Epigrinch

Let’s ban Christmas. I hate Christmas. Christmas in this country is like sex with five condoms on - a drawn out, overlong annoyance where the final gleeful splurge only drives home further the futility of the experience in its entirety.

Don’t get me wrong, Christmas day is alright. The telly is marginally less awful, no-one expects you to go anywhere, and for a couple of glorious days otherwise criminal levels of gluttony aren’t just acceptable, but encouraged. It’s the three months of full-scale corporate Chinese water-torture beforehand that makes everything so utterly unbearable.

Right from September onwards, all manner of festive fripperies begin appearing on supermarket shelves. But seeing these whilst still attempting to cling to the pretence that summer is yet to end actually summons up all the festiveness of an emergency Christmas-Eve stomach pump. Scientific studies have shown that catching sight of a latex-faced Zac Efron looming out at you from an advent calendar on the bread aisle in Sainbury’s during the first week of October is roughly as traumatic as watching a video of your own birth.

At the same time, a kindly bunch of diversified multinational conglomerates become keen to make sure we remember that Christmas will still happen this December. Don’t panic! That loving, expensively shot advertising campaign will make sure not only that you'll remember, but that anyone who doesn’t end up hugely personally indebted in order to give their family a ton of chintzy crap and/or shit vol-au-vents (depending on your soulless chain of choice) will feel guilty enough to end up spending a delightful Christmas sat in their car in a locked garage as it slowly fills with fumes.

The slow, inexorable annexation of Christmas by commercial interests has been discussed so much it’s a cliché, but it’s not the fact that Christmas has been commercialised that rankles. I’m sure if I were a religious person it’d be at least mildly irritating, but for me it’s not a problem on its own. It’s the nakedly militaristic planning and build-up that’s the problem. If John Lewis had been in charge of invading Afghanistan, we’d have been out of there years ago. Christmas has been so extensively fetishised by the time we finally get there that it’s difficult not to feel short-changed when it comes and goes and is merely nice, rather than magical. Whilst on any other day I’m perfectly happy to get mildly tipsy during the daytime with a few relatives and then watch some telly, on Christmas Day (CHRISTMAS DAY!!!!!!!) it’s incredibly underwhelming when you don’t wake up to a light dusting of snow, presents that answer some primal urge that you could never before articulate, and a raucous family tousling each others' hair like characters from some long forgotten Enid Blyton novel.

If Christmas could just be Christmas, without the months of anticipation, noise pollution, and open warfare by retailers, it’d be just lovely. But in the absence of any kind of sense or proportion, it’s consistently a disappointment. So let’s do what we can. Let’s lower our expectations. Let’s try to enjoy an average Christmas. And if your loved ones can’t do that, why not just make this Christmas so thoroughly awful for everyone that anything from now on is an improvement? It’s the best gift you could possibly give.

Wagner, we hardly knew ye

Why, viewers? Why? The day every right-thinking human being has dreaded for weeks has finally come to pass, and it’s all your fault. Shorn of the votes he needed to squeak over the line, Wagner, the lion-haired love god himself, has finally left the building. Worst of all, leaks from inside X-factor’s production company suggest that he just failed to beat out the awful One Direction, a group described by that mastermind of accidental satire, Louis Walsh, as ‘a bunch of little Justin Biebers’.

From the moment at the judge’s houses stage that he serenaded Sharon and Louis with a rousing rendition of ‘You got the Lobe’, causing even the permanently frozen-faced Sharon Osbourne to gape in astonished adoration, the boggle-eyed Brazilian bongo fan has become something of a national treasure. He quickly consolidated that with a string of performances so adorably awful that the nation grasped him to their ironic, piss-taking bosom. Not since that bloke who used to be on the news decided to have a bit of a dance have we as a people decided that we loved someone so unconditionally that we would prolong their continued embarrassment on a national stage. Awww.

Yes, with his twinkly-eyed brand of bitter ranting, casual misogyny, and alleged benefit fraud, Wagner charmed the entire country, holding up a mirror to a people who liked what they saw. So what does the future hold for Wagner Fiuza-Carrilho, still a sprightly 54 years of age, and currently surfing on a wave of misguided public adoration? Here are a few possibilities.

1. Wagner goes into investment banking
Odd, maybe. But once you’ve been a lion tamer, karate instructor, PE teacher and national entertainer, there’s little else you can do to replace that thrill without gambling on the international markets with the contents of people’s current accounts.

2. Wagner Sings at the Royal Wedding
It might sound odd, but think about it! With republican sentiment at an all-time high due to the huge cost of William and Kate’s wedding, what better way for the royals to ingratiate themselves with the lower classes than to get this popular singer chap at their wedding? Dynamite. And what better soundtrack for their first gentle sashay onto the floor for their first dance than Wagner’s awesome rendition of Bat out of Hell? They’re a match made in heaven.

3. Wagner becomes the first entertainer in space
As Wagner’s hypnotically wobbly features fill every TV in the land, the economy falters as people stay in night after night to watch his new variety show. Faced with no other choice, the coalition government decide to fire him from a cannon. Nick Clegg is heard to say: “Look, we all like Wagner. But government is about hard choices. Did I come into government to fire Wagner into space? No. But faced with the economic mess and lack of space-based performers we were left with by the previous government, we really had no choice.”

4. Wagner goes gracefully into dignified retirement, and is never seen again.
Unlikely.

Debate

In a relatively well-educated age, we seem to be getting stupider, or at least more credulous. Used to hearing well made, carefully and logically constructed arguments, people are more adept than ever at dressing up their own extreme views with all the same trappings, like a creme-egg with a turd at its centre.

This isn’t often done with wicked intent, and is often what the person actually believes. Arrogantly assuming we’re well placed to make sense of the deluge of often conflicting information that pours down on us daily, we use what chimes with us to buttress our own views, whilst picking holes in that which doesn’t, merrily going on our way without ever learning a thing. Worst of all, this effect is exacerbated as information is spun, rewritten, and re-presented, shorn of context, nuance, and accuracy along the way.

Imagine a study about drug use is published by a fraying, busy sociology professor, who as it happens enjoys spending a good deal of his time lost in a haze of opiates. He seizes upon a statistic in his findings to present legalisation of drugs in a positive light as he writes it up. This is then reported as gospel by various left-wing news outlets, and later taken up by columnists who blather on about rehabilitation, tax revenues and all manner of pro-drug idealism based entirely on the compromised study.

Suspicious right-wing pundits soon find out the professor is a raging smackhead, which discredits the information just a little bit in their eyes. Instead they suggest as a counterpoint statistics from Iran, showing that beheading is a pretty good deterrent against drug-taking, further fuelling their brand of harrumphing, ‘THROW AWAY THE KEY’ bullshit.

By the time the professor has been arrested for riding a spacehopper naked into a local primary school (“point to what you saw on the doll, Timmy”) and someone’s pointed out that the accuracy of police statistics and cultural situation may be slightly different in Iran, all search for answers has been lost. Instead all you get is a retrenchment of positions, as each side decides their information suggests something it might not, and begin to characterise one another as sandal-wearers and Hitler respectively.

If this sounds far-fetched, take economics as an example. People who’d have difficulty with basic algebra but nonetheless have a certain attachment to public services are suddenly quite happy to debate the nuances of Keynesian economics, based solely on a column they’ve read in the Guardian, whilst those who’re instinctively mistrustful of government intervention would have you believe they’ve grasped the perils of the complex and shifting relationships between international bond markets and government debt overnight. Before long it’ll have all boiled back down to the rich calling the poor lazy, and the poor calling the rich cunts. Standard.

The problem is that we instinctively think of ourselves as sensible, well-informed, proper-thinking beings, rather than know-nothing lumps of flesh subject to wildly irrational emotions and egos the size of a small moon. At the same time, we’re drawn to people who think the same way as us, making further remote any chance of having our views challenged. Almost all of us lack the ability to examine ourselves and our biases dispassionately. Even when you try to, you find yourself shot at from both sides, contending with such a seething morass of bias, prejudice, spin, cherry-picking, and just general anger that suicide quickly becomes preferable. Accepting and embracing your own ignorance whilst arguing with those on either side with entrenched positions isn’t just like banging your head against a brick wall, but being bounced between two of them, like a ball in an enormous, high-stakes game of Pong.

And so far this is just people who have the decency to attempt to think critically, not even taking into account people who’re happy to work their way through life doing and saying things that simply wouldn’t make sense if given a moment’s thought. My favourite pet peeve are the nebulously religious, those that are quite attached to the thought of an afterlife, but balk a little at all the self-sacrifice and rules. I like to think they’ll rock up at the Pearly Gates nonchalantly as if it’s a night on the lash, if only so I can imagine the looks on their faces when St. Peter grunts “but you’re not on the list” like the world’s surliest bouncer. This also explains the seemingly perverse (but actually just fucking retarded) messages of condolence some people left for Raoul Moat, reflecting a belief that they’d see him again in heaven. My grasp of theology isn’t what it was, but I’m not sure that’s quite how it’s supposed to work.

It seems to me like the search for truth, to phrase it somewhat grandly, is like an endless row across a choppy lake. You press on, battling the sapping currents, ever more certain you’ll arrive at the opposite side as the years pass, only to turn around and find you’re barely any further out than when you set off.  Sometimes it just feels like it’d be easier to abandon ship and lie on the muddy shore, basking in the warm, soothing sunlight of ignorance.

A shorter version of this appeared in Epigram 228.