Chris Page

News stories illustrating the imbecility and unfairness of humanity are so commonplace as to be almost banal yet on a regular basis you come across stories that make you go ‘Bah! Horrid world! I want to get off this planet.’

This week two stories came around within about 24 hours of each other, which on their own might have been depressing enough, but coming together gave me a really big bah! moment.

The first was that a poll in the US suggested that the most trusted news source in the US was Fox (read). The second, the very next day, was that Wikileaks has gone offline for lack of funds (read).

Fox News is either a paradigm of right thinking, or if you don’t actually live under a rock, it is the paradigm of the thinking of the right — anthrax to the intellect, purveyors of fine propaganda on behalf of the radioactively plutocratic. It is also by any objective standard a behemoth of the media, owned by News International, the second biggest media conglomerate in the world, prop. one Rupert Murdoch.

The non-behemothian Wikileaks is, in its own words, “a non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public,” and which publishes leaked documents from governments, corporations and religious organizations, documents the authors would prefer kept from public sight.

In other words, it is probably the bane of many of the people R. Murdoch has tiffin with.

But why am I explaining who Wikileaks are when you might already know, or when you could read a more coherent account here on Wikipedia?

The point is, while Fox, the fountain of untruth, goes from strength to strength, Wikileaks, exploder of porkie pies, is in danger of going offline for lack of money.

Just another tale of humdrum iniquity — well, what do you expect? Wikileaks should carry advertising and give up its independence from outside interests, let the free market control the flow of information.

Well, I’ve put my credit card where my blog post is and contributed to Wikileaks fundraising drive and I mention this story because there may be more people out there who would like to exclaim ‘Bah, horrid world!’ with me and then try to make a small difference.

A Dutch McDonald’s employee is fired for adding an unauthorised slice of cheese to a burger. (Read here.) I love stories like this that illustrate the petty mindedness, rule obsession and control freakery of super-sized corporations.

“We have found out … that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them … The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.”

(At the end of the linked story, sense was enforced by a court that ruled that McDs were wrong to fire the employee and awarded damages against the company.)

Another abandoned Weed cover design

Weed is a catchy little name but, despite the genesis of the story (see last post) the story is not about dope. No, really.

There was a moment when the writing was done and I was thinking about putting it out there in the big wide world that I had an attack of cynicism in which I thought the name with its puffy associations might be a good marketing gimmick. I slap myself on the wrist for the thought.

Weed is named Weed because that’s the name it needs. It is not for or about pot heads— stoner stuff is just boring. I am bothered that I might be seen to be championing drugs. I am happy to champion drugs, but will do so on another occasion in another way. Possibly the easy associations with the name might put off certain people from reading the thing.

The story is about so much else that is far dearer to me than puff.

Back in the day, a weed was a person who was considered physically weak and who probably had poor social skills (probably as a result of being considered by others to be physically weak — how we love the Aryan!). These days, a weed might be called a nerd. A weed is actually a person who merely has different interests and priorities to the socially fragile and intellectually impaired cool kids and jockstrap brigade. There is no need for the weed-nerd to be like everyone else and it is very often the nerdy kids who go on to create cool stuff like spaceships and the internet. In the garden, a weed is something that does not fit in, that gardeners will pull up and throw away. A weed hasn’t been planted, chosen or cultivated — it is outside the control regime so bin it. However, weeds are tenacious things. You can’t get rid of them: they just grow back and multiply and if you take your eye off them for a minute they take over the whole garden. Weeds are an image of resistance. And then there is the kind of weed that you can smoke, which has its own associations of resistance to order (both mental and social).

Weed (the story) from its inception was more of a gesture or an impulse than a deliberate or reasoned thought. It came to be a free-ranging satire of this environment of manufactured pleasures, mass-produced satisfactions, pre-fabricated jobs, assigned lifestyles, and prescribed thoughts and emotions.

It has always seemed to me that getting on, getting ahead, in this environment requires a massive act of self-abnegation, one that neither Robert D Weed nor I are capable of or willing to make. To survive or progress in this made world, you have to adapt your entire identity. It’s not so much a case of playing the part as being the part. You have to give up your self. And it scares and repels me. We are trained into obedience and banality by school, colleges, the media, our employers (and eventually our own fears of exclusion). So, one of the big themes of Weed is identity. And being is another. I could now go into Marxian notions of species being but we’ll be here till the cows come home if I do. Anyway, the darn thing is a silly little comedic two-fingers at the world, so who wants to hear about Big Ideas?

So there you go. It’s not about pot. I’m off to tend the grow lamps.

Music: Craig Padilla and Zero Ohms

Mood: I wouldn’t mind one, thanks.

Reading: Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque — READ IT IF YOU HAVEN’T!