I can make you hate (36 page)

Of course, anyone proposing the use of the noose or the chair is guilty of moral cowardice anyway. Capital punishment is supposed to act as a deterrent, but it doesn’t seem to have much effect on crime statistics. This is because most current executions a) employ methods that are as quick and efficient as possible and b) take place behind closed doors – almost as though the people doing it are ashamed of themselves.

What sort of half-arsed half-measure is that? Cold logic dictates that the only way to turn capital punishment into an effective deterrent is to make each killing as drawn-out and public as possible. Maximum agony, maximum publicity. Anything less is a cop-out – and death penalty supporters should have the stones to say so. Stop this placatory talk about breaking people’s necks gently with rope. Go the whole hog.

Don’t campaign to bring back the gallows – campaign to bring back the saw. The medieval saw. Raise the prisoner by his feet and then saw through him vertically, starting at his arsecrack and ending at his scalp. Suspending him upside down ensures a constant supply of blood to his brain, so he’ll remain conscious throughout and provide all manner of usefully lurid screams. In fact with any luck he’ll carry on screaming even as his throat is sawn in half, thereby creating a pleasing stereo effect for viewers
with home cinema systems. Did I mention the viewers? This is all broadcast live on television, in HD (and even 3D) where available. Maximum agony, maximum publicity.

Not that the broadcast should pander to ghoulish onlookers. It should pander to ghoulish participants. This is the
twenty-first
century: public executions can and should be as interactive as possible. So this death-by-vertical-sawing isn’t just broadcast live, but broadcast live from the perspective of a camera with a crossbow attached. Viewers at home control the gunsights by tweeting directions such as ‘Left’, ‘Right’, ‘Up a bit’, ‘Fire’, and so on – a bit like ye olde gameshow
The Golden Shot
, but with approximately 100 per cent more footage of shrieking bisected carcass being shot in the eye with a bolt smeared with excrement. A shot in the eye, incidentally, will win you 5,000 Nectar points and a congratulatory tweet from Paddy McGuinness.

Obviously, not everyone would voluntarily tune in to watch a broadcast that graphic, which is why highlights of each execution would be randomly spliced into other popular programmes – everything from
Top Gear
to
Rastamouse
. It would also be compulsory viewing at every school in the land. And children who try to evade its salutary message by closing their eyes will have still images of the precise moment of death beamed directly into their mind’s eye using Apple’s AirPlay system, as soon as we can establish some means of doing that.

Maximum agony, maximum publicity. It’s the only way. It’s saw or nothing.

Like almost anyone who wasn’t outside running around with a scarf over their face, I sat at home last week gawping at my TV screen in horror as English cities, including the one I live in, came under attack from their own citizens. It was a self-inflicted
horror show, like watching a man repeatedly smack himself in the teeth with a breezeblock. But not as funny.

Since I write for a newspaper, I’m now legally required to write an agonised hand-wringing article in which I attempt to explain why the riots happened. Which is tricky because I don’t have a clue. Some blame the parents. Or the education system. Or the economy. Or our unequal society. Or just the rioters themselves. I’d guess at some soupy combination of all the above.

Aside from the sheer mindless ferocity and violence, one of the most depressing aspects of the protracted smashup was the nature of the looting: time and again, shops selling trainers or gadgets were targeted first. Fancy shoes and electric widgets mark the peak of ambition. Every looter was effectively a child chanting ‘
Give me my toys; I want more toys.
’

Look at the prick captured on video mugging the injured Malaysian student. Watch his unearned swagger as he walks away; the size of a man, yet he overdoes that swagger like a performing toddler. That’s an idiot who never grew up.

Why the obsession with trainers? Trainers are shit. You stick them on your feet and walk around for a while ’til they go out of fashion. Whoopie doo. Yes, I know they’re also status symbols, but anyone who tries to impress others with their shoe choice is a dismally pathetic character indeed – and anyone genuinely impressed by said footwear has all the soaring spirit of a punnet of moss. There’s no life to be found in ‘look at my shoes’. There just isn’t.

In the smouldering aftermath, some politicians, keen to shift the focus from social inequality, have muttered darkly about the role of BlackBerry Messenger, Twitter and Facebook – frightening new technologies that, like the pen and the human mouth, allow citizens to swap messages with one another. Some have even called for the likes of Twitter to be temporarily suspended in times of great national crisis. That’d be reassuring – like the scene at the start of a zombie movie where the news bulletin is suddenly
replaced by a whistling tone and a stark caption reading
PLEASE STAND BY.
The last thing we need in an emergency is the ability to share information. Perhaps the government could also issue us with gags we could slip over our mouths the moment the sirens start wailing? Hey, we could still communicate if we really had to. Provided we’ve learned semaphore.

If preventing further looting is our aim, then as well as addressing the gulf between the haves and the have-nots, I’d take a long hard look at
MTV Cribs
and similar TV shows that routinely confuse human achievement with the mindless acquisition of gaudy bling bullshit. The media heaves with propaganda promoting sensation and consumption above all else.

Back in the eighties the pioneering aspirational soap opera
Dallas
dangled an unattainable billionaire lifestyle in front of millions, but at least had the nous to make the Ewing family miserable and consumed with self-loathing. At the same time, shows aimed at kids were full of presenters cheerfully making puppets out of old yoghurt pots, while shows aimed at teens largely depicted cheeky urchins copping off with each other in the dole queue.

Today, whenever my world-weary eyes alight on a ‘youth show’ it merely resembles a glossily edited advert for celebrity lifestyles, co-starring a jet-ski and a tower of gold. And regardless of the time slot, every other commercial shrieks that I deserve the best of everything. Me and me only. I’d gladly introduce a law requiring broadcasters to show five minutes of footage of a rich man dying alone for every ten minutes of fevered avarice. It’d be worth it just to see the presenters trying to introduce ironically it on T4.

If we deleted all aspirational programming altogether, the schedules might feel a bit empty, so I’d fill the void with footage of a well-stocked Foot Locker window, thereby tricking any idiots tuning in on a recently looted television into smashing the screen in an attempt to grab the coveted trainers within.

Speaking of stolen shoes, if I were the CEO of Nike (which
at the time of writing I’m not), I’d encourage Foot Locker to open special ‘decoy’ branches near looting hotspots – unattended stores stocked full of trainers with soft sponge heels. Anyone pinching a pair of these would find it almost impossible to hoof in a window ever again. You’d be kicking fruitlessly at the glass for fifteen years, making it less an act of spontaneous violence and more a powerful visual metaphor for your misguided existence.

But perhaps it’s better to nip future trouble in the bud with the use of deterrents. Obviously a small percentage of the rioters are sociopaths, and you’ll never make any kind of impression on their psyche without a cranial drill. But the majority should be susceptible to threats. Not violent ones – we’re not animals – but creatively unpleasant ones. Forget the water cannon. Unleash the slurry cannon. That kind of thing.

Greater Manchester Police has attracted attention by using Twitter as a substitute for the ‘perp walk’: naming-and-shaming rioters by tweeting their personal details as they leave court. Not bad, but maybe not humiliating enough.

Personally, I’d seal them inside a Perspex box glued to a billboard overlooking a main plaza for a week, where people can turn up and jeer at them. It’s not totally inhumane: they’d be fed through a tube in the top – but crucially, they’d be fed nothing but cabbage, asparagus and figs, and since they wouldn’t be allowed out for toilet breaks, it’d get pretty unpleasant in there after
forty-eight
hours. And it’d be a cheery pick-me-up for passersby.

This one’s for underperforming students, and anyone who got rubbish exam results. The rest of you can walk away. Go on. Shoo.

Gone? Right. Last week was A-level judgment week, which, as per tradition, gave newspapers a brilliant excuse to run photos of attractive teenage girls leaping with delight as they receive their
results, a phenomenon that has become such a cliché that pointing out its existence has become another cliché in its own right.

And the schools themselves aren’t shy of using it as a PR opportunity. According to Chris Cook of the
Financial Times,
a press liaison officer from Badminton school in Bristol once left him an unsolicited voicemail alerting his paper to the existence of some particularly ‘beyootiful’ girls who were due to do a bit of impromptu delighted leaping on results day, in case any of his newspaper’s photographers fancied popping along for an ogle.

According to the
Mirror
, Badminton school responded to criticism by saying: ‘We always do this and, to be honest, most girls are attractive at eighteen.’ So that’s a school, then, talking like a dirty dad. It probably rubbed its hands on its thighs as it said it.

Actually, they’re missing a trick by restricting themselves to one news story per year. The school could raise its profile yet further by pimping those ‘beyootiful’ students out for other news stories. Certainly the coverage of the shooting of Osama bin Laden could’ve done with more images of delighted teenage girls jumping for joy as they heard the news.

The day I got my own A-level results, the only thing leaping was the pit of my gut, as I realised I hadn’t got the grades I needed. No surprise: I was lazy and easily distracted in school. I didn’t read half the books I was supposed to digest for my English literature course, for instance, and instead relied on Brodie’s Notes.

Today I can’t even remember precisely which texts I was bluffing about; I definitely read
Othello
, but never finished
Antony and Cleopatra
(or was it
Hamlet
?). I think I might’ve pretended to read a Thomas Hardy novel too. But then English lit. was easy to pass: it was a bullshitting exam in which you simply wrote what the examiner wanted to read and got away with it. A-level art – that’s where I messed up my grades. You can’t fake an ability to draw, and some of the work I submitted wouldn’t even pass muster on moonpig.com.

But my despair was short-lived, because I somehow managed to squeak on to the course I’d chosen regardless. My academic career wasn’t glittering – more ‘gluttering’, whatever that is. Because I’m called Charlie (which people wrongly assume is short for Charles), and because I write for a broadsheet paper (even though I write gibberish), people often assume I went to private school (which I didn’t), and then went on to Oxbridge (which I also didn’t). I went to a fairly standard comprehensive followed by a polytechnic, which became a university during my second year, thereby making me feel like a fraud whenever I tell people I went to university.

Predictably enough, I took media studies. And I failed to graduate, thanks entirely to my decision to write a 15,000-word dissertation on the subject of videogames, without bothering to check whether that was a valid topic, which it wasn’t. Forward planning isn’t my strong point.

This is a long-winded way of saying I’ve got shit-all in the way of qualifications. Fortunately I’m lucky enough to work in a field in which a lack of certificates (and talent) hasn’t been a hindrance. I’m glad I received an education, although beyond an ability to read and write I’m not sure quite what it gave me.

On the one hand I’m glad I didn’t go to public school, and on the other I’m jealous of the innate lifelong confidence it seems to instil in people – as though they’re aware of some safety net I can’t see.

The most valuable thing you get from education is a space in which you can make friends, gain experience, and figure a few things out. I spent the first half of my twenties deep in debt and working in a shop, with a vague idea what I wanted to do, but no idea how to go about doing it. At the time I thought I was incredibly lazy; looking back now I realise I kept trying my hand at different things: cartooning, writing, rudimentary web design and so on, until eventually I started getting the kind of work I wanted, after which I worked my arse off out of sheer
crippling guilt over the years I’d been coasting.

Today it’d be harder for a younger me to get a break. For one thing the student debt would be so huge I’d probably have to work at two jobs, thereby leaving little time or energy to dabble with articles or cartoons after-hours. And although technology has made it possible to write, direct and edit a short film on a computer the size of a teaspoon, it’s also flooded the internet with competition, making it harder to stand out.

Even so, success is always possible if you forget about ‘success’ as a concept – it’s hopelessly amorphous anyway – and focus instead on doing what satisfies you, as well as you can. Clichéd, bland advice, but it’s true.

Your grades are not your destiny: they’re just letters and numbers which rate how well you performed in one artificial arena, once. And no one ever checks up on them anyway – so if in doubt, lie about your qualifications. It may be dishonest, but it’s also £9,000 cheaper than any university course.