Yoga, Swastikas, and Pauline Hanson

Yoga is really old. Maybe not as old as Indian Nationalists say it is, but it's still very, very old. The earliest evidence we seem to have of it is cylinder seals and reliefs from the Indus Valley which appear to depict yoga practices as part of ritual activity. These date to roughly 3000BCE. In this time period, Yoga is intimately associated with ideas of universal order, the primary symbol of which, for the Indus Valley cultures, is the swastika. Some archaeologists date cave paintings of swastika to 10000BCE, and posit a link between yoga, tantra, veda, and paleo or mesolithic ritual and cult. I find all this kind of thing profoundly fascinating, but I'm well aware that in this I am practically alone. So I may as well get to the point.

Over the millennia, yoga transformed, adapted, and expanded into a wide variety of practices and applications to do with medicine, religion, and so on, but until about the turn of nineteenth century, it was very much an exclusively eastern product. The idiocy of Orientalism helped to bring an awareness of yoga to the west, with fantastic authors like Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Roald Dahl being sucked in by its mystic allure and contributing to its popularisation. As for the swastika, I don't believe there's any real need to recount the story of its transmission to the west. The point is that the introduction of this alien cultural material was accomplished in a way which has rendered it practically unrecognisable with reference to the original.

I don't understand much about the detail of yogic practice, but what I do know for sure is that its original function is almost identical to that of gungfu - a form of moving meditation designed to link or connect the body with external, universal forces. Which is really not at all what it is today. For the most part, yoga in the west has shed its religious and ritual functions, and is now firmly entrenched in the self improvement/self management space. The key word being 'self'. Talking to practitioners and reading their promotional bumf reveals an overwhelming tendency to view yoga as a way to connect to inner aspects of the self, to improve or otherwise harmonise physical and mental components of the self, to engage with and learn to love the self. Self, self, self. Which is much more in the vein of being an observation, rather than a complaint. But the importance of the observation exists in the metamorphosis of the practice. When we in the west absorb an alien cultural product, we make it very much our own. A core element of pagan ritual and medicinal practice becomes, in the process of transmission, a leisure activity focussed entirely on individual well being, individualism and leisure activities being fundamental to western modes of life. This process can be seen over and over again through tea, pepper, potatoes, astrology, martial arts, curry, medicine, theatre, and writing... the list of appropriated (in the neutral sense of the word) cultural material is practically endless.

Which is what monocultural reactionaries simply don't understand. Idiots like Pauline Hanson and her fan club see the ingress of foreign cultural material as a threat principally because they do not understand the ways in which such material is transmitted or absorbed. To be fair, they also have trouble understanding primary school level civics and words of more than one syllable, but that's probably beside the point. The thing about anglophonic culture is that it is highly robust. We in the English speaking world have acquired the greater part of our cultures from outside, while the tiny original ethnicities forming our internal basis are arguably more mysterious to us than the cultures we have conquered, colonised, or otherwise absorbed. Western cultures in general are not so much under threat as they are in an accelerated phase of absorption and appropriation (neutral again).

It is only possible to view culture as safe when static and under threat when evolving if the viewer is suffering from some sort of serious mental deficiency. This could be ignorance, cognitive incapacity, or the delightful combination of both represented by Pauline Hanson. So really, we should basically leave immigration and other such issues alone, and focus on stealing ideas from a culture that refuses to allow intellectually stunted imbeciles to ascend to positions of power. Surely, there's some tiny country somewhere from whom we can appropriate this idea.

Blackjack And Politics

The best time to grind out a few hands of Blackjack at the casino is a Monday afternoon. This isn't about maths, but people. Blackjack is one of the few games where, with careful play, it's possible to take advantage of a very slight swing in favour of the player. In order for this to happen, however, all players need to co-operate intelligently against the bank. Players who are selfish, ignorant, or both, will make decisions which swing the advantage back to the bank. A good example is when the dealer draws a six or less. In this situation, it's vitally important not to draw picture cards from the deck, as these are needed to help maximise the probability that the dealer will bust. Of course, it's necessary to hedge oneself a little, so it's allowable to hit oneself up to ten, but the common good requires that players do no more than this. Ignoring the table and going for an individual win will usually result in every other player at the table losing. And this in a situation where proper co-operative play would have most likely resulted in everybody winning against the house. This is why Monday afternoons are best - none but seasoned, dedicated players hit the casino on a Monday afternoon.

In western democracies, politics is a game that's quite similar to Blackjack. Sure, the odds seem to be stacked against us, with big money interests and aggressive lobby groups poised to use up all the available oxygen, and legislative systems so opaque that the whole game seems irretrievably rigged in favour of the house. But we see again and again that united popular will can and does beat the bank. Thing is, this can only happen when it's more or less united. When we have a situation where the people are mired in useless garbage - semantic disputes, arguments over statues and holidays, mutual name-calling, and idiotic recrimination - the house will always win. So just like Blackjack, where a responsible player always follows the probability matrix, there are ways to swing the balance of politics back into our favour.

• Ignorant participation allows interest groups to tailor the narrative to their own narrow requirements. If you're not across an issue, either get across it or shut up. Economics is a good example - hardly anyone understands it, but our insane insistence on talking about it anyway allows governments to fight elections around issues we do not comprehend.
• Play the long game - sure, it's about self interest, but if we let our neighbour's house catch fire today, there's a good chance ours will go up tomorrow.
• Default to the equal treatment of all people. Giving groups more rights doesn't destroy functional societies - it's taking them away which does that. 
• Fear is never the answer. The project of civilisation is inherently unsafe, which means that its survival is dependant on our individual and collective courage.
• Tribalism is the enemy of democracy. Any political view which isolates any group based on who they are rather than what they do, is almost certainly invalid. 
• Think. How we feel about something is not a reliable guide to what is right, or even to what is relevant. Politics is neither a sporting fixture nor a soap opera - it's a real life process in which we are duty bound to participate as intelligently and responsibly as we can.
• No-one can live in a world tailor made for them and them alone. Grow up and make room for other views.
• Find common ground. Demagogues love division. When the people are polarised, the popular will is atomised, and the bank will always be able to have it all its own way. 

Great experiments of connectivity have always been a bit bamboozling for humanity. It's worth noting that great collapses and wars have tended to happen at our periods of closest interconnection. 1177 BCE, 576, 1913 - moments of broad connection seem to act as the tipping points of history. The internet has created another one right now, and the confronting realisation that the vast majority of people can neither ratiocinate, articulate, or spell, seems to be causing us to shrink from each other - to fragment and fracture apart as quickly as we possibly can. Which is the surest and speediest way to ensure that the house will always, always win.

The Sudden Awareness of Statues

I'm used to being the only person who notices statues. Usually I'll be out in a public park somewhere, generally very late at night, and while everyone else is finding places to throw up or urinate, I'll be reading plaques and saying things like, "Who the hell is John Adamson, and why should anyone care?". I still don't know, but what I do know is that nobody I've ever encountered a statue with has ever had the first clue as to who it's for, or why people pay for statues to be put up in the first place.

What this means is that, as usual, the sudden emergence of this 'hot button issue' has caught big sections of the population entirely unprepared. And it's into this gap of understanding that the usual bigots and loonies have flocked, attempting to cast (no pun) the issue as stuff it is emphatically not. From the conservative 'destruction of history' nonsense, to the progressive grievance factory's 'endorsement of crime' polemics, the issue of statues is set to become another battleground for the nation's political soul, only this time potentially without the toxic scrutiny of innocent citizens' lives which comes with the Marriage Equality 'debate'.

So why do statues go up? And how, after a snappy five thousand years of living with and participating in the practice, can we still be as confused about this as we so patently are? The conservatives are right in that the central motivation is a kind of 'public history'. Prominent or otherwise significant figures in the formation of thought or the nation, or whatever, are commemorated in more or less random locations around the city, with little plaques curtly explaining who they are and why we should care. This is indeed a form of concrete (again, no pun) collective memory. But the progressives are also correct in saying that there is an element of morality in memorialisation. The strong implication of a statue is that its subject is someone to be admired - figuratively (because literally) placed on a pedestal. But there are statues of Bligh, Boudica, Napoleon, and other far from unambiguously admirable people, erected much more because the individual in question is considered to be important, rather than actually good. 

And this is really the essence of it. By far the most salient consideration when erecting statues is significance. The nature of the medium is such that fine shades of meaning, complex modes of communication, and so on, are basically impossible. I'm not saying they're not present - the statue of Bligh, for example, is deliberately stumpy, ugly, and truculent in stance. But this kind of fine symbolism is generally lost on the vast majority of the statue-ignoring public, and creators of public monuments must be aware of this general insensibility when it comes to their works. So statues are principally designed to memorialise the 'great' as distinct from the good. And, apart from a few notable exceptions (like Confederate memorials erected at the height of the Civil Rights Movement), in a largely neutral way.

Which brings us to the issue at hand. Should statues of colonialist, racist, or otherwise morally ambiguous figures be allowed to stand? I vote that we ask the children of Syria, or Yemen, or the citizens of Venezuela, or the women of Saudi Arabia - all the people most likely to give us the sensible answer, which is, "Who really gives a toss?". But, failing that, I think it isn't too hard to figure it out for ourselves. If statues are memory and a more or less tacit acceptance of certain values, then we should probably just leave them alone. Because we are generally pretty crap at remembering our past, and as a nation we are, by and large, tacitly accepting of our racist, murderous past. So until and unless those things change, I'd suggest that our current crop of statues is actually exactly representative of who we are. Pulling them down won't erase our deep-seated moral failings. It will only render them invisible.

Race, Representation, and White Saviours

This picture of Fagin is a silent comment on the 'progress' made in discussions about inclusion.

Inclusive writing appears to be all the rage these days. All sorts of advice is available to the aspiring or established author as to how to represent people from different races, sexual orientations, and socio-economic brackets, in a 'sensitive' and 'inclusive' manner. I suppose this reflects the recent discussions around cultural appropriation and controversies surrounding various authors presuming to write, with greater or lesser success, from within a skin colour which was not their own.

As an ethnic Chinese in a majority white country, I have personal experience of the impact of representation and inclusion, having been brought up in the long, long shadow of Bruce Lee, Fu Man Chu, and Charlie Chan. So why is it, then, that the idea of creators making deliberate efforts to include me makes me so uncomfortable? Sticking with the idea of the representation of ethnic Chinese, there are a few aspects of this whole culture of affirmative action which are highly distasteful.

First of all, the whole idea underpinning the concept is fundamentally racist. The assumption that my skin colour dictates the shape and nature of my mind is no different, in essence, to the kind of social Darwinism which informed much of the racial hatred and prejudice of the twentieth century. The idea that Chinese people exist in some kind of ethno-cultural quarantine zone which can only be explored with special sensitivity training strikes me as a rather stupid and counter-productive inversion of the whole concept of pluralism. The point of a pluralistic society is that difference of any kind, while interesting and potentially productive of corporate advantage, should be largely irrelevant. For difference to be elevated to the status of some kind of sacred cow is simply moronic - it misses the entire point and purpose of key liberal values.

I'm aware that much of the model for 'sensitivity' and 'inclusiveness' is driven by ethnic minorities themselves, but this is, if anything, even more offensive. The belief in some sort of yellow, black, orange, or rainbow privilege speaks to a belief in the fundamental difference of these people, which is all kinds of wrong. Common courtesy dictates that we not deliberately offend each other, but common sense equally dictates that packing a given segment of society in victim grade cotton wool is offensive in itself.

And then there's the whole idea of patronage. The strong implication of all of this effort is that I should be somehow grateful. Look at all the effort those lovely white people are making to ensure that I feel included. Which is also deeply unintelligent - whether it's positive or negative, division is division. Also, anyone who's ever been picked for a team because the teacher has insisted that the fat and the uncoordinated should also be given a go, understands exactly what this kind of treatment feels like. My ethnicity is not a disability, and even if it were, simple courtesy demands that I not have it thrown in my face in a patronising manner.

I was once asked whether I included 'diverse' characters in my writing, and whether I thought this was a good thing to do. My response was that people, and types of people, occur in my work for the simple reason that they occur in the real world. Because all fiction, regardless of the height of its brow, depends for its validity in the reflection of some sort of truth. If any author is unable to understand a person as a person, regardless of their ethnicity or their walk of life, they simply have no business writing them. This isn't political, it's a fundamental principle of art.

The Real Whitewashing Is Not In Casting

To my mind, the whole issue of 'whitewashing' misses the point. I honestly don't give a flying toss what colour actor is cast in the role of Othello, Major Kusanagi, or whatever - a faint whiff of racism seems to me inherent in the idea that skin colour is the only reliable indicator of culture. What does bother me, however, is the whitewashing of meaning.

Let's take Mulan as an example. Mulan, in either of its original forms, is a fable about self sacrifice for communal or family goals, as well as the absolute requirement to preserve both male and female honour. In both versions of the original story, there is a strong ethic of service - the obligation to serve their lord is never questioned, and much more is at stake than just her aged father's welfare. Mulan risks her future and person to preserve not just her father's head, but the honour of her family and community, the idea being that failure to fulfil their obligation of service would be shameful. And then there's the question of marriage - there are two variants of the story, but both involve Mulan refusing marriage as the specific offers (one from an enemy, the other as part of a more or less financial transaction) would be dishonourable.

Now let's compare this with the Disney version. As far as I can make out, what passes for deep messaging in this inane mash-up is the idea that feminism means proving you can do whatever boys do, and then ending up in a princess gown anyway. The other values which come through most strongly are those of individual liberty, individualism just generally, and the absolute comitment to make snide comments about anything that isn't an exact analogue of western parliamentary democracy. In short, the story of Mulan has been deliberately warped in order to deliver unmistakably western values. Whitewashed, in fact, in the only way that really matters.

This leads to me to ask several questions. Firstly, is this a conscious process? Are these people deliberately appropriating an alien culture in order to peddle their own values in an annoyingly superficial way, or is it possible that they just haven't understood - couldn't understand - the tale's more alien elements? A quick reading of the promotional bumf answers that question - it's deliberate. Which then leads to the next question, which is: If the intention was to deliver a western message to a western audience, why then was it necessary to piss all over a Chinese cultural product?

Surely, if the message one wishes to deliver is so inconsistent with the material, the sensible thing to do is to just use other material, right? Wrong. The fundamental factor at play here is deep racism. It's my impression that adaptors like Disney actually believe they're making stories like Mulan and Alladin and so forth better by ignoring the cultures from which they originate, and warping them into carriers of western values; western values presumably being the only valid values around.

And now I hear that the ABC is producing a re-telling of 'Journey to the West', the seminal tale of Buddhist sacrifice and self-denial, for kids. 

"The 10-part half hour series follows a teenage girl and a trio of fallen gods on a perilous journey as they attempt to bring an end to a demonic reign of chaos and restore balance to their world."

Seriously? A teenage girl in the Tripitaka role? And this nonsense:

"The Legend of Monkey is big budget fantasy drama series that will surprise and delight family viewers globally and locally. We’re a business built on highly original content and this ticks all the boxes: it’s a tremendous tale, visually imaginative and made by talented people. Kids are going to love it."

I believe that I can translate this. It would read:

"We have ripped out the deep messaging of the key foundation story of an entire religion and culture in order to make a sort of mediaeval cross between 'Kung Fu' and 'Power Rangers'." 

Perhaps I'm overreacting, but I can't help but think that if all you're trying to achieve is the creation of an entertaining kids' fantasy series, it would be eminently possible to do this while simultaneously leaving the deep fables of my culture the hell alone.

The Calculus of Hatred

I don't know what it's like to be a Muslim in Australia. In fact, I don't know what it's like to be a Muslim full stop. What I do know, though, is what it's like to be an Asian growing up in an Australia dominated by racial politics.

I came to this country when I was two years old, landing in what used to be the rough and tumble neighbourhood of Surrey Hills. Some of my earliest memories are of drunks stopping me and my mum in the street, bowing and saying, "kon nichi wa", or shouting "Ching Chong Wah" into my face as they walked past.

The leftist narrative of the nineties says that John Howard attempted to garner popularity and unite the country by appealing to deep-seated and long-held cultural anxieties, calling for an end to multiculturalism and insisting that newcomers to Australia conform to Australian values and ideals. I don't know how accurate this is and I don't care - the whole thing strikes me as meaningless anyway. On the face of it, demanding that Australians be accepted and regarded as Australians and that they act accordingly sounds like a politically expedient truism that shouldn't do any real harm. I'm pretty certain that's what Howard and his people thought it was. As a concept, it's so vague as to feel completely unreal. What does feel real, though, is the subsequent ascent of the far right and Pauline Hanson.

The real world consequences, for me, were mild enough. Having to put up with 'Asians Out' plastered on walls in pretty well every neighbourhood, every conversation eventually turning to race, and reasonably regular, but not usually serious, violence. Looking back, I can sort of see it as a parabola, peaking some time around the millennium before taking a slow and steady nose-dive into the realm of bad dreams half-remembered.

Of course, it's all come back to the surface now, and I remember, with startling clarity, exactly what it's like to be the focus of the kind of negative attention Muslims are receiving today. Every day, just like for everyone else, is a collection of small - laughably small - negative incidents. An insult yelled out of a car window, filthy looks in pubs, the news constantly reminding people that you exist and aren't welcome, fist fights at bus stops and your friends and relatives being insulted, snubbed, called upon to justify their existence to complete strangers and, sometimes, spat on and abused.

In terms of the negative contacts that most people face on a daily basis, all of this is pretty small. The difference is, though, that it's constant. And more than that, it's very easy to get the idea that it's institutionally acceptable - that the majority of your adoptive country might shake their heads and tut but, at some level, they're okay with it. It's just how things go. It used to be the Italians, now it's you, now it's the Muslims, and next year it'll be some other group. This makes it okay - it's just the hazing ritual every newcomer has to go through and this is right and just and why don't you just develop a sense of humour for God's sake and get over it?

And you do - if you're not to go completely insane, you learn to laugh at it all. To play on it, to revel, in fact, in being the one who pre-empts the racist joke. But there's a part of you that knows you're being a shameful clown, that you are pissing on your heritage every time you join in on racist banter because you're tired of fighting, that you are a disgrace to yourself, the place from which you've come and the place in which you are.

And then there's the fact that every single insult and indignity you swallow pours another tiny dram of hatred into your heart, and inches you just that little bit further away from the community you so desperately love, admire and want to be a part of. And eventually, your cup runneth over, and you look up one day and discover that you are so far beyond the pale that you can't even watch television or read a newspaper without feeling like an alien in your own home.

Which is why I don't care about red or blue, left or right, who's to blame, or long, pointless conversations where people exchange half-baked, poorly understood factlets about Islam, Arab history, colonialism, or whatever else has been dragged into the half-arsed narrative we pre-chew and spew out to poorly explain complex ideas to the public.

The essential thing for me is that we're on the upturn of that parabolic procession again. Heedless of the past, we are creating yet another generation of newcomers to this country who will remember, always, that their existence rests on a precarious knife-edge of potential bigotry. Who are aware that the person smiling at them today was very likely the same one who threw food at them out of a car window yesterday, and may do so again tomorrow.

The Greatest Semantic Dispute On Earth

I am becoming increasingly annoyed at this kind of silliness.

Apparently, the solution to all our problems is to simply call things by different names.

Want to fight Islamic State? Call it 'Daesh'. Concerned about continuing discrimination against disabled people? Then make sure you call them 'differently able' and all will be well. It seems I can't go a day without at least five mass circulation publications insisting that I change what I call something, and vaguely implying that this will help in some way. You know the kind of thing I mean: "Why we shouldn't call it [insert controversial topic here] any more."

It's not like this is new. I remember a brief period in the '90s when I was solemnly informed by everybody that we were obliterating words like 'waitress', 'actress' and 'murderess', and that by doing so we would forever destroy the last dying basis for the patriarchal society. I call this kind of thinking 'bullshit'.

Don't get me wrong - words do matter. The thing is, though, they don't matter because they're words, they matter because of what they mean. Let's take the word 'spastic' as an example. I once had the privilege of working in a centre designed to help people with cerebral palsy get out and about and connect with the world. Part of my job was helping those of our clients who wished to create a Facebook account. My first client was a fifty something sex maniac, closet-genius and dalek lookalike. Let's call him Joe. Joe couldn't really use his hands or voice, so he took to Facebook like a duck to water. Almost literally, because in order to type he had to kind of peck at the keyboard with the pointer attached to his head. This pointer is kind of why he reminded me of a Dalek. I've never seen anyone more pleased than he was when I told him about this.

Anyway, Joe decided to fill in his profile information by writing a brief bio of himself. I clearly remember the first sentence. It was: "My name is Joe and I am a spastic". My first response was confusion, followed very quickly by gales of laughter as I noticed him giving me a rather beady-eyed look to see what kind of reaction he'd provoked. We then had one of our many very slow chats (Joe spoke by indicating letters on a pad with his pointer - it's a bit like interpreting a Ouija board message from a highly intelligent and amusing ghost). What was revealed was that as far as Joe was concerned, 'spastic' was a medical term, and one with which he had grown up. Then, of course, the frequent use of the word 'spastic' as a playground insult caused some troupe of policy wonks to declare that we should no longer use it. At all. Not in it's medical, perjorative, or any other sense.

While I understand the thinking behind this, it does strike me as vaguely reminiscent of 'Newspeak'. Orwell posits that the control of language is the control of thought (I'm sure someone else does too, but Wikipedia's taking ages to load), and as far as I can see, we're living in an era where language is more tightly controlled than at any other time. A very telling example of this is the fact that I have a fourteen year old student who manifests signs of deep discomfort every time he has to use the word 'Jew' when describing the character Shylock, who is, in fact, a Jew. So deeply has it been drummed into him that this generally innocuous word is somehow taboo that he can't comfortably use it in any sense.

I find this deeply worrying. We've always needed to be jealously protective of our few and precious freedoms, and it seems that freedom of thought and speech might be quietly slipping away under the radar. Don't get me wrong - I'm not pulling a Clint Eastwood here. I think much of what he's said recently is the result of long pent-up bad temper, and possibly age-induced psychosis. I'm not sure how much serious consideration his comments really merit. But I do think that when it comes to our approach to hate speech and bigotry, we've got it wrong. It's not words we should be addressing, but meaning.

We've created an environment where many people feel compelled to censor themselves, but we have utterly failed to address the roots of the underlying prejudices which make this necessary. This means that there are some people out there (you know who you are, Ms Hanson) from whom 'Person of Asian Descent' sounds worse than 'Gook' or 'Zipperhead'. And the annoying thing is that I can't call them out on it, because they've conformed to the new convention of the acceptable which stifles racist language, but ignores racist intent. And then there's the further consideration that if you silence someone for long enough, they'll eventually explode. Sometimes literally.

I think the solution, like so many other solutions, lies in us just growing the hell up. As fun as it is, we need to stop this childish game of he said/she said, stop being hysterical about names and get back to the core business of liberalism, which is defending and promoting the real-world equality of rights of every human regardless of shape, colour, creed or gender. If we take care of that, the semantic equality should just naturally follow.

Red Tube, Blue Tube, and the Mnemo-Narrative of Trump

I'm still idealistic about the internet. I still think, even with all that we've seen and done so far, that it can be a tremendous force for good, giving voice to the voiceless, enriching minds and providing a pathway to mutual understanding, the first and most fundamental pre-requisite of peaceful co-existence.

Of course, not being completely insane, I'm well aware of the fact that it does not currently do any of these things very well. The temptation here is go on a tremendous rant, excoriating the epic, biblical scale of stupidity which is displayed, minute by minute, in any corner of the net you might wish to name. The rational thing to do, however, is to ask why this is so.

Why is the internet so often such a disappointing place? Why has public conversation been so infantilised that most political discussion is indistinguishable from a screaming match between nine year olds? What's happened to feminism? And, most incomprehensibly, why is Donald Trump?

One idea which has been in the public domain for quite some time now is the 'echo chamber' effect. We filter our online experience through algorithms which determine our preferences and prejudices such that it forms a kind of feedback loop - we believe the world is a certain way, and social media sites reinforce this belief by showing us the world according to our conception of it. This means that without breaking the red tube/blue tube effect, we are continually being provided with 'evidence' that the world is, in fact, the way we think it is.

When it comes to the curation of personal interactions, I have absolutely no problem with this. We have so little control over other aspects of our lives, there is an imperative need to control the tenor of what little time we have that actually belongs to us. If your idea of Nirvana involves cat pictures and pseudo-spiritual platitudes delivered by meme, all I have to say to that is: "fill your boots." The problem arises when we then decide to filter news, politics and broader world philosophies through this same set of algorithms.

What this creates is an instant mythologisation of the real world. Without serious effort, it is actually impossible to qualify and compare sources or to access points of view which diverge from our own. This means that every time something happens, each segment of the political spectrum creates, in real time, its own instant mnemo-narrative of the event.

In the past, it used to take years for an historical incident to be warped, mythologised and then co-opted to support a world-view or a broader idea. These days, however, it happens instantaneously. A plane crashes in the Middle East and it's immediately hard evidence of Islamists destroying the world or the CIA protecting its alien overlords or, more generally, of the non-Western world being just a little more crap than our own.

And by the time the investigators and other more responsible brokers of information have caught up, it's too late. The mnemo-narrative has been created, and yet another bulwark constructed between individual ideologies and the pluralism of actual reality.

It is fascinating to watch this happening with the distasteful phenomenon that is Donald Trump. I watch the red tube and the blue tube, the right and the left, and what I see is mutual incomprehension.

On the one hand, we have a mnemo-narrative of Trump as hero of the downtrodden and the excluded. A man for the people, who is radically against the world as it is currently configured - a configuration, I might add, which has routinely excluded, exploited and disadvantaged the unskilled, the under-educated and the poor. The red tube is full of praise for Trump's attacks on 'political correctness' and, more broadly, on what it sees as the 'intellectual elite' and its contempt for the 'ordinary man in the street'.

Over on the blue tube, we see the representatives of this 'elite' being simply unable to understand what is being said and how any message so fundamentally stupid can be accepted by anyone. The mnemo-narrative being created here is of Trump as an atavistic fascist, using populist trickery to drag the world kicking and screaming into the 1930's. His followers must therefore consist only of fascists, racists and the cognitively impaired. Careful interrogation and refutation of his spoken arguments is seen as being the kryptonite best suited for the fight against the Trump phenomenon.

In a way, this is stupider than anything Trump has ever said. One of the major discontents being channeled by Trump is the feeling that the 'elites' think 'ordinary people' are stupid. To attempt to discredit this by calling Trump supporters out for stupidity is a wonderful example of the kind of idiocy possible in a world viewed entirely through partisan filters.

The simple fact of the matter is that what he says doesn't matter. Populism is about being popular, and one look at the world as it is now and has always been should be enough to tell us that popularity has absolutely nothing to do with competence, sanity, rationality or any other objective measure. Populism is all about speaking the language of emotion, and this is a language that does not so much form sentences as it uses tropes. Apparently nonsensical slogans become pregnant with multiple shades of meaning, and the aggregate of these slogans comes to represent the totality of one's discontent with the world. This happens all across the political spectrum, which makes it even more incredible that politicos are confused by Trump.

We need to get un-confused, and very quickly. If we keep concentrating on irrelevancies like words, policies and arguments, and fail to address the very real, very intense emotions behind the rise of Trump, we risk alienating enough of the population to result in his election.