What’s black and white but read all over?

I have a companion site to this blog: www.of-course.co.uk . It’s a sort of extra resource that I use when I want to expand on things I blog about. The biggest search term, by a long chalk, for www.of-course.co.uk is ‘nothing is ever black and white’. I get hits daily from all around the world. Presumably it strikes a chord. Perhaps it should be the mission statement of the progressive pedant.

People have always craved easy and simplistic answers. It’s why we have religion and why politics is so often reduced to meaningless sound bites and slogans. Sadly too many people seem unable to cope with questions that don’t have easy answers, or horrors of horrors don’t have any answers currently available. The mind of the lazy thinker abhors a vacuum; so when an easy answer is missing one is made up, or sort from a convenient charlatan.

I’m a firm believer that nothing is ever black and white. Nothing is ever that simple. Scratch below the surface and you will always find a multi-coloured myriad of meanings, causes, reasons and answers for what, why are where for. Through my art I endeavour to interpret and convey this philosophy. If you think like me please help spread the word: ‘nothing is ever black and white’.

Lateral ruminations

This morning, as I was getting dressed, I witnessed a very large branch of a tree, in the wooded area opposite, break with an almighty crack, free fall almost in slow motion and disappear amongst the other trees. I saw it snap before the sound of the crack reached me. The immediate area between where I live and the trees is relatively quiet first thing in the morning in my little part of the city so the sound of the crack was quite loud. Rather musing on what caused it my immediate that was of that old philosophical chestnut “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" The joy of that question is that there isn’t really an answer. But then I suppose you can also ask the question, what is an answer?

All my life I’ve suffered from ‘going off at a tangent thinking’ syndrome. I think it’s what has given me my creativity. Shame I’ve never been able to harness it fully or to good effect. Creatively I’ve always felt unfulfilled.

I then went on to ponder about the tree. Was it the victim of a disease, what humans have done to the environment or just old age and the cycle of life? I never reached any conclusion of course. There are no answers. There are only ever questions.

Thinking out of the box

Up and down the land, in every pub, on every form of public transport, on radio phone-ins, in the workplace you hear the blinkered morons offering their opinions with a banal simplicity. They are the loud-mouthed brain-washed foot soldiers that halt progress; they stop this country from moving forward.

I don’t care much for ‘management speak’. I’m sure you know the sort of thing, the likes of, “run it up the flagpole and see who salutes” etc. etc. But there is one of these sayings that I would use in certain circumstances and that saying is, as the title of this post suggests, “thinking out of the box”.

“Thinking out of the box” is a commodity that is in very short supply. It is like ‘common sense’ which I find is rarely that common; an irony lost on most people.

Cause and effect are rarely linear. We live in a fractal world.

Narrow mindedness is an affliction that far too many people suffer from in this country. I'm sure you know the sort; the Neanderthal Sun reader, the middle-class Daily Mail* bigots; the sort of people who think all of the world's ills can be cured by a slogan. The sort of people who will blame the world's ills on health & safety, the smoking ban, immigrants, speed cameras, the EU, trade unions, the gay community, the CofE, the BBC, BB King, Doris Day, Matt Busby et al. They will be climate change deniers. They are people who would rather accept conspiracy theories and superstition over logic and learning. These people need to think out of the box. But how do we get them to do that?

*the paper that supported Hitler

Tax-payers (work in progress)

‘Tax-payer’ is one of the many nonsensical terms currently bandied about by the media. A hateful term also highlighted by that reactionary organisation trading under the name of The Taxpayers’ Alliance. An organisation that no doubt draws sizeable support from Daily Mail readers. When the term ‘Tax-payer’ is used it is done so in a way to imply exclusivity. In reality though virtually all of the adult population are tax payers, along with many children. The largest source for revenue collection is derived from what people spend. Consumers are the only real tax-payers. Certainly 'for profit' organisations don't pay tax and neither does anyone assessed under the standard rate of tax.

Now before you accuse me of peddling some kind of Stalinist philosophy I urge you to remove those blinkers and consider the economy of this country from a different perspective than the one you normally adopt. If you are one of those "I don't work hard and pay my taxes to subsidise the feckless and the [enter persecuted minority of your choice]" Johnnies then I feel sorry for you. Please stop taking things at face value. That is the mark of an imbecile. Nothing is ever black and white, so please don't pretend that it is. Society’s make up is complex and multi-faceted, slogan-solutions are never the answer to a problem, if indeed there is a problem, which is often just a matter of opinion.

'For profit' organisations don't pay tax

Now this will fit nicely into the prejudiced view of many a hardened left-winger. But please just hold on a minute and let me explain. Now I’m not talking about tax avoidance or evasion here, although I have no doubt that many a corporation practises these dark arts. No matter how large or small the tax bill of any company is when the bill is paid it is not really paid by that company. I know that it is they that hand over the cash, but ultimately it is their customers that pay their tax bill. This is repeated all the way down the supply chain until it reaches the end. The end being the consumer. Companies don't really pay tax; they build it in to their pricing and effectively pass it on.

Standard rate tax payers working for profit orientated companies don't really pay tax either

I guess, with your pay-slip in hand, you might challenge me on this. Especially if you pay a sizeable wad to HM Revenue and Customs on a regular basis. But given we live in a market driven economy. Yes I know we don't like it. Wages are determined by the market and ultimately it is take home pay that drives wage levels so tax levels are immaterial.

What about the public sector?

I won’t even begin to try and explain the role of the public sector in all of this as this whole blog-post would end up being much more tedious than it actually is. Plus we could easily end up disappearing up some financial bum-hole in the process. That’s not putting the public sector down. The public sector plays a vital role and doesn’t deserve all the criticism it receives. The unjustified cuts that they are subject to are a result of charlatan economics.

There seems to be a misjudged paranoia amongst certain sections of the community that they are the only ones paying, whilst everyone else is taking. If true Tory intentions come into being, with all public services being privatised, I think people would be in for a big shock. If we were each billed for the services we use I suspect a large proportion of “hard working tax-payers” would find that they would pay out much more than they do now. Be careful what you wish for.

The average person on the Clapham Omnibus needs to stop accepting what they are fed about the economy. They need to scratch beneath the surface. To use a hateful business slogan they need to “think outside of the box”. Individual economic events don’t happen in isolation. Economic issues aren’t addressed by snappy on-liners.

The idea that you can measure a person’s worth is obnoxious, and to try and measure it in financial terms is immoral as well as laughable. We all make a contribution to society in our own individual ways. Don’t knock people because they are different or because the way they cope with life isn’t your way. Think before you cast the first stone, you might not realise that you are living in a glasshouse.

Life’s a bitch

“Life’s a bitch and then you die", so the saying goes. Being someone that has been blessed with a lot of luck in his life, most of it bad, I have always found that two of the most important things to help you cope with the shit that comes your way are music and humour. No, make that three things, music, humour and the love of a good woman. Cancel that! Four things, music, humour, the love of a good woman and beer.

Out of those four the one that bemuses a lot of people is humour, and how when I’m seemingly reeling in the feculence of my or someone else’s latest disaster, I can often find something to laugh about. It’s my way of coping. Basically life is absurd, so why be miserable about it?

The Monty Python song Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life is a great little ditty to sing to yourself to remind you that perhaps life might not be as bad as it seems. If it gets to the point where you can’t stand the song going round in your head then replace it with Ian Dury’s panacea Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll. Sorted!

Laugh while you can. You are a long time dead!