January 29, 2009
Incompetent or Devious
As I write this, I am unsure whether by the end of the day it will be national news.
I am currently working for John Pugh, Liberal Democrat MP for Southport, as a researcher and press-release-writer-person. A week or so ago we did some local press releases about a little-known tax credit for families, which many people who were eligible to claim for weren’t doing so because they simply hadn’t heard about it.
Since then the issue has evolved significantly. Lots of people have been trying to claim the tax credits but the HMRC forms are a complete mess, meaning many forms are being returned incomplete or late – hence lots of families could be losing up to £1000 they are owed by the government because the deadline for back-dated claims is this Sunday.
The key problems are:
- Forms downloaded from the HMRC website ask applicants to enter their name, address and NI number “in the boxes above”. There are no boxes above included on the form
- The helpline number provided in the explanatory notes is no longer operational.
- Applicants are asked to “Please return this form to your Inland Revenue office. Their address is on Page 1″. No address is provided on Page 1, or anywhere else on the form.
- Constituents of Mr Pugh who collected application forms from their local tax office were not supplied with explanatory notes. The form asks applicants to refer to the explanatory notes if they have difficulty.
- Access to forms and explanatory notes is therefore largely dependent upon having internet access. Many families eligible for the Child Tax Credit have severely limited access to the internet, often due to financial reasons.
This morning we sent out a big national press release calling for deadline extension on the basis of government incompetence. We’ve yet to see if anything will happen.
What I’m wondering is whether any editorial or comment pieces will take up the matter. After all, the government seems caught up in a dilemma on this issue. Either it is so incompetent it can’t properly produce and administer a 3-page application form, or else it deliberately threw obstacles in the way of poor families trying to claim money they were entitled to.
Neither option is particularly flattering.
January 28, 2009
Moobs?
There is an interesting article over at the BBC today about the increase in the number of men having breast reduction surgery. As well as being provided for men with medical disorders, there seems to be a trend for breast reduction surgery in cases where men are simply overweight or obese. They want their “moobs” (man-boobs) cut down surgically, so that they look less fat.
What interests me is an implication of the article suggesting that surgery is a new form of male-liberation: that men have always wanted moob reductions, but only now do they feel confident enough to talk about it and prepared to take (surgical) measures to deal with it.
For example, Kerri McPherson, a chartered health psychologist at Glasgow Caledonian University and a so-called “expert on male body image” has this to say:
“I would argue that what the media is really discussing is just representing the growing concerns of everyday men. This concern has always been there but they have not been able to articulate it.”
Adding:
“More and more people are being given a language to talk about concerns about their body”
In reference to the increasing media preoccupation with “moobs” and other perceived male physical imperfection.
I disagree, strongly. My hunch – and lacking statistical evidence, that’s all I can offer – is that in general most men did not care about having “moobs” until relatively recently. Until, that is, the celebrity-obsessed media and its preoccupation with physicality started telling men that they ought to care about having “moobs”. Rather than men having always been secretly troubled by such an issue and now being liberated by public discourse, it is the public discourse itself – an obsession with a particular conception of how people should look in order to qualify as worthwhile human beings – which generates the trouble and anxiety prompting many men to seek surgery.
In other words, the 44% increase in male breast reduction from 2007 to 2008 is related to the 161 uses of “moobs” and 350 references to “man boobs” in UK newspapers since June 2004 not in the sense that increased attention to the issue has liberated men by revealing surgery as the solution to their woes, but rather that it is the media reporting itself which has created an obsession with male physicality which then translates into increased demand for surgery.
When you think about it, it’s a sad state of affairs. Perhaps the emphasis on looking fit and slim would be no bad thing, if the message to people went something like this: “you ought to lose weight because it is good for you, you will feel better and live a healthier, longer life – but don’t worry if that’s not for you, it’s far more important that you are an interesting and likable person content with themselves, than that you have rock hard pectoral muscles and a washboard stomach”.
But that’s not the message. The message is: “being fat is disgusting because fat people fail to conform to one non-negotiable standard of physical beauty which is unattainable by the vast majority of human beings. It is not important if you are doing a highly demanding and important job which leaves no time for exercise (e.g. being Prime Minister), if you have moobs you are an appropriate target for public ridicule and disdain”. And of course, the answer many men have to this message is not “OK then, I’ll hit the gym and stop eating cupcakes”, it’s “Christ, I better have surgery”. Which is hardly surprising given the quick-fix, get-everthing-for-free-with-no-hard-work culture which goes hand in hand with a shallow obsession with bodily physicality over intellect or personality.
There will be many commentators from the feminist movement who will, understandably, have little sympathy for men with moobs or the media attitude towards them. “Welcome to our world” they might justifiably say. After all, women have been putting up with being told that they must conform to one standard of sexual physical attractiveness (in sum: big tits, small waist, lots of make up, vacuous eyes indicative of no cognitive capacity) for a very long time. And the statistics for painful, sensitivity-reducing and potentially dangerous breast-enhancement surgery vastly outstrip those for moob reduction.
But whilst this is true, it is hardly very constructive to say somewhat vindictively “Yeah? Well now it’s getting shit for men too, so at least things are starting to get even.” Instead, men and women should refuse to be bullied by this obsession with physicality, caring more about what people are like as people than as comparisons to photo-shopped ideals. Although, as is so often the case, saying this will be a lot harder than doing it.
January 23, 2009
Explanation
I’ve not posted anything here for a while. Mostly this is because I have had nothing to say.
The Gaza conflict was horrible, but I had nothing constructive to say except that Israeli politicians presented particularly arrogant and unapologetic responses to the often needless death of innocent civilians (hardly man bites dog).
Obama’s inauguration was fun to watch, but there were no surprises.
Ken Clarke is back, which means the Tories are steeling for an election and Peter Mandelson will be getting Machiavellian.
The economy is even worse that we thought, the banks are even more of a mess than we thought, and Britain may actually be bankrupt.
Until something happens I have something worthwhile to say about, I’m afraid it will be silence.
Toodle pip.
January 12, 2009
Because You Already Feel Great This January
If you take the London Underground any time this week, you’re more than likely to round a corner and come face-to-face with a giant six pack. And i’m not talking about beer.
A poster campaign is currently under-way for Maximuscle Protein Powder, and it’s getting on my nerves. The concept is a simple one, a tried and tested method in advertising: make your target audience feel so awful about themselves they are compelled to spend money on your product.
Let me elaborate. The posters in question depict a topless man possessed of the body of Adonis. His chiseled pectorals and washboard-abdominals speak of a physique most men can only dream of. And that, of course, is precisely the point. For in his hand this living Greek statue holds a photo ostensibly of himself at a previous time, complete with ”moobs” and a gut which will be far more recognisable to the average morning commuter.
Alongisde the brazen colossus of Holborn there runs an extended caption – and it’s caption that really bugs me. Presented as a short narrative of ‘how a fat man got fit’, the caption explicitly states that the pictured specimen of masculine perfection achieved his Kafka-esque metamorphosis simply by “doing some decorating, going to the gym a couple of times a week, and using Maximuscle”.
Which is, frankly, outrageous. Nobody achieves those sorts of results by “going to the gym a couple of times a week” and drinking a protein shake. The sorts of results depicted would require months of intense workouts, involving much highly- exacting cardio-vascular exercise, extensive weight-lifting and a strictly controlled diet. But even if all that were undertaken, in order to affect the transformation depicted the fact is a man would only achieve such spectacular results if he were fortunate enough to be endowed with a near Olympian physique. The fact is, no matter how many sit-ups they do and how carefully they eat, some men will just never have a six pack.
The hard truth is that most men will never look that great - especially those without four hours spare for the gym every day, and who can’t afford personal trainers. And I know this to be the case, because I lift weights 3-4 times a week and will run an average of 15km over the same period. And believe me, I fall significantly short of looking like the Hellenic warrior of London Underground.
But misleading advertising is hardly something new, so why am I so bothered?
Well partly the lying itself just aggravates me. The dishonesty in this case is so egregious that I’ve taken special exception to it. For that reason alone I encourage everyone to make a short complain to the Advertising Standards Authority, by clicking here.
But there’s more to it than just dishonesty. The first time I came across one of these posters I snorted in contempt at the obvious dishonesty, smug in my own self-confidence. But then I turned to my left and saw the guy on the platform next to me. He was in his early 40s, balding and with a slight paunch, but overall a fairly ordinary physique. He too was looking at the poster, and the look in his eyes said it all; the self dissatisfaction, the staring forlornly at the poster and thinking “why don’t I look like that? Why am I so unattractive?”
Normally I don’t talk to strangers on the tube (it’s a good way of avoiding weirdos) but this time something compelled me to make a jokey commnt about how ridiculous the advert was, about how it’s impossible to look like that just from “going to the gym a couple of times”. The guy laughed, and it seemed to cheer him up – but I noticed that after I moved down the platform he continued to stare at the poster.
I suspect that man is typical of many, and increasingly of men generally. Women have been putting up with this (or in the cases of anorexics and bulimics, conspicuously failing to put up with this) for decades now: the constant barrage of images telling people that there is a certain way to look, a certain tightly-defined concept of physical perfection which denotes attractiveness. Alongside that image is the dual message that it is an abhorrent failure not to attain that perfection, but that such perfection can be bought, at a price.
There are many reasons to lament this culture of obsession with physical stereotypes, unattainable (for genetic or socio-economic reasons) by the vast majority of people. The shallowness of a culture which glorifies oneconcept of physical beauty, the attitudes to sex and sexuality which go along with that shallowness, and the base-capitalism which drives the advertiser to calculate that profit is maximised if consumer indvidual insecurity is heightened, all spring to mind.
But without getting bogged-down in all of that, there is a simple reason to lament this obsession with physical perfection. Namely, that January is a horrible time of year, when people are likely to be feeling near their lowest due to the cold, the damp and the darkness. How many people, recovering from the Christmas excesses will have walked onto a tube platform, seen the near-naked Adonis, and thought to themselves: ”I am disgusting person – and furthermore, I have no excuse. I could look like that if I just went to the gym a couple of times a week” ?
How many of those people have walked away feeling miserable? How many have given in and bought a tub of Maximuscle? How many have joined the gym, and wondered what is so wrong with them that after going “a couple of times a week” the image in the mirror still looks nothing like the one on the tube? How many then give up and sink into a physical self-loathing, quite possibly contributing to wider dissatisfaction and depression?
As I mentioned above, this is a problem which has dogged women already for decades, often in more pernicious formats with more pernicious outcomes. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon that man too are starting to be affected, as surely they must be whenever they see an advert for Calvin Klein or Abercrombe and Fitch, let alone the downright dishonesty of Maximuscle.
Either way, it shouldn’t be tolerated. We should not stand by and be told that there is a certain we way have to look, be coaxed and bullied into parting with our money out of a desire to fulfil that image, and condone the state of affairs where failure to attain the virtually unattainable renders untold millions miserable.
It’s just happens that in the case of Maximuscle - the case of the wilful misleading of consumers to exploit insecurities a product’s own poster campaign helps to create - there is a direct opportunity to take a stand and protest that this is unacceptable. Here’s the link, one more time.
If enough people complain, the ASA does listen. If the ASA listens, then Maximuscle will know about it, and it should hit them where it hurts. Filling in a complain form will take five minutes of your time, and it could be the most worthwhile thing you do today.
January 4, 2009
Dreams From His Father
I never thought I’d read either of Barack Obama’s books. When I saw them on display (everywhere) in the United States I assumed they were simply campaign fodder: ghost-written contributions to the electoral machine. I think that may still be true of his second book, The Audacity of Hope. It’s certainly not the case with his first offering, Dreams from my Father.
The only reason I read this book was because my dad bought it for me this Christmas. At first it looked like a straight-to-ebay job, but I bothered to read the blurb first. I’m glad I did.
Dreams from my Father, for those who don’t know, was written before Obama was a politician. It was commissioned after he was made editor of the Harvard Law Review, a prestigious academic journal which Obama was the first ever black man to edit. The book received moderate interest upon initial publication, and would probably have remained largely forgotten thereafter had Obama not gone on to be the first black man to receive the nomination of a major political party for president of the USA.
And what a tragedy that would have been.
Dreams from my Father is Obama’s story, written in his own words, presumably before he had a political agenda. It traces his own roots in Hawaii and Indonesia, through his time as a community organiser in Chicago, and up to his soul-searching journey to Kenya to meet the family he’d never known, looking for the spirit of a dead father he barely knew.
The first thing to say about this book is how unbelievably well-writtenit is. It reads like an exciting and gripping novel – at times I forgot I was reading an autobiography. Obama has a style most professional novelists would envy. Even more impressive is the subtle structuring of this work; although there is a clear linear narrative, it is interspersed with memories, flashbacks and structural compositions which both engage the reader and connect Obama’s thoughts with his memories, whilst simultaneously telling his story in an accessible and engaging manner.
In fact, the composition of this book is a testimony to the intelligence of the author. The outgoing President Elect is well known to be no intellectual (read: pig stupid), but neither were many of his predecessors. Clinton was a political animal but not an intellectual, while the same can be said of Bush Snr. Ronald Reagan was a second-rate film star with no particular cranial talents beyond his hair-do, and so on down the line for a fairly long way. A man of real intellectual prowess has not occupied the oval office for some years. If this books is anything at all to go by, one certainly will do by the end of the month.
But intellectualism alone is not enough in a politician (that charge has been levelled not just at Plato’s philosopher kings, but at real-life politicians – Harold Wilson, Gordon Brown, anyone?). Sometimes you don’t wantintellectualism in a politician (Lenin stands as a shining example). So what else is to note about this book? Well, it seems that Obama might be the first president in a very long time (perhaps since Lincoln) who has lived amongst not just ordinary people, but amongst the exceptionally poor and downtrodden.
During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Sarah Palin mocked Obama at the Republican Convention by making remarks such as “what isa ‘community organiser’ anyway?”. Her sneering tone implied it was nothing. Reading Dreams from my Fatherwe see that it is anything but. Obama is a man who turned down well-paid jobs in big business to go and work in a strange city with some of the poorest, most deprived and most dis-enfranchised people in his country. Obama is a man who has had direct contact with America’s biggest taboo: its poor, black working- and under-classes. That’s pretty unique for a President in a country where you basically have to be a millionaire to even run for the highest office, and where most candidates inherited either their wealth or their advantageous start in life.
And the best thing about finding this out? Obama freely admits that it had more to do with his own demons, his own anger and confusion at being a black man in modern America, his own search for meaning and worth than it did about the people he set out to help. Indeed, that sort of honesty, self-analysis and admission of his own failings is a hallmark of the book. It’s part of what makes it so readable, but also so refreshing.
Indeed, Obama’s own demons play a big part in the earlier part of the book especially. As a white middle class English male, I don’t think I had any idea what it means for a black man to grow up in America, mostly because I’d never thought about it. Sure, i’ve been to the States and was shocked by the elephant-in-the-room nature of race relations there. But it was reading Dreams from my Father that began to make it clear to me just what it means to have a black man in that white house. Of course, it’s the sort of thing that a white middle class man from England can only ever partially understand, by definition. But in the same way that finding out what a community organiser isconvinced me that Obama is something generally different from what has gone before, hearing his thoughts on what it means to be black in America, reading his account of black people’s experiences in America, convinces me that it is worth believing his message of ‘change’.
I must admit, I found Obama’s personal soul-searching in Kenya less interesting than the first two-thirds of the book. If I must level a criticism it would be that the work is a little too long, and that more could be cut from the final third. However, the reader can expect to learn a lot about Kenya and its people, whilst Obama’s ruminations on the colonial legacy are certainly worth reading. Throughout, his ability to take large, complex and difficult issues and convey them through an anecdote or conversation with a long-lost family member testify to his fantastic style and comprehension of ideas.
Ultimately, Obama has yet to prove himself. His message of ‘hope and change’ may prove either insincere, or un-fulfilable given the economic and political mess he is about to inherit. Yet I now have what I secretly lacked during the 2008 campaign: reasons to believe that Obama might genuinely desire and bring change, and in its wake, hope. A man with an absentee black-African father, with a Muslim middle name and grandfather, who lived in the Far East and worked in the South Side of Chicago? If you wanted ‘change’ in the Oval Office, it would be hard to imagine a character who embodied that change better.
Many commentators on the left are wary of Obama: he may afterall have changed greatly since his idealistic young days organising in Chicago, and he said many right-wing things on the campaign trail which set alarm bells ringing. But as my old tutor and friend Chris Brooke said on the eve of the election: “I’m no kind of Obamaniac, and there’s always going to be a lot wrong with any US politician who could conceivably win the Presidency, but in a contest between Obama and McCain I don’t think there’s any reason to qualify an endorsement at all”. I’ve always backed that thought, but Dreams from my Fathernow makes me think that there may be a lot less wrong with Obama than there has been with any US President for a very long time.
But as it happens, there is a reason to read Dreams from my Father regardless of the politics and attempts to predict the future. A reason beyond the fact that this book is a historically unique event: a memoir by a President written before he was President and before he had even gone into politics, offering a unique window into his thought and character.
The reason is simply that the book is inspirational. This is the story of a mixed-race boy in a country living in the shaddow of racism. A boy who met his father only once and was raised in large part by his grandparents, who dabbled in drugs and nearly became another black statistic of crime and delinquency. Who travelled from Hawaii to the crime-infested streets of black Chicago. Who saw the poverty of Africa first-hand. And who one day became the President of the United States. It’s more than just Obama’s ability as a writer which can lull you into thinking you are reading a work of fiction: if the American Dream ever needed a poster-book, this is surely it.
(End note:
One lingering question that does come out of reading Dreams from my Fatheris the following: why didn’t the Republicans succeed in making more of the Jeremiah Wright affair? My impression was that Wright was just a preacher whose sermons Obama had attended on occasion – not the man who performed the ceremony which wed Obama to his his wife, and who inspired the title of Obama’s second book (The Audacity of Hopewas the name of the first Wright sermon Obama heard when still organising in Chicago before he studied at Harvard). Given how easy it was to take some of what Wright preached and make it sound profoundly un-American (although in my opinion it was fairly on-the-money if you listened to what he was actually saying), why did the McCain campaign not make more of it? It seems Obama got let off very lightly with a simple “oh, i’m not going to his sermons anymore” disassociation. Was this just another example of a supremely badly-run campaign, or what? Thoughts in comments please.)
For more pro-Dreams From My Father writing and in case you weren’t convinced by the above, go here.
January 1, 2009
Happy New Year
Last night my friend Sarah Lewis told me that my blog is the most miserable thing she has ever read. Accordingly, it was agreed that my new year’s resolution will be to produce a more positive output.
I doubt this will last, but in the spirit of being happier here’s a video of a dog saying I love you.
It cracks me up every time.
Seriously.
Happy New Year.
