On the Importance of Acknowledging Evil

I remember when I was in secondary school I would regularly cut class to go to the George Street Timezone. Whilst there, I met an older Chinese - he was probably in his early twenties - with whom I bonded over Double Dragon and a mutual interest in looking up the skirts of female characters in Street Fighter. I remember during one of our wide-ranging discussions he solemnly advised me against hooking up with a white girlfriend. "They don't see us as human," he said. "We're basically pets to them, or at best, accessories to prove to their foolish mates just how 'advanced' they are."

This idea is, of course, laughable, but I took it as gospel at the time as it does, in fact, have a kernel of truth. Where the truth lies is in essence rather than in detail: the world is a hostile place, and the vast majority of people in it will behave amorally the majority of the time. This might seem controversial, but I don't really think it is. Where people are consciously in control of their behaviour, the majority are moral while a minority are deliberately immoral. But just how much of anyone's behaviour is consistently under their conscious control? For most or all people, it's laughably little - so many of our actions, small and large, are reflexive responses to drives we're either unaware of or do not wish to acknowledge. This being so, it's always been axiomatic for me that people in aggregate represent the most dangerous type of threat - the one which is not cognisant of its status as a threat.

This way of looking at the world was, in my early life at least, pretty well universal amongst all the people I knew. But now, as I reluctantly advance in age and prosperity, I'm more and more coming into contact with people who think very differently and, somewhat more surprisingly for me, fast coming to the conclusion that it's normal to do so, and that my view is the anomalous one. The most prevalent world view I come across these days is one which consists of deliberate and wholly voluntary blindness to evil. It's interesting to me that the division falls roughly across class lines (with me being an obvious anomaly in that respect), and reminds me of Becky Sharp's famous bon mot from Vanity Fair where she muses that she would also find it easy to be "virtuous" on fifty thousand a year.

I don't really have a problem with people wishing to see things in this way, but I do wonder if they're aware of the implications of such a view. There are some crucial assumptions, almost certainly all incorrect, which underpin such a way of being. People who allow their bodies to become soft and dysfunctional in the name of instant gratification are somewhere deep in their minds assuming the invincibility of the civilised order. People who laser focus on their own tiny lives without paying attention to the rest of the world are assuming that history can't touch living individuals in the same way that, say, WWII fatally interrupted the plans and aspirations of millions, many of whom were very clearly caught napping. People who exempt themselves from political process or awareness are possibly making the most stupid assumption of all - that the systems under which we live are somehow natural and native to reality, rather than delicate webs of abstracts requiring constant maintenance and defence. The vulnerabilities created by these deliberate blind spots really do look, from where I'm standing, utterly appalling.

It could be argued that I'm just as skewed as anybody else. That I'm arguing from an equally deluded position located on the paranoid end of the spectrum. I don't think so. I know from personal experience as well as close observation of others that wherever we find within ourselves an area made up of rationalisation or excuses, that that area represents a critical vulnerability - a part of ourselves which can and will be destroyed by the Brownian motion of human interaction, and which might very well facilitate the destruction of the person as a whole. I'm not saying that everyone should work to coat themselves in the invincible armour of isolation - vulnerabilities are not just entry ports for hostile action, but also for the types of human connection which are the only thing that potentially makes the endeavour of human life worthwhile.

But what I am saying is that it's essential to manage one's interface with the world, because the world is as full of danger as it is of wonder, and it's impossible to manage threats of which one is unaware. And should we cease to match and manage ourselves accordingly, we potentially cut ourselves off from the good things in life, it being impossible to really experience anything when dead or broken beyond repair.

School of Mine

I'm generally quite proud of my school, despite the fact that it is unlikely to be proud of me. But this fact is neither here nor there - I'm proud to have been a part of it, proud of the outstanding education they delivered to us, and immensely proud of the school's broader ethos, which unlike so many others, has evidently carried over into the later lives of its alumni, even in my case, where the uptake of its values was delayed until far too late in my life.

I was not an easy child. Underhanded, sneaky, dishonest, vindictive, occasionally violent, and sometimes flat out criminal. I remember my first detention was handed out in my first week of year seven, for lighting a fire in a bin. I'm pretty sure the only reason they held onto me for as long as they did was my academic ability. But this is not to say that the school was without its own problems. There was a distinct issue with bullying, in which I both participated and was a victim of. Elitism and arrogance are the besetting sins of all schools like mine, and there was quite a bit of our student culture which would now be condemned as toxic.

And it's not as if my memories of school are un-mixedly happy. Failures on the part of staff and other students to understand certain aspects of life which I felt to be obvious, and critical failures on my part in the area of character, made for a generally troubled and turbulent school life. Every time a form master appeared at a classroom door, there would be a chorus of, "That's for you, Lake," - and just like in Greek tragedy, the chorus was generally unerringly accurate.

For all that, however, I still think it was a sterling institution. Whenever I speak to our alumni, a fondness comes over their faces when we talk about the old school. This is in stark contrast to the boys who went to other schools in our cluster - the Knox and Trinity and Riverview boys, who wax contemptuous about their school culture, faculty, impacts on their subsequent lives. For the vast majority of the old Aloysians I speak to, the days of our schooling exist as a pure and bright cul de sac of time-softened recollection. A place where values mattered, and where the old connections are still upheld to an extent I have never encountered anywhere else apart from the military.

Tutor Group, with Idiot circled in red

So it was with pardonable complacence that I heard the news of the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sex Abuse. My own personal memory could only conjure up a handful of incidents, disturbing enough in themselves, but relatively innocuous. A form master who once disciplined a student by strapping his bare backside - the strap was an ubiquitous punishment in my day, and I personally was strapped an average of twice a week, on the hands. A dubious relationship between one master and a student who, when it comes down to it, weren't that dissimilar in age. Dark rumours of faculty sauntering through the showers insisting that boys should be comfortable being naked in front of each other, but no corresponding action. Just the normal idiocy and weakness one expects in an institution, and which I'd always assumed was rigorously policed to prevent harm.

So it was with a mixture of quite unexpected emotions that I heard, through an old boys group, of the sentencing of two of our faculty for serious sexual offences. One was worse than the other, and both appeared to have taken place outside of our school at affiliated Jesuit institutions, but even this extremely peripheral view of the cancer of paederasty is disturbing enough. I remember the men in question. One was a Brother, actually wider than he was tall, so fat was he, who had a grating nasal voice and a habit of petty tyranny combined with the somewhat ridiculous habit of falling asleep at his desk in front of the class. It didn't take us long to figure out that leaving silently to pursue our own leisure was, in fact, the perfect crime. The other one I principally remember for a scathing thirty minute critique, mostly justified, of my character and morals, delivered at volume into my face in a small room. It's interesting to think of this in the context of the thousands of pornographic images of children he was subsequently convicted of possessing.

A picture of me, clearly thrilled to be in Concert Band, and unaware of the camera.

And that's the thing - the corrosion of my memory of the school has left me furious. Sure, I wasn't exactly its proudest son, but how dare these maleficent petty tyrants taint all of our recollections with their own sordid evil. How dare they. Not only have they done incalculable harm to their victims, for whom I cannot express enough sympathy, but they have also pissed on the childhood memories of thousands upon thousands of boys. Their gross betrayal of the credo that they themselves were the foremost in promoting is entirely unacceptable, and coupled with this is the chilling inference, given the delay in exposure and conviction, of the steps the school and church authorities both took and signally failed to take.

There has to be something positive to take from this, and to my mind it's a simple lesson, applicable across all areas of society, the state, and at every level. Never wink at evil to protect any institution, however great. This is not the first mass exposure of predatory behaviour in large and well respected institutions (though it might be the biggest), but it's down to all of us - every single one of us - to make it the last. If we're to learn anything from this, we must, I think, learn that this sort of thing cannot be allowed to stand.

Vote For The One You Don't Like

People often ask me why I hate populism so much - surely that means I hate the people, right? Surely the people are smart enough to know what they want, and how their country should be run - right? Right?

Well, possibly. But who, in fact, are the people? Are they the urban latte sipping elites whose top priority appears to be banning anything and everything which offends their delicate, Guardian driven sensibilities? Or are they troglodytes from Far North Queensland, demanding a ban on immigrants whom they have never encountered or had to live with because some idiot has asserted with no evidence whatsoever that their culture is under threat? Or are they the middle citizens, the quiet ones who are generally too busy being the engine of the whole damn country to have or understand political opinions, and who will generally vote based on whatever their mass media of choice tells them is the right way to vote?

This is the biggest issue, really. The people, en masse, are, in fact, critically stupid. Not because of average IQ or educational level - these are generally quite high - but because of the necessarily inchoate nature of a polity deliberately made up of disparate and competing interest groups. 

And that's the biggest problem with populism by far. A canny populist - one who knows what they're doing - will generally pick the biggest and/or most coherent interest group and tell them exactly what they want to hear. It's telling that in the Anglophone world, this group tends to be the xenophobic reactionary middle. But that's not the point - the point is, that they'll pick that one. A crap or incompetent populist will try to please everyone, resulting in the ridiculous situation where they'll be applying ten year gaol sentences to strawberry fiddlers one day, bringing children off Nauru the next, and then announcing vague plans to cut immigration while increasing immigration (WTAF) the day after that. The biggest single problem with populism is that it's a signal failure of leadership.

Most people - the vast majority of people, I'd be willing to hazard - are politically indifferent or politically moderate. Right up until the moment you ask them to state their position, at which point they vote Brexit not expecting it to pass, vote Trump in protest against the political establishment in the full knowledge that he's a fucking moron who won't fix anything, engage in flame wars about vaccines, corporate tax, international trade, or any other of the myriad issues which they know exactly nothing about, and generally just act like crazy people until the rush passes momentarily and they go back to work in the system which, once they've finished mindlessly excoriating it, they rely on for their livelihoods and well-being. 

So given the incoherent and frankly mindless nature of populist discourse, all a populist leader can actually do, in terms of concrete action, is address how people feel about an issue. Actually fixing it is an impossibility. Because the truth of issues like population, trade, or foreign affairs - the stuff people get really het up about - is that solutions are slow, complex, and usually highly counter-intuitive. So a populist solution is almost always good in the short term as it rubs everyone gently on the bum and tells them how smart they are, but disastrous in the long term, as such gains need to be disproportionately paid for in the world system. An excellent example of this is the trade deficit. Given our position in our region, it's both expected and desirable to run a deficit most years, but every single election both sides of the house will campaign on reducing or eliminating it, whilst shamelessly conflating it with the budget deficit. And we swallow it, for reasons I still can't explain. 

I understand that these arguments are probably not going to sway anyone in the populist camp, probably because they're reasoned arguments, and pay scant attention to how the people feel. This is because I don't give a fuck how the people 'feel' about the Iran deal, trade tariffs, price elasticity of demand, or any of the other innumerable things we shout about without knowing a damn thing about. We're really not supposed to know these things. What we're supposed to do is demonstrate at least as much sense as the average family dog, and vote in our own self interest rather than for some idiot who's clearly following us around and trying to stoke irrelevant outrage. Populism is to politics as a three year old child trying to live on sour candies is to healthy lifestyles. 

If I approached you in an alley in King's Cross and offered to sell you a diamond ring for a hundred bucks, and then spent the next few hours assiduously agreeing with whatever you had to say, however stupid, you wouldn't then decide to put me in charge of your household finances and career prospects. Or if I lobbed up next to you at a bus stop and started blaming all your problems and mine on mythical outsiders and 'the deep state', or a media conspiracy, I doubt you'd ask me to participate in decisions affecting the welfare of your small children. So please, for the love of all that's holy, can we please apply the same principles to selecting our political leaders?

The Magic Eye

When I first watched Training Day, I was a much younger and less experienced person. One concept which resonated, however, was the concept of 'the magic eye'. This was presented as a sort of eye for 'the street', a way of looking at things which would reveal that which is hidden, that layer of existence which lies beneath the manicured and regulated stream of ordinary life. Of course, Training Day being Hollywood, the proof of this was that the young police officer was able to spot a rape in progress, which is something I don't actually believe anyone needs a magic eye to achieve. But then, for a mass audience, the obvious needs to elevated to the level of the arcane.

Having said that, the magic eye does exist, and people who have it recognise each other. It's very hard to explain, but there's a few ways to look at it. The most basic and simple is to notice the way people look at people. This creates a different kind of look in the eye of the observer, and somebody who is looking at the way other people look at things, will become noticeable to someone else who's doing the same thing. This is how it works at the lowest level, and I generally remember it mostly from my youth, with recognition generally taking place amongst other youths. When older people would notice and comment on this to me, they would generally loom up out of nowhere, surprising me.

As we move forward towards inevitable death in that process we euphemistically refer to as ageing, habits of life and thought harden and submerge such that they are pursued both imperceptibly and ineluctably. Now, it looks utterly different. Instead of individuals connecting across a crowd in a sort of freemasonry, it is now a matter of scenery versus protagonist. The eye flicks over a crowd of people walking up and down a footpath, and the vast majority of these people have a gaze which is internalised and, to all intents and purposes, blind. It can be easily seen that what they are seeing is at least half made up of things inside their own heads, rather than that which is around them. These people fade into a kind of moving backdrop, interesting enough in and of itself, but rather like the sky in that unless something extremely unusual is happening with it, it's not exactly of immediate importance.

But then there are the others. The man who stiffens and moves his bag whenever someone comes within half a meter. The other man, next to him, who turns his right hip away from whoever he's talking to. The girl sitting on a wall whose glance goes from waist to hands to face, in that order. The woman who makes a point of looking over her shoulder every fifteen paces. Or the man who does the same thing, only instead of looking back, he looks up at the windows and rooftops above him. The people who are scanning the crowd and who lock gazes as soon as they encounter one that's doing the same thing - lock and dismiss when there's no threat detected. And in that split second between lock and dismiss is a sort of recognition. Not the happy or hostile recognition of youth, but rather a more matter of fact, sometimes quite sad acknowledgement that here is another person who is just as damaged, frightened, alienated, or just plain suspicious as themselves.

In my old neighbourhood of Manly, after the gentrification, I could go for days without seeing such a look. Where I work now, in Lane Cove, there's a grand total of three people (in Lane Cove you see the same people every day) I've seen with this look over the whole of the four or five years I've been there on a daily basis. But in the street where I live, which is not more than twenty minutes away, I see that look every time I go outside, multiple times. What is it about the street on which I live, that so many of the people walking up and down it have been sufficiently smacked around by the world to have the magic eye? It's not as if I live in a particularly rough neighbourhood - in fact, it's so not rough that the idea is laughable. I don't know, but as soon as I'm able to convince one of them to stop and talk to me about something that isn't the weather or the transit system, I will post that conversation up on this blog.

Work and Home

I live near a hospital, and there's a weird acoustic flaw where people standing and talking at street level across the road sound like they're having a conversation in my bedroom. As I spend quite a bit of time working from home, I hear quite a few of these little chats. What I mainly hear is people being comforted. I generally don't understand what is actually happening, as people have an incomprehensible tendency to never refer directly to what they're talking about, especially if it's important – a thing I don't think I will ever understand. Cancer, death – all horrific pain – is referred to as 'it', if at all. Sometimes, I'll pop my head out over the balcony and have a look. It's a deeply unattractive aspect of humanity, but whenever I encounter tragedy I have to see if the sufferers are beautiful, dumpy, misshapen, stylish, rich or poor, for no other reason than to project backstory onto their pain for my own private entertainment.

It's not just a hospital, there's also a methadone clinic and rehab as well. This means that I'm far from starved for entertainment. There was one night where a woman was screaming "Don't!" and "Stop it!" over and over again. I initially didn't want to do anything about that, not wishing to interrupt my highly important business of watching people fall over on Youtube. But this hesitation didn't last for more than a few seconds, so I went downstairs. At my appearance, the man who had been beating her ran away, and when I went to help the woman up, she screamed, "Don't fucking touch me!" and started screaming even more. So I went back upstairs and watched a video of people wiping out on waterslides.

The conversation I probably hear most often is people haggling furiously over prescription drugs. The price for Valium seems to be anywhere between one and four dollars per pill, depending on bulk, with good character, constant willingness to 'shout a shot', and length of relationship being the principle reasons given in favour of discounts. These conversations also often degenerate into violence, but I never feel even slightly inclined to get involved in those. Nor am I much interested in the occasional ice tantrum, usually involving one of those women who look like they're made of op shop leather storming down the street screaming imprecations at the tops of their voices.

One of the more interesting episodes involves a gigantic man with scars all over his forearms. He looks exactly like a GI Joe action figure, haircut and all. He's always humping a pack, always dressed in black, and always, always smoking. I would see him around the neighbourhood, looking like an action hero whose puppy had just died, smoking and generally staring glumly at the world passing him by. In my mind I called him 'The Happy Welder', partly because of the nature of the scars on his forearms, but mostly from an innate cruelty which I think I share with our entire poxy species.

Anyway, one day he happened to be standing in that spot over the road, so I went out to have a cigarette on my own balcony. He was visiting the rehab, standing outside and having a smoke with his case worker. He assured this man that things were going well. There were good prospects that he might get housing in the next year, and he hadn't attempted suicide in months.

These are the stories I observe on my street, before I head into the neighbourhood where I work and listen to conversations about which restaurants are new, and which are getting a bit tired, how unbelievable Tracy was at the last yoga class, and just how exciting and satisfying some new data centre project is. The distance between these two areas is roughly two and a half kilometres.

Observations On Teaching And Education

Education is in the news a lot these days, with quite a few people talking about systemic problems a la NAPLAN and so forth. As a tutor who is across something like one hundred and twenty students, I thought I'd put in my two cents about what I've been seeing in the world of secondary education.

It's always been axiomatic that school teachers are ludicrously busy. Apart from contact hours, there's the huge and ever-increasing burden of reporting and process, statutory requirements, extra-curricular duties, and professional development. As such, I've always known that my particular profession exists primarily to take up some of the slack which is created by the sheer impossibility of providing intensive one on one remedial or extension tuition for harassed, over-worked, and over-committed classroom teachers. It's telling also that a fair proportion of the tutors I manage are classroom teachers themselves, who freely acknowledge that the service we provide plugs specialist gaps which just can't reasonably be expected to be filled by the broader school system. I also tend to go in to bat for teachers when students complain that they've received no feedback on their seventh submission of a practice essay or whatever, explaining that these people are really really really busy. But lately I've found myself more and more called upon to defend or rationalise the indefensible.

The students who rolled up with printouts of the presentations their teachers have been delivering, still watermarked with the logos of Sparknotes or Gradesaver. Students set to study the difficult and abstruse poet T S Eliot who, for four of the six weeks allocated for the unit, were basically left to their own devices to Google the poet and poems, and then spent the remaining two weeks having their own (understandably terrible) research read back to them. The student who was advised not to choose The Iliad as a related text because it was 'too famous'. The class who spent an all day session on creative writing being actively encouraged to write stories on subjects that are specifically outlined in the syllabus as subjects to avoid. The class whose faculty has been setting them gruelling, multi-phase, multi-modal assessments which have eaten up most of the term's class time because their faculty apparently didn't understand the word 'or' in the syllabus. The same class whose teachers instituted a three week shut down in the middle of term as they suddenly realised they didn't understand the syllabus they'd had a year to adopt. The teacher who swore blind that the film Metropolis - a film which consists mainly of mass production machines killing and enslaving workers - had nothing at all to do with a critique of capitalism or class power.

And then there was the student who came to me with a voluminous notebook filled entirely with interpretations of Frost poems which ranged from the invalid to the insane. The same student who, when studying Strange Meeting, a poem self-consciously referential of Percy Bysse Shelley's Revolt of Islam, was given an interpretation which mentioned nothing about this. And when she asked her teacher if she should do some independent research on Shelley was told that the teacher "had never heard of that woman". Needless to say, Percy was a man. And then there was the teacher who marked one of my students down for pointing out that a poem which included a scythe, multiple images of 'reaping', and 'sleep' might just be talking about death, and the one who insisted that a poem with a rigid six syllables per line was in iambic tetrameter, which would require eight. And when asked what tetrameter actually was consistently, according to my student, 'ducked the question'. This is not to mention the multiple reports I get of whole classes spending weeks watching Netflix programs like The Crown for no discernable reason, teachers repeatedly informing classes of outright fallacies like, 'The HSC exam will never prescribe a Yeats poem to talk about', despite the fact that last year's HSC did, and one shining, gobsmacking example of a whole class who had been taught that Buddhism and Yoga were forms of devil worship.

Given all of this, I think it's time for some hard truths. The current system of teacher education does not reliably produce competent teachers, at least when it comes to the humanities. And then there's the input of the electorate. Every time we get outraged about inadequate education outcomes, the guaranteed institutional response is to add another layer of reporting and process, without necessarily allocating more funding. All this put together makes teaching an extremely unattractive profession. Sure, a small minority will be attracted to the profession as a vocation, but the reality is that most people work to pay the rent, and if working conditions are sufficiently crap, then so will be the pool of talent.

We need to get serious about education, and the only way to do this is to make teaching an attractive profession. It's really just a simple matter of paying more and raising standards accordingly. We can only lift the quality of teaching if entry into teaching is competitive, and it simply won't be if it continues to be an ever crappier job with ever crappier pay and conditions populated by the inevitable concomitant of ever crappier members of the profession. Paying salaries commensurate with the importance and demands of the job, requiring teachers of subjects - all subjects - to actually know their subjects at least as well as they know how to format lesson plans or fill in mandatory metrics reporting, and lifting the onerous and, let's face it, utterly worthless burden of process and reporting which was only ever instituted to appease the electorate without actually making any attempt to fix the system, are all essential steps in any effort to 'fix' education.

And it's not just systemic stuff either. It also comes down (arguably mostly) to our own attitude to what education is for, and our own practices in terms of demanding things from it. When government listens to the electorate in terms of what we want from education, what they generally get is inchoate gibberish. A thick layer of partisan outrage over-topping a bewildering plethora of demands for the education system to act as high end creche, ideological and spiritual coach, vocational employment trainer, high academic institution, life skills tutor, and general utopian fairyland in which no child is ever hurt, stressed, underwhelmed, overwhelmed, bored, or challenged. If we want meaningful change in education, we ourselves need to do some serious thinking about education on a systemic and social level, instead of just inundating government with shrill knee jerk personal responses along the lines of  'won't somebody think of the (my) children'. Because while education is very much about children, that's not all it's about by a very long shot. The product of our education system as a whole has a direct and significant impact on the economy, future social happiness, our viability as a nation. And it's not just economic - education is pivotal to the production of individuals capable of ensuring our future defence. In fact, our whole future viability as a nation. So why does everyone balk at the idea of spending on future defence the way we spend on, oh, let's say, defence?

It's possibly to do with the fact that we think about education stupidly, because for most of us, our education was the product of people thinking stupidly about education. It might perhaps be time to break that cycle.

Marking Time

I went to a raspberry farm once. It was in Tasmania, and was billed as the thing to go and see. In fact, it was represented to me as a thing to do, which would put it in the same category as writing a novel, having a jousting tournament with shopping trolleys, or walking long distances in the bush. A thing to 'do'.

When I got there, I found it surprising in several ways. First of all was the revelation that a raspberry farm looks like a vineyard, or a tea plantation, or like any other vaguely green space full of commercial agriculture. I am an urban creature, and that's really all I got from looking out at the neat green rows of what I presumed to be raspberry bushes.

The next surprise was the sheer number of things people are willing to put raspberries in. We went to a very nicely outfitted cafe/restaurant/gift shop type thing, where a six page menu contained an astonishing variety of dishes containing raspberries. There were pancakes and whatnot, as you'd expect, but also incongruous combinations, like a bacon and egg breakfast with, for no discernable reason, a raspberry compote. And even more intriguingly, a short list of items having nothing to do with raspberries, proof positive, I think, that the people running the place were well aware that they would be faced with people unwilling to tolerate their berry based whimsy.

But the most surprising thing of all, from my point of view, was the idea that going to a raspberry farm in order to eat a weirdly berried meal and look at some bushes constituted 'something to do'. I remember the person I was with stating that it was 'a bit of fun', and looking back, I think she did have quite a lot of fun watching me go from bewildered to nonplussed to irate. I can't help but wonder if that was her plan all along.

I wouldn't say it was a wasted experience, though. I did enjoy my breakfast, and I learnt several interesting facts about raspberries, though I think I may have forgotten most of them. But I also learned an invaluable lesson about people. Such activities have always been a complete mystery to me. I've always been vaguely aware that there are people for whom life consists solely of eating painstakingly made things in odd or new locations, but I always assumed that there must be some secret thrill to the whole thing. That in the same way I don't really understand people who are addicted to mindless MMOs or Valium or whatever, that there must be some intense pleasure or satisfaction to be gained from this mode of life. The biggest surprise of the day was that there isn't.

These people are just marking time, and doing it (usually in grim silence) in the company of their loved ones. And this makes me wonder about what we all do in our sophisticated urban environments. All those brunches and craft beers, our manufactured enthusiasms for manufactured trends and products - surely this is just a delusional version of going to the raspberry farm. It's all just as poorly qualified to be thought of as 'something to do', but because it's new and bright and colourful, and because we do it loudly and quickly, we deceive ourselves into thinking otherwise.