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Protest Violence Cliché Bingo
I wasn’t there. But as soon as I’d finished work for the day, I glued myself to my laptop, obsessively refreshing news websites, trying to follow the ticker-tape madness of the #demo2010 and #Millbank Twitter feeds, watching the reactions pile up on political blogs. I don’t often fully embrace or participate in the social media commentariat, feeling generally pretty sceptical of its significance and self-obsession, but this time I was right there buzzing alongside every other laptop-shackled numpty. Because this time how the protest was portrayed, how the public(s) reacted, how the news reported — these things seemed more significant. The British public(s) are starting to fully digest the meaning of the coalition government’s programme of ideologically-motivated, economically insane and destructive cuts — and starting to get angry. We’re well behind continental Europe and its movement to resist austerity measures, but I don’t want it to be true that Britain is just going to keep calm and carry on: I want us to struggle. And Wednesday’s protest gave me some hope that we will.
So the reporting and reaction was important to me, because I want to see the public discourse turning, I want to see a wider understanding of the need for anger and resistance, I want to see more support for protesters, even when their direct action can seem frightening to many. And, by and large, I did see the first glimmers of a change in the discourse, at least in the centre-left press. But, as always, inevitably, that hope was buried beneath a mountain of garbage, of clichéd and misleading and irresponsible and editorialising journalism — journalism that failed its duty to enhance public understanding, that, by resorting to hackneyed narratives and obfuscating clichés, actively sought to confuse, prejudice and disempower the general public.
This is nothing new (although the damning ubiquity of one photo was a particularly horrible example of lazy journalism). And in fact there was, as linked above, some better reporting than usual. But I am so tired of this. I used to want to be a journalist, and my first job was on the local paper, but the venal charlatanry of the British media drained every such desire from me. I don’t feel there’s much I can do about this but howl into the void. So I decided to make a game instead, so that at least next time I would have something to do.
The Bingo Card
click to expand
Download a ready-to-print bingo card, with detailed commentary: Front Card and Back Card
The Rules
1. Whenever a major protest occurs, a new game begins;
2. To tick off a square, you must find an example of the cliché in the print, broadcast or online media (blogs, youtube and social networks not included);
3. The first person to score a BINGO (five squares in any direction, including diagonal) and e-mail the sources to harry DOT lodestone AT gmail DOT com wins a prize. The reason for the sourcing is not just so that the adjudicator can check your card, but so that we can also e-mail the media outlet or comment on the article to let them know they’ve been bingod;
4. Some variations in language may be allowed, at the adjudicator’s discretion, but may lose out in the event of a tie-break;
5. Bonus points may be awarded in a tie-break (see overleaf, or for particularly excellent submissions), entirely at the whim of the adjudicator.
Download a ready-to-print bingo card, with detailed commentary: Front Card and Back Card
Protest Violence Cliché Bingo by Harry Giles is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Some Notes
This has been released under a Creative Commons License not because I’m particularly fussed about my ownership of the piece (I mean, it’s bingo) but because I want to actively encourage people to share this bingo card far and wide. I’d love it if a good few people were playing this game every protest, especially if we were able to embarrass media outlets with it.
On that note: I am neither an illustrator nor a graphic designer, so the .pdf of the card is currently quite spartan. I would love it if anyone who does have those talents would like to make a new version of the card that looks nicer. If you need a copy of the original texts, e-mail me.
Finally, because this blog also functions as a semi-professional website, and because potential employers may look at it, I’m going to have to be absolutely, pedantically clear on my position. a) I fundamentally support everyone’s right to protest, and believe that direct action and civil disobedience have historically been and are now important protest tactics, even though they often entail breaking laws; b) I do not believe that property damage is violence, and I certainly will not condemn people who damage property for political aims, but nor do I believe it is always a beneficial tactic to use; c) I do not think that actions like throwing light missiles at police are particularly violent or dangerous, but again I do not think it is always beneficial, and can sometimes greatly damage a protest; d) Personal assault (including dropping a fire extinguisher from a great height) is, obviously, violence, and will very rarely help a protest, particularly in affluent societies, but I don’t feel the need to condemn or condone it, because to think that social change will always happen peacefully for all people is naive and culturally imperialist; e) Any employer who has a problem with their employees holding particular political views is not an employer I would want to work for anyway.
I declare the first round of Protest Violence Cliché Bingo, for the 10/11/10 UK student protests, officially open!
On America
Being a too-short series of thoughts on and records of my recent too-short trip.
1.
My border guard teased me as entered the county; I’d spent twenty minutes giggling at the introductory video blazing over the queue (bald eagles, panoramas of the statue of liberty, stern instructions on how assiduous border guards are):
- What’s the purpose of your visit?
- Oh, um . . . a visit! I’m visiting my er girlfriend’s family.
- Uh-huh? Met them before? Place the fingers of your right hand on the scanner.
- Er, half of them. Now I’m seeing the other half. Her father.
- Thumb. That means you got to get married now. Left hand.
- Er . . . well . . . !
- Thumb. *glances at customs form* I see you brought gifts. Yup, it’s all over for you. Good luck with that.
The whole conversation took place while he was messaging a friend on his iPhone.
2.
I took a piss on American soil. Actually, in an American toilet. I had forgotten how huge they were. It had a big, splashy bowl, and an infrared automatic flush. The urinals had little green barriers between them to protect me from accidentally seeing another man’s penis. I spent much of my trip remarking on how much bigger everything in America is than everything in Britain: toilets, houses, meal portions, gestures of love. I remarked on the same thing returning from Russia. (I have a similar dysfunctional romance with both countries: I am a child of the Cold War.) It might in fact be the case that everything in Blighty is just really small.
3.
The house was surrounded my trees. I’d never really realised how bare and treeless my home, Orkney, is, or how extensively my whole country has been potentially irreversibly deforested. In Raleigh, where I stayed, the land is covered with new growth pine forest – fragrant, airy woods which rapidly reclaimed abandoned farms, because here the trees are strong enough to do that. I’d never understood why people love, hug trees. Now I do. They’re beautiful. And full of birds. The birds I know are sea birds: squawking, aggressive, exciting, social. These birds – I’m seeing cardinals, red-bellied woodpeckers, chickadees for the first time – are colourful, cheerful, tuneful. The air is thick with song and heat. The American robin is a bigger, redder bird than what we call a robin.
4.
There is so much money around. The houses are embarrassingly ostentatious. Real mansions, flaunting. In Britain the noise of building these would be drowned out by the sound of tutting. And everyone seems to want acres of yard – including the urban businesses. The sprawl is like nothing else. Urban living ought to be the most ecological mode of life, when done compactly, mindfully. (Why do the hippies in Asheville oppose every skyscraper?) But there’s a parking lot outside every diner along the huge, huge roads. Expensive, unwalkable suburbs take bites out of the forest; more trees are cut down to build greenways for joggers and dog-walkers. Ker-ching. Ker-ching.
5.
Those huge roads have few markings – the paths for cars are not clearly defined. But every street name is well-labelled.
6.
I love the American concept of service: friendly, conversational, attentive, human. At first I thought it was because it seemed so genuine. But then, most of these waitresses survive on tips. Then again, is British sullenness and resentment any more truthful or self-determined?
7.
Everything I ate seemed delicious, from the bottomless coffee and cheese-laden hash-browns at Waffle House to the hyper-vegan biscuits, greens and gravy at Rosetta’s Kitchen, Asheville. Serving sizes were everywhere enormous, of course. I get Southern cooking now, and by God I spent a portion of every day with the Itis. You can tell you’ve been fed good when you roll over and go to sleep.
8.
Britain just does not understand sushi.
9.
I and all around me seemed to drink only diuretics: coffee in the morning (to wake you up), soda in the afternoon (to keep you going), beer at night (to chill you out). I pissed all day long. Water existed as a medium for carrying caffeine, sugar and alcohol through my body.
10.
Beer was a surprise. The whole culture of micro-brewing in North Carolina, especially around Asheville, produces astonishing work; I think this might be the best beer area outside of Bavaria. And here was me thinking that America produced nothing but trash brew. How tragic that that’s all it exports. Interesting, though, that all the beers were parasitic on European forms: they were American interpretations, rather than American inventions. What would an American original taste like?
11.
Asheville: the town when you can genuinely give the direction turn left at the drum circle. Streets of shops selling nothing in particular: ethnic drapes, new age books, copied statuary. A smell of patchouli everywhere. But despite the bullshit, I felt that spark of wanting to stay. There was a genuine protest culture. An exciting arts scene. An ethic to be part of. And I started to wonder whether the American counterculture wasn’t a little bit further on in its projects, in its realisations of alternative social forms, than its British counterpart – or whether our dirty, neurotic, haphazard anarchism wasn’t a little more truthful, if less hopeful.
12.
The mountains were blue-grey and forest-covered; this horizon seemed like the three-layered background of a side-scrolling platformer. We went up into those mountains. There were back porches. I saw the site of Black Mountain College, a spiritual home. I discovered what a mountain dulcimer looks like, and resolved to learn it. Little communities of aging hippies were interspersed with enclaves of mountain people and musicians. Appalachia. My kitsch memory and fantasy of its music, its accent, its culture started to intersect with its lived reality. The two seemed indistinguishable; everything was proved, disproved. I felt that part of me was home – that same sense of cultural affinity that Americans who claim Scottish descent feel in the Highlands. But this was an imagined Appalachian ascent. Or, perhaps, what I feel everywhere in America: the sense that it is the home of every citizen of the world, the site of our fantasies, our cultural heritage, our imagined future. Our possibility.
13.
Depression medication is everywhere advertised . And every advert is doubled in length by a terrifying sequence of warnings about how this shit might kill you, or make you kill yourself. Depression is real. Be frightened. Ask your doctor about.
14.
Everything is advertised, all the time, everywhere. The public radio has to stop every five minutes for a sponsor list. Television programming is contrived especially to make adverts as intrusive and unavoidable and frequent as possible. Each museum room, exhibit, has a backer in large print.
15.
To compare: print journalism here is vastly superior to the UK’s – more in depth, more wide ranging (if more disguising the difference between advertising and editorial); television journalism is a bottomless pit in the absence of a BBC corollary. If I listened to NPR and read USA Today, I’d get the impression of a well-informed nation, deeply-engaged with its multi-levelled political processes. If I watched Fox, I would despair, and despair.
16.
This is a vast, complicated country. North Carolina, I was told, is comparable in size, population, and geographical distribution to Scotland – but everything seemed to be on a larger scale, or a small part of a great project. The scale of the local here is totally different to what I’m used to: local is a large town, or a state, and not a neighbourhood. I began to sense the psychological effects of federalism (and I liked them): this idea of the relationship between quasi-autonomous regions and vast, suspected overseers, one which echoes down to county level and up to the national. The play of shared values and mythical differences. The cosmopolitan chauvinism. The endless elections and Byzantine debates.
17.
My message to America: build some fucking railways. Again. It’s ridiculous.
18.
Why is it that, when travelling, everything we see must be refracted through the prism of home, defined as either a difference or an identity?
19.
My partner’s grandmother lives where she grew up, and, in her 80s, meets up at a drug store to gossip with her high school friends twice a week. Her son, 50s, went to see the Moody Blues, and she said “I don unnerstan all this new stuff; it don soun like music t me.” The elderly are our memory, our brass mirror. Why does cross-generational conversation seem so rare but untreasured?
20.
It is a triumph of contemporary life that something as extraordinary as air travel has been made to feel so dull.
And yet America’s city lights at 6am, from the air, were a mysterious language, were arcana, asbtract paintings. What is that glittering square? Who are the people in those counter-flowing arterial streams of white and red? What are the patches of darkness, and the points of light?
