SOS

No! Not a cry for help (not yet anyway), but an acronym for the subject of my latest missive. To be revealed below...

Evenin' All!

I find myself in two minds over the invasion at the moment - largely because the Yanks seem to like me!

If you haven't seen them yet, I've been getting great reviews for my portrayl of CS Lewis. Words like "Superb" have been bandied around! How can I maintain ire against such a friendly people?

Well... they seem loathe to give me a job that will actually involve a notable sum of money - and that is starting to get irksome.

Hence the feeling that my life is currently a victory of Style Over Substance. No, Caps-lock isn't stuck, that was to let you know that that is what SOS stands for - in this instance at least... any air traffic controllers reading this... probably shouldn't be.

Yes, Style Over Substance. That's me all over. The toast of the town, on both the internet and the TV - check out Taproot Theatre's site for all the links - but slumming it on Craigslist during the day deciding whether to be a dog fluffer or a wet chugger.

It got me thinking about other examples - helpfully linked to things people (i.e. Ifo) have asked me to write about on my blog.

First, Obama's fall from grace. Total victory of style over substance. Not in the sense that he is, but that those who wish to portray him as such are winning the day. For example, today there was an article in the Guardian about Obama selling out by visiting a prayer group, whose leader apparently admires Hitler. Sounds terrible doesn't it. Until you read that previous speakers have included Bono.

Basically, what the journos have done is search hard enough to find some oddball members of the organisation and then link them incredibly spuriously to Obama. You would expect this sort of thing from the right-wing - but from the Grauniad? It is just more evidence of how every section of the media has bought into the metanarrative (you know how much I love those!) that Obama's presidential win was a victory of style over substance and he is now failing to deliver.

In doing so, they are actually succumbing to style-over-substance themselves - but only for a while. The insidiousness of this particular beast is that it effects how people vote, so now Obama has less of a mandate (after the Dems lost the Massachusetts senate seat), and will find it harder to get substantive work done.

So, why has Obama fallen from grace so spectacularly? Because the media needed him to.

What else were they going to report? Good news? Not likely. The only newspaper to concentrate on good news closed down after 16 months (though that was itself an SOS victory, as it couldn't print a story about its own demise!).

Ifo is also interested in food stamps - the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The title here sounds totally SOS. You can just hear the cogs turning in the spin-sters minds - "let's call it SNAP, it sounds so cool". They forgot that no-one cares about being cool when their kids are starving. So everyone calls them Food Stamps - for that is what they were. Stamps that could be redeemed for different values toward food. They now use electronic benefit transfer cards but the idea is the same.

You have to be very near the poverty line to have access to food stamps. Currently, around 40m Americans are on the program (i.e about a sixth of the country as a whole), with an average monthly benefit of $133. Most shockingly, 1 in 4 of America's children is linked to the food stamp program.

I'm not a public policy specialist by any stretch of the imagination, but it actually seems like a program of substance to me - with evidence to suggest that it helps families stay out of welfare, in work, and above the poverty-line.

However, the system it supports is SOS - with the desire for America to be seen as the best country in the world far outweighing the desire for it to actually be the best country in the world.

The Food Stamp program was originally brought in during the great depression, to help farmers sell their crops to starving city-dwellers. It was brought back when JFK witnessed appalling poverty in the Appalachian region during his presidential campaign.

It was never intended to assuage the guilt of unscrupulous employers who pay their workers a pittance so that they can afford the cars and houses for which this country is famed.

Grotesque income disparity = SOS. In both senses.

Well, that's enough of me! Looking forward to lots of comments!

DD out

P.S. Kira is actually living both style and substance at the moment. Her hypnotherapy is going amazingly, she has just landed the biggest agent in town (totally by chance!), and has a ton of other v/o and theatre auditions. She puts me to shame...