Context is King

Whilst not wishing to comment upon a court case currently in progress, it has to be said that Graham Linehan’s trial for allegedly harassing a trans activist does serve to highlight the fact that the Tweets which resulted in him being arrested for incitement to violence as he stepped off of a plane from the US, aren’t an isolated incident.  I recall that, with regard to getting good rankings on search engines, people used to declare that ‘Content is King!’ (how naive we were then).  In real life, however, it is context that is king when it comes to information.  Hence, put into the wider context of Linehan’s social media activities, those Tweets intimating that a legitimate way of dealing with the thorny issue of single sex spaces for women would be to punch any trans interlopers in the balls might well be taken seriously by the authorities when a complaint was made about them.  Taken alone, they can be passed off as a joke – a poor one, but a joke, nonetheless – but seen against the background of his relentless, obsessive, some might say, anti-trans campaign and the often aggressive and violent language employed in said campaign, they might well be a cause for concern.  Because that’s the nub of the matter:  nobody is saying that Linehan, or anyone else, can’t have, or even express, views sceptical of trans rights, only that they should be expressed in reasonable, rational terms, without recourse to angry and violent language which could be taken as an incitement to violence.

Which is why, of course, the likes of Fartage, the Tories and the rabid right-wing press, do their best to avoid mentioning the context of the case. Instead, they try to present Linehan as a victim of wokeness-gone-mad, a hero for standing up against political correctness and left-wing bullying, whereas, in truth, he’s just a very angry man who, despite being a writer, is seemingly incapable of expressing himself in a reasonable and coherent manner.  Obviously, this isn’t an isolated phenomenon: it’s the right’s stock-in-trade to always omit context from any issue, instead presenting everything as an entirely isolated incident.  Take the business of the current campaign by shady players to stick England flags everywhere.  If we were to believe the right-wing press, it is a simple expression of patriotism and attempts to remove them represent a typical left-wing repression of our freedoms.  What they omit to mention is the context of this campaign, that the England flag has, in recent years, been co-opted by various extreme right groups and used to intimidate not just immigrants, but anyone who disagrees with their pound shop fascism – oppose the posting of that flag and you are obviously an unpatriotic traitor trying to undermine our national identity.

‘It’s only a flag – what’s your problem?’ the crypto-fascists ask, a sentiment echoed by Fartage, Tories and the press, as if they are completely unaware that flags are never ‘just’ flags.  They can have all manner of connotations according to context, often amplifying their innate symbolism.  Take the confederate flag in the States. For many years this was just seen as a harmless, albeit archaic, regional symbol, a way for the Southern states to assert some sense of identity and independence from the federal government. Something flown by ‘Good Ol’ Boys’, as a pretty harmless symbol of rebellion against ‘The Man’. Damn it, none of us thought that the Duke boys were racists because they had the confederate flag painted on the roof of the ‘General Lee’, or that Uncle Jesse was the ‘Grand Wazoo’ (or whatever the fuck they call themselves) of the local Ku Klux Klan branch. They were just a bunch of loveable reprobates running moonshine sticking a finger up at corrupt local law. That was the context we saw it in. But with the rise of a new generation of the extreme right in the US, (encouraged by the likes of Trump), that flag has been co-opted as a symbol of their ‘resistance’, not against corrupt lawmen, or Federal tax collectors, but instead against such insidious things as letting black people vote and racial equality. The context of its display has changed.

Getting back to the UK, the motivation for wanting to fly these flags is never questioned – I mean, why do you need to have England flags plastered all over England?  I don’t know about anyone else, but I know that I’m in England, I don’t need visual confirmation everywhere, even painted on mini-roundabouts.  Are those putting them up saying that they think people are so stupid that they don’t know where they are? But, of course, they’d respond that with country overrun by foreigners, jabbering away in their heathen foreign tongues and wearing their ethnic clothes, it’s difficult to know that you are still in England. That’s the context that they’d like to postulate so as to justify their actions. Excepte that the real context is quite different. Despite what the right-wing press will try and have you believe, there aren’t UK cities where white people, British citizens or English speakers are in the minority. The proportion of the UK population that immigrants make up is tiny. But they relentlessly try and convince us otherwise, continually highlighting the number of Muslim (and by implication non-white) politicians there are now – just look at the amount of attention Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London’s background gets from the right-wing press, regardless of the issue at hand, or the way in which this same press feels the need to keep emphasising that the current Home Secretary is Muslim, regardless of the irrelevance of this fact. But in order to create a context for their flag flying fetish, the right has to create this whole alternate reality, where ‘we’ are under siege from ‘foreign devils’ and government is being taken over by Muslims (who are undoubtedly fundamentalist fanatics hell-bent on imposing Sharia Law), then try and gaslight us into believing it exists via the media that their allies control.

Look, if somebody wants to fly a flag, any flag, on their own property then, so long as it doesn’t contravene planning or safety laws or it isn’t offensive (ie a Nazi swastika), then good luck to them (although I don’t know why anyone would want to have a flagpole in their garden).  But sticking them in public places without permission, or painting them on roads, is simply vandalism, regardless of the flag involved – it can also present a safety hazard as flags hung from lampposts, say, can be a distraction to drivers or obscure their view at junctions. I find it fascinating, though, that the sorts of right-wingers and newspapers who usually decry vandalism seem to want to defend this particular instance of vandalism.  Which they can only do by their perverse refusal to properly contextualise the issue.

Doc Sleaze