Godammit, You’ve Got to be Kind

A reading list from Robin to help deal with the next four years of a sexual predator criminal as President of the USA

In my lifetime, I have written two letters to newspapers and one to the Radio Times. My letter to the Radio Times was filled with righteous ire over the BBC’s edit of Get Carter.

No pissholes in the snow!!

At eighteen years old, bowdlerisation of cult movies was a major bugbear of mine.

My newspaper communications were a snarky letter to The Times about the Thatcherite regime, a teenager showing off and failing to make the grade, and a letter to an Australian broadsheet, I cannot remember which one, but it made me even more furious than Michael Caine’s mouth being wasted out with soap. Sat up outside Sydney at 3am, out of sync with the clocks, I read an interview with Kurt Vonnegut. It was a hatchet job by hack.

Kurt Vonnegut photographed by Bernard Gotfryd

Starting by criticising Vonnegut for being dishevelled (he was eighty three and, if one ever needs to earn the right to be dishevelled, then Vonnegut deserved that right). The disdain bled across the page. It seems that the hack was outraged that Vonnegut said that he could understand the Bali bombers. In daring to comprehend terrorist actions, the confused scribbler could not understand that this was not the same as condoning. Vonnegut had seen some of the most grotesque atrocities of the second world war and been committed to peace, I left the pages outraged by the lack of understanding for Vonnegut’s intentions or his work.

Near dawn, I spilled my anger and mailed it.

None of the letters ever bothered the pages, but as was once almost written, The Master’s Broadsheets (or TV listings magazines) will not Dismantle the Master’s House.

I was reading Vonnegut today.

I was thinking of the advice from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s that so often sings inside my head, we spend too much time identifying poison and not enough time seeking nourishment.

On a day where any pretence of American politics not being a criminal act is finally eviscerated, we need to fill ourselves with noble and passionate voices.

On the day of Trump’s inauguration, I started with Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned - Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Her reply to the question of who her book was for, “Everyone who knows a world where queer black feminine folk are living their fullest, most abundant and loving lives is a world where everyone is free” (I am quoting from memory, so it may be a bit off, but you get the gist) brings inspiration to me whenever I read it.

I am pale stale male and, to make it even worse, I am probably technically defined as woke.

But fuck that.

I’d rather be this form of ludicrous than a greedy bully bigot who wears their inability to comprehend progress with pride and the expectation of candy treats from Rogan or Peterson, who fondle their callousness and ignorance like a pontiff caressing his elongated crucifix.

I hurriedly pack further inspiration into my rucksack, including a book of interviews with Howard Zinn. Zinn was a groundbreaking anarchist historian, or in his own words, "something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist.” He was beloved by the equally inspirational Arundhati Roy, who wrote of him, “a teacher who belongs to that most unusual tradition of academics - intellectually rigorous but unafraid of taking sides when it is right and just to take sides”. In the first interview, he talks of those in “the suites” who define crime.

“If somebody holds up a store or robs someone on the street, of course, those are crimes. If somebody robs consumers of millions of dollars or robs workers of their lives because of unsafe work conditions, that’s not a crime. That’s business.”

Whenever you read Zinn, the quotation that often returns to mind is from The Great Gatsby, “They were careless people…they smashed up things and then retreated back into their money”. What we will impotently watch over the next four years is the merciless smashing up of things so that there will be more and more money to retreat into.

Howard Zinn photographed by Jared and Corin

On my wall, next to my framed letter from Boris Karloff’s widow, is a letter from Howard Zinn to Barry Crimmins, recommending Barry as a fine human being. It was given to me by the photographer Helen Crimmins, he was married to Barry until his death. Barry always fought for the bullied and the oppressed, often to great personal cost. I think of his furious and poetic outrage. I think of his summary of those edgy comedians, the ones that pick the simplest path to bullying those who are already frequently dehumanised.

“You know who the biggest suckheads in the world are? The people who think they're clever by saying, 'Well, I happen to be politically IN-correct.' And now you get to act like you're a cutting edge rebel, because you're reinforcing the oppressive status quo! You sack of fucking rancid horse assholes!”

I also flick through Empire of Illusion - The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges. I first came across this book when I was in New York and Trump was campaigning to become the Republicans presidential candidate. It still seemed too absurd then, though months later it was reality.

The speed of absurdity to reality is something we should keep thinking on as we watch what happens to in both USA and UK politics. We should also remember that when the absurd becomes reality, it does not immediately need to be accepted as normal, something our media usually forgets.

The chapter I return to of Hedges’s book is the one that explains how political discourse in America has become the spectacle of wrestling. Written back in 2009, he discusses Trump’s love of getting in the ring to be part of the glitter and pomp. In Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, the President of the USA is wrestler who treats government like Saturday night primetime on WCW and is killing all the crops due to his belief in irrigating them with Gatorade.

I read some comic strips from the comic book anthology Femme Magnifique, one of Ursula Le Guin another on Octavia Butler, I have packed Parable of the Talents in my back to read again.

“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.” Ursula Le Guin

And then I turn back to Vonnegut and his final book, the book he wrote after he thought he had retired from writing. The book that came from the outrage of Bush Jr’s government. (let us not look back on Bush Jr and, due to the new extremes, see him as less destructive than he was. The path to Trump was laid by spiteful, ignorant and duplicitous men like him and Ronald Reagan).

The difference between men like Trump and people like Butler, LeGuin, Vonnegut, Zinn and Crimmins is that their drive comes from making the world kinder for all, while the values we see being promoted and cheered for by the very people who will be destroyed them, are to destroy all who can be framed as “other” for no other purpose than ensuring a very small group of humans have the golden elevators they believe they deserve as whatever cost to others.

Vonnegut says of socialism, “‘socialism’ is no more an evil word than ‘christianity.’ Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society that all men, women, and children are created and shall not starve.”

This year, it will be more vital than ever to reach out to those who are being dehumanised and in despair because they are the collateral damage for wild profiteering.

We must try not to spend our energy on rage against the cruel and greedy, and use that energy to elevate the oppressed and the voices that speak for humanity not wealth.

I may say it too often, but Vonnegut’s advice always remains true, “Godammit, you’ve got to be kind”.