Horizon

"If you want to be true to life, start lying about it."
- John Fowles

Surely an indictment of the lib-left's victim culture and the disastrous trend of women's magazine journalism as fiction?

[Editorially deleted and then reposted.]

A surprising comment from the author of "Death or Bongo," I'd say.

Only if you, as you seem to do, believe that that book contains my entire philosophy and that everything I've said since is a pose or a deviation from noble savagery. Incidentally, there's as much pure invention in that book - more actually - as there is memoir.
But I think my point stands: these books are late-capitalism's version of the 'As Told To' lurid bios of gunfighters and Indian fighters. They will have to keep topping the last big seller to attract the attention of the latte-aesthetes who manage the slush pile. As we all should and must know by now, good writing is not at the top of many agents' priorities. Look at Oprah herself and the loathesome format she has exported round the world: it quickly becomes corrupt and cheap and solves nobody's problem.

By the bye: I see Tim Robbins is looking to make 1984 as a film. That'll be one-way traffic.

No, not quite, Robbie, but you've done your own share of claiming poverty-authenticity, so I thought you might be indignant at rich kids claiming to be the real deal and diluting the goods. (It's strange to me what people define as poverty in Britain -- I mean, good grief, the unemployed receive guaranteed housing and medical care -- but that's another conversation.)

'No, not quite, Robbie, but you've done your own share of claiming poverty-authenticity'

I never have. You show me where I have said anything other than the circumstances at the time. In fact I would be willing to bet that I have never used the word poverty in relation to myself.
This is what happened: I, totally as a by the bye, mentioned that I was working in a factory five years ago on abg-o. You reacted rather as if this was showboating (evidently revealing on your part a concern that you were not 'authentic' or poverty-struck enough), whereas it was simply a fact. My book and some of my subsequent posts revealed me to have worked and lived in the low-pay/dole hand-to-mouth cycle that is the quotidian for hundreds of thousands of people here. I didn't do it as a lark or a pose (something you've insinuated a couple of times).
A quick google group search 'ROBBIE + Poverty' reveals that I never used the word much - one or twice when talking about some of my friends who I went to school with who *did* live in poverty and NEVER in relation to myself.
I spoke about my experiences, that's all.
Of course I'm against rich kids fabricating their 'as told to' addiction horror stories. The difference between you and me is that you are *only* against rich kids writing victimographies, whereas I'm contemptuous of the whole humourless and lazy genre. NOTE: I am not against memoirs.
In England, there are very many Oprah/Springer knock-offs and they all have become corrupt - as undercover news stories have revealed in the press - and simply degrade and humiliate the people on them, before they are sent back to their problems.

And, though the following isn't the most elegant bit of op-ed, it does mention Orwell and smelly little orthodoxies:

'I see that man in Dickens. And I see him too in Orwell. In James Frey, alas, I see a face more representative of these times: a self-serving equivocator who has done serious harm to those he says he wants to help --- and is, sadly, too small a man to know how to undo it.'

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060116/cm_huffpost/013910;_ylt=A86.I2vv9ctD43kAExb9wxIF;_ylu=X3oDMTBjMHVqMTQ4BHNlYwN5bnN1YmNhdA--

Either one of you have an opinion on Dom Boscoby's Down and Out in Sheffield & Lincoln?

Either one of you have an opinion on Dom Boscoby's Down and Out in Sheffield & Lincoln?

From a look at the intro, "Feh." Does that help?

Chapters 2 and 3 are much better -- all about the Dole and British bureaucracy, and especially on surviving on an extremely low income.

Either one of you have an opinion on Dom Boscoby's Down and Out in Sheffield & Lincoln?

It looks like a tedious ego-ride to me.

How did you find out about it?

Via Harry's Place a while back. Feh on you both — I enjoyed it.

I'd guess we both started with the annoying introduction. Want to pick out something from one of these later chapters that's better?

Self-aggrandizing poodle rockers are very boring.

Bloke fucking *adores* himself.

Okay, try this on from Chapter 2:

The Employment Training Scheme - or ET as it was more commonly known - was introduced in September 1988 to replace all the various adult training schemes[8] with a single programme. This was the latest in a succession of misguided attempts by the incumbent Conservative government to give the impression they were doing something concrete to address the crippling levels of unemployment (that is apart from changing the way the figures were calculated, which happened an average of three times a year during their 1979-1997 tenure). Under the auspices of this marvellous new regime people who had been out of work for over a year would, we were assured, ‘have the opportunity to acquire new skills’ and for their efforts trainees would get a bonus of ten whole pounds on top of the social security benefits they already received – which led to it being widely remarked that ET stood for ‘Extra Tenner’.

I remember the publicity campaign heralding the scheme’s introduction. Posters suddenly appeared in benefit offices and job centres - along with full page adverts in the Tory tabloids - all bearing the caption: ‘Can’t get a job without experience? Can’t get experience without a job? Vicious isn’t it?’ which was written in a circle around a picture of some disgruntled looking youth. There were the TV ads too, which showed people with determined expressions striding purposefully around suspiciously clean workplaces and making asides to the camera to announce they were ‘training for a real future’ and other such trite nonsense.

The idea behind the Employment Training Scheme was a partnership between government and the private sector whereby employers who signed up would be given a hefty subsidy to provide on the job training to unemployed people for a period of either six months or a year. Upon completion of their course trainees would be presented with a certificate – which was of dubious worth - and in some cases taken on permanently, although official sources tended to be pretty vague about the chances of that (once in a blue moon as it happened). To compliment the private sector’s contribution the employment service set up huge workshops in old factory buildings and purpose built centres where approved third-party agents would organise and run vocational courses which consisted of a mix of ‘formal directed training and work placements within the local community’ - or so it says here.

The reality of ET became apparent all too quickly and was a far cry from the rosy picture painted by the publicity material. In some ways it actually made the unemployment situation worse.

Unscrupulous employers would take on ET placements rather than casual or temporary staff and, leaving aside any ethical considerations, why not, it made perfect sense, why pay people to do a job when you can get them to do it for free? Better still, the government wants to pay you for the privilege!

This sort of thing was extremely common and within a very short time engendered a cynicism which destroyed any grassroots faith in the scheme - certainly where it involved working for private companies.

The workshop based courses under the direction of the employment service fared little better in the credibility stakes and soon descended into an equally ridiculous farce. Given the number of potential trainees and the limited resources available to train them it didn’t take long before finances were stretched to the limit. As there was still a significant shortfall in the number of people the government had intended to get on the scheme something had to be found for more trainees to do. Something that could operate on a shoestring budget. In Sheffield and the surrounding areas this meant repairing dry stone walls, of which there were thousands upon thousands of miles worth in the nearby Peak District.

Call me a cynic but I could never see how this constituted ‘training for a real future’. As it happened neither could anybody else and the only people who ended up doing it were, as I referred to them earlier, total spanners.

On week day mornings fleets of mini-buses would ferry people out to the countryside to spend the day doing what basically amounted to carrying stones from one pile to another. The ‘Spaz Convoy’, as it was known locally, passed through some of Sheffield’s more affluent western suburbs on its way in and out of the city and to the people living in these areas it must have given the impression that spiralling rural property rents had forced every village idiot in North Derbyshire to move into town and commute to work.

I expected both of you to dislike it for different reasons, but surely that gets a chuckle.

I refused to work for benefit on the occasion many years ago when it was offered: that's workhouse, I said. I still think its workhouse. On the other hand, Gordon Brown's ways of avoiding unemployment, which is to expand the civil service and employ people on a strict socialist quota mentality is a bad idea as well: good for the people getting the nice paycheck for doing next to nothing and retiring at 60 on an inflation-busting pension while the people being exploited in the private sector finance it. In other words, a woman working for a pittance in a London supermarket is financing the socialist dream in, say, Aberdeen. So that's a socialism that makes even less sense than capitalism.
I don't see this bloke as a victim, at least not like a Jarrow marcher, but it was grim to be in the dole offices of the early nineties and some people got caught in the rebound between short term work contracts and getting benefit: I know I did. The dole is very soiling and the nature of the employment market begets lying on an institutionalised basis. People like me: intelligent, rebellious and with a low bullshit threshold are bound to come unstuck. And that's exactly what happened to thousands of us, including this bloke on the website.
I agree with Martha about people having a funny idea about poverty in England. The pseudo-left graduate class that runs England now blame all the ills of society on poverty - as they have been trained to do; but on closer inspection, as Martha finds, it's not quite as simple as that.

Sorry, what is it I'm supposed to be finding here? Whatever it is, I'm not sure I've found whatever Robbie thinks I've found.

Wrt the use of employment-program subsidies to undermine regular employment, yes, some U.S. programs have anti-job-pirating regulations now to supposedly prevent similar from happening but I doubt they'll work. It's a major problem.

Robbie, I'm interested that you're against "workhouse" labor and makework, which I am too, but you're also against socialism. How do you propose that unemployed people should be provided for, then?

'Robbie, I'm interested that you're against "workhouse" labor and makework,'

May I say that your biggest mistake with me is the kind of fundamentalist counter-intuition which you disliked from the neo-cons in the run up to Iraq: oh, you ain't with us, then you're against us.

Then I say something like the above you act as if you thought I was fascist just because I'm not a supine, politically correct middle-class grad.

It is a tiresome feature of leftist behaviour than when someone deviates from the script unpleasant insinuations are never far behind.

However.

'How do you propose that unemployed people should be provided for, then?'

As they are now in England. You have the dole. I never worried too much about claiming it when I had to because the first time I claimed it I'd been working four years and paying tax and stamp. Of course, like the NHS, it has become corrupt and overburdened by people using it who are not entitled to it: England having the easist to abuse immigration/benefit system in the world.
English modern latte socialism, being unable to say no to anything that *appears* powerless and deserving, therefore turns everything into a corrupt and overburdened mess. This is why, after ten years of latte-socialist government the NHS in England is in a state of crisis and Barts, the hospital that the tories wanted to close and Labour said it wanted to save, is now facing an uncertain future. This, after five years of unprecedented funding*

*source for the *news* not the *opinion*: The Times, yesterday.

Chronic unemployment is a hard nut to crack because a lot of the people in it are not wanted by the employers and in any case don't want what employers are offering. For example, I would never, for many reasons, work in a fast food outlet. I'd rather take my chances on the street - I'm an extreme example. Other people would do it, enjoy it and go out and pay the man their sheckles with pleasure. People who do well out of the current situation are the middle-classes and, unlike Marxists, I don't see why they should be penalised: their advantage isn't economic (not the UK anyway) so much as attitudinal: that's why I meet so many middle-class dullards who have good jobs: they've been flogged to it by their parents - can you penalise that through latte-socialism? You can try and you generally end up with the third-world positive discrimination culture that has descended on England. Again, socialism turning out with best intentions, and getting it plain wrong.
Nothing was going to get me off the dole until I wanted to. And I approve of that system, because I approve of free-will over state-coercian in these matters. Right-wing shock jocks who are forever moaning about the unemployed and wanting them to be forced physically to work, are idiotic in my view.
However, big government/latte socialism is the royal road to corruption and listlessness. As can be seen in the UK right now.

Latte-Socialism sees the past as generally evil and an unneccessary encumbrance on its present-day activities. Why ask how we achieved the liberty and social/intellectual capital to formulate Late-Socialism? Can a society survive with Latte-Socialism as its ruling orthodoxy, not healthily, that's for sure.

'Orwell’s assertion that the state would simply calculate what was needed airily overlooked the difficulties of the matter, as well as his proposal’s implications for freedom. The “directing brains,” as Orwell called them, would have to decide how many hairpins, how many shoelaces, were “needed” by the population under their purview. They would have to make untold millions of such decisions, likewise coordinating the production of all components of each product, on the basis of their own arbitrary notions of what their fellow citizens needed. Orwell’s goal, therefore, was a society in which the authorities strictly rationed everything; for him, and untold intellectuals like him, only rationing was rational. It takes little effort of the imagination to see what this control would mean for the exercise of liberty. Among other things, people would have to be assigned work regardless of their own preferences.'

http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_2_oh_to_be.html