Who Is DaN McKee?

But I don’t see what there is to hide? I am a teacher, yes, but I am also a human being. The same kind of human being I would encourage each of my students to be - thoughtful, reflective, error-prone and able to learn from my mistakes, proud of what I have done, productive, creative, open, honest; a fully rounded, politically engaged, person with many flaws as well as many positives.

As 2020 saw the publication of my first book - Authentic Democracy: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - I began to think more and more about my own authenticity.  The fact that I am an anarchist was never a secret to anyone who has ever employed me, or to students who have discussed political philosophy with me in lessons (I have even been hired as a guest speaker in some schools to speak specifically about anarchism), but the idea of pretending somehow that I am not that person to students, their parents, employers, etc. seemed even more absurd now. The cat is out of the bag. You search for me these days, and if you don’t find the random Rhode Island governor who shares my name, you find the book. No amount of clever handles on social media or anonymous usernames on blogs can, or should, hide that from people. And once one thread is loose, a little pulling can undo the whole sweater. The book itself, and any publicity I have done for it, also mentions my music, as it is an important part of who I am and what got me into political philosophy in the first place. It’s even part of my author bio, with my current band named, plainly, on my Amazon author page.

So after a decade of hiding all the various things I am and do outside of the classroom because of some misguided notion of “professionalism” within education which encourages teachers’ lives and personality to remain hidden behind a veil of privacy (forgetting that privacy is not something to be enforced, but something we choose to maintain or yield when interacting with our fellow human beings) I decided in the summer of 2020 that I was sick of the hypocrisy of hiding. That we shouldn’t live in fear of some future employer, or whoever, Googling us and disliking what they find anymore than we should cover up our tattoos - if they don’t like what they see here, then I’m probably not the right fit for the place anyway! I have long wanted all the disparate things that I do collected in one tidy place where they can all be easily found, accessed, archived and generally put into some sort of coherent whole instead of dotted about across diverse locations of the internet under various strange names.

I also saw no good reason why the fact I am a teacher should prevent me from sharing my creative output with the world. I see no professional conflict with being a teacher of philosophy and also being a human being with ideas and opinions, some of which are expressed through art.

Like I said: teachers today talk a lot about wellbeing and mental health, and are supposed to be positive role models to their students. For me, my mental health has always been aided by creative output. I have written for as long as I can remember. I was that kid who thought a book of homemade poems was a suitable gift for a parent’s birthday (and had the sort of parents who would agree), and the one who thought a new diary was the most exciting kind of Christmas present. All those blank pages filled with promise. I liked to draw too. Cartoons, mainly. One year for Christmas I asked Santa for what I thought was the most outlandish gift: 500 sheets of plain paper! Little did I know the figure, clearly encouraged by a parent somewhere along the way, was exactly what is found in a ream of printer paper. I couldn’t be happier than I was that December morning I woke to find exactly 500 blank pages of paper (topped with several Mars Bars, also requested) waiting for me outside my bedroom door. I drew cartoons, wrote stories and poems, and believed in magic for one more year.

And then in my teens I found music. Not that I hadn’t been listening long before I first picked up a bass guitar. I still own (for all the horrible crimes he is alleged, and - let’s be honest - very likely to have committed) the Michael Jackson Thriller record I used to dance to around my childhood home (as well as the more age-appropriate Minnie Mouse and Cookie Monster records I also used to love), and was probably only about eight or nine when I first heard Guns ‘N’ Roses and sold my soul to rock and roll (a path already paved with Springsteen, Beatles and Bowie records); but I was merely a passive spectator to music until my best friend decided his fledgling band needed a bass-player and stuck some Blu-Tack on the fret-board of his dad’s guitar so I could play along to the Green Day covers he and his guitarist were doing. Punk rock changed my life. It gave a voice to the dysfunction I felt every day in my broken family home and direction to my anger. No longer a passive spectator to music but an active creator, it gave me my voice as I began to write songs as well as play the songs of my heroes.

To get very real: there is a good chance I wouldn’t be here today had I not found punk rock and written myself out of the very dark place I was sinking into around the age of fifteen. But I did, and I haven’t stopped writing music, or being thankful, since.

I wrote my first novel (unpublished) during my gap year between sixth form and university. Since then I have written three other unpublished novels and have been working on my fifth for a few years now in my spare time. Each book was a way of dealing with things going on in my life or in the world - break ups, my father’s infidelity, childhood trauma, the death of my parents, family… I write to process. I write to keep sane, just as I pick up my guitar, just as I breathe. Lyrics and poems spill out of me. Stories. Articles. Opinions. Fanzines, pamphlets, blogs. Pen on paper, fingers on keys - seldom a day goes by without articulating something. It’s what I do and have always done to make sense of the world, and survive in it.

The same is true of philosophy. I studied philosophy at A-level because “philosophy” was the word we discovered as the name for what already came naturally to me and my friends: asking questions. We were the students who got told off at school not for breaking the rules, but for asking why the rules were there in the first place. Truth was always the goal, not offence or upset. I have always asked questions and don’t intend to stop trying on ideas for size - sometimes deeply controversial ones - and kicking thoughts around to see if they can survive the analysis. But you can’t do philosophy in fear of saying the wrong thing or censoring where the argument leads. You have to be free to make mistakes and change your mind. It has to be a safe space for failure as well as success. I have written a lot over the years - especially in blogs, which I have kept on and off since 2004; more so in handwritten personal journals not published online - and many times something I write on Monday evening might be disavowed by Tuesday morning. I do not stand by every word I have ever put down, nor would I expect anyone else to. If we are to not stagnate, we must be allowed to adapt and evolve; change our minds; improve our ideas. Putting everything I have ever done publicly into one place spans songs written in my teens to my most recent words - I have no doubt there are many awful things to be found. Some real clunkers. But one of the problems of the world today is self-producing our digital footprint and ensuring it paints only a positive picture of who we are. I can’t quote Tony Benn to my students - “making mistakes is how you learn” - if every mistake I make remains hidden. Honesty is warts and all, and there are plenty of warts here; beautiful in their own way, maybe even necessary at the time, but we can also be glad now that they’re behind us.

To summarise: this page isn’t for my employers, my students, or their families, but it also isn’t not for them. If they want to waste their free time prying into the life of one of their teachers/employees, so be it. But what they should learn by doing so is that they’d be far happier finding out who they are and then doing more of what makes them happy than worrying about what I have done to make myself happy. Who this page is for is anyone who has ever enjoyed my book, my music, my writing, my blogs, my poems, my lyrics, my art, or anything else I’ve ever tried my hand at and wondered who the hell this weirdo is and if there’s anything else he’s ever done. Or for those who have no idea who the fuck I am (spoiler alert: I swear in real life, just like we all do away from the constructed and damaging myths of “professionalism”, and if you don’t like it I strongly recommend you don’t listen to any of the songs) and stumbled on here because of some poor search choices and a curious mind. All of you are welcome to stay a while and look around, see what you enjoy, see what you don’t, and move on with your lives. If you like what you see, stay longer, come back for many visits, and if you don’t then thank you for your brief stay and drive safe to your next destination.

If you want to know who I am in a single song - this is the story of my life…