Thursday 28 April 2011

Parts Private

Dear Reader

If you live in a cage like me, then you may find all the fuss about privacy hard to understand. Poor apes, such as yours truly, must  live their entire lives on display even when we are doing our monkey business. Think about that, next time you are on the toilet how you would feel if you had to answer nature's call in front of gallery of Japanese tourists taking pictures and Italian schoolchildren throwing sweets.  And then there's the captive breeding programme where we are supposed to get it on like a furry Amsterdam sex show, whilst you video the action on a smart phone and post links to your friends via Facebook. Now you know why gorillas in zoos look so annoyed.

But then this ape got to thinking about privacy and which parts should be private, surveying your antics involving injunctions, super-injunctions and hyper-injunctions. For those not in the know, hyper-injunctions are new type of legal device like super-injunctions but they also apply to other dimensions and alternate realities. A hyper-injunction means that if you publish a story in an alternate universe where JFK wasn't shot, dolphins can talk and the sky is purple and it mentions a certain footballer by name you can still be sued.

A right to privacy is a misleading concept in these cases in the media as no genuine intrusion of privacy has taken place. If someone breaks into your home, hides in your wardrobe and takes pictures of you and your partner doing the horizontal jiggle then your privacy has definitely been invaded. Either that or it's a weird sex game.  Likewise, when you get in the shower and you find a stranger there, he better be a plumber or it's time to call the police. There is a definite violation of your private realm, innuendo intended.  But preventing someone talking about your love life is very different, as your privacy now extends to a gagging order on someone else. Moreover, do we really want to live in a state where someone is not free to say who we  have had sex with? In the case of Katie Price, the answer is yes, because life is too short, otherwise the answer is no. Freedom of speech isn't simply the right to create erudite articles on the latest play at the Royal Court or a scintillating open-air opera, it is also the freedom to say foolish or salacious things.

Even if you try to enforce this militant version of privacy,  in the digital age it's impossible to keep anything private. Google knows more about you than you do yourself, which is why thanks to my browsing history I am now on the run. Note to self, stop researching how to make your own explosives on the internet,  it gives anti-terrorist officers the wrong idea and apparently being curious isn't a defence. For those of you not in hiding, everything you have ever done has been logged somewhere  on CCTV, on your phone or on your browsing history. Big Brother is watching you and will Tweet his story within seconds if you're famous and you've been naughty.

An absurd parallel world exists of court orders and injunctions, then there's the real world where the name of the TV personality who's been trollope-clinching is all over the internet. Making laws over things you cannot possibly control brings the law into disrepute, you might as well injunct the Moon. Little bit of legal trivia,  Mohammed Al Fayed did in fact sue for the Moon for helping Prince Philip kill his son.

Although there is one change that might make amends, even if those in the news have to accept that everything they do, especially if it involves their penis/vagina, will also be in the news. Paparazzi photographers should be classified as vermin, like crows or wood pigeons and therefore fair game if you have a shotgun license. We get to read salacious stories about celebrity indiscretions, they get to gun down paps. So from now if you are well-known, don't shoot the messenger, shoot the photographer.

Wednesday 20 April 2011

Snow Blind

Dear  Reader

Time for your second hit of Gorilla Philosophy and this week, the typing ape has gone drug crazy, so roll up that twenty pound note and snort yourself a sinusful of powdered politics that isn't cut with dogma or soundbites. The Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs, the ACMD, will be publishing a new report highlighting the dangers of cocaine. Britain is now number for cocaine use in Europe,at last back in pole position! Britannia Rules the Raves! But seriously, we give a big monkey whoop that a report is coming out. As is common knowledge, coke dealers and their clients are keen followers of government publications, indeed the consensus amongst Kentish Town street hustlers was the Vickers report into banking was a missed opportunity to separate retail and investment activities. They also wanted to know if anyone wanted to buy some crack.  Warnings against coke's dangerous effects are everywhere: Tara Palmer-Tompkinson's nose, the third Oasis album, an upmarket bar in City after 10pm and everything Charlie Sheen has said or done, ever.  None of these horrors stop the devotees of the naughty salt, so a spiral bound slab of bureaucratic-speak won't make a toot in hell's difference.

Cocaine is a dangerous drug not least for its extraordinary bullshit producing properties; you don't even to take it to start spouting arrogant, strident nonsense. Take for example  the 'Get Tough' brigade, apparently as a result of the permissive society (possibly a lesbian gay support group in Haringey), the whole of the UK has been overtaken by coke fiends. Maybe the typing ape is being a touch unfair, but their solution to the cocaine problem would be imprison dealers,  users and people who use the word coke, even if they mean a popular brand of soft drink. So throw another 100,000 people in jail and another 200,000n suspects and then what to do with them? Flogging is often mentioned, whether that's a criminal justice measure or a private fantasy, who knows. It is very hard to get inside minds so tiny. Obviously they overlook a few important points such as the facts. The police and courts generally do lock up cocaine dealers when they catch them. Contrary to tabloid hysteria, they go to prisons not five star hotels, where they sit in a cell for 23 hours a day. Fortunately the 'Get Tough' mob don't allow reality to get in the way of a good fairytale, which goes like this: Back in the 1950s, there used to a be country called England where everything was perfect, women stayed at home, there were no blacks and most importantly no drugs. So all we need to do is turn Britain into one enormous period drama, coke problem solved. You do wonder who's been taking what sometimes.

This ape has a modest proposal to reduce cocaine's harmful effects, which is to stop wasting police time interdicting a relatively harmless substance. Yes, The Shamen were right, Ebeneezer's Good. If ecstasy were more widely available, the police would no longer be breaking up street brawls on Friday evenings, it would be group hugs. Bouncers could deal with trouble using only a head massage. If people used MDMA at work, you would just have a different type of office bullshit. Instead of Powerpoint presentations about customer focus, there would be long rambles about how everything is connected, you know, like one massive brain filled with love, complete with trance soundtrack and a giant inflatable pink octopus. There would be some harmful effects - fashion decisions made under the drug's influence are questionable. White gloves for example, should incur a custodial sentence.

Ah, but isn't E the killer drug, what about Leah Betts? 100,000s of people die every year from alcohol and cigarettes, yet they are available on every street corner. Public policy on ecstasy has been hijacked by bereaved parents as if their personal tragedies made them overnight authorities on substance abuse. Following this logic  if a member of your family is eaten by a shark, you become a shark expert. You don't. You get very upset, probably never watch Jaws again and might order shark's fin soup wherever possible as form of species-wide payback. What you do not become is a world authority on marine predators.

Of course relaxing the stance on one drug would never happen, because that would 'Going Soft'. We've had thirty years of the hard man approach, isn't it time for a big group hug?

Footnote:


The pairing of 'Misuse' and 'Drugs' is illogical and nonsensical. Drugs alter your mental state, that's what they do. 'Misuse' implies there is some other way you should employ the substance. Maybe you can use cocaine to grout tiles, but you probably shouldn't unless you want to have very paranoid showers where all the tiles fall out.

Wednesday 13 April 2011

Match Royale

Dear Reader

Welcome to the first article of Gorilla Philosophy, the product of an educated, part house-trained ape with typing skills. If you only skim this piece, thank you for those precious seconds squeezed in between status updates, browsing porn, shopping for vintage trainers or emailing amusing videos to your friends. The purpose of this blog is simple: to entertain and if nothing else to help stave off the gnawing existential despair that hovers over your shoulder, as you pretend to work in the office, staring blankly at the computer monitor whilst secretly wondering what would happen if you just walked out, pausing only to  smash a ring binder into that smug bitch/bastard (delete as applicable) who makes your life hell. In case you are considering stationery-assisted GBH, the most likely outcome is arrest. At the very least you will struggle to get a reference for your next job, unless you are hoping to join an organised crime syndicate, in which case face-smashing is very much seen as a plus rather than a negative on the CV. (1)

So what is Gorilla Philosophy? Think of it is as a little digital corner of contrarian cussedness that strives to amuse. Even if like most of us, your every waking hour is signed away to the bank paying off a mortgage on a flat you don't really like in a part of town you chose only because it was marginally better than sleeping rough, then you can still let your mind roam free. The bank doesn't own that yet. Gorilla Philosophy will take you in its great big hairy ape hands and grope you mentally - go with the metaphor, the gorilla isn't real. Of course a genuine sexual assault by a large primate is no laughing matter, unless the assaultee is Piers Morgan, in which case the event should be celebrated by a national holiday or a public sculpture.

For its opening article, GP (that's Gorilla Philosophy for those of you too busy sending taking Polaroid effect pictures with your Iphone) , turns its furrowed, simian brows to the upcoming wedding and wonders what the fuck? No subject produces more instant mental retardation in otherwise intelligent citizens of this fine nation of ours than the Royal Family. Mention the Queen to an English person and it's like saying the codeword to a KGB sleeper agent. All normal brain function shuts down and they adopt a strange faraway gaze as if they have just taken too many magic mushrooms. Instead of rational conversation, you get dream-like phrases about Albion, tradition, charity work, the war and what if Tony Blair became President - total cognitive shutdown. Monarchy it seems is the Hannibal Lector to our frontal lobes, sawing through the skull and scooping out the thinking parts, to fry them lightly in garlic butter.

This wedding in popular discourse is a good thing, in the same way that murder is a bad thing, the goodness is intrinsic and not debatable. (2). We, the British people, are all looking forward to the wedding and stop asking inconvenient questions about why the landed gentry still owns 12 percent of the land in Britain and exercises political power.  It is a good thing, now stand up when the national anthem plays.  Yes, we know deep down it is an absurd anachronism that makes Britain seem like a cheesy historical attraction, complete with animatronic Shakespeare and 3D Churchill experience.  But Kate Middleton is pretty girl, everyone likes a wedding and won't it be fun to see both her and Wills dressed up smartly.

Maybe this presentation of the royalist case is unreasonable, so let's not forget the crucial role of tourism in determining a political system. The Royals are good for tourists.  Apparently any tradition, no matter how antiquated and obsolete, should be retained for the benefit of tourists, preferably the high spending Chinese, given that the rest of us will be paying for the banking crisis until Fred Goodwin and friends develop a conscience. (3) By this compelling logic, it is a shame that hanging, drawing and quartering no longer takes place at Tyburn, now known as Marble Arch. Think of the missed photo opportunities for visiting foreigners.

If the tourism argument doesn't quite persuade and it really shouldn't unless you have had both a stroke, a blow to the head and are drunk, then the royalists have to scrabble around elsewhere to justify keeping our political structure frozen somewhere in the 16th century. Time to bring out the charitable work that our current royal family does as if the merits or flaws  of a political system should depend on the vagaries of personality rather  than founding principles. Whether the Queen does a lot of a work for charity or whether she goes out every night to set fire to tramps for kicks makes no odds. Either the idea of the monarchy is defensible on its own merits as a concept or it is not. Truth is if the Windsors were poor and lived in a council flat, Harry and Wills would have been taken into care and the rest would be serving time for tax evasion, but that proves nothing about the idea of a hereditary monarchy.

And what a strange idea it is, even in a symbolic, ceremonial power to someone on the basis of their DNA - it's not even special DNA like the bit of the double helix that makes Angelina Jolie's lips quite so pouty. No we have picked a run of the mill family, with no special attributes to be our head of state and to pass that role from generation to generation as it were a family heirloom - an antique dresser or sideboard that you don't really want but you don't have the heart to get rid of it. If we were a Stone Age tribe that worshipped the Sun God and thought an eclipse was the Moon eating the Sun, then there would be no shame in rule by kings. Hell we paint ourselves blue and sacrifice pigeons to make it rain. Equally if Britain were a Disneyworld theme park it would add a extra sense of authenticity. But in theory, Britain is supposed to be meritocratic, democratic state, except of course when it comes to the head of that state when it's a birthright by blood.

The wedding throws this nonsense into focus and it's a call to action, or rather inaction. Perhaps best way to fight the upcoming surge of forelock tugging and brown nosing this wedding will induce is to ignore it, a strong dose of popular apathy may finish the monarchy off in the way no po-faced movement every could. Remember, these pair are just a regular couple who were not for accident of birth would lead regular lives. For those of you who give in to the monarchist brainwashing and you know you are, get a grip.

Notes:

1)  For best results when whacking an irritating work colleague, use a laptop not a ring binder.
2)  Murder is wrong 99% of the time, most of us would agree. There are notable exceptions, for example, the mobile phone designer who allowed the phones to play music via their speakers turning bus and train journeys into the upper levels of hell,  is fair game.
3) This means a really long time.