Two Chaps Talking

Dear Boy,

A short summer break combined with moving house and the duties of Fatherhood have kept me too long from the keyboard. Consequently my mind is overflowing with unusual levels of hateful bile and closely reasoned vitriol.

Reinforce this with recent circumstances which clearly make us question every second of our lives we waste and I fear you're in for a rough ride...

As you may know, I worked or a while training boring business people in the dark arts of brainstorming. A large part of the work we did was to encourage an attitude of 'positivity' amongst our charges. There was, I recall, a section when one of my wilder eyed colleagues would illustrate the power of 'positive thinking' with a marvellous, though I'm sure, entirely apocryphal story.

"In a recent study at (insert name of academic institution here) two teams of golfers were set the task of improving their swing. Half of the golfers practiced for 15 minutes per day, the rest visualised successful strokes for the same period of time. At the end of the experiment the visualisers showed a marked improvement over the practisers. The reason was thought to be that the practisers would, quite naturally, have experienced a degree of failure whereas the visualisers would only have experienced 15 minutes per day of perfect strokes. They would thus believe themselves incapable of failure".

There you have, in a French-polished nutshell, the flaccid, weary, self-deluding doctrine that's the root cause of everything from shite novels, through reality TV to US foreign policy.

It comes, naturally, as most of the worst things do, out of America: a sort of cult of relentless, asinine positivity, which, serendipitously, yields the deathless acronym - CRAP.

CRAP is what makes any American, and increasingly most Englishmen, recoil in physical disgust if you dare to suggest that something can't be done, is a really stupid idea, has been tried and failed before or is just a plain, flat out physical impossibility. If you try and explain it their eyes cross and they suffer a spontaneous nosebleed as they attempt to assimilate such heresy.

"But, they stutter, how can you be so negative?"

Well I guess they have me there. Perhaps it's just a talent

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not suggesting moping around like a bad smell denying any possibility of change or success in life. Many good things happen. I'm a relentlessly optimistic person and can always be relied on to encourage and support wherever possible. I believe in giving it one's best shot. But I also try to be truthful.

In English schools, whole generations have been developmentally warped by a system that refuses to acknowledge the existence of failure. By years of frantic goal shifting it has become possible for everyone to pass everything.

Have you ever seen those little signs on the backs of trucks that enable you to dob in the driver? This very day, in the cab home from work I saw a sign on the back of a delivery van which said....

CALL XXXX_XXXXXX

IF MY DRIVING IS GREAT

I reached for the phone to tell them that, though their driver was entirely adequate, their utterly transparently ham-fisted attempt at motivational positive spin made me want to vomit my liver.

Why is this important? Because failure, we are told, is demotivating.

In truth, the reason our social educational system and our work hierarchy have purged the possibility of failure from our lives is that, if we fail at school or work we might just find ourselves saying

"actually, they're right. I'm rubbish at this - I think I'll try something else. I'm going to pack all this bollocks in and go and open a sub-post office in rural Dorset. I've never enjoyed being Sales Manager for this incontinence product conglomerate. I'm going to take my wife and kids and fuck off to Tuscany in a converted bus where I'm going to apologise to them continuously for being a souless yuppy shit until, pray God, they remember who I am and love me again".

And there you have it. The reason for CRAP is that it keeps us from questioning the status quo of tedious careers and pointless education.

Anyone I've ever respected has failed. Repeatedly. Day in day out until failure made them better or they quit and did something utterly brilliant instead.

CRAP gives us a World of staggering mediocrity, a world of micro-slebs who feel we owe them attention and airtime just because they want it so badly and are deluded enough to believe in themselves. CRAP keeps alive the notion that George W Bush in some way deserves his position. That his crippling stupidity was not an impediment because any American who believed in himself enough could sit in the oval office in his place.

CRAP makes it impossible for us to pass on experience, to motivate or to educate and, most heinous of all, it makes us feel guilty for telling the truth.

We have a unique opportunity, Dear Friend, to something great for the world.

Let's go out, this very day and make a difference. Let's stand up from our keyboards, put on our coats, select a tightly furled brolly from the rack, go out into the street and tell someone they're shit.

In the end they'll thank us for it.

Yours Aye

T