The apotheosis of the idiocracy?

Is it just possible that we live in an age that is seeing the apotheosis of the idiocracy?

The last few weeks seem to have provided ample evidence of such a state of being.

First (for the sake of this post) there was the sheer obscenity of ‘Black Friday’.

People falling over themselves, fighting, screaming and altogether behaving like total cretins in order to get goods that they probably have no need for, which in many cases were being marketed as ‘cheap’ when the price before this sale madness had been hiked to enable that.

And don’t pretend that it was just the lumpen poor either, simply because TV cameras went to the shops where some of them would be congregated. The likes of John Lewis was advertising ‘Black Friday’ nonsense too.

But setting even that aside, let’s remember that this is not (yet) the US and we do not (yet) celebrate Thanksgiving.

So why the hell have this obscene nonsense?

Not that that is likely to stop anyone, as we increasingly see an Americanised Halloween merchandised and sold to the credulous as a major event, while an increasing number of schools have ‘proms’.

What was wrong with signing each other’s school blouses/shirts and, if you were so inclined, chucking some flour and a few eggs around?

Now, we have a situation where stupid parents are encouraged to behave ever more stupidly; encouraged to try to ensure that their brat has the most expensive outfit and arrives in the most stretched limo of any of their peers.

I absolutely shudder at the thought of being forced to go through all that. Thank god I grew up in saner times. Now, there’s even a rise in proms for ‘graduation’ from nursery school, as well as from primary school.

Only a generation and a half ago, most people would have seen through the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses cult for precisely that – and laughed at those who played that game.

Now, we’ve turned it something that’s so important that it’s central to the economic calculations (I use the word loosely) of the Chancellor, who is basing his predictions on households going ever deeper into debt.

Moving on, this Christmas – even before we had reached Advent – decorations were going up (and not just in the big stores), while stalls had set up selling Christmas trees. Who is stupid enough to buy one so early? It’ll be dried up before Christmas itself!

Indeed, why the creep of the start of Christmas ever earlier and earlier?

I know that, historically speaking, the long Christmas shopping season started in WWI when families in the US were sending presents and cards to their loved ones in the trenches.

But it has lengthened further for entirely commercial reasons in more recent years, and now Christmas seems to start as soon as the Halloween sales opportunity is done for another year.

Of course, it’ll only be a week or so before we see the first adverts for Easter eggs.

Like Christmas tree sales, decorations were going up at hotels and businesses, as well as in homes, before the start of December this time around.

Generally speaking, most people only decorated their homes a fortnight before Christmas Day itself, and the time to take them down is 5 January, the 12th Day of Christmas.

And what’s with the ‘buy a sweater for one day a year’ thing – never mind that being followed by: ‘pay £2 to wear it to work and that will go to charity’?

Instead of spending £15 on a sweater (probably made of crap acrylic, in a sweatshop somewhere), and then £2 on your charity giving, put a tenner in the collection box.

Still, if you live to shop, then it just gives you another excuse to … well, shop.

Not that this is just about Christmas and commercialism in general.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not against having fun, but when I see adults scooting past me on over-sized scooters of the sort that were designed with small children in mind, wearing wooly hats with animal ears on them, I wonder if we are also in an age of increasing infantilisation.

And then there’s the total logic deficit that we are increasingly witnessing in other walks of life.

Take the case of Russell Brand. Now I’m far from being a fan (and I think his opinions on voting are misguided at best and downright dangerous at worst), but in the present instance, with his involvement in the campaign to try to stop the tenants of the New Era estate in Hackney being evicted by a US business that will then hike the rents through the roof, he is most definitely on the side of the angels.

But what does he get accused of? Hypocrisy.

Now admittedly, this was from the Sun, with the Mail in hot pursuit, but the story seems to be that he rents – and not cheaply – and that his ultimate landlord is not the most ethical.

Now if Brand was calling on everyone to check the ethics of every individual or company that they do business with, while not doing the same himself, that would be hypocrisy.

But this really seems to come down to a view I’ve heard espoused from right-wing cretins more than once: that, if you are doing okay yourself, it is hypocritical to care about anyone who is not doing as well as you are.

Further, I’ve seen it suggested that, if you are in the above situation and you dare to think that people should be paid a living wage, for instance, then you should somehow use your wage to achieve that.

And then there’s the guff about how ‘socialists’ should not earn £X, because they should only ever be on low incomes.

‘Socialists’ has become a word used by the terminally (if only) imbecilic to damn anything they simply don’t like. Few have any concept of the actual economic philosophy behind it.

It’s reminiscent of the woman filmed calling Obama a ‘communist’ during the last US presidential election. When asked what she thought a communist was, she had to admit that she hadn’t a clue.

Of course it also means that we’ve moved so far to the right in UK politics that when someone says that people should be paid a living wage, it’s considered not as ‘fairness’, but as something to be slagged off, either bizarrely as ‘envy’ or as ‘socialism’!

To the dolts out there: if people cannot afford to live, how do you think that will impact on recruitment, retention, sickness rates and productivity?

And why do you think that the tax take has gone down even as the number of people in work has risen? That’s right: because we’re in the middle of a drive by business to a low-wage economy, with hundreds of thousands (about 1.4 million, to be accurate) on zero-hours contracts, many more in insecure jobs and yet more forced into ‘self-employment’ that gets them off the books, but can see them earning well below what is needed to live.

Mind, all this sees us looking at a media that is increasingly dumbed down, even in the supposed quality press, with increasing amounts of bias too and far less good-quality reportage.

What’s so depressing is the sheer number of people who appear to believe at face value anything they read in print.

You can bet that the same papers that are railing against Brand are not railing against the new owners of the New Era estate wanting to throw the residents onto the street.

And if this all sounds like a rant, that’s because it is. But honestly, look around you and at the things I’ve mentioned above and tell me that it doesn’t make you want to do a combination of ~head > desk~ and ~face palm~.

A few of the pains of modern life

Modern life has many things going for it – but also many things that make you want to walk away from it.

For instance – technology is great, isn’t it?

Well, in many ways yes, but …

As the lone member of staff on the till in WH Smith struggled patiently with a customer the other morning, I gave in and opted for one of the self-service tills.

I usually refuse to use the damned things on the simple basis that I am not in the business of helping to put people out of work.

And it is equally worth noting that no store has yet suggested deducting the cost of serving oneself from the product that one is buying.

There’s another reason, too. The ‘service’ is crap.

‘Have you got your own bag?’

‘Yes’.

‘Please put it in the bagging area.’

‘Done.’

‘Please wait while someone comes to validate your bag.’

In the end, I waited behind the awkward-squad customer until I could be served, quickly and efficiently, as it happened, by an actual human being.

Not that that is the only example of what makes me grouchy about the modern urban experience.

Less than two months after giving up fags (again) and as the flu finally cleared off to go and torment someone else, my own sense of smell went into overdrive, to the extent that, as never before, I am conscious of the smell of traffic. It’s unhealthy – but it’s also downright repulsive.

But before I was subjected to that, it was a case of a woman at my first bus stop who always arrives when other people are there – and then tries to barge onto the bus ahead of anyone else. And she gets off around the corner! It's so staggeringly rude.

And then there are people like the man who sat next to me on the bus the other day and gabbed for the entire journey to someone on the phone, via his hands-free headphones and mic, all the time twirling his brolly.

Why do some people think that having a phone conversation is something to subject everyone else to? There’s something quite invasive about it – people imposing their concerns (private or business) onto total strangers. Only last month, I had a train journey that was marked by some goon two seats back holding – loudly – a video conference.

How wonderful it is that the French have notices everywhere on their trains saying that, if you wish to make a call, you should do so in the area between carriages.

The mobile phone as megaphone syndrome is little different from people thinking that they can play their choice of music so loudly that everyone else gets to share it.

Indeed, why is it that such music is usually total crap? It’s unfailing something with a simple, repetitive beat. It’s never a piece of Chopin. Or Miles Davis. Or Ella Fitzgerald. Or even Abba.

It’s not Bohemian Rhapsody or Smoke on the Water or Purple Rain or Why Do Fools Fall in Love? – just thump, thump, thump thump.

And because there are so many people living almost in each other’s pockets, we’re compelled to listen to this musical dross, played so loudly sometimes that we can even feel it physically.

Not that the only dumbing down in today's world comes in the form of something that can loosely be described as 'music', the media is on the same path, with so-called newspapers convinced that the really important stories are about whom shagged whom or who tweeted what.

And the sound of music it hardly the only noise intrusion: in the city, there never seems to be silence – not least from the sirens blaring around; traffic on the roads and in the air. It's only when you get away form London that you realise how inured you've become to being under a major route into Heathrow.

On a different note, is the amount of litter around a modern phenomenon? Walk anywhere and you can’t fail to see the mess that people leave behind them – most often in the form of the left-over wrappings or containers from beer or sugar-laden soft drinks or fast food or assorted snacks and crisps. Was it always this messy?

In the planters at the front of our flats, people even consider themselves entirely free to chuck plastic bottles and chocolate wrappers into the ivy.

Damn modern life, because sometimes it feels as though all who sail in her are damned.

There: a rant – and I haven't even mentioned cyclists on pavements.

Imagine there's no politics

I hate politics. No, really I do. And don’t tell me there aren’t myriad things that any of you would prefer to do with your time than politics.

John Lennon asked people to imagine a life without religion – well what about a life without politics?

The trouble, though, is that for that to happen, we’d all need to see a society that we believed needed no change.

Which would mean very different things to different people – as even a cursory glance at our present situation illustrates.

Some would want to create equity and fairness by regulation; some would believe that allowing those at the top of the income tree totally free reign to make more money would benefit everyone below.

Some would believe in more state – some in as little as possible.

One might need to invoke Jeremy Bentham and his idea that the greatest good is the one that produces the greatest happiness – in other words, whatever pleases a majority.

Although, in the manner of the old adage about not being able to please all of the people all of the time, that would still leave a percentage of the people unhappy.

And that, in essence, is democracy: or so you’d think.

But for that to work, we all need to do politics. Whether we like it or not.

And when we don’t do politics, we get a situation such as we’re seeing today.

Just look at what we have found out, just recently, about what has been going on at Barclay’s Bank – and quite probably other banks too.

Unless something quite dramatic changes, the people ultimately responsible are quite possibly going to get away with it.

Yet someone who looted a solitary bottle of water during last summer’s riots was sentenced to prison.

If the latter was a crime – why not the former?

And that brings us to a fascinating question: who is the country being run for?

Look at the Olympics. Who will benefit? It won’t be the small, independent businesses, some of which are being told – in effect – told they cannot trade during the Games.

This has been done in order to ensure that big, multi-national businesses that have paid some money to be Olympic sponsors face no competition on advertising in and around Games venues and coverage; no competition at Games venues – McDonalds will be the only ‘restaurant’, for instance – and then, to cap it off, the same companies are being exempted from paying any UK tax between March and November of this year.

So how are ordinary taxpayers, who have paid for the whole shebang, going to benefit? Bread and circuses, tied in with a dose of patriotism?

Well, a £60m ‘retail boom’ has been predicted – but that’s primarily going to be to the benefit of the big businesses that are already making the big bucks.

Unless it becomes part of the ‘Olympic legacy’, unemployment have not noticeably fallen, suggesting a vast boost to employment and the economy as a whole from hosting the Games.

But let’s move on.

Look at the health service. The other day, GP and Private Eye correspondent Dr Phil Hammond tweeted that private health insurance companies are already giving patients (customers) money to go back to the NHS for costly cancer care rather than the same private health care companies finding their profits hit.

That, in a nutshell, is everything that’s wrong with private healthcare – and exactly why the NHS is so precious.

But surely health secretary Andrew Lansley must understand this?

Well, he’s been privately funded by private healthcare companies for years. If he sells off the health service – as he is trying to do – does anyone seriously think that, if he loses his seat at the next election, he won’t have loads of lovely, lucrative directorships to step into?

So is he doing what he is doing out of nothing more than personal greed – or because he really believes that the public will genuinely benefit from his overturning everything about the health service (something that renders David Cameron’s pre-election promise of “no more top-down reorganisation” in the NHS a total lie, incidentally)?

That’s one of the other things about politics – is everyone really behaving with the best interests of Bentham’s masses in mind? Are you sure? Can you be sure?

Is there a sort of national naivety that still generally believes that all politicians of all parties many be misguided but are generally benign in their intent?

Recent affairs suggest otherwise.

You need a modicum of pragmatism as well as some ideology in politics, together with a bit of enlightened self-interest.

By the latter, I don’t mean greed – but to say that things that improve society as a whole are usually better for yourself is self-interest, and it’s pretty enlightened.

If you have less crime, for instance, that’s better for everyone. More crime is committed by people with very little financial resources and decent work than by those in an opposite situation.

So how about helping to ensure that as many people as possible have jobs – and that those jobs pay a decent, living wage, as well as ensuring that the police and judicial services are properly funded and staffed too?

Okay, that might mean a slightly bigger state than you’d ideologically say that, ideally, you approved of, but the end surely justifies the means – and you benefit as well as the people with jobs and a decent income.

Yet some people really don’t seem to get this. Could it really be rocket science?

In the US, for instance, some neo-liberals and laissez faire free-market fetishists are still whinging about the stimulus packages that rescued the US motor industry.

At the simplest level, it kept people in jobs – and that is better for the economy and society than them being out of jobs, which is hardly a cost-neutral situation for society.

That’s hardly a statement of ideological idiocy, is it?

Come on – who are the idiots here?

On the one hand, that should be easy to answer. It’s the people who, in our own times and situation, still continue to believe that austerity works and is the only way.

Except that that’s not true.

Some of them don’t believe that austerity works (or that it’s ‘the only way’). What they do believe, however, is that it’s a great excuse to strip away the state, to strip away regulation (because that’s what caused the financial crisis and the subsequent recession in the first place) and to open up everything possible to themselves and their friends to make as much money as personally possible.

As the Thatcher era taught us: greed is good. Loadsamoney!

And so many have been caught up in the belief that austerity is the only way; that the deficit is a simple matter – just like having spent too much last month and have busted your overdraft – and even that the problems were all caused by spending on schools and hospitals, and ‘gold-plated’ pensions for the people who care for the elderly and clean the wards and take your 999 call.

And here’s another little problem with politics: because in a sense, I am, right here and right now, saying that they’re wrong; that they’re possibly naïve or gullible – and that I know better.

And in essence I’m assuming that most of you reading this know better too.

Oh, I can point out that there is a heavily biased media in this country and that, in general, it has peddled that mythology; that the Fourth Estate of which I am a card-carrying member has, in many ways been emasculated by the greed and lack of responsibility to fairness and truth of media barons and magnates, of which Rupert Murdoch is simply the biggest.

But then, in many ways, I’m saying that people aren’t very bright if they simply accept what they’re spoonfed by such media.

I don’t actually like that. Or rather, I don’t feel particularly comfortable with it.

But if I try to claim that the views that I hold (on any subject) hold up no better than those of anyone else – that all views are ultimately subjective and owe nothing to differing levels of evidence etc – then ain’t that relativism?

And when it comes to such things as politics, I like to think that at least a chunk of what I eventually decided is right, wrong or somewhere in the middle, is actually based on facts.

Austerity is not based on facts – or not on what its proponents tell you are facts. Even the International Monetary Fund (hardly a bastion of lefty thinking) has admitted that austerity doesn’t work and that austerity isn’t working.

So when certain figures or publications tell you that ‘there is no alternative’, they’re either deluded themselves or they’re telling porkies.

Which, of course, brings us to why.

Greed. Self interest without any enlightenment – and without any responsibility or accountability that matters.

I mentioned Lansley earlier. What will it matter to him if the electorate vote him out at the next opportunity? He’ll have done what he set out to do, and he won’t be suffering.

You could look at Tony Blair too – lining his pockets further by helping a despotic regime in Kazakhstan. That’s a country that – entirely coincidentally – has oil. Perhaps the former PM is looking the place over for signs of WMD …

There are times when I think that a heaven and hell would be a nice idea, if it meant that shits like Blair and his prayer buddy Dubya actually paid for what they did. Since there isn’t, let’s hope someone actually manages to arrest him one of these days – there is a bounty on offer to anyone making such an attempt.

Is there really anyone left who doesn’t realise that Blair was Son of Thatcher – a neo-liberal to his own core, who took up where she had left off, deregulating (so that it would be easier for the banks to screw everyone else) and selling off even more stuff so that private firms could crash down wages, sack staff and offshore in order to increase their profits.

It’s utter economic imbecility and short termism.

If you have an economy that is dependent on the service sector – including retail – then you need people to have money to spend in that sector.

If they don’t spend, companies go bust, more people end up unemployed, paying no tax but claiming benefits and with no money to spend in the service sector, thus ensuring that ever more business go bust – and so forth.

People need jobs. And they need to be paid a living wage for doing them. That is the only way to gain growth and cut the deficit in the short term. Rebalancing the economy is essential in the longer term, but cannot happen over night.

And this is hardly rocket science. I’m not some sort of economic Einstein in claiming that. It’s straightforward common sense.

But let’s have a look at the Eton boys – full of a belief that they were born to govern. Does anyone really believe that they care about the country or the bulk of the people therein?

I don’t. There’s hardly a politician in any party who has an inkling of ‘the real world’ (I know – I‘m squirming even as I write that cliché, but it’s true). And in the case of a lot of the current government, I don’t think they care either.

And that, when I’d much prefer to be doing other things, is why I ‘do’ politics to some degree.

It’s because I do care. And also because I’m a pragmatist – and a realist. And because, horribly as I get older, I realise that it’s just plain old bleedin’ common sense.

It is worth pointing out that there's nothing much new about corruption in politics. Take a look at Hogarth's pictures of English life or read Dickens on elections and bribery in The Pickwick Papers (see ilustration).


So let's avoid getting caught in a trap about imagining some halcyon time in the past.

The moral of this, for want of a better word, is that if you aren’t prepared to do even a tiny bit – by which I mean voting and trying to keep yourself informed and thinking past the knee-jerk headlines – then you don’t have the right to whinge when you get walked over.


Put up a bit of a fight, in other words.

As the great German author and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann put it: "A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries."

Mann, who at one time was mooted by some as the first post-war German president, said that: "everything is politics".

He also noted: "Every reasonable human being should be a moderate socialist" – which considered construction should get the brain cells churning.


Oh – and I still hate politics!

Of misandrists and men

How long ago is it that women had the debate about whether feminists could wear lipstick?

Like you, I thought that that issue was dead in the water – after all, isn’t feminism supposed, at core, to be about women’s liberation? And wouldn’t any meaningful idea of liberation mean that women could choose things for themselves?

And isn’t it about women taking responsibility for themselves and their own decisions and actions?

Well, unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward, as Irene’s story and the responses to it that she received illustrate.

And it adds yet more weight to what I’ve been noticing in the last few years.

Self-appointed, unaccountable women who have decided that they hold the keys to everywoman’s experience of womanhood – of life – and will do their damnedest to foist their views onto every other woman around.

They’re fundamentalists and, like other fundamentalisms that are on the rise these days, feminist fundamentalism is also rearing its ugly head.

In various places, I find other women telling me what to do: how I should dress, how I should behave, how I should fuck (and whom). I’ve even been told that I should be afraid to walk the streets – and when I respond that I am not, I’ve been told that I’m a fool.

The Guardian newspaper, supposedly a bastion of liberal thought, lends legitimacy to this fundamentalist feminism by allowing its exponents pretty much un-challenged space in its opinion columns and online blogs.

The British government is creating dismal legislation that has comes out of an alliance between fundamentalists of feminist and religious hue.

The whole thing is full of misandry – and misandry is no better than misogyny. Indeed, it’s also full of misogyny – such feminists seem to despise the overwhelming majority of their ‘sisters’.

So get out of my life. If I want to be spanked by a man, I’ll damned well be spanked by a man – and I’ll damned well enjoy it.

If I want to wear a burgundy velvet dress, team it with a studded wrist band and idly contemplate what handbag will work best with it – I’ll do so. And I’ll damned well enjoy it.

I’ve managed to rid myself of the controls of religion on my life and thoughts; I’ve dealt with the long-term consequences of having grown up with an emotionally bullying parent, and the impact on my self image and self confidence of yo-yo and faddy dieting and weight worries since the age of 12. In oh so very many ways, I spent years in an intellectual, emotional and sexual burka, hiding from view, from life. It is absolutely no coincidence that, during those days, I hid my physical self beneath layers of drab, shapeless clothing, embarrassed and ashamed by my own body and by my own physical needs and desires.

So I am most certainly not going to start kow-towing to a bunch of women telling me how I, as a woman, should live my life now.

And it would be such a dull and colourless life, because their dull and colourless little brains are filled with bile and jealousy and the need to justify their own tawdry existences by controlling others.

Like puritans and prudes and prigs everywhere, they live in fear of anyone else having any pleasure – unless they’ve approved it first.

According to a certain view, the whole fashion thing, for instance, is a male conspiracy against women – not least, because it’s about getting women to dress for men; in a way that men like.

Let’s assume for the sake of the discussion that such a simplistic idea has some legitimacy – as we’ve discussed elsewhere, dress is partly about attracting a mate.

So …

So what? If I want to dress to attract, why not?

If I want to dress to ‘play the game’, why not?

If I want to dress a certain way because it gives me pleasure … why not?

If I get a kick out of being aware that I attract male glances on occasion (these boobs are difficult to hide), then what on Earth, in Mother Nature’s name, is wrong with that?

The logical conclusion is that it is wrong for men to behave like … well, men. And that it is wrong for women to enjoy men behaving like … err, men.

How do we ‘solve’ this? How about all females of the species wearing burkas? Let’s stop those looks by removing temptation from men – because we all know that it’s women’s fault that men are sometimes tempted to behave badly, and therefore it’s women’s responsibility to avoid that. We know it, because the story of Adam and Eve made it clear that women are the temptresses who must be kept under control, lest they drag down decent, honest, God-fearing men.

While we’re at it, let’s return to the olden days where, in rape trials, the question of what the woman was wearing was paramount – was that short skirt or low-cut blouse ‘asking for it’?

There are times when these radical ‘feminists’ seem to have an awful lot in common with sexist bigots such as the Taliban. Indeed, they’re quite happy to make unholy alliances with religious conservatives in the West when it suits their ideas on certain issues – Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon are a case in point. What an irony! So-called feminists climbing into metaphorical bed with the very sorts of people who would limit women’s choices!

Feminism is not dead. It better hadn’t be. Because we have many, many important things that still need achieving. In the UK, for instance, equal pay is just one such thing. A real thing. A real, day-to-day, economic issue for millions of British women.

Elsewhere in the world, women are dying because a bunch of dried up old men in frocks have decided that they cannot be allowed to have control over their own bodies and their own fertility.

In parts of Pakistan, as the Taliban gain ground, girls are being barred from education.

But no: the important questions are whether women should be allowed to like handbags and green angora sweaters and lipstick. And whether they should ever dare to allow themselves to sexually play a submissive role to a male Dominant (the other way around is just about acceptable, apparently).

What spectacularly crass priorities.

Simone de Beauvoir must be spinning in her Montparnasse grave. But then again, de Beauvoir understood the value of intellectual rigour – not the sort of self-indulgent wanking that the women who would replace a patriarchy with a matriarchy like to pretend passes for ‘thought’.

Now, if you'll excuse me: I've a clothes and lippy shopping trip to plan for this evening.