The world can be a terribly terrifying place, and throughout history people have done horrendous things to other people at any given time. I can perfectly understand if some people would rather not hear about it. The average human mind is not equipped to deal with all the atrocities, the suffering, the injustice, and all the horrors that have been a part of our history from the very first day. It takes superhuman mental strength to look at the unvarnished truth about life, the universe, and everything without going insane. Most people simply do not possess that kind of strength, so how do you expect them to cope with reality?
Everyone has the right to view the world through a filter, a shield that protects them from having to deal with what they’re incapable of dealing with. Everyone has the right to protect whatever little amount of sanity they have left. Thomas Huxley once said that the greatest tragedy of science was the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. That doesn’t just apply to science and scientists; it applies to everyone. We all have our own hypotheses of how the world works, and those of us who are not scientists and who do not actively seek the validation of their hypotheses will perceive any facts that question their faith and contradict their beliefs as an unwelcome challenge to their way of life and a significant threat to their mental wellbeing. Everyone has the right to distract themselves from the harsh realities of life by means of light entertainment and a belief system that favours (at least on the surface) hope over fear and comfort over truth. People have a right to comfort. And that is all that MMC provides. We provide comfort to all those poor souls who find too much knowledge of the truth too heavy a burden to bear.
It had been only thanks to Mr Maddock’s religious passion—some may want to call it fanaticism—that the church had returned to the center of public attention in recent years. By following the Pope on every single one of his trips around the world and covering everything he said, everything he did down to his last fart, on our national and international TV channels and on our radio stations and in our newspapers and on our websites, we had turned him into a pop star, the kind of pop star the popes had been in the olden days before all those beautiful, young and modern pop stars, all those Justins and Brittneys and Gagas had shown us how it’s done.
Remember John Paul II? He used to be a pop star. He was a pop star in the sense that he was extremely popular, eloquent, and relatively modern for his time, i.e. the late 1970s and early 80s. But John Paul’s problem was that he overstayed his welcome by a good 20 years. His fan base aged with him, and he failed to significantly tap into the coveted younger demographic, people who weren’t even born yet when he was elected Pope. The world has changed a lot since the 1970s. Society, technology, the media, they have all made quantum leaps into the 21st century in the last two decades, but a millennia-old organization like the Roman Catholic Church was struggling to keep up and adapt to conditions that not only kept changing but that were changing at a faster rate than any time before in human history.
It wasn’t for a lack of trying, though. Benedict XVI was the first pope to use Twitter, except he never actually used it himself which—quite frankly—was a huge mistake. In terms of public relations it was an unforgivable mistake. One of the greatest appeals of Twitter is that it gives regular, normal people like you and me direct access to celebrities by effectively eliminating the middleman. It is no coincidence that the Latin word
medium
literally means
middle
. The traditional media—newspapers, radio, and television—used to be the middlemen between celebrities such as singers, actors, artists, politicians and so on, and the common people. If you were a celebrity you talked to the media, and the media would relay your message—more or less accurately—to the rank and file. I’m asking you, why on earth would you use a service like Twitter, whose most interesting feature is the absence of a middleman, and then install another middleman yourself? It doesn’t make any sense. If you want to be on Twitter, you better do your own tweeting instead of having some halfwit intern do it for you. If you’re standing in St Peter’s Square with your hands raised in blessing the masses, and thousands of people in front of you have their iPhones lighting up with a tweet from you when you obviously haven’t been tweeting, then you’re effectively wasting all the great potential of social media. This is not the Middle Ages anymore where people would have been stupid enough to believe that as Pope you were probably powerful enough to send out a tweet without using your hands. Nowadays most people are still pretty stupid, but they’re not
that
stupid. And believe me when I tell you that the average stupid person does not appreciate the notion that you might think they’re stupid.
I know that Christians are big on forgiveness and mercy and all these noble concepts, so some of them will say, ‘Oh, the Pope is a busy man, of course he has people who do these petty things for him.’ Others might say, ‘Oh, the Pope is an old man, of course he doesn’t know how to use Twitter.’ But trust me, even as the Pope you don’t want to constantly rely on forgiveness and mercy for all your fuck-ups. You’re the leader of 1.2 billion Catholics in the world, so
lead
, for Christ’s sake! Stand in front of St Peter’s with an iPad in your hands and send out a tweet to all your followers in the square and all your followers around the world who are watching you live on MMC News24 in over 120 countries. You have no idea what this will do to people’s perception of you. It will make you appear modern, tech-savvy, and cool. It will make you look like a pop star, and people will love and admire you for it. Especially the people you need like no other if you want to make an impact not only on today’s world, but on the world of tomorrow: the people in the 14 to 29 demographic.
Mr Maddock was a big fan of Twitter, which is not to say he completely understood how it worked. He was well aware of its enormous potential, but not so much of its dangers and pitfalls.
One day he came to me and said, “Pickle, I want to be on Twitter. Go put me a team together.”
It took me three weeks and a whole lot of persuading to talk him out of it. As Mr Maddock’s head of PR and marketing, my biggest priority was to keep both MMC as well as Mr Maddock himself out of harm’s way in terms of public image and perception. Mr Maddock didn’t always like the decisions I had to make on his behalf, but I couldn’t afford to take his personal sensibilities into consideration when it came to making crucial business decisions. I was being paid to do a job, and if I do a job I do it right because that is an integral part of my own professional image. If you work in public relations and your own public image is not 100% pristine and flawless, then what does that say about your professional skills?
If I had allowed Mr Maddock to be on Twitter, it would have not only put his own public image in jeopardy, it also would have tarnished my reputation as one of the best PR consultants in the world. I managed to talk him out of employing a team to impersonate him on Twitter, but then he wanted to do it himself. As far as Twitter was concerned, it was evident to me that Mr Maddock was like a little boy who had seen everyone in the playground play with this shiny, brand new toy, and so he wanted it too. Not because he was particularly interested in the toy itself, but because he didn’t want to feel left out. He only wanted people to see that he was just and cool and hip as everyone else. Now if you’re dealing with an actual little kid, it is quite okay to give him the benefit of the doubt and let him have his toy. In fact, it’s even advisable because kids need to try out different things. You can never know which will spark his interest, capture their imagination, and keep the fire of their passion burning for the rest of their lives. However, I wasn’t dealing with an actual ten-year-old; I was dealing with a 62-year-old who happened to be the most powerful media tycoon in the world. I had been working for Mr Maddock for over 30 years at that point, and there was not a shred of doubt in my mind that letting him anywhere near Twitter—and thus giving him direct, unfiltered access to a worldwide audience—was a terrible idea. It would have been the equivalent of making a kid who’s suffering from Tourette syndrome high school valedictorian. He would blurt out his half-baked, ludicrous ideas in bizarrely convoluted language with a couple of obscenities and expletives thrown in for good measure, and halfway through his speech he would lose interest, say, ‘I’m done with this shit,’ and go home. I knew that because I knew Mr Maddock.
Or so I thought.
The Gospel According to Michael – 3
Julian evolved into my friend the Darwinian way; that is to say by means of random mutation and natural selection.
The random mutation was that my family moved to his street when I was four years old. That never would have happened if my mum hadn’t had that job offer from a local biotech company to become their head of research. It was a good job with a good salary, so after 20 years at Microsoft, my dad decided to quit and become a freelance software developer and IT consultant. He sold some of his Microsoft shares and built us a nice little big house in Finchley, close to mum’s new job and with a home office where my dad would write code all day while Mum was doing cancer research and I was at nursery school. That’s where I first met Julian, and I naturally selected him as my best friend because he stood out from the other kids. I didn’t like the other kids much. I thought most of them were stupid.
One day our nursery teachers made us play a game called
All Birds are Flying High
. It went like this: the teacher would say something like, ‘All eagles are flying high!’ and everybody had to raise their arms because eagles can fly. Then the teacher would say, ‘All airplanes are flying high!’ and again everybody had to raise their arms, because airplanes can fly as well. But when she would say, ‘All police cars are flying high!’ you weren’t supposed to raise your arms because, well, police cars can’t fly, and if you raised your arms anyway you lost the game. Then our teacher decided to let us kids do the announcing. First up was a dumbass kid named Phil Dixon, and he started off with, ‘All birds are flying high!’ and everybody raised their arms, except Julian. All the other kids started laughing and pointing their fingers at him.
He said, “Penguins don’t fly.”
The other kids laughed even more because they didn’t know that penguins were birds, and the teacher said, “But Julian, Phil meant
real
birds.” And she laughed at him too.
So he got up from his chair and went to a corner of the room where he started playing by himself. That’s when I went over and joined him. I’d been at nursery school only for a couple of days, so I didn’t really know him yet, but I sat down with him and said, “Emus don’t fly either.”
He nodded. “Or kiwis.”
“Or dodos.”
“What’s a dodo?” Julian asked.
“A bird that couldn’t fly. But it became extinct.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I have a book about birds,” I said.
“Can you show it to me?” Julian asked.
I said, “Sure.”
Later that day when my mum came to pick me up from nursery school, the teacher took her aside to have a word with her. She told my mum that I had smiled and played with another kid today, and that she thought it would be a good idea if Julian and I became friends, because I didn’t like playing with the other children. That made my mum very happy, and my dad too when she told him about it over dinner that night. I was happy too, because I had made a friend. I’d never had a friend before, and now I had one who was the only other person in nursery school who knew that penguins were birds.
A few days later Julian came over to my place and I showed him that book. I knew most of the birds because my mum had told me all about them, what they were called and where they lived. When we reached a page with a bird that I couldn’t remember, Julian said, “It’s a toucan.”
“How do you know?”
“That’s what it says there.” He pointed at the word next to the bird, the word I couldn’t read because I was only four years old. “T-O-U-C-A-N. Toucan.”
“You can read?”
“A little. My mum taught me.”
It turned out that he was only able to decipher individual words, not complete sentences, but that changed very quickly once we entered school and they taught us to read properly. Julian started reading everything and anything, any time, all of the time. He was reading while sitting on the loo, while having breakfast, on his way to school and in the school playground between classes. When we were playing outside in the afternoons, it was the greatest thing for him to pick old newspapers from garbage bins to see if he could find any new words in them. And whenever he found a new word he had to go to the library to check if there were any books on the subject. And then he’d read those. During tea, in front of the telly, while brushing his teeth. When he slept, he dreamed of reading. He read everything that interested him, and the more he read, the more things he became interested in. One day he became interested in his own name, and a few days later he gave me a college-level lecture on the name Julian and all relate names like Julia, Julio, Julius and so on, on Julius Caesar, the Julian Calendar, and why the month of July was called July. It was the first time I ever saw him talk himself into that weird state of trance where he became completely oblivious to the world around him and would just stare at some imaginary point right in front of him, and he’d just keep talking and talking. When he was finished he didn’t move; he didn’t look at me. He would just keep staring straight ahead and breathe heavily. Expressing his innermost thoughts always exhausted him.