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Just Say No
From BoF Issue 3
It was going ten pin bowling with Christians that made me
realize something was wrong. Admittedly,
I was the victim of some classic Holy Joe tactics. I’d recently started a new job in a new town
and my overly pious colleague sensed an opportunity to feast on some vulnerable
agnostic spirit. “There’s a group of us
going bowling if you’d like to come along”.
What should have happened at this point was a simple no. Attired, of course, in the caddish outfit of
“I’d love to but…”. However, as on many
previous similar occasions, something mysteriously took possession of my better
instincts. Possibly it was the hand of
God. And instead of doing what my brain
was telling me to; scream No, NO, NO!, hit my colleague in the face with a
telephone and hide under the desk, what I did was say yes. The true folly of this course of action was
revealed to me in the next moment when, after we had agreed our bowling
contact, the sacred small print was cruelly revealed: “Just me and some people
from the church”. Told you so, said my
brain as I went and cried quietly in the corner.
Later that week, as 25 middle aged men hit the lanes
occasionally shouting out “That one’s for you Jesus!” when a strike went down, two
questions refused to leave my mind. The
first being where the hell are all the impressionable young Christian woman,
and the second; why the hell did I not just say no. The whereabouts of the sexy Christian girls
remained elusive, despite the internet research I carried out into the
topic. Musing on just saying no,
however, led me to many an ill thought out and badly researched conclusion on
human society. Ideal material for the
BoF then.
I discovered
I live in the age of the positive.
Subsumed by the organization, the corporation or the collective it is
expected that my answer to any question posed at any time by those
hierarchically placed above me will be 'yes.'
And who is to blame for this sorry state of affairs? None other than that Orkian master of cocaine
fuelled sentimentality Robin Williams.
The key moment in the history of the yes came in 1989 when Williams unleashed
“carpe diem” on the world. Since Dead Poets Society, seize the day has
been a mantra used to belittle anyone one who prefers “can’t be arsed” as their
motto. Take the scene where Williams’s
character, schoolboy’s idol John Keating, demands that shy Todd Anderson
perform a Whitman-esque free association in front of the class. Naturally, he seizes the day and in 2
mintues, by saying yes to an insistent Keating, Todd is a new man. What about the alternative version where
sensitive young Todd’s life is unsurprisingly destroyed by being forced to
stand in front of his classmates and act like an arse? Seize the day? Surely it’s preferable to seize Robin Williams’
testicles and squeeze until he apologises.
All that emoting, standing on desk shouting, orthodoxy
shredding yessiness convinced people that they had to agree to everything or else
their lives would be meaningless shells orbited by regret. Even a yes student blowing his own head off couldn’t
dent everyone's enthusiasm for carping that diem.
Actually, I’m being rather disingenuous to the film, primarily
for the purpose of inserting the words “seizing” and “testicles” in the
paragraph above. Dead Poets Society is a great story of people challenging
oppressive authority and orthodoxy, if a little fanciful and simplistic. But of course the best way for oppressive
authority and orthodoxy to crush any radical awakening is to co-opt and use the
very things that threaten it. Thus a
motivational speaker supplied by the company I work for extolled us to “learn Latin”
and seize the day. Which was great, so
long as the only seizing you did was work based and in line with achieving
company targets. Seize the sales figures,
seize them and find self actualization!
Look at how advertising plays on this terror of having a
single regret in life. After all, what
is advertising but an aggressive attempt to get me to say yes and open my wallet?
Yes lifestyles are sold in place of products.
Just do it; the ‘it’ being buy
trainers with a 1000% mark up made in a warehouse in Hanoi by 5 year olds. The bank that likes to say yes; to
repossessing your house when you fail to afford the repayments on the absurdly
inflated mortgage they gave you. Are you a Cadbury's Fruit & Nut case?;
Yes! Give me another bar of tooth rot. Ah,
Bisto; I just like Ah bisto, but you get the point.
This niggling sensation that there was too much Yes in
the world was cemented by the experience of reading Danny Wallace’s Yes Man. The book
describes the crazy madcap adventures which result from Wallace’s commitment to
saying yes to anything asked of him. I
approached the book with an open mind, ready to have my preconceptions about
Yes and Yes people overturned. Happily I
loathed it.
I should have heeded the warnings signs that are there on
the front cover: “This book is a treat”
says Richard Madeley. “Funny. Very, very
funny” adds Dom Jolly. Oh dear. Surely any book that can only muster quotes
from the renowned daytime TV arse and the disappearing tosspot prankster is in
trouble. Nevertheless I ploughed
on. The book commences with Wallace in
something of a rut having recently split up with his girlfriend. A chance encounter with an enigmatic stranger
results in his conversion to the world of the yes. Confronted with the horror of an empty diary
we are introduced to the cavalcade of characters that should be populating the
baron pages:
Next I phoned Wag.
‘Wag! Waggle! Wagamama!’
Sadly, this is not me saying that. This is how Wag chooses to answer the phone
sometimes”
It was around this point, on the 18th of 400
long, long pages, that the Yes campaign lost a potential convert. Had
the narrative continued with Wagamama’s phone being explosive and thus blowing
his head off, I might have felt some affinity with the story. Unfortunately, the type of person who answers
the phone like this is seen as boon to Wallace’s social life and ‘pint with
Wag’ is added to the diary. My growing
sense of bilious loathing continued on reaching the following passage:
‘I’d missed birthdays. I’d missed barbeques. I’d missed various and assorted parties. I’d missed dinner with friends, I’d missed
nights down the pub, I’d missed Tom’s stag do.
God, Tom’s stag do. I bet that
had been legendary. I bet they’d all got together and painted
his privates blue and handcuffed him to the buffet car of a train. Suddenly, I
wanted to do that”.
Call me a miserable shit if you
like, and many people do; I’ll call you annoying prick. Tom’s stag do would be high on my list of
events to avoid, just behind “being knifed” and “jump off bridge”. Especially
if Wagamama was invited. I’m more of a
person that sits on train and scowls as a group of pissed, guffawing men find a
blue cock hilarious, and magnanimously wishes them a lingering and painful death.
i.e. I’m not a cretin.
Wallace goes on it compound the book’s all round twatery*
(allowed in scrabble) with a section guaranteed to set any chippy northerner’s
teeth on edge:
I’d worked for the BBC ever since
leaving university, when I’d somehow talked my way into a six-month traineeship
in the Light Entertainment department… who wanted to work, when they could
dance and play outside, in the sunshine, saying Yes to people willy-nilly,
instead
It is apparently
easy to get a job with the BBC where you can do what you want, when you
want. A book detailing how this miracle of
employment came about might have interested me.
However, the role of work in the book is indicative of its fundamental
dishonesty. Where is the “can you work
24hrs overtime without pay please Danny - Yes!”
Where is “the bog’s blocked on level two Danny, be a mate and swill it
out would you - Yes!” Work is a benign,
merry irrelevance in the book, whereas in reality, to anyone who hasn’t ‘talked
their way into a 6 month traineeship’ with the BBC, it’s the shits. The place where saying yes will lead to
nothing but pain. Similarly, when
Wallace encounters the predictable email request for his bank details from King
Abdullah the response is:
I made a harrumph sound , I drank
my tea, I ate an inexplicably large amount of toast, and I went to bed.
So that would be a no, then. In the happy, wealthy, London media world of the book nothing
encroaches that could ever threaten the financial standing of our wacky, care-free
hero. The bank account details issue is dishonestly
side stepped with as another of Danny’s great mates sends a capering reply, in
effect saying no for him. Indeed, it is
this abdiction of self responsibility that Wallace finds appealing:
…the thing that Ian just didn’t understand – could
probably never understand – was just
how good saying Yes had made me feel. It
was utterly liberating. My life was in the hands of everyone but me.
As we all know, thanks to the bong-eyed French
philosopher Sartre, hell is other people; people who wear Burberry caps and
stab you or those that talk about streamlining the current product flow
leverage. Unless you are a member of the
London media
elite placing your life in their hands is like basting yourself with essence of
gnu and finding the nearest crocodile’s mouth to have a nap in.
After 250 tedious pages of yes waffle I finally reached
the point where Wallace realises the error of his ways and finds a place for no
in his life:
No is power. No says ‘I’m in charge’… Maybe being able to
say No is the one thing that keeps us sane.
However in an incongruous piece of brevity, just 10 pages
later Wallace indulges in the lonely naysayer clichés of staring forlornly out
of the window, regretting saying no to the opportunity to eat a Domino’s pizza,
and impress his characterless tosspot friends:
I glanced down at what I’d
written in my diary. I weighed up what
it all meant, and realized in an instant that it meant… well.. nothing.
Of course there is nothing worse in the peer obsessed
world of London media than the horror of the empty diary.
How on earth could you impress your coke snorting chums without another
amusing anecdote about Wagglesmama getting his head stuck up his own arse? Wallace presents the fallacious argument of ‘No’
equalling lonely bed-sit despair, rather than peace, creation or freedom, and ‘Yes’
equalling hilarious escapades rather than irritation and destitution via theft
of your bank details. The book is pure propaganda.
Looking around for further information to slate Wallace
and hoping to find out that he was an Oxbridge graduate (he wasn’t, dammit) I
came across the following update from his website:
Regular visitors will know that a
few weeks ago I asked for your help in raising £5000 to build a new classroom
at the Gatumbiro Primary
School in Kenya
How well intentioned, how… annoying. The world probably needs folk like this to
combat global poverty, but we all hate them.
Just look at Bono.
Yes men are people like Wallace – smug, annoying, talking
at inordinate length without any wit (having never met Danny Wallace he is
welcome to refute these ill founded accusations by taking part in a BoF
interview. No fee included) He travels
across the world, indulges in crazy antics and dabbles with suspicious
substances all of which are meant to prove the validity of the ‘yes’ course of
action. Unfortunately, for me all this
does is prove the validity of what Oscar Wilde said; “Action is the refuge of
people who have nothing whatsoever to do."
In reality, yes will leave you cowed, beaten up and
penniless, because people are bastards.
But that might not have pleased Dom Jolly and Richard Madeley. And just to rack up the pertinent quotation
kudos, Pascal wrote that ‘the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does
not know how to stay quietly in his room.’
Certainly Wallace and his ceaseless activity caused me great unhappiness
having to read all about it.
Dipping into the respected world of popular psychology,
say yes to a child constantly and you produce a beast of satanic
proportions. Introduce a little no and
you get a rounded individual. However,
the stern 1950s patriarch removing his pipe to say ‘no, you can’t have another
spoonful of gruel, William, now get back to resenting me’ was replaced by the
feeble 1960s hippy removing his spliff to say ‘yes, do whatever you want,
Moonbeam 3, you’re entitled to anything’.
Which sadly leads on to the bloated vest clad cretin of today bellowing
“hit the fucker again Conner. Or I’ll
bray you”. Which is pretty much how we
find ourselves in a society that expects everything and denies itself nothing,
racking up debts of trillions, isolating ourselves in overpriced homes with the
plasma flavoured fruits of our compliance with consumption. Told you I was a miserable shit.
Happily, there are alternatives to the mindless
acceptance of yes. Good ones too. Flann O’ Brien’s marvellous, bizarre and
actually funny The Third Policeman contains
the following passage describing the meditations of Old Mathers:
That no is
a better word than yes…I discovered that everything you do is in response to a
request or a suggestion made to you by some other party either inside your or
outside. Some of these suggestions are
good and praiseworthy and some of them are undoubtedly delightful. But the majority of them are definitely bad
and are pretty considerable sins as sins go… I would say that the bad ones outnumbered
the good ones by three to one… I therefore decided to say No henceforth to
every suggestion, request or inquiry whether inward or outward. It was the only simple formula which was which
was sure and safe. It was difficult to
practise at first and often called for heroism but I persevered and hardly ever
broke down completely. It is now many
years since I said yes. I have refused
more requests and negatived more statements than any man living or dead. I have rejected, reneged, disagreed, refused
and denied to an extent that is unbelievable… The system leads to peace and
contentment.
Hoorah for Old Mathers!
Alright, he’s a scary old man living alone in a mansion, but he’s
peaceful and contented. So he says. But he’s not the only one. Take some other famous literary no men from my
limited repertoire of reading. Howard
Roark, the hero of Ayn Rand’s The
Fountainhead refuses to comprise on, well, anything really. On being asked to collaborate on another architectural
monstrosity Roark declares ‘there are some things I cannot do’. A simplistic interpretation of that isolated
sentence would label it failure, a weakness, when in fact Roark is refusing to
bend his will to the mediocrity of the bland corporate mindset. It is a wonderful moment and a triumphant
refutation of this concept that acquiescence results in liberation.
How about Bartleby?
Melville’s famous scrivener has inspired many a bored and frustrated
soul caught in the cage of forced employment with his “I prefer not to”
response to anything asked of him. Bartleby
intrigues and inspires. And admittedly ends
up dead in prison. But that is the point of the no man; they shake the system
that encages others. Some are
victorious, others perish but both are the heroes of their stories. I could bring in Rousseau’s The Social Contract and Theroux’s Passive Resistance, had I read
them. But they sound like they’d back me
up. Take a few cinematic equivalents,
instead. The Shawshank Redemption shows how a no man uses the cover of yes
to shaft the oppressive system that thinks it controls him. Andy Dufresne’s
escape from Shawshank Prison is another moment of no triumphalism. No less inspiring is Red’s rejection of
obsequiously seeking his freedom form the parole board:
Rehabilitated? It's just a
bullshit word. So you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my
time. Because to tell you the truth, I don't give a shit.
Another
prison drama, Cool Hand Luke has the
same effect. Luke’s persistent denial
and subversion of the system he is forced to live in tickles the latent rebel
in us all. Like Bartleby he is a
casualty in the war against yes, but at the film’s conclusion Luke is a folk
hero, an inspiration to others and a man who once ate 50 boiled eggs in an hour. What’s not to admire? And look, it’s almost as if I’d thought all
this through; Danny Wallace says “I weighed up what it all meant, and realized
in an instant that it meant… well.. nothing”.
But Luke Jackson has another opinion; “Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can
be a real cool hand.”
Who are the heroes of history? The yes men who follow orders or the ones who
choose to disobey? A mixture of both,
obviously, but let’s skew the argument in favour of those who have the courage
to face down an absurd and vicious society that demands they say yes. 'No, I'm not’ said Rosa Parks when asked if
she was moving into the ‘colored’ section of the bus in Montgomery, Alambma in
1955. Who is lionised more, the
acquiescent Chamberlain or that old drunk bulldog Churchill? The suffragettes said no to patriarchal orthodoxy,
the Tolpuddle Martyrs to oppressive slave-wages. That bloke who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, erm… Jesus?
Alright, I didn’t pay enough attention in History GCSE but go with me on
this one; I’ve got anecdotal evidence, which all lawyers will tell you is the
best type.
This suspicion that ‘Yes’ lay at the heart of a global
conspiracy more dangerous than neo-con sects or Islamic Killer Robots was
confirmed by, unsurprisingly, the fount of all evil; my boss. At one of our regular life wasting session
known as the “one to one” (or 121 as it is unnecessarily and irritatingly
abbreviated) the boss was anxious to tick off the requirement that employees be
“positive about change”. Ordinarily I’m not
the argumentative type, but rather than do as I usually do and grunt a
disinterested agreement, I found myself possessed by the spirit of an obstinate
bull refusing to copulate on demand despite a cattle prod wielding farmer. Because I simply didn’t understand the
question. What change? I inquired. Well, change in general, came the reply. But what is change in general? Just change that might occur. Ok, I thought, death is a change and I’m not
all that keen on it. Same goes for
developing genital warts or being sacked (although this one is something I’m
occasionally in favour of). And on we
went, eventually, reaching a compromise as I maintained that it ‘depends’ and
the boss ticked the box marked ‘yes’.
It was this two pronged attack on human integrity that
piqued the latent rebel. What was
demanded was that I say yes to a yes and go away like a good little drone. You must be ‘positive’, i.e. say yes to any
management diktat that comes your way.
You must say yes, in writing to saying yes. Or else.
That way, should you feel slightly put out having to sell more of your
life or disagree with being given the boot, well, you’re just being silly
because, look here, you said you’re positive about change. We’ve done everything we can…
This yes culture in the modern workplace is another
assault on freedom of thought and expression.
What if I feel that the introduction of a corporate newspaper costing
£100,000 per year is a bad idea? Hiring
Bernard Manning as the Christmas Party entertainment at a cost of £5,000? A
dreadful idea, especially as he’s dead.
But if I express my lack of faith in my superiors’ decisions I am simply
‘being negative.’ And anyone who’s
negative clearly has a personality disorder, and suffers from impotence and
needs psychiatric care. As Wallace
concurs with his all too brief foray in to the world of no, yes equals acquiescence,
yes equals subservience, which is exactly what employers and managers want in
their worker drones, while no equals power.
But it is difficult to say no. People, like all animals, are comforted by
the uniform behaviour of their herd. The
weight of an insecure society is instantly upon you should you decide that Eastenders is indeed shite and not to
watch it or that you prefer creating to consuming or you decide to stay in rather
than go out to be vomited on. The
culture of yes is all about saying yes to the mindless mass of people.
Not yourself, not nature, not anything but wine coiffing, barbeque
holding media consuming middle class twats who I am told I must aspire to be or
the gutter dwelling pissheads who are having what I am informed is a great
night out. The fear of no is the fear
instilled by the forces of conformity whispering that you will be unpopular,
disliked, ostracized, bullied and end your friendless, mockable days moulding
in a ditch with only a dead bird for company.
Yet like most fears all this is a myth.
Look at our literary and historical forbearers contrast them with the yes
banality that surrounds you everyday. Reject
yes and you can be a liberated, contented and creative soul. Or else enjoy Danny Wallace’s Yes Man and regale the pub with your
astounding exploits before getting your cock out and painting it blue. If you want me I’ll be at home reading Bartleby.
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