26 Thursday February 3 2022 | the times
Comment
all automatic, are booming.) Driving
tests are catching up slowly. Eleven
per cent were automatic-only last
year, although an interesting gender
gap has emerged: 6.4 per cent of men
take the automatic test but 15.7 per
cent of women. It’s that Top Gear
dream of commanding a classic car
up a mountain road, elbow out of the
window as you stick her into second,
that makes manuals more manly.Keep the felines free
P
eta (People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals)
has declared that cat-
flaps should be banned. “We
wouldn’t dream of
opening the door and
letting a toddler wander
into the road,” says its
founder, Ingrid Newkirk.
Cat owners, she says, must
instead adapt their houses
into adequate cat homes
and keep pets indoors.
I look outside my
garden office to see my
now almost full-grown
cats climbing trees or
stalking each other from
behind bushes. The
moment they first went
through their little
door was fraught. As with
children, you are
relinquishing control of
something you love. Onbonfire night, Teddy disappeared for
24 hours. I assumed he was doomed
but next day he was back.
That these mysterious, half-tamed,
insouciant creatures happily come
and go, that they could leave at any
moment yet choose to live with me,
is what draws me to cats. They’re not
needy, they can’t be contained. Yes,
they may get run over,
hurt or stolen but they
are free. Freedom —
whether for humans or
felines — is full of risk.In bad odour
W
hat does
“fresh” smell
like? I ask
because my usual
laundry detergent has
changed its formula so
now newly washed
clothes have a violent
smell. Something like
over-ripe melons — or
rather a harsh, synthetic
rendering of that not
unpleasant scent.
It’s part of the mission
creep of modern
washing powders:
instead of seeing their
job as eliminating bad
odours, principally
sweat, they want to
colonise our lives with
their own bespokeW
ill being able to drive
a manual car become
an obsolete skill, like
wiring a plug on a
toaster, or whittling?
My younger son takes his driving test
this week in an automatic, since
several instructors assured him the
gear stick will be dead in ten years.
Yet still he is being ragged by mates
— mainly Yorkshiremen who, unlike
London softies, passed at 17 — that
he’s taking the easier option. Which
of course he is. But does it matter?
I’ve owned automatics for 20 years
and when compelled to drive a
manual find it a mild annoyance. All
that faff at junctions. As a learner it
must be great to bypass gear-
grinding, finding the “biting point”,
and the hell of hill-starts to just
concentrate on the road.
Besides, the future is automatic.
Last year manual cars were for the
first time a minority of newly
registered vehicles. (Electric models,
Joe Rogan is no fool but he’s still dangerous
was going crazy... and he also had a
serious head injury as a kid”.
Rogan’s curiosity is driven by a lust
for privileged information, the stuff
other people don’t know. His lifestyle
is a testament to this: the mushroom
coffee that starts his day, the sensory
deprivation chamber, his insistence
on Onnit’s MCT Oil toothpaste
(“tastes like wet sand and looks like
loose stool” according to a journalist
who tried it). All new information is
exciting. On a recent episode he was
almost beside himself at the prospect
of a new kind of pillow that can be
“activated” in the tumble dryer: “I’m
curious,” he enthused.
However good-natured and
interesting Rogan is, I think there is
something undeniably conspiracist
about this credulous craving to be in
on things other people don’t know
about and to believe you can get
there by “just asking questions”.
However charming the impulse, it
leads you to owl gods and vaccine
scepticism as well as to esoteric
toothpaste brands.
There’s a significant-feeling
moment in one of Rogan’s most
recent episodes with Jordan Peterson
(a regular guest) in which Peterson
recalls how Richard Dawkins
“stripped my skin off” in response to
his suggestion that ancient shamans
had drug-induced visions of the helix
pattern of DNA (a very Rogan idea).
“The problem with Richard
Dawkins,” Rogan sighs, “is he hasn’t
had psychedelic experiences.” An
interesting intellectual generation
gap between reason and unreason.
We’re moving closer towards the
latter. Rogan’s survival of this latest
scandal is another sign.finds sincerity an embarrassing joke
— the path of trolls and shitposters.
The podcast Red Scare, which
recently hosted Jones, has this
nihilistic streak. To that show’s hosts,
Jones is a comic figure. They call him
a “yeti” and a “clown” to his face and
giggle at his inept and growling
attempts at flirtation.
Rogan’s appeal is that he offers the
third way: a kind of inverse-nihilism;
a gregarious, undiscriminating
curiosity; a sunny openness to the
idea that anything might be true.
Chaos is an adventure. This is what
makes him a reassuring figure for
fans, like one of those manly,
goodhearted heroes of Wagner
plunging cheerfully into the abyss. He
is a man of enthusiasms (psychedelic
drugs, weed, whisky, mixed martial
arts, the gym, aliens) armed with an
extraordinary mix of belligerent
credulity and a misguided faith in his
own ability to discriminate between
“alternative facts”.
Often, his faith guides him to the
mainstream: Elon Musk, Louis
Theroux, Bernie Sanders have been
guests. But it takes him elsewhere,
too: Rogan characterises Jones as “an
entertaining, fun guy to be around
who knows a lot of crazy shit”. He
trusts himself to filter what’s worth
knowing (he’s keen on Jones’s theory
about elites worshipping an owl god)
from what should be discarded. “I
actually no longer worry about
disinformation,” a recent guest said,
“there are selection processes where
ideas rise to the top.” Rogan excuses
Jones’s Sandy Hook controversy with
the not very reassuring explanation
that Jones “was in a very bad place in
his life, he was drinking heavily, he‘W
hen,” Joe Rogan
once asked the
conspiracy theorist
Alex Jones, “did
the connection
between aliens and Nazis start?”
Because Rogan’s podcast is, in The
New York Times’s rather envious
formulation, “one of the most
consumed media products in the
world” (a single instalment can
attract tens of millions of listeners),
he can ask whatever he likes.
Earlier in the same four-and-a-
half-hour episode, Rogan and Jones
dwell upon the sexual attractiveness
of the devil (extremely sexually
attractive, Jones insists) and the
possible existence of an alien base in
San Francisco (Rogan sceptical;
Jones adamant).
Not many people are willing to
talk to Jones about the devil’s erotic
appeal or whether the US military
uses drugs to contact aliens, because
he has been almost universally
deplatformed. Of Jones’s many sins,
his tormenting pursuit of the parents
of children killed in the Sandy Hook
massacre with the accusation that
they were government-employed
“crisis actors” is the most egregious.
When Rogan has Jones (an old
friend) on the show, storms whirl.
Staff at Spotify, the platform which
hosts the podcast, complain bitterly;
liberal-minded guests waste whole
minutes of Rogan’s (admittedly
abundant) airtime on futile but
principled denunciations.
Unusually, Rogan’s present
controversy is not about Jones. This
time, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young
have left Spotify in protest at Rogan’s
promotion of Covid disinformation.
But all Rogan controversies are best
explained with reference to Jones.
If we live, as is often claimed, in an
age of “post-truth” — a chaos of
alternative facts, deranged ideas,
conspiracy theories and meaningless
abuse — Jones is an interesting
figure because he’s far ahead of us on
the dark highway to anarchy. For
Jones, the truth is not even a speckof light in the rearview mirror. It has
vanished from his intellectual
landscape. He’s way out in the cold,
nighttime desert with the aliens, the
Nazis, the interdimensional
paedophiles and the shapeshifting
lizards. He is post-post-truth. A
frightening symbol of where we
might end up; a living embodiment
of the internet’s chaos.
To this chaos there are three
responses. The first is to attempt
desperately to bind it with rules and
commandments — the standard
liberal approach, which has its
apogee in the “woke” movement.
The second is a kind of nihilism,
which in the face of so much havoc
denies the value of anything andRogan offers a sunny
openness to the idea
anything might be true
fragrance. Now you can buy capsules
that smell of lavender, camomile or
“the gorgeous scent of one of
nature’s most enticing flowers”. Even
the bog-standard ones have a
headache-inducing pong. I just want
my clothes to smell clean.Off with their heads
O
n a sunny walk through
Westminster we came across a
solemn procession, hundreds
of men and women in costume,
marching to a slow drum-beat. It was
the English Civil War Society’s
annual commemoration of the
beheading of Charles I. Watching
bearded men who all looked like Bill
Bailey struggle to hold heavy pikes, I
wondered what they enjoyed about
this cosplay. Why do they fantasise
about living in a more brutal age?
Since they’d marched from St
James’s Palace, within sight of
Buckingham Palace, I wondered
whether their ceremony might
disconcert the royal family. But these
were cavaliers not roundheads and at
the front one held a wreath to
remember “His Majestie’s horrid
murder”. As they rounded the Mall
to Whitehall where the king lost his
head it was the partying
parliamentarians in No 10 who had
reason to worry.Janice Turner Notebook
Manual cars
don’t belong
on the road
to the future
@victoriapeckhamWheels have come
off our overloaded
ambulance service
Jawad Iqbal
T
he ambulance service is in
crisis. Nothing illustrates
this better than the tragic
case of Bina Patel, who
woke up at her home in
Greater Manchester feeling unable to
breathe. She died after waiting more
than an hour for an ambulance.
Her son Akshay called 999 six
times, pleading with call handlers to
send help. In one recording his
mother can be heard in the
background screaming: “Hurry up, I’m
dying!” By the time the ambulance
turned up, it was too late.
What’s worse is that her case is not
unique. In September a pensioner
died after a 40-hour wait for an
ambulance in Glasgow; the following
month a patient died in the back of
an ambulance while waiting outside
Addenbrooke’s Hospital in
Cambridge to be handed to A&E
staff; and last November a pensioner
was left on the floor of his house for
more than five hours waiting for an
ambulance.
In January, North East Ambulance
Service told patients suffering from a
suspected heart attack or stroke toget relatives to drive them to hospital
rather than face a long wait for
paramedics. It makes a mockery of
national guidelines that say patients
should be transferred from an
ambulance to an emergency
department within 15 minutes.
This crisis has been brewing for
years yet no one in authority has
done anything significant to address
it. Instead the problems mount.
There are growing shortages of
frontline staff. Morale is low, sickness
rates due to stress are high and the
pandemic has stretched resources to
the limit. Last year in one month
alone there were more than a million
calls made to the 999 service.
Structural issues have never been
properly addressed, with ten
ambulance services in England alone,
each with its own problems of staffing
and resources. Budgets have been
squeezed too much and to the
detriment of patient safety: there is an
urgent need for more call assessors
and clinically qualified people to help
sift which incidents require an
ambulance. Hospital trusts must do
more to ensure patients can be
dropped off quickly, even if that
means creating temporary areas to
house patients. And why can’t we have
more paramedics deployed on bicycles
or motorbikes to enable them to
attend more incidents?
That Bina Patel died waiting for an
ambulance is a shameful indictment
of a service that isn’t fit for purpose.
It needs fixing urgently.Jawad Iqbal is a freelance writerIn September, a patient
died after a 40-hour
wait for an ambulance
James
Marriott@j_amesmarriott
The Spotify podcaster is open-minded but credulous and his win will please conspiracy theorists