries. I am unfamiliar with his art but for such galleries to display it suggests that it has merit. He specialised in painting of young prepubescent girls and rural landscapes.
Overden obviously had an attraction to young girls. He was prosecuted and found guilty of six counts of indecency and one of indecent assault for which he received a 27 month jail sentence.
A judge has now decided to go through Overton’s art work, including his collections of work by other artists, including Sir Peter Blake, and deciding whether they are obscene. If they are considered indecent they will be destroyed.
I found this disturbing. This seems to me to be a return to State censorship that has repercussions for everybody.
I do not condone what Graham Overden has done. Young girls should not be sexualised or used as sex objects, let alone physically abused.
I suspect that the young girls who posed for Overden were doing so with their parents’ consent?
This threw me into a number of thoughts:
Are we entering a new age of prudery?
Should we have censorship of art?
Should art be destroyed?
Are some subjects, such as young girls, now off limits for photography and art?
Could some of the photographs I innocently took of my children, who seemed to have a predilection to throw off their clothes, now have to be viewed in a different light?
Is obscenity in the eye of the beholder? Can a photograph/painting of a young girl be viewed as purely aesthetic by one person and as sexual by another?
Do we have to reassess everything a person has done in their life if they are a convicted paedophile? And does that negate all their output?
I had to think hard about some of these issues. This is what I concluded:
I think paedophiles have an illness. If they have an unhealthy sexual attraction to young girls or boys they should suppress it and seek treatment. If they abuse young children they should be punished and be treated.
I do not think any art should be subject to censorship unless it incites violence or hate crime.
We do seem to be entering a new age of prudery on sexual matters. I think all matters of sex between consenting adults, of whatever gender, in private, is purely up to them.
I do not believe a judge has any right to destroy works of art. That smacks of the Nazis burning books.
I do not believe anyone can see in the mind of another. If they view something as sexual in their heads then that is up to them. The Victorians covered legs on pianos because they found them sexual, while round the corner they had brothels.
If some people find a work of art sexual that is up to them.
It is only natural to reassess the work of an ‘artist’ if they are convicted of a crime. But it does not invalidate their work.
Naked people are not sexual. They are aesthetic, including children.
Sex is not obscene. Abuse of underage children is obscene.
Artistic freedom should be sacrosanct.
Now those are my views. What do you think?
I believe in personal freedom.
The freedoms we have in this society of ours had to be fought for through civil protest and paid for with blood. They were never freely given.
I believe in the right to follow whatever religion, or none, without coercion.
I believe in the right to support whatever political ideology I wish.
I believe indoctrinating young children in politics or religion is child abuse.
I believe in the right to chose my sexual partner.
I believe in the right to speak my mind, walk where I like, go about my life without hindrance, deride the stupid things my government do, deride religion and public servants and express my views on all manner of subjects.
I want to listen to what I want, read and watch what I want and partake in whatever I want with the proviso that my activities do not hurt other people, animals or the environment. I am opposed to censorship.
I support laws that restrict my freedom when it comes to such things as torture, slavery, exploitation, paedophilia, racism, violence and environmental damage. It makes sense not to jump red lights or go the wrong way up streets. It is only when laws become bureaucratic, and trivial that I consider that they infringe on my freedom.
I do not believe in anarchy – I believe that results in giving power to powerful bullies.
I believe in fairness, justice and equality. What consenting adults do in private, if it causes no harm, is their own business.
The society I live in has a good deal of freedom. I think it stands out as a beacon in the face of so many repressive regimes who wish to take away personal freedom in the name of religion, politics or morality.
Freedom is worth standing up for!
We create the zeitgeist!
