Mesmerised

When I snap my fingers you will awake. One, two, three... So goes the old stage hypnotist spiel, whereupon the supposedly mesmerised stooges will act out their rehearsed business and the audience will be amused for a few minutes. And then the audience gets to go home and think about the act of gross deception they just participated in. Were those subjects really unable to resist the will of their puppet-master, or were they just going along with it so as not to spoil the show?

Do I think hypnotism is a crock? Pretty much, in that environment; the idea that certain people possess the power to almost instantly induce a trace state in their subjects is clearly risible. (Having said that I have endured some of Ed Miliband’s speeches.) Do I believe that in a controlled environment people can be induced to relax and enter a waking dream? I guess so, if they want to. Can hypnosis create Manchurian candidates who will kill on a command word? Hell no – far too many people took far too many drugs in the sixties.

I have a low regard for the soft pseudo sciences, especially those whose title ends in therapy: psycho, aroma, chromo, hypno and so on. And especially those whose claim to be a science derives from their name alone. It’s not that they have no place at all; after all the placebo effect is recognised, measurable and can be surprisingly strong. It’s just that even after their snake oil salesmen practitioners have been revealed as charlatans, the weak-willed still feel the need for a magic cure.

Magicians often hide their distractions in plain sight, misdirecting their observers with dazzling displays while the mundanity of the trapdoor allows the ‘volunteer’ to vanish. But we all – by the age of majority, you’d hope – know that what we are seeing is a show and not reality. Spend money on a hypnotist to stop you smoking and you will be taught practical strategies, displacement activities, to get you over the craving. It isn’t the hypnotism that is stopping you smoking, but having bought into it you will convince yourself that Mr Mesmer did the trick.

Look into my eyes...

The above, however, seems to be utterly negated by the Trump effect. Whatever else he might be – madman, liar, crook, psychopath, bully, paranoid power freak – all of which he has in common with many who have held the office before him, he has the left mesmerised to instantly react whenever he appears. And that is a bloody brilliant act. As the blond bouffant hoves into view you can barely take your eyes off it. And then off they all go, wildly strutting about the media stage, clucking like hens, fighting off imaginary threats and helplessly dancing to his tune. When Donald Trump snaps his fingers... One, two, three... 

Trumpageddon?

We shall not be moved, sang the peaceniks of former years as the children of the post-war generation began to exercise their hard won rights to free assembly and free expression and eschewed the taking up of pitchforks that in earlier centuries may have been the last resort of desperate peasants. Freedom and democracy and the brotherhood of man and the right to turn on, tune in and drop out and let’s all hold hands until we get a better world. The young became enfranchised and politically active in a way they never had before and some things genuinely changed for the better.

And on they went, those children to become some of the wealthiest and happiest people on the planet. Maybe because in an age before the instant wish fulfilment of the internet they had the sustained will to organise, spread the word and turn out; it took resolve and stamina to protest back then and it was effective, eventually. But in the present, when 89.5 million people follow Justin Bieber on Twitter, when the world watches Kim Kardashian’s enormous and ever bared arse and a movement can spring up and die in a day without anybody leaving their bedrooms, protests are just a form of entertainment.

“Anything worth watching?” Not really. “Wanna hit the streets, we can get an Uber?” It’s all too easy and ironically, the ease and convenience of the world we live in distorts perception. It might feel like you’re taking up cudgels for a cause, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find you can buy ready-made protest kits from Amazon: V mask, banner, your-own-message-here placards and tips on taking the best demonstration selfies. There are so many gatherings of zombie-like, pre-contribution citizens that if there is any unified message other than ‘Me, me, me’ it is lost in the chaff and clutter of information overload; it just sounds like an enormous flock of roadrunners out there.

As the US Election result became clearer Shaun King, of Black Lives Matter tweeted: “Dear Friends, If Donald Trump wins within the next hour, we still have 70 days before he becomes President WE MUST ORGANIZE OUR RESISTANCE.” Whatever happened to the democratic will of all the people? Once, people demonstrated in order to be allowed to vote. Now they demonstrate, nay demand, that those votes be ignored or overturned and they have marched on Trump Tower in New York City against ‘Trumpageddon’ and ‘Trumpocalypse’... oh and the all-encompassing ‘hate’.

Does any of this sound depressingly familiar? The anti-living-within-our-means protests, the anti-Tory demonstrations, the anti-Brexit movement. How come we didn’t see anti-Labour demonstrations... at least until Blair upset the bien-pensants of the ‘new establishment’. I think it may be down to a matter of confidence. The students always were revolting, to resurrect an old joke, but today’s ‘yoof’ seem to be in thrall to a whole swathe of loosely bound minority rights issues and emboldened by years of soft administrations willing to indulge them. After half a century of moral grandstanding they have come to believe that what they want is theirs by rights and creating mayhem is the way to get it.

You'd better believe it!

Meanwhile the rest of us, too busy getting on with getting on, grin ruefully because we can see what they can’t. While the entitled classes were going about the business of insisting that their needs were met, that their rights were respected and loudly proclaiming that they would reclaim the streets, end globalisation, abolish war, fight poverty and establish universal equality; while the mob was loudly demanding that everybody else listen to what they had to say, they rather forgot to listen. To see the fallout is truly glorious.

Stereo

Stereotypes exist for a reason. They allow us easy access to a wide range of reflexive responses, eliminating the need for reasoned analysis:

• Hear a Scottish voice and expect to be informed in tedious detail exactly what they want us, the English, to pay for.
• A Liverpool accent alerts us to tune out and avoid listening to the imagined anti-Scouse cultural injustice they are protesting today.
• At the first guttural syllables of a third-generation, still unintegrated Pakistani ‘community spokesman’ I brace myself for the multiple charges of islamophobia that are surely coming.
• And when I hear the blunt, dead vowels of a South Yorkshire denizen I cringe in sheer embarrassment at the thought of being a Yorkshireman although, to be fair, only the north and west of that great county is truly god’s own.

If you think those stereotypes lazy, here’s a beauty. The laziest of all stereotypes is the positively bone-idle example of a hooded, tattooed thug, parked on the sofa, smoking skunk and scratching his all-too fertile balls in front of always-on reality TV, living a life free of worry, free of effort and free of all responsibilities. You can actually picture this right now and that's because these people do exist. The people who made them, however, will bend all the laws of the human universe to deny it. But it makes no difference because a stereotype is also a pattern, a mould, into which many of us have been poured and left to set, to conform to type.

Stereotypes act as handy ciphers to aid understanding and prepare our defences – see a crop-haired, androgynous, chunky female on the television and I don’t need to be told I am going to hear about wimmin’s rights and general lefty issues with a touch of anti-Zionist sentiment tossed in for good measure; oh and ‘men’. It alerts me to the need to find another avenue of entertainment and so avoid having to listen to tired and irrational arguments about misogyny, racism and the evils of the very free-speech, capitalist society that gives her the freedom to practice her free-preaching.

One of the truths about a stereotype is an inability in many to rise above the programming. So when I heard about Donald Trump cancelling his Chicago rally because of violent protesters I didn’t need the telly to picture the general dusky hue and temperament and political persuasions of the multi-culti rent-a-mob; it's just the same over here. It’s interesting though, when the islamists make common cause with the lefties to protest against a third party stereotype. This is a dangerous act, for without the Trumps, who will defend the left and their pets when islam  takes over and sharia reigns?

See, Trump may be a chump to many but his targets are legitimate ones. If there is to be common cause for a better future the allies here ought to be the left and right of the west versus the utter wrong of the rest. The events in Ankara yesterday should be yet another warning about the dangers of allowing in the Trojan horses of the stereotypical muslim world. We should be hearing the protest against the avowed invasive intents of islam and all who would harm us and burn down our culture, what's left of it. We should be hearing it from all sides, in both ears. In stereo.