robert banks stewart

May 3, 2012

Fear Them

Jack Graham blind and unreasoning rage, bullshit, corporations, fear her, manufacturing consent, olympics, robert banks stewart, series 2, social cleansing 1

“Does this mean that the Olympic Dream is dead?

“There’s a mystery man… he’s picked up the flame… we have no idea who he is… he’s carrying the flame! Yes, he’s carrying the flame and no one wants to stop him.

“It’s more than a flame now, Bob. It’s more than heat and light. It’s hope. And it’s courage. And it’s love.”

– From the script of ‘Fear Her’.

Heartwarming, I’m sure. Absolutely certain to inculcate desirable attitudes in children. Watching that will have them all full of hope and courage and love as they quaff their isotonic drinks and get exercising, hoping to one day be standing to attention as their national anthem is played and a bit of metal is draped around their necks, secure in the knowledge that all is for the best in the best of all possible social and political cultures.

On the other hand…

On 19 May, the Olympic torch will begin its journey, accompanied by 52 police officers, due to fears that the torch may be ‘targeted by radicalised protest groups’ or dissident Irish republicans, since according to the Telegraph ‘ experts on the IRA are warning the torch relay is vulnerable to attack.’

Other threats include ‘public disorder’ – a possibility that was identified as a risk after last August’s riots by assistant police commissioner, Chris Allison, the national Olympic security co-ordinator.

To eliminate these threats, the military/police ‘ring of steel’ around the Olympics will be buttressed by security infrastructure that includes an £80 million, 11-mile, 5,000-volt electric fence around the Olympic Zone, and a range of new surveillance and monitoring technologies in London itself.

The largest peacetime security operation in British history cannot be simply attributed to paranoia and an overzealous desire to protect the public. On the one hand it reflects an overlap between homeland security and corporate profiteering that has become a feature of the post 9/11 world.

As the urban geographer Stephen Graham has observed, the Olympics are ‘the ultimate global security shop window through which states and corporations can advertise their latest high-tech wares to burgeoning global markets while making massive profits’.

The Games also represent a more general marketing opportunity for their corporate sponsors. In 2006 Parliament passed the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act, which upgraded the level of brand protection to Olympic sponsors and made any unauthorised marketing or commercialism connected to the Olympics a potentially criminal offence.

And:

This highly profitable, publicly subsidised, sporting event always attracts the major, and wannabe major, cities of the world, using any and all methods to entice an unaccountable Olympic committee, each flexing their political muscle to ensure theirs is the next chosen location. The Olympics take billions of pounds, yen, dollars of their host countries’ tax revenue to build magnificent stadiums and housing facilities, militarise the city, trample civil liberties and construct elaborate installations with shelf lives of a few weeks.

London 2012, originally expected to cost £2.4bn, is now projected at £24bn, with contracts going to some of the world’s most egregious employers and global human rights violators.

…

May 1, 2012

Green Day

Jack Graham baker and martin, entropy, monsters, panic moon, robert banks stewart, seeds of doom, tentacles, tenuous thematic connections 0

This is a slightly-tweaked version of something originally published in the January 2011 edition of Panic Moon. Back issues of this excellent fanzine (now, sadly, on hiatus) are still available, here.

Plant monsters. That’s an old one. Where does it come from? Maybe it’s about the Venus Fly Trap, the cactus or the thorns on the stem of a rose. Maybe it’s about the faces that we see in the gnarled bark of trees; the faces that gave us generations of tales about tree folk. We see this in ‘The Seeds of Doom’, in the initial humanoid shape of the monster, in its booming threats, in its communion with Chase, in the way that the Doctor keeps calling it Keeler ironically, having chided Sarah for referring to the transformed Winlett by name.

Maybe it’s the sheer unnerving silence and mindlessness of things that nonetheless seem to have flesh and veins and skin, that nonetheless grow and move and breed. We see this in ‘The Seeds of Doom’, with all the emphasis on skin, blood and pain… and Chase’s obsessional desire to “see what happens when the Krynoid touches human flesh”. We see this in the way the Krynoid moves, unfettered by roots. The way it seethes and crawls. The way it is tentacular, like the octopoda or squid monsters that pervade 20th century literary/cinematic/political monsterology, standing
for the threatened global reach of the powerfully, shapelessly, amorphously unknowable.

Maybe the Krynoid is an echo of the trauma of the first humans to discover that sometimes delicious-looking vegetation gives you agonizing stomach ache… or kills you… or causes terrifying hallucinations. We can see this fear demonstrated in Stevenson, mesmerised by his pod… and Winlett and Keeler so “taken over” that they literally transform into nightmare images of the insane roots that have taken their reason prisoner.

Maybe it’s guilt at tearing up and eating beautiful, living, growing things; we see this in Chase’s later ideological hatred of “animal fiends”. Maybe we can’t help see it – on some level – as exploitation, hence the Doctor’s word: “revolution”. Maybe it’s guilt at the way we wipe out plant species with our industrialised carelessness, guilt that makes us imagine them turning on us. We see this in the existence of the World Ecology Bureau, and Chase’s accusation to Dunbar that the endangered plants are ignored because of a pro-animal bias.

Maybe it’s about ancient history, about wars between peoples over cultivated land covered in crops; organised violence that had been unknown to hunter-gatherer societies for thousands of years until the development of agriculture. Maybe it’s the old and persistent nightmare of the classes of priests and administrators who started to rise once agriculture came, who hoarded the surplus grain and used it to wield power over the people. We see these fears demonstrated in ‘The Seeds of Doom’, with Scorby the violent capturer of coveted plants, with Harrison Chase (the sole proprietor and abbot of a “green cathedral”) lording it over everyone else because of his wealth, owning people “body and soul”.

Maybe it’s to do with the way vegetation encroaches upon human civilisations, almost like an invading enemy, unless carefully held in check.…