By Benjamin R. Barber, Benjamin R. Barber, a distinguished professor at the
University of Maryland, is the author of numerous books, including "Jihad vs.
McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World" and "Th

Critics of imperialism have long insisted that international exchange and free
trade are screens for the colonization of one culture by another. In my "Jihad
vs. McWorld," for example, I argued that the dominant pop culture of the United
States, embedded in fast food, fast music and fast computers, not only erodes
the particularity of foreign cultures but also promotes a radical homogenization
of taste and mores within American society as well as around the world. The
homogenization thesis does, however, have challengers. They are mostly
anthropologists such as David Howes, Constance Classen or Jean Comaroff who,
reporting from the field on the reception of global markets, have been at pains
to show how complex and multifaceted cultural interaction can actually be. Using
terms like "hybridization" and "creolization," such scholars have noted that
culture is constructed by consumption as well as by production and that through
the "creativity of consumption" imperial homogenization can be turned back into
cultural particularity or even into a kind of counter-colonization. Classen
cites the surreal artist Leonora Carrington's charmingly ironic story about how
"in the Mexico of the future one would find tins of Norwegian enchiladas from
Japan and bottles of the 'rare old Indian drink called Coca-Cola.' "
    Economists, though dispositionally inclined to champion cultural exchange as a
facet of free trade, are not usually such anthropological sophisticates. But
Tyler Cowen, an unapologetic neoliberal who teaches at that busy hive of free
market economics George Mason University, prides himself on his cultural
cosmopolitanism. As Chris Mooney notes in a recent profile of Cowen in the
Boston Globe, Cowen is not only the author of the not-so-subtle and altogether
revealing laissez-faire celebration "In Praise of Commercial Culture" (1998) but
also a gourmand sophisticate who writes an online restaurant guide whose motto
is "restaurants manifest the spirit of capitalist multiculturalism." He
describes himself as a devoted "cultural consumer," suggesting just how rooted
in the language of consumption his free trade approach to cultural exchange is.
Yet he admits to tastes that run the gamut from Vietnamese cuisine to Taco Bell.
He likes Beethoven but listens to Smashing Pumpkins as well. According to
Mooney, Cowen collects Haitian art, has traveled to more than 60 countries and
drinks French wines. A rather different breed of economist.
    Once we know something about Cowen's predilections, we can be sure that in his
new book, "Creative Destruction," he is doing something more than merely sharing
a student's academic library research. When he opens this short work, subtitled
"How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures," with a comment on the
cultural complexity of Haitian music and closes it with a remark about how a
visit to a Wal-Mart in Mexico will prove that America's export commercialism
brings diversity rather than uniformity to other lands, we figure he's probably
got a Haitian music collection and has walked the aisles of Wal-Marts in places
other than Virginia. As it turns out, Cowen actually does bring the knowledge of
a traveler and the love of a collector to the mixed cultural artifacts he uses
as evidence for his defense of globalization and free trade. This gives to what
otherwise might seem merely an ideological tract a certain experiential
authenticity that enhances the persuasiveness of its sometimes dubious
arguments.
    At its best, "Creative Destruction" -- its title is drawn from economist Joseph
Schumpeter's classic description of the dialectic in which capitalism destroys
as it evolves -- offers good reasons to treat with several grains of salt the
claims of critics, like this reviewer, that McWorld is homogenizing the planet
and leaving in its wake a trail of devastated local cultures. That is especially
true because in this work (unlike in his "In Praise of Commercial Culture")
Cowen displays some ideological balance, acknowledging, for example, that while
international trade can enhance diversity, it can also lead to what he calls
"the tragedy of cultural loss."
    Cowen's case for the pluralizing effect of global cultural trade is most
effectively argued in the chapters written while he is wearing his amateur
anthropologist's travel-wear rather than his economist's library bowtie, for
this is where he substantiates his position from his own experience with the
cultures about which he writes. His argument is twofold: "Culture" is itself an
evolving category rather than a fixed signifier of some unchanging "original"
essence. What critics worry may be altered and perverted by confrontation with
"foreign" or "outside" influences is in fact from the outset a product of
ongoing cultural interaction and exchange. There is no such thing as an original
culture, no wholly other "alterity," only phases in cultural development that
become embedded in time and hence regarded (inaccurately) as fixed and
indigenous. As historians such as Michael Kammen would agree, cultures are all
invented and hence to be viewed as collective artifacts of many different
earlier historical and cultural streams.
    Second, Cowen argues, even when a particular culture that is relatively insular
encounters a relatively cosmopolitan "colonizing" culture, the local culture
usually does as much to transform the encroaching culture as the encroaching
culture does to transform it. The outcome is not homogeneity but new forms of
diversity: "fusion" music or "fusion" art that, like "fusion" cuisine, is
genuinely innovative in ways not limited to the cultural parts being conjoined.
    It is on his first point that Cowen is most convincing. He shows, for example,
that the "indigenous" music of Zaire, which dominates much of Africa today and
-- critics fear -- is in danger of being lost in the din of MTV's international
music, was itself actually a product of the electric guitar, saxophone, trumpet,
clarinet and flute, "none of which are indigenous to Africa." Indeed, "Cuban
influences, especially the Son, Mambo, Cha-Cha, Biguine and Bolero, entered
Zaire by the time of the Second World War." These foreign influences accelerated
in the 1950s with the visits of cruise ships, the introduction of radio and
phonograph technology and with them American rhythm and blues styles. For those
like me who worry about the corrupting effect of MTV on "local" African music
from, say, Kinshasa, Cowen's message is "not to worry." The music was never pure
but was "corrupted" long ago in ways that created its fresh and powerful hold on
African and, in time, foreign audiences. That "ancient traditional culture" that
cosmopolitan worrywarts anxiously try to protect from the corruption of today's
new foreign influences is actually yesterday's corruption made over into
tradition by time and cultural propaganda.
    Take Trinidad's steel bands, among its greatest "indigenous" tourist attractions
but in fact a relatively recent creation of Trinidad's interaction with the
global energy market that led in the late 1930s to the replacement of truly
indigenous bamboo instruments with the byproducts of the world oil trade. Steel
drums cut from oil barrels not only lent themselves to interesting and varied
new tonalities (Trinidadians had experimented with various other imported metal
objects from the Machine Age) but were far more resilient and enduring than
traditional instruments.
    Or take those storied "indigenous" Navajo designs and colors -- above all the
deep red serape patterns with their serrated zigzag lines -- that distinguish
their traditional blankets from all others. Stunning, yes, but indigenous?
Hardly. The designs reflected a pattern borrowed from "the ponchos and clothing
of Spanish shepherds in Mexico, which in turn drew upon Moorish influences in
Spain," though of course the Navajos altered them and made them their own. And
that distinctive Navajo "bayeta" red? Drawn from threads "unraveled from Spanish
cloth, which was in turn imported by the Spanish from England (English baize)."
    And so it goes, from "threatened" culture to "threatened" culture, with Cowen
retelling a seeming story of colonization as something quite different and far
less threatening: redrawing, for example, Gandhi's campaign to protect
indigenous Indian hand-weaving crafts from the colonizing influence of foreign
mechanization as something of a protectionist exercise in the name of cheap
local cloth that was actually made not by hand but in Indian mills. Indeed,
Cowen suggests, quality foreign cloth made in technologically advanced mills in
England in time forced hand-weavers (of whom 6 million survive today in India)
to up the quality of their goods and develop a handicraft worth defending. Why,
Cowen asks, should poorer societies in any case "be required to serve as
diversity slaves," their quaint distinctiveness used as an excuse to obstruct
their path to modernization?
    Cowen's second more economic argument, while not without truth, is less
persuasive and ends up revealing the primary defect of his overall position. In
suggesting that in an open market there is a confrontation of two cultures -- in
which the colonizing culture is itself as equally colonized as the society it
thinks it is colonizing -- Cowen makes a mistake common to anthropologists and
economists alike. He ignores the role of power: the relative political and
cultural coerciveness the stronger party brings to the table. Anthropologists
treat cultural exchange in a vacuum. Culture confronts culture, they posit; each
borrows from the other, both emerge changed and enriched but more different than
ever. Economists treat exchange within the mythic frame of perfect market
freedom, where it is the result of two equally free, equally voluntary, equally
powerful contractees who sit down as gentlemen and make a deal. You get our
technology, which will transform your cultural goods; we get your cultural
goods, which will transform our technology. You look more like us, and we look
more like you.
    Once the relative power of the intersecting cultures is factored in, however,
the happy reciprocity of cultural hybridization is trumped by the unhappy
preeminence of the dominant culture. One McDonald's in Tiananmen Square may
enhance diversity in China, just as the first Starbucks in Berlin diversifies
its cuisine. But the market corporations of McWorld aspire not just to penetrate
but also to permeate markets, and their ultimate objective is monopoly. The
tenth McDonald's is a different story than the first, and No. 100 begins to
force out the competition. When the franchises break the 1,000 mark,
homogenization is more salient than diversification. Pluralism is not only
diminished within a given culture (Cowen admits as much), it is diminished among
cultures as well, with one looking more and more like the next (the claim Cowen
wants to rebut).
    With a Starbucks on every corner in traditional coffeehouse Vienna, the city
loses its distinctive Viennese coffeehouse culture. Competition inside the
United States withers too, with delis and coffee shops being put out of business
in favor of a bland global Starbucks culture. In the 1992 Coca-Cola corporate
report, when Coke was going into the Indian market, it identified "Indian tea
culture" as a rival that would have to be overcome if Coke was to prosper on the
subcontinent. Film industries in Mexico, India and Hong Kong may still be
flourishing, as Cowen says, but the percentage of world screens devoted to
American-made product continues to grow in ways that make it hard to believe
that Hollywood's global muscle is good for cultural diversity.
    Then, finally, there is the question of the authenticity of origins, the
integrity of the cultures that produce diverse goods. As Cowen himself finally
acknowledges, in reproducing and commodifying cultural goods, their character is
put at risk. "Cosmopolitan attitudes," Cowen agrees, "if held fully and
consistently, would defeat the cosmopolitan end of diversity and freedom of
choice." As cultures are borrowed from, encroached upon, altered and sold to,
they may continue to affect those doing the borrowing, encroaching, altering and
selling, but the sources of their authenticity upon which their own distinctive
cultures are founded gradually are eroded away. Take a (fictional) recipe for
Grandma's Maryland crab cakes, developed over generations by families who live
and work the Maryland eastern shore: When its success as a subcultural taste
icon turns it into a national brand that is sold back to Grandma's kids living
in Baltimore and then to Grandma herself, who no longer bothers to cook,
cultural capital is being exploited and exhausted in ways that will ultimately
vitiate Grandma's disappearing culture and with it the crab cake recipe. At this
point, cultural diversity is reduced to a plastic theme-park variety show that
resembles the wild West shows of the turn of the century that marked the end
both of frontier life and native American society as a living and evolving
culture.
    When anthropologists talk about hybridization, I am reminded of the sorts of
exchanges "negotiated" by hares and pythons. "Oh, yes," exclaim the relatives of
the hare, "you may think our cousin has been consumed, but look at the snake!
There our cousin is, his profile distending the shape of the serpent! Each has
transformed the other! Neither is gone, both are transformed." But wait a week
or two and, as the python's relatives know very well, the hare will have
vanished and the serpent will slither on in search of new prey in the false name
of voluntary market exchange. Cultural exchange may be a form of "creative
destruction," but over time dialectic is trumped by power, and destruction
merely destroys, leaving the Panglossian Cowens of the world with neither new
cultural creation nor genuine diversity but a handful of Disney souvenirs that
in their shallow mimicry mock true pluralism. *

From http://www.corporatemofo.com/stories/Moorcock1.htm

...I'm a political person. When we decided to move to
the States I wanted to move somewhere south of the
Mason-Dixon because that was where I perceived the
real, on the ground, politics to be happening. It's
post-LBJ America I'm interested in—watching the Civil
Rights and Immigration legislation making the changes,
creating the variety, creating the civil resistance,
coming up with the strategies, making an America Tom
Paine would perhaps be able to revive a little hope
for.
    I don't look to escape when I move (unless it's to
nicer scenery) and can't help but become involved in
the politics of the area I live in. After all, as a
British residence I pay taxes but can't vote. The cry
of the London mob for two hundred years before it
became the cry of the American revolutionaries was "no
taxation without representation." I see the American
Revolution as a re-run of the British "Glorious
Revolution" in which defeated Methodists (as it were)
continued hoped to continue their reforms. The British
Bill of Rights of 1689 is very similar indeed to the
American and I find it very odd that American history
seems, in modern versions, to have begun spontaneously
in 1776.
    This tendency to romanticize and sentimentalize
history is common, of course, but has become somewhat
institutionalized in America, even in some academic
circles. It means that the political continuity, of
which America is a part, is misunderstood. This is
also the only country which commercialized all its
radio waves and didn't leave anything for the public.
PBS in this country is a lie. It is controlled by
government, through grants, and by big business,
through patronage. It is not controlled by the public
by any form of licensing fee to fund public airwaves
(as in pretty much every other advanced democracy in
the world).
    America has always been in the hands of violent and
ruthless entrepreneurs. There would have been no "War
of 1812" without the land-hungry Madison and Jackson
to fake it and the general treatment of Indians, while
continuing the tricks and hypocrisies and cruelties of
the original Dutch, English and French colonists, is a
terrible indictment for a country which alleges it
founded itself on ideals of liberty. The rhetoric, of
course, is what makes the American who uses it
evidently provincial and poorly educated. You can hear
Bush attempting public speaking without the otiose
cliches and its almost impossible for him to speak at
all.
    The words of American politicians in the world in
general are empty of content and understanding.
Americans are incredibly badly served by their
representatives and too many Americans seem to think
of their representatives as patrons. The
authoritarianism in the political language is
astonishing to a modern ear. So I might sometimes
despair of this huge country's inadequate and
unsophisticated bureaucracies and follies, but every
so often the clouds part and I see the same vision Tom
Paine saw—the same possibilities remain. All is not
lost!
    I have no representative. Therefore I make it my
business wherever possible to represent myself. They
ain't getting those fucking taxes without me having a
say in how they spend them. This means I remain
political. I'm involved in local politics around water
rights and social reform, I'm involved in State
politics with reference to Alcoa and some of Dirty
George's other get-rich-quick-and-fuck-the-people
schemes. I'm involved in national politics to the
extent that I write articles and letters concerning
U.S. politics and join organizations designed to
ameliorate or reform U.S. social institutions. I'm
still involved with British politics. I was involved
with the Women's Shelter movement from the very
beginning and still send money to the original
Chiswick Shelter, which was the first modern women's
shelter. I have been a keen supporter of Womankind
Worldwide since it began (an outfit that puts the
power—like the water purifiers and donkey engines—into
the hands of the women, who will conserve, preserve
and prosper whereas the men and boys would swap it for
an AK-47 tomorrow).
    My wife is hugely effective both as a fund-raiser and
as a planner in our local Family Crisis Center, which
is regarded by Federal agencies as one of the very
best and as a result it now receives good funding and
is a model to others. I'm very proud of what she's
achieved. I've been involved in racial politics since
I was a teenager and helped get the U.K. Race
Relations Act through. Now that the E.U. has
incorporated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
into its legal system, there is now far better
machinery in place for solid social reform. If I had
time I'd work for that to be incorporated into U.S.
law as well, but the U.S. argues it already has a
system.
    That's the wonderful excuse of American big business.
We already have a good system. It was a good system
for its day. it is now a pretty awful system. Canada
and Australia, among other countries, have learned
from the US experience and got themselves superior
constitutions. The only problem is that the American
version seems to work a lot better for the rich than
the poor. That isn't a Christian system, whatever else
it is. America sometimes seems to me to be more Old
Testament than New and a lot of the Jews seem more New
Testament than Old.
    Liberal humanism—what young Americans believe is
"socialism." I grew up in a British version of
socialism and it was very good to experience. We have
to understand that certain public services actually
are better provided by and for the community rather
than by and for private enterprise. Americans used to
understand this. I know because I've seen the movies
and my friends used to talk like that.
    I 've seen the quality of life and thought in America
decline badly since the full-fledged adoption of
consumerism Ralph Nader warned the world about so long
ago (not capitalism—consumerism in my view is
totalitarian capitalism and it's the totalitarian bit
I hate—it's also dumb and doesn't work, as the Soviet
Union proved). We are almost as badly mired in
orthodoxy as the Soviets were, but we probably have a
slightly better chance of getting out of it. Mire, I
would say, is George Bush's middle name. (Well, mire's
the polite word). Theirs is probably the last attempt
of the old guard to produce the counter-revolution
Reagan and Thatcher thought they had started. They
cleared the decks for the real thing, but the clearing
was unnecessarily brutal and still is. There are
subtler engines for running a large economy.
    I do have a huge faith in American citizens to put
their house in order. But when everyone has been told
they live in the best of all possible worlds (they
don't—the French do at the moment) and that it's
thanks to the rapacity of big business, it takes them
a while to find out otherwise. Americans have been
badly educated. It suits crude consumerism to have an
under-educated, self-esteeming public. But it's
short-term. That under-educated, self-esteeming public
makes blunder after blunder, and the economy of the
country declines as a result. Americans are just
waking up to that fact and I've seen improvements
already. My sense of commonality extends, as it were,
to my fellow Americans. I know from my own experience
that there are lots and lots of smart Americans. It's
time they got themselves some real power.
    Americans have to understand how their public language
buzzes with authoritarianism and aggression and
actually contradicts the idealism in the rhetoric.
Email correspondents in Europe are often astonished at
the aggressive language used by Americans and I still
reel a bit from it when I encounter it unexpectedly. A
weird sense of "success," of competition, or value.
They are also astonished at the ignorance and bad
education of so many young Americans.
    But again, I don't believe this will last. Nobody
likes to be stupid. If you're told you're smart and
then discover that you're not as smart as you were
told, you tend to start getting yourself properly
educated. As I said once—if Jay Leno tells his viewers
that 75% of students at Harvard didn't know the earth
went round the sun, by the next day every one of those
viewers is likely to have made it their business to
make bloody sure they know that and everything else
associated with it!
    As long as the problem is identified, Americans can
solve it. People love solving problems. If they didn't
there would be no market for crosswords and detective
fiction. You could argue that as it becomes
unnecessary for us to solve problems on a
moment-to-moment basis, we seek out problems to solve
anyway. We are problem-solving machines who make
problem-solving machines. . .
    The American Giant is capable of doing a lot of good
for itself and the world. It needs to drop the
self-esteem and the rhetoric, however, and start
responding to reality. So far the world's perception
is of a selfish, greedy giant that merely spouts
Disney sentiments while stealing your cow.

COURTESY JOSHUA B.!

Chris Morris: the movie

The last time he was in the news, it was for the 'paedophile special' of his TV series Brass Eye. Now he's made a film - just 15 minutes long - which is tipped to win a Bafta on Sunday. In a rare interview, Britain's greatest contemporary satirist talks to Xan Brooks about making the film, celebrities and why he won't be tackling the war on terror

Friday February 21, 2003
The Guardian

Chris Morris's film debut runs 15 minutes top to tail. Inside lurks a man "sick as diesel", a talking dog that claims to be his lawyer and a London bus bound for a destination called "Shit Off". For those acquainted with its creator's unique (some say uniquely reprehensible) sensibility, My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117 could not have been made by anyone else. In terms of style and content, it stands as a direct descendant of the toxic satire of Brass Eye and, more specifically, the nocturnal lullabies of Blue Jam. From narcotic intro to demented finale, the film provides a trip through familiar Chris Morris country.
    Off-screen, however, Morris's landscape has slipped bizarrely out of joint. The last time the man was nominated for a Bafta award (for his Brass Eye "paedophile special"), the decision was greeted by a wail of protest from the NSPCC and a public put-down from Bafta host Chris Tarrant. By contrast, this year's nomination for My Wrongs (in the "best short film" category) has provoked barely a whimper. This time last year, Morris was sticking to his general policy of not talking to the press. Today, he has agreed to be interviewed.
    All of which suggests a change of attitude - not just for Morris, but for a British media grown used to regarding him as some shadowy hit-and-run monster, a hoaxer of innocent celebrities and "the most loathed man on TV" (the Daily Mail). In shifting into legitimate film drama (albeit of a dark and twisted kind), Morris has effectively steered away from the satire that made his name. In breaking his customary silence, he becomes just another writer-director with a product to plug. In doing so, he risks blowing the whole Chris Morris enigma right out of the water.
    Except that the man himself doesn't see it like that. Speaking from his Soho office, Morris is brusque and breezy. Wary of journalistic angles, he moves swiftly to head them off. On the subject of the interview itself, he insists that he finds it no more exposing than hiding out behind his myriad screen personas (be it his combative Paxman-esque alter-ego, his roster of ghoulish reporters or his paedophile rap star JLB8).
    "It depends on what you consider to be exposing," Morris says. "I remember that the first time I did a live radio broadcast I felt outrageously exposed, even though there were probably only three people listening and one of those was a pensioner. But I know what you mean. There is a mask on Brass Eye or The Day Today that doesn't apply here. And yet if I were worried about being exposed, I'd probably have become paranoid about what each of those masks said about me. Because whatever you do reveals something about you as a person, you can't help it." With regards to his first film, then: "I only feel exposed in that I don't want to arse it up."
    If so, he needn't worry. The first production from the fledgling Warp Films (the short-film offshoot of Warp Records), My Wrongs revisits a monologue from his late, lamented Blue Jam radio series and conjures it into a vivid, haunting little nightmare. Buttressed by a £100,000 budget, Morris ploughed the cash into a burst of startling digital trickery, cast Last Resort actor Paddy Considine in the lead role and turned his own inimitable public-school bark to the role of the talking dog. "Actually we shot the film with a pair of dogs and oscillated between the two," he explains. "One dog was older than the other. One dog was slightly more trainable, and the other was an idiot."
    Considine would not dispute that. "The dogs were real divas," he tells me. "They were both bitches and I'm never working with them again. The only commands they knew were 'Sit' and 'Fetch'. They couldn't do anything." Move him on to the subject of his director, however, and the star turns glowingly enthusiastic. Morris, he says, was a brilliant, hands-on director, the equal of anyone he has worked with. Yet Considine admits that when he stepped into the project, he did not know what to expect. "I think I was very on edge before I met Chris. I had absolutely no idea what he'd be like as a person."
    Considine's concern is understandable. Few performers throw up so thick a smokescreen as Chris Morris. Few trail so fearsome a reputation. Debuting on BBC2 as the imperious anchor of The Day Today in 1994, he mercilessly demolished the whole lexicon of TV news-speak (meaningless slogans, tortuous links and all). On Channel 4, his Brass Eye series spotlighted a celebrity culture sleepwalking towards oblivion. Its rent-a-quote personalities would seemingly champion any cause, be it a ban on a "made-up drug" called Cake, a nonsensical guide to prison slang ("woggy coconut means air-bricks") or an impassioned warning on the dangers of "heavy electricity". Lured in by a campaign of phony letterheads and makeshift offices, Morris's dupes (Noel Edmonds, Richard Briers and Tory MP David Amess among them) signed up in haste and repented at leisure.
    On his 2001 Brass Eye special, the satirist reprised the scam. The programme found Phil Collins talking "Nonce Sense" (and subsequently threatening to sue), while presenter Richard Blackwood claimed that you could tell if your children had been abused because they "smelt like hammers". Most memorable of all was the spectacle of DJ Dr Fox insisting that "paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you or me. Now that is scientific fact. There's no actual evidence for it, but it is a fact."
    The irony, though, is that Brass Eye may prove to have been just too successful. With each new project, its creator finds himself the focus for renewed press outrage; his methods scrutinised, his face plastered across the tabloids. No doubt this has made it increasingly tough for Morris to slip undetected past a celebrity's radar. This may explain why he has recently limited his satirical output to doctored George Bush speeches on his website (thesmokehammer.com), while devoting the bulk of his energies to getting My Wrongs off the ground.
    Again, Morris resists this interpretation. "I'm not sure that it has got more difficult. To be honest, when we were planning the Brass Eye special, I thought that people would be so much more alert and on their guard. And I was staggered at how gullible they were. It's simply a case of identifying the right blind spot and exploiting it." If anything, then, the process has become too easy. "Once you can operate the levers with an 80% degree of efficiency, then there's no point in doing it. You should only do it if you think you're going to fail, otherwise the whole thing becomes depressingly routine."
    For the moment, he admits that there are no plans for more of the same. Even the satiric possibilities of the war on terror, with its attendant segue into Islam, haven't managed to fire his interest. "I'm not sure you can play with that," he explains. "The very specific nature of Brass Eye is in identifying a thoughtless, knee-jerk reaction to an issue. If you tackle drugs or paedophilia, then you're dealing with something where people's brains are nowhere near the point of debate. That's why you can get them to say that paedophiles are like crabs, because they have never given the subject any thought." By contrast, he says, "People are thinking quite seriously about the war on terror. Don't get me wrong, there are many eminently mock-able things about it. I'm just not sure what you could do with it all."
    More than anything, he worries that it wouldn't make good comedy. "Brass Eye is not overtly political," he stresses. "OK, maybe it is political in the widest possible sense, in that the public has a herd response and is running in the same direction. But that's only a small part of it. Look at Dr Fox's speech about crabs. Regardless of what that is dissecting about the issue, it's also rather funny. And if you don't have that element, you end in the position of someone like Michael Moore, building lame gags around some central thesis."
    At least for today, Morris seems happy to outline the philosophy behind his work. But off-screen, the man remains a closed book. A self-confessed "loner", he surrounds himself with a small circle of colleagues, shuns celebrity functions and refuses to be photographed out of character. Unable to flush him out into the open, a Mirror profile decided that "Morris hates being photographed because of the strawberry-coloured birthmark on the left-hand side of his face". Moreover, his refusal to publicly defend his work confirmed him as "an arrogant, egotistical character, driven by an almost psychopathic need to shock but too cowardly to account for his actions".
    Alternatively, Morris's subterranean public profile could be viewed as his greatest strength, prompted by an utter disdain for celebrity and a determination to let the work speak for itself. Either way, he is notably reluctant to discuss his behind-the-scenes existence. When I ask if, since making Brass Eye, he has ever run into any of the celebrities he has hoaxed, his initial response is to deconstruct the question. To run into someone "would be foolish. Or possibly tactical". Certainly he has never done so "in a dark enough alley to make it interesting". Finally, he sighs. "Look," he says. "Do you really think I would spend my free time swanning around with the likes of Noel Edmonds, Phil Collins, Dr Fox or Barbara Follett? Do you honestly think I have nothing better to do with my life?"
    As it stands, Morris is even unsure whether or not to attend Sunday night's Bafta bash. He hasn't received his invitation yet, and doesn't know if he'll have to part with any money. Then there is the obvious fear of terrorist attack. "Just imagine if there was a similar situation to that siege in the Moscow theatre," he moans, voice dripping with sarcasm. "Just think of it. All those celebrities, held inside at gunpoint. The looks on their faces. Wouldn't that be terrible?" A moment later he has strolled off on a tangent. "It would be the perfect opportunity, though. I thought about this after the tragic death of Jill Dando, when they believed that she might have been killed by a Serbian agent. [I thought that] if a terrorist organisation wanted to knock out the moral compass of Britain, all they'd have to do is to kill 100 celebrities at random. The entire country would have an instant nervous breakdown."
    Interview complete, I ask if I might possibly ring Morris with a few follow-up questions later in the week. Rather dutifully, he says that this would be OK. Except that when I dial his number, I'm greeted by a recorded message. It invites me to call his mobile "by pressing your hash key 17 times". This, I suspect, is Morris's way of retreating back into his own warped woodwork, and of telling the world to "shit off". On the one hand, I'm not sorry to see him go. Ultimately, Chris Morris is at his most powerful when he's invisible, organising some ambush from wild left field as opposed to freely talking up his latest movie venture. That said, I was briefly tempted to start pressing that hash key - just on the off chance of finding him again.

My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117 is released on DVD on Monday, priced £6.99.

COURTESY J. PATTERSON AND J. COULTHART

TOO FREUD TO ROCK'N'ROLL, TOO JUNG TO DIE
Brain Donor's 2xCD anthology TOO FREUD TO ROCK'N'ROLL, TOO JUNG TO DIE is NOW AVAILABLE.

Julian H. Cope's Track By Track Guide

Schizadelic KO
The title of this song concerns the split personality, the bullshit duality, brought on by Monotheism. The stars of this song – myself and a be-burkha'd Moslem woman – are both being shafted by Patriarchal kackola whether we wanna be a part of it or not.

My Pagan Ass
More concerns about the fact that the USA and Britain, under the banner 'Slugging fer Jesus', are setting off to the unHoly Land for another round with Saddam, which is mad ass backwards. This secular crusade – in which Bush and Blair, like latterday Richard the Lionheart (another phoney baloney if ever there was one) purport to be Christian soldiers, while they take on another secular despot Saddam Hussein (himself conveniently posing under the guise of Saviour of Islam). Meanwhile, back at the ranch – me and my polytheistic cohorts are getting our butts shot up by the resounding ricochets from their fucking weapons.

Like a Motherfucker
Neurotic or watt! More of the same bile from yours truly, this time a rant against the Linear Time frame which the West has foisted on our agricultural land by forcing us to worship outmoded desert Gods.

The Two Towers
A rant about how horribly-more-ish watching the news coverage of the tower burning really was. I'm addicted, it's hard, I coo, piteously. Get down!

White Van
A British phenomenon caught in the spotlight. Like the mythological motherfucker that I am, this song places the white van driver as analogous to Heimdal, the staring White God – opponent of Loki at Ragnarock – and patient watcher of the Gods. Oldest male of the Van (as opposed to Odin's As) and known as Vindhler God of the Windshield (I shit you not).

Love, Peace & Fuck
Three things I care deeply about. The MC5 plays Blue Cheer plays Ray Charles, uh, Look out.

Get Back On It
A modern day nurd song for horny males everywhere.

Messages
In which the ur-Gollum of my unconscious bares its toothless gums and Doggen bones all of Snottingham with his unholy of holies.

From the January 15, 2003 Times of London:

The United States of America has gone mad
John le Carré
 

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
    The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.
    The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world’s poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions.
    But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet. The Bushies are riding high. Now 88 per cent of Americans want the war, we are told. The US defence budget has been raised by another $60 billion to around $360 billion. A splendid new generation of nuclear weapons is in the pipeline, so we can all breathe easy. Quite what war 88 per cent of Americans think they are supporting is a lot less clear. A war for how long, please? At what cost in American lives? At what cost to the American taxpayer’s pocket? At what cost — because most of those 88 per cent are thoroughly decent and humane people — in Iraqi lives?
    How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.
    Those who are not with Mr Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I’m dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam’s downfall — just not on Bush’s terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.
    The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America’s Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.
    God also has pretty scary connections. In America, where all men are equal in His sight, if not in one another’s, the Bush family numbers one President, one ex-President, one ex-head of the CIA, the Governor of Florida and the ex-Governor of Texas.
    Care for a few pointers? George W. Bush, 1978-84: senior executive, Arbusto Energy/Bush Exploration, an oil company; 1986-90: senior executive of the Harken oil company. Dick Cheney, 1995-2000: chief executive of the Halliburton oil company. Condoleezza Rice, 1991-2000: senior executive with the Chevron oil company, which named an oil tanker after her. And so on. But none of these trifling associations affects the integrity of God’s work.
    In 1993, while ex-President George Bush was visiting the ever-democratic Kingdom of Kuwait to receive thanks for liberating them, somebody tried to kill him. The CIA believes that “somebody” was Saddam. Hence Bush Jr’s cry: “That man tried to kill my Daddy.” But it’s still not personal, this war. It’s still necessary. It’s still God’s work. It’s still about bringing freedom and democracy to oppressed Iraqi people.
    To be a member of the team you must also believe in Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, and Bush, with a lot of help from his friends, family and God, is there to tell us which is which. What Bush won’t tell us is the truth about why we’re going to war. What is at stake is not an Axis of Evil — but oil, money and people’s lives. Saddam’s misfortune is to sit on the second biggest oilfield in the world. Bush wants it, and who helps him get it will receive a piece of the cake. And who doesn’t, won’t.
    If Saddam didn’t have the oil, he could torture his citizens to his heart’s content. Other leaders do it every day — think Saudi Arabia, think Pakistan, think Turkey, think Syria, think Egypt.
    Baghdad represents no clear and present danger to its neighbours, and none to the US or Britain. Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, if he’s still got them, will be peanuts by comparison with the stuff Israel or America could hurl at him at five minutes’ notice. What is at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic imperative of US growth. What is at stake is America’s need to demonstrate its military power to all of us — to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little North Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America at home, and who is to be ruled by America abroad.
    The most charitable interpretation of Tony Blair’s part in all this is that he believed that, by riding the tiger, he could steer it. He can’t. Instead, he gave it a phoney legitimacy, and a smooth voice. Now I fear, the same tiger has him penned into a corner, and he can’t get out.
    It is utterly laughable that, at a time when Blair has talked himself against the ropes, neither of Britain’s opposition leaders can lay a glove on him. But that’s Britain’s tragedy, as it is America’s: as our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way. Blair’s best chance of personal survival must be that, at the eleventh hour, world protest and an improbably emboldened UN will force Bush to put his gun back in his holster unfired. But what happens when the world’s greatest cowboy rides back into town without a tyrant’s head to wave at the boys?
    Blair’s worst chance is that, with or without the UN, he will drag us into a war that, if the will to negotiate energetically had ever been there, could have been avoided; a war that has been no more democratically debated in Britain than it has in America or at the UN. By doing so, Blair will have set back our relations with Europe and the Middle East for decades to come. He will have helped to provoke unforeseeable retaliation, great domestic unrest, and regional chaos in the Middle East. Welcome to the party of the ethical foreign policy.
    There is a middle way, but it’s a tough one: Bush dives in without UN approval and Blair stays on the bank. Goodbye to the special relationship.
    I cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend his head prefect’s sophistries to this colonialist adventure. His very real anxieties about terror are shared by all sane men. What he can’t explain is how he reconciles a global assault on al-Qaeda with a territorial assault on Iraq. We are in this war, if it takes place, to secure the fig leaf of our special relationship, to grab our share of the oil pot, and because, after all the public hand-holding in Washington and Camp David, Blair has to show up at the altar.
    “But will we win, Daddy?”
    “Of course, child. It will all be over while you’re still in bed.”
    “Why?”
    “Because otherwise Mr Bush’s voters will get terribly impatient and may decide not to vote for him.”
    “But will people be killed, Daddy?”
    “Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people.”
    “Can I watch it on television?”
    “Only if Mr Bush says you can.”
    “And afterwards, will everything be normal again? Nobody will do anything horrid any more?”
    “Hush child, and go to sleep.”
    Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: “Peace is also Patriotic”. It was gone by the time he’d finished shopping.

COURTESY R.P. LUGER!

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