Our feral youth: let’s exploit their stupidity, cowardice and rape anxiety
News that Britain has witnessed its second pedal-by shooting in as many months should give cause for alarm, hand-wringing and hyperbole. Just not for the reason desperate politicians and newspaper editors with their eyes on the bottom line are spoon-feeding you.
No, the spate of knifings and shootings are less to do with absent fathers (code from both sides for single mothers are useless) or a blood-soaked society swirling down the plughole to Hell than to do with a significant minority’s ingrained stupidity in the face of eons of evolution and/or a rank cowardice pretending to be swaggering machismo. Those who, in the first instance, pick up a knife or a gun for offensive or defensive purposes are labouring under one or both of two deficiencies.
Firstly, their fight or flight response is disabled or severely impaired. These people lack the wit, intelligence or even sheer animal cunning to get the hell away when the fighting starts. The first response of any normally functioning member of society, at the first sound of trouble, is to have it away on their toes. A person with an impaired fight or flight response sticks around thinking he either won’t get sucked in or can handle himself if he does. Nobody’s expecting these sadsacks to be able to grasp Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene but any idiot could grasp the basic thrust of ‘nice guys finish first‘
Which leads to the second factor fuelling knife and gun crime: weakness and cowardice masquerading as dick-swinging self-assuredness. To be blunt, people who carry guns or knives in these circumstances are pussies. Bed-wetting, snivelling little pussies. They bring guns and knives out to play because they can’t bring their mums. These shaky little inadequates, no good with their intellect or fists, initiated an arms race. Without their toys, they reason, they’re meat for the bigger boys. And instead of pointing and laughing at them, society decided to be frightened of them.
In summary then, people pick up knives and guns because they’re too stupid to avoid trouble and can’t handle themselves when they find themselves in said trouble. The result is, of course, dead kids.
Dead kids have their uses, however. A few years ago there was a ‘humorous’ stocking-filler book called ‘101 Uses For A Dead Cat’. If the author has any sense, he’ll be working on ‘101 Uses For A Dead Kid’ and make a fortune.
The first use, I’d humbly suggest, is wedging a dead kid under the leg of a political party to stop it from wobbling, much as you would with a beer mat and a pub table. If that doesn’t work, take the corpse and beat your political opponent with it. Blair did it to great effect with the corpse of Jamie Bulger (kicking off the crime and punishment arms race) and David Cameron has shown admirable spadework exhuming cadavers of his own to clutch to his breast. It’s another unsightly melange of crotch-grabbing bravado and sweaty opportunistic fear. Meanwhile 99% of Britain’s citizens lead their blameless lives, teach their children their Ps and Qs and wonder if these political pronouncements aren’t being beamed in from a parallel dimension.
Newspaper editors also put dead children to good use. For years editors have found that if they suspend a dead child over the news desk, the resulting smell will attract hordes of readers seeking an emotional outpouring by proxy. You know, that nice kind of grief that lets you get it off your chest without going through all the misery of having a close family member actually die and everything. No doubt red top editors calculated weeks ago which outcome of the Madeleine McCann abduction they’d most like to see (hint: live kids don’t fuel moral panics - the buggers refuse to catch light).
(The author could follow up his book with ‘101 Uses For A Dead Kid’s Family’s Grief’. As we’ve seen with Philip Lawrence’s widow in the last few days, grief is the lubricant to ease the passage of many a stubborn political or editorial stool.)
So what’s the solution? That popular culture feeds machismo amongst young men is an argument for the lazy. Blah, blah, rap music. Yap, yap, video games. Rather, I’d argue, it’s the other way around - there are people happy to exist in a self-created blurred area between real life and fiction. It’s an escape for those without the cojones to face up to real life and they were doing it long before Tupac was born and Manhunt was out on the XBox. For these people, the sense of security afforded by closing their hand around the handle of a knife or the butt of a pistol must be like holding hands with their mum.
To be glib, for starters the inherent ridiculous nature of knife and gun crime should be played up, massively. Appealing to these people’s basic humanity is probably a non-starter. Peer pressure made these people pick their weapons; couldn’t it be used to make them disarm? Or at least prevent those coming after them doing the same? Look at dickhead over there with his gun; you want to be like him?
These aren’t heroic Andy McNab figures - they’re idiotic pussies. With respect to the family of Rhys Jones who are now having to somehow fathom the senseless death of their 11 year-old son, we shouldn’t be frightened of his killers, they should have our pitying laughter ringing in their ears. You shot a kid on your BMX bike, soldier! Who’s the man?
How about advertising campaigns with slogans like ‘Look At The Little Prick With The Big Gun’ and ‘He Couldn’t Pick Up Girls So He Picked Up A Knife’. If that risks further alienating already alienated youths (although, really, what they have to be alienated about I’m not really sure - yes, life in the UK is dull and unfulfilling and the long term solutions are complex but it’s hardly Somalia), how about subverting the ingrained hyper-masculinity and homophobia of gun culture? ‘Carrying A Gun Made Him Feel Hard. Now He Makes His Cellmate Feel The Same’. Here’s a campaign advert: an enormous bull queer in prison overalls fellates a big, oiled pistol. He winks at the camera and breathes, ’see you real soon, sugar’.
The sooner we get hold of the fact that the likes of the Croxteth Heds aren’t rampaging Droogs with society in the palm of their hand but shakey little inadequates, desperate for any semblance of power, the better off we’ll all be. They’re bogies not the bogeyman.
Update: At last, some perspective.
Posted on August 24th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
I shouldn’t be surprised if these kids didn’t take guns and knives out on the street after seeing how real men, presidents, prime ministers, and the like behave in the real world. If fantastically powerful death machinery can make them feel big and strong and settle arguments amongst themsleves, why shoudln’t the little kid round the block do the equivalent?
I don’t blame the parents so much as the example set by those who like to be called leaders.
As ever, very well put.
I think anyone who saw last night’s Newsnight, which featured a clip of a bunch of 14-year-olds dressed in the regulation uniform of tracksuit bottoms, hoodies and face masks who preceded to produce meat cleavers from what seemed to be their underwear and wave them around as if it was somehow meant to show their manliness when it was unlikely that their balls had dropped would find it difficult to disagree with you.
The problem is, rather than pointing out that these idiots either need a smack round the mouth or a thorough dressing down, we have morons like the Scum’s Jon Gaunt shouting for zero tolerance, when the very last thing they need is a criminal record or the police to get involved, but rather a lesson in how not to act like a twat. Unsurprisingly, when being a complete wanker is shown every night on the TV screens on Big Brother and advertised every day in the tabloids, it’s little wonder that so many other impressionable urchins find it within themselves to show off their laughable choppers on YouTube.
I was with you right up to:
If that risks further alienating already alienated youths (although, really, what they have to be alienated about I’m not really sure - yes, life in the UK is dull and unfulfilling and the long term solutions are complex but it’s hardly Somalia)
The whole point about alienation is that it doesn’t happen in places like Somalia or DR Congo or anywhere else people face a daily struggle for survival.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and all that. When your life is all about securing Personal Safety, there’s little psychological space for Esteen and Self-Actualization. Indeed the whole point you’re making, and it’s one I agree with, hinges around this very fact.
The reason these knife-carrying idiots do what they do is because their struggle is going on further up the hierarchy. And they’re failing miserably with it.
Esteen?
“Esteem”, of course.
agree 100% is this why blair kept reaching for the military cos he looks like he was bullied at school.
I note that the only place you mention the word “boys” is to dismiss the idea that popular culture feeds machismo. Nevertheless, I think a gender analysis of this is inevitable, since it is in fact the case that the gun and knife wielders are almost exclusively boys, not “people”, as you neutrally put it. Can you imagine the shrieks of “girls gone mad” if it was the other way around?
It may be lazy to blame it all on rap music and video games, but it is not lazy to try to examine machismo culture.
To be honest, Katherine, isn’t there pretty much an unspoken acceptance that knife and gun crime is an entirely male domain? I used ‘people’ to lump together boys/teenagers and men. I agree I should have been more explicit. ‘Males’ rather than ‘people’ perhaps?
I also agree that it’s important to examine the culture of machismo - I’d hoped I’d done that here to a certain small extent.
Does Gaunty call for zero tolerance for car crime?
Cameron’s tactic of blaming family breakdown/rap music/violent games for all societies ills ignores that much gang crime is fueled by the drugs trade - the most lucrative of which is the trade in coke. This is the case in Croxteth/Norris Green, where the shooting of Ryan took place (about 2 miles from where I live).
Isn’t it time upper/middle class snorters, such as David Cameron looked in the mirror, and saw that their “harmless” toot at university/dinner parties fuels a much darker, and deadlier trade?
Is it simply that the corpses rarely fall on his leafy streets? That most drugs violence happens in impoverished ghettos like Brixton, Southall, Moss Side and Toxteth, and even more so in Columbia and other cocaine-producing countries.
During the Tory leadership election Cameron was questioned by Alex Thompson for Channel 4 News:
AT: “If you were asked have you ever taken class A drugs as an MP, would you answer that question?”
DC: “I have always said that lawmakers cannot be lawbreakers. All I have said about my past, though, is that what is private in the past should remain private.”
AT: “If I asked you if you’d snorted cocaine as an MP, you’d therefore say No, wouldn’t you?”
DC: “That’s right, but please, I mean, I think we’ve dealt with this issue…”
AT: “So that’s ‘No’?”
DC: “I’ve absolutely answered your question.”
AT: “Say No.”
DC: “I’ve just said No.”
AT: “Thank you. Right. We can move on.”
Next time Cameron gets on his high horse about gang culture, maybe he should be asked about his part in fueling it.
[...] Uses for a dead kid [...]
@ Anon - AIUI the coke dealers who supply upper class tits like Cameron are not connected to the crack dealers on sink estates.
They both purchase coke from the proper villains (i.e. serious, nasty but professional criminals, who don’t shoot 11-year-olds on the street because it brings them bad publicity) who supply it in large quantities, but the supply chains then diverge - broadly:
1) importer -> proper villain -> feckless toff who thinks he’s a gangster for dealing with proper villains -> David Cameron
2) importer -> proper villain -> tit on a sink estate who thinks he’s a gangster for dealing with proper villains and having a gun -> derelict crackhead
People still shouldn’t use coke, because the proper villians are still evil murdering bastards, and the effects on the economy and people that it benefits in Latin America are even worse, but it’s daft to suggest that middle-class coke use has any impact on crack-fuelled shootings.
Slightly OT, but I always get a laugh when sabre-rattling free marketeers step up to blame society’s ills on video games, rap and porn.
The notion that popular culture is the result of a liberal desire to destroy society is entertaining, but misguided - last time I looked, rappers and pornogrophers were more interested in money than politics.
Call me nuts, but if we’re going to sob over the evils of modern consumerism, wouldn’t it be helpful to point the finger in the right direction?
Justin -
I recall an article you wrote a while back, concerning the male members of society responsible for two 7/7’s worth of death each year:
It is notable that when an Islamic terrorist atrocity occurs, the chat is all about how their culture must be depraved and the members of that ‘community’ must weed out the perpetrators and ‘do more’ to stop this kind of extremism.
Yet when an atrocity occurs a white community, and the liberal left begin blaming the wider culture, the condemnations of wishy-washy political correctness are not far behind.
[...] other times, the shocking imagery is entirely appropriate, as in a post on Friday from Justin at Chicken Yoghurt, on the subject of teen killers and Rhys Jones: If the [...]
Justin, you may well have an unspoken acceptance, but the trouble is that whilst it is unspoken by people like you it can by some be safely ignored or simply not noticed. And by “some” I mean the people who simply don’t understand that it is hypocritical to scream and shout about the downfall of “womanhood” when some girls get pissed and seriously harm someone, but go on about “people” when it is the boys what dun it. The “some” who dumbly don’t think normality should be examined because they don’t even notice that normality is not inevitable.
101 Uses For……
Inspired by a line in a post Justin did a few days ago…