I am suffering from a book hangover. I have been making time to read, on the advice of my counsellor, and have ploughed my way through a number of books in the last few weeks. A couple have gripped me – ByThe Rivers of Babylon, by Nelson DeMille, whose obituary in the paper last week pointed me to his debut, was a compelling and exciting piece of brutality that seemed to have some relevance to the slaughter going on in Palestine at the moment, but it has left no particular mark, apart from a certain queasy aftertaste of a relish for brutality. I’ll look forward to reading another of his books, when I am in the mood for a well-written but unchallenging thriller, but I am not particularly enlightened by it, only further convinced that Israel’s terminal decline is very much of its military’s own making.
Last Friday, however, I came across American War on my ebook server while I was tidying up my Tolino, and read the first couple of pages. It was immediately engaging, even though it begins with a meta-narrative frame voiced by a character who then disappears from the story until the last fifty or so pages, a conceit I rather dislike. However, for a literary science fiction novel, the exposition in this story is well handled, and the narrator provides a very useful historical framing, while not giving too much away.
The novel is actually about a character the narrator knew when he was a child, Sarat1, whose tragedy is that of the war child: displacement, refugee status, recruitment, betrayal, torture and, well, that would be telling. Although her doom is played out within a broken America, it is the experience of any one of hundreds of thousands of children who have grown up or are growing up under the distant but devastating influence of the American military empire now, and over the last three quarters of a century. Her country is riven by a proxy war, and she is a mote within the storm who rises, through her fury, to achieve the status of decisive pawn.
The story is powerful in its own right. However, as a parable of how the American empire keeps its potential rivals from developing through the fomenting of division and war, it is a masterpiece. In early childhood, Sarat’s family is forced to seek refuge in a breakaway revolutionary territory, The Free Southern State, after her father is killed by a southern suicide bomber (they are not called that in this book, in order, I think, to not stress the comparison too early) and the simmering war between the U.S. and the Southern rebels threatens to reach their home. From the refugee camp, she is, eventually, recruited to the rebellion by an American agent who is in the pay of a controller from the unified empire of the Middle East, The Bouazizi Empire.2
The agent engages in all the shenanigans of an agent provocateur in the pay of the C.I.A. in Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine or anywhere the U.S. wants to keep in chaos. He recruits bombers, pays off their families, whose poverty is too deep to allow them to fight back against him, and sows a sense of belief in the fiction of the rightness of the confected conflict. The cassus belli for the South’s rebellion, incidentally, is the ban on the use of fossil fuels: that is the religious split over which the U.S. tears itself apart, and it is no sillier than the exaggerated distinction between Shia and Sunni, or Arab and Persian. The South fights to retain the right to burn fossil fuels, even after the technology is largely redundant.
The great tragedy of the story is a great crime, but it is a crime committed by a character whose motives we understand fully by the time it occurs. She has my unreserved pity and I have to remind myself that what she does is not justified by her suffering. Her crime is that of every soul-wounded jihadist: allowing her own sufferings and tragedies to eclipse her view of the rights and fears of others.
I am trying to be careful about spoilers, but I must go into the sequence which, in my view, locates this novel as a dark satire of American atrocity, rather than some weak-arsed “warning about the future” so, if you want to read the book unsullied, you should stop reading this post now. At the core of Sarat’s moral undoing is not her choice to join the rebellion, or her commitment to political assassination, questionable as they are. Sarat is broken by imprisonment in a military torture camp. In here, she is taught that she did still hold illusions about the restraints on power, and about her own ability to maintain some thread of agency in a life which has repeatedly beaten her with messages of her worthlessness. She is brutalised by people who believe they are being clever. Their rape-acts are couched in a sort of science that is supposed to make them virtuous torturers. They are the camp guards of Abu-Ghraid and Quantanamo who return to their respectable middle-class lives after making a living from sating their satanic lusts behind the razor wire. They are the least human of us all. El Akkad’s portrayal of these people is a triumph, in their bureaucratic, shoulder-shrugging pretence of disinterested duty, and the fact that he allows his heroine to enact a revenge upon one of these monsters is a weakness of the book – a little too neat, a little implausible, and setting up a ridiculous coincidence in the final act – satisfying as it becomes.
Incidentally, if these people suffer,3 I don’t care. I cannot raise sympathy. It is not a revelation to know that torture is wrong and torture is not hard to recognise. They crossed the line. They had a choice. There are some things that it is worth dying to avoid doing, and the real Guantanamo guards would not have been killed for refusing orders. A few unpleasant years, perhaps, and some economic disadvantage in the richest nation in the world, but still nothing compared to the loss of their eternal souls.
This novel impresses me the way very few do. It is not perfect, but it holds together and, in its cleverly coherent fictional world, it is true to the actual world. Nothing except the great final crime is without precedent in this novel of horrors, and that crime is something we know all militaristic nations have plans to commit, if they can ever find an excuse and overcome their fear of retribution.4
Over the last year, the monstrous, squinting depravity of the military mind, enabled and encouraged by its despotic political lackey-chorus, has been flaunting the worst of its diseased imagination in a holocaust against refugees. The sheer lack of fucks given by the bureaucracy of hate that must have been necessary to enact the pager and walkie-talkie mass assassinations is blinding; as bad as any act in El-Akkad’s fiction. The blind hatred of the Hamas warriors, who employed rape and child murder in their revenge for the near-century of Israeli atrocities is as difficult to justify as the final act of Sarat in her agonised hatred of her oppressors and torturers, but the soullessness, implacability and nihilistic determination of the Israeli mafia-war state, even in the midst of its nation’s obvious death-spiral, is giddying.
This is a novel of history, of prophecy, and of contemporary commentary. I recommend it.
Names matter in this book. El Akkad uses a clever device to give a southern-states black/Latino American girl an Arabic name, pointing to the central satirical theme of the novel. [↩]
Four months ago, almost to the day, I didn’t feel right on a Sunday morning. Amanda thought I was faking it, because it was the day of her father’s birthday celebration tea, and I might have been a little unenthusiastic about the prospect. Her doubt was good, though, because it allowed me, after my blood test results showed I was having a heart attack or, more correctly, a myocardial infarction, 1 to text her from Accident and Emergency saying, “I told you I was ill,” which was a great, great moment, almost worth having a heart attack for.
The realisation that this was serious seemed to come in little slides, rather than a tumble. The first sign was when a nurse practitioner, a former learner of mine and someone I like very much, went from friendly to grave, about half an hour after my blood test had been taken. An enzyme, troponin, was seriously raised, and Russ’ manner became serious and cautious, and he began to choose his words carefully. Later, while I was sat in a crowded A&E admissions corridor, a registrar came to me after my second set of blood tests and said they’d be finding me a bed fairly soon. He didn’t disguise that there was urgency: they had a certain amount of time to prevent further damage to my heart. I felt as though I was on a cliff edge, the words “damage to your heart” hammering at my balance. I had visions of no more cycling, of oxygen bottles, of short, halting steps in slippered feet, holding on to walls.
“We don’t expect this sort of condition in a person as fit as you,” he said.
Besides the troponin levels, I had very high cholesterol.
“I’m vegan!” I said, and I heard what became a refrain: some people just have high cholesterol. That seemed inadequate, to me. I didn’t have high cholesterol ten years ago, when I had blood tests as part of my registration with my G.P. practice. I don’t eat a lot of processed food. Could it be stress?
There was no room in the Coronary Care Unit, so I was moved to the Acute Care Unit, which is the place where ambulance arrivals are seen. It is not a good place to be put: it means you need immediate help but the specialist ward is too busy for you. I spent a sleepless night in a cubicle as emergencies came in, and as crash teams saved, or failed to save, people much sicker than me. The drip they put me on raised my blood pressure and gave me a headache. I was on half-hourly tests, so couldn’t sleep, and the constant alarms of blood pressure and cardiac monitors made a peal of electronica, one always out of time with another, like a round sung by a soulless robot choir, singing without listening, staring blindly ahead, their brittle harmonies drowning out their desire to scream.
A robotic chorister, singing because that’s all it knows to do.
At dawn, a consultant, reassuringly middle-aged, Asian and bearded, with a smiling gravity, told me that the CCU was unlikely to be able to take me so they were talking to The Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth about transferring me there. I asked how I was to get there and he said they’d take care of that.
The night shift left. The man with COPD in the booth next to mine was wheeled off, every breath a fight to the death, exhaustion and fear warring in his own personal hell. The day shift came to familiarise themselves with their patients but otherwise the hours dragged on into mid morning in uncertainty and exhaustion. The tea trolley lady got used to my request for soya milk in my tea, and the health care assistant got permission for me to stand up so I could use a bottle. I had established a routine.
Towards lunchtime, they were suddenly there. A registrar came and told a health care assistant to get me ready, and then an ambulance crew, a woman my age, and a younger woman, appeared with one of those tank-like, high-tech stretchers. I was strapped on, my possessions were perched on my lap and we were off.
The older woman, a paramedic, was leading the stretcher, so I was looking at her. I asked her how I was crossing the Solent.
“Hovercraft,” she said. “We’ll be coming with you.”
I was loaded into the back of their ambulance and attached to the heart monitor. She checked that it was saying I was alive and then she gave her colleague the all-clear and we were on our way. We chatted as we travelled to Ryde, and she told me that the hospital would have commandeered a hovercraft and the passengers would have to wait for the next one.
“It’s quite an honour,” she said. I thought, it’s a sign that I’m not in a good way, but I didn’t say it. Instead, I said,
“How much do you think that costs?” and she said, “Less than the air ambulance.”
I told her that I was friendly with Russ and that he was studying to become an advanced practitioner and she said that she was lined up to do that, but had deferred because it was her son’s GCSE year. Then she told me that she dreads the hovercraft – she gets seasick.
We arrived at Ryde seafront and they opened the back, but the hovercraft was still disembarking the passengers from the trip over so I lay looking out of the back doors of the ambulance, feeling exposed. The ambulance crew were busy removing bags and equipment from their vehicle, piling it ready to go aboard as soon as they got the signal.
I apologised to the hovercraft crew, but it seemed they enjoyed these situations. A young woman among them had done the course on safe stowage of a stretcher, and directed two men. They worked with cheerful speed, and she checked each of the buckles before giving the pilot the go ahead. I hadn’t been on a hovercraft for many years – it goes to Portsmouth and I prefer to travel via Southampton – and I’d forgotten what an odd sensation it is. It feels like a horse that’s rushing ahead. On that day, it was a horse running over very rough ground, pitching up and down. It’s not like a boat, though: you don’t crash down, but can feel that you’re cushioned. I was facing the stern, strapped into a bed, but I’ve always been a reasonable sailor and I was quite happy, trying not to enjoy the poor paramedic’s distress too much.
We landed at Southsea, and I was wheeled out into a grey afternoon, to another waiting ambulance, with a new crew. These were two young women, and the one who stayed with me in the back was newly qualified, still excited by her job. After a quick debate, they decided they were justified in using the blue lights, and we edged and shouldered our way through Portsmouth’s permanent rush hour towards Cosham.
I expected another crowded ICU and another long wait to be admitted, but they wheeled me through the hospital, into a lift and straight on to a rather luxurious ward. It was a large lobby ringed by single-patient rooms. In the middle of the lobby was a large nurse’s station, looking like the flight deck of a very smart space ship. Two nurses, both male, both young, both handsome and bored, with an end-of-shift distraction, introduced themselves and took me off the ambulance crew’s hands.
The two nurses finished their shift within the hour, and were replaced by an African nurse. I wanted to sleep so badly, and seemed to fall into it, but I was still on half-hourly observations, so was dragged up to wakefulness by this gentle-faced carer throughout the night. It prompted a chaos of dreams, vivid as fever wraiths. To me, it was a relationship, lived out in the echo-realm of faery, sad and lovely.
In the morning, I had to negotiate to have my bowel movement in a proper lavatory. I was not using a commode. I was ashamed by the attention, and annoyed with myself for being so precious. I had a shower and some breakfast and felt better, the strange, distant, fantastical night melting away as I interacted with ward nurses, an angry cardiology trainee who took an echocardiogram – I managed to calm her a little and get her talking about her course – and the Latvian cardiac rehab nurse, who gave me lots of useful information about my condition and was keen to reassure me that I would be able to have sex again.
I thought she was presuming rather a lot, but it was fun listening to her say “intercourse,” in her lovely accent.
I spent a week in hospital, waiting for a slot in the angio lab to come free. After that first, busy day, I was moved to a ward with four beds, and greeted by the other occupants as a welcome distraction. Over the morning, we got to know one another, in that slightly exaggerated blokey way that British men adopt with new acquaintances. Opposite my bed was a man in his late thirties, squarely built and with the air of perilous affluence of a hard-working business owner. He turned out to be a kind, gentle man, though worried about his business, a furniture retail warehouse, which was in the hands of a less interested brother and a couple of staff. His wife, a lovely woman as rotund as him, visited every day and brought him heart-ruining Pakistani delicacies. I liked him at once.
On my side of the room, the other occupant was an older man from the Island, a farm worker, who was waiting for a bypass. This is the hard core patient. Our businessman friend and I were both waiting for stents, but if you need a bypass, you are in serious need. Southampton doesn’t do bypasses – they’re less common these days. He was waiting for a transfer to, I think, St Bart’s, in London. He’d been waiting for a week and was, it became clear, slipping into depression. He hadn’t had any visitors in all that time. The businessman was trying to keep him cheerful, but there was an air of gloom about him that felt dangerous.
Our final comrade had loads of visitors. He was a man in his sixties who, I gradually gathered, was quite autistic. He spent a lot of time colouring, and discouraged conversation. I never established what his condition was, but his sister, who spent every afternoon with him, seemed cheerful.
After two days, I was moved from there. I was, a nurse told me, stabilised. There was no more danger of heart damage and I was now only in hospital for a stent. Unfortunately, each day’s list got hijacked by emergencies, and as you stabilised, you became less urgent and were dropped down the list. The businessman had his and came back to be discharged at around the same time as I was moved to the Cardiac Day Ward. The name was out of date. It was supposed to be an outpatients’ ward but is routinely used for inpatients in the angiography queue.
This was a long ward with one row of beds, each cubicle curtained and separated from its neighbour by a high, narrow window. Somebody had missed a trick and the windows were rectangular, rather than arched, which would have made the place feel magical. I was in the first cubicle by the main door. It became a home, and I would have defended it if they had tried to take it away from me. Each morning I was woken by a tired night nurse for my observations. I would get up after that and shuffle along the dimly lit room to the bathroom, to shower and shave and clean my teeth in leisurely peace before it got busy. I hadn’t packed pyjamas, so I was in hospital P.J.s, using a gown as a dressing gown. I looked like a very camp jedi.
The tea trolley was my main delight. They were initially thrown into confusion by my request for soya milk but became used to it and made sure there was always a mini pack of bourbons (vegan) among the biscuits. I heard about relatives who’d had heart attacks, their recoveries or, hilariously, given the setting, their failure to recover. I shared dog pictures with one of the housekeepers.
I got used to taking pills and to being connected to a heart monitor. I became adept at removing the clips without disturbing the stickers when I wanted to go to the loo, and replacing them when I returned. I had bloods taken by lovely nurses from various African countries, from the Philippines, from India. I tried to befriend each one, treating the brief interaction as a challenge and a respite, surprised that in such a busy place, I could feel quite so lonely. I became a connoisseur of cannula inserts.
Each morning, the consultant, who did his best to be patient and nice, came round to tell us that we were number one in the queue, number two in the queue, etc. Above number three, you stood a chance of having the procedure that day. Otherwise, you would be stuck until the next day. I tried my best to not show impatience. I was still effected by the night in St Mary’s Emergency Admissions ward, where I had listened to people die. I didn’t want to be in competition with people on the edge of death, when it was clear that I would live, would cycle again, would be okay.
Eventually, on the Saturday afternoon, I was taken in to a cave-like room, part laboratory and part Alien-film spaceship bridge, and put on a weirdly technical chair while filaments were pushed up my arm and a stent was fitted into my aortic artery. There was rock music playing softly: the Spotify playlist of someone who is proud of their taste. Surgical lights lit patches of the room, while the rest was lit only by computer screens and video monitors that showed the inside of my circulatory system, but were angled so I couldn’t properly follow the procedure. The Consultant asked me questions, but was impatient with imprecise answers and did not answer my enquiries. I guess he was doing overtime and, I suppose, concentrating. I’m grateful, but that sense of estrangement from control of my own circumstances is something with which I have become familiar since then. At the time, it annoyed me.
I left hospital the next day. My sister-in-law, Jo, and her partner, Paul, very kindly came to pick me up in their comfy S.U.V. and we got the Fishbourne ferry back. I felt fine, but desperate for home. They took me to their house, where Amanda was waiting, and I was reunited with a joyful Hazel. She squirmed backwards and forwards in front of my legs, rubbing her bottom against me, twisting her body to look back at me, whining a high pitched squeal.
My reception from the humans had the feeling of fragile celebrity that surrounds the patient who has had a life-changing diagnosis. I think that was the moment when I realised I had entered the realm of the unwell, from which there is no real return. It crossed my mind that I was out of work, an invalid, in the eyes of the world if not in fact, and in the middle of trying to move my mother into a house for us to share. It wasn’t the time to think about these things, though. I wanted to get home.
Prior to my heart attack, I was feeling better about life than I had for some years. I had escaped the bullying supervision of my former “colleague” by an act of economic self-destruction, but I was ready to start looking for alternatives, and the extent to which my mother’s care was going to impact my freedom hadn’t quite hit me. I was volunteering for the cargo bike business, trying to write, with my usual progress, walking the dog, shopping, cooking, reading.
Why did it happen? I truly think that ten years of manipulative bullying by a chaos-queen, on top of my long grief for my father, both before and after his death, had a massive impact on my health. I thought, because I ate a decent vegan diet, had given up smoking and cycled a considerable distance most weeks, that I was immune from the ailments of middle age, but it appears not. The one thing I could not control was my mood of anger and frustration. Some of that was political, but my working life was, for a decade, like a toxic marriage, and I stayed because I needed the money. It had some good aspects, but it was all overshadowed by that fucking person. She has her own challenges and sorrows, but she is a past master at division, manipulation and keeping everyone on the back foot, and herself at the centre of things.
On the other hand, my diet wasn’t perfect, much as I have cooked from scratch for many years. I may have relied upon the bad vegetable fats – coconut and palm – more than I should have and I definitely developed a real instant noodles problem over the last few years. Also, I smoked for thirty years and drank for forty. These things aren’t good.
The genesis of this post was a review of my increasing sorrow: the loss of the optimism that had been my characteristic outlook since my teens. I didn’t notice when I lost my gift for happiness. There wasn’t a moment when I felt a whoosh, a gust of cold and a crushing sense of absence. The jolts to my cheery nature have been cumulative,34, rather like my realisation in A&E that what I felt in my chest was serious. I faced each event with the courage it demanded at the time, but, gradually, they eroded me until I had become rather darker than I have been for most of my life, and much sadder.
I’ve been aware of it. I shelled out for counselling for several months last year, and it helped me to confirm my need to ditch the job, and seek more control over my circumstances. And it comes back quite frequently, in moments of understanding, as it did two nights ago, when Amanda and I avoided an argument because, unusually, she let it go.
“You’ve got enough to be dealing with at the moment,” she said. It was dark. We were in the kitchen and I had only put the extractor lights on, so there were shadows surrounding us. I sort of slumped, and she crawled into my arms to hug me.
In her embrace, I remembered that I still have much treasure, a great deal to be grateful for. We will get past this. All will be well.
It’s coronation weekend. I’ve not participated and I have felt more annoyed by it than interested when it has intruded. You know the cringe inspired by a performance that’s slightly off-key? That’s how I feel about it all. I don’t want to join in with The Guardian’s self-admiring republicanism: like most of the Guardian’s attempts to paint itself as still relevant, it has a whiff of trust-fund radicalism to it, but, on this point, my sense of events chimes with its.
A billionaire gets a ceremonial celebration of his privilege that costs the state millions, and we’re told we can’t afford to fund a decent health service, to educate children properly, or treat victims of war and oppression who seek safety here with human dignity.
For most of my life, I’ve been an intellectual republican but a sentimental monarchist, but I’m alienated from all of it now. It’s a farce: a Netflix mega-production pretending to be real history. It’s the simulacrum in the middle of our national breakdown, an embarrassment.
In our time the destiny of man presents itself in political terms.
Thomas Mann
Today is the third day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I am travelling home after having visited my mother and my sister. This morning, the front page of my mother’s right-wing newspaper was covered with pictures of terror and pain and the business section noted that BAE systems are the best performing stock in a turbulent market. Even my mother, in her increasing dementia, raised the topic of the Russians’ massacre of the innocents when I got to her flat for breakfast.
My sister was less interested, or less obviously so. We are careful about our discussion of politics, although it animates us both, and we are sympathetic to one another’s outlooks. She is preparing for another Extinction Rebellion action, and for the appeal against her conviction for protesting against the Murdoch empire’s half-century of climate crisis denial. On Thursday night she spoke at a meeting. I spent the evening at my mother’s flat, then met Charlotte – my sister – at a pub afterwards. She was with people from her meeting; good, impassioned activists who are committed to pushing for real change in the way the world is run, in the hope of mitigating the damage done to the world by human activity.
I felt ashamed in their company. I am torn by a guilty desire to affect indifference, to the war and to the climate disaster. I had my season of political hope2 and it made me very unhappy,3 and the awareness of my impotence in public matters, and the apparently illusory nature of the virtues of democratic involvement, seem to press on me whenever I break my embargo on news. I leave my phone in another room when I sleep; I try to discipline myself to avoid the news, and I seek calm and serenity.
And yet my sister’s comrades seemed to me to be – not happier than I am – but more aware of themselves and warmed by their mutual endeavour. I’ve no idea whether there is a Christian among them, but they seem to have the clear-sighted tenacity of hope that I have always envied in true believers. I didn’t get to know them closely, but they included me in their round of goodbye hugs and I felt they were giving me access to the secret of their power, as they drew their comfort from each other and, generously, shared it with me.
I found the Yeats poem while reading an LRB article4 by Seamus Perry, on Colm Tóibín’s new novel,((http://colmtoibin.com/content/magician)) about the life of Thomas Mann. I intended to read the entire issue of the magazine, taking advantage of my train journey home, but this article has brought me up short. It seems to address perfectly the disillusionment I feel towards taking responsibility for anything outside my personal orbit. I was surprised to read that Yeats was a reluctant revolutionary. He wrote, after all, perhaps the greatest poem of struggle of the twentieth century,5 a poem that might today be applied to the awful glory of Ukrainian heroism in the face of the Russian spasm of fascist imperialism: in this horror, another “terrible beauty” is born. And yet, at least at the end of his life, in Politics, the last poem of the last collection he published, he expressed a weary indifference to worldly engagement.
I ‘did’ An Irish Airman…6 at school and I learnt the first stanza of Second Coming7 when I was a taxi driver, about twenty years ago, and I have, at times, taken a non-poetry-enthusiast’s limited interest in Yeats, as both an historical figure and an artist. I respected his reputation as one of the best of the modernist writers, but he was shaded from my enthusiasm by the fact that I despised them as a group because my teachers were all so uncritically adoring of modernism. Yeats got lumped in with (well, actually, overshadowed by) Lawrence, who was drilled into us as a paragon when he seemed to me to be a hack. It is only now that I realise that most of my English teachers just weren’t that good: they may have been devoted pedagogues, but their tastes were shaped by their polytechnic educations and their 1960s and ‘70s, lefty-ish, play-for-today political outlooks. Lawrence, with his leaden, explicit prose and his interest in sex and class, was easy to teach; Yeats, an infinitely more subtle and wide-ranging writer, was a more difficult study, even if his is the more beautiful work, by a country mile.
“Yeats sometimes feared that his work would be distorted by the restrictions of Irish culture.”8 He was, throughout his life, inescapably a political and public person, serving, to his apparent regret,9 six years as an Irish senator. It seems that, as he could not escape Irish culture, neither could he escape politics, living, as he did, in the long, bitter decline of British colonialism, whose death watch has lingered for over a century now.
It must be a terrible thing to be forced to upend your life in resistance to an inescapable event. How bitter the longing for the life abandoned must be. To my modern ear, the poem seems to drift close to depicting lechery as a virtuous alternative to engagement, but my response is, no doubt, an artefact of the time, and misses some of the poem’s cultural echoes: according to the notes in my copy of the Collected Poems of Yeats10, its phrases reflect the anonymous sixteenth Century English song, Westron Wind.
Westron wynde when wyll thow blow
the smalle rayne downe can Rayne
Cryst yf my love were in my Armys
And I yn my bed Agayne.11
Perry has this to say about how Yeats gives privately cherished passion a greater truth than worldly knowledge and engagement:
You could imagine a much more straightforward poem that pitted public discourse against, say, the intimate conversation of lovers, but Yeats does something much odder than that: he sets public language against the private and wordless intensity of an absorbed gaze. And here, too, Yeats was entirely in tune with Mann, who was similarly fascinated by the way that catching sight of someone you don’t know can make you forget yourself – or, rather, suddenly discover yourself to be something other than you had thought.
(( Perry (2022)))
For Mann, apparently, aesthetics (that ‘forgetfulness’), at least partially, manifested in a life of secret and vividly focussed crushes on unsuspecting men and boys. The most famous expression of this in his art is the ecstatic fixation of Aschenbach the writer upon the boy Tadzio in Death In Venice.12 It’s decades since I read it, but I remember feeling slightly alienated by the conflict between the internal values of the story – an ambiguous mix of social self-criticism and moral reverie – and the actual sleaziness of the character, consumed, after all the angst about aesthetic ideals, by a lust which is the deepest crime of modern culture.
Like Yeats, Mann was dragged into political activity by his times: first by the German collapse into Nazism, and then by McCarthyism in the States.((Meyers, J. (2012) ‘Thomas Mann In America’ Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume 51, Issue 4, Available at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0051.419;g=mqrg;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1 Accessed 6th March 2022)) Even earlier, his Nobel acceptance speech of 192913 addressed the balance between art and the political atmosphere in which it is practised. He is, however, considered an ‘apolitical’ writer.14 After he had grasped the full stupidity and dishonesty of the McCarthy putsch…
Mann vowed not to make any more political statements, which could be dangerously distorted, and wryly remarked, “the world needs peace—but I need it too.”
Unsure how to respond to the experience of reading a poem that I feel might have been written for me in my current situation, I turned away from this post and read some news articles on my phone. The Russian attack was utterly mesmerising to watch, a dreadful deluge of iron and diesel spills, unleashed by the shrill screech of Putin’s deranged sanctimony. By the time I reached home, it had become clear that something that should be impossible was happening: the Ukrainians were standing up to their invaders and the Russians appeared to be stumbling. The Ukrainians’ courage was inhuman: it must have felt like watching a tidal wave coming at you, but as a million of them fled to the borders, hundreds of thousands of them rushed to take up arms.
By the next evening, there were interviews on the BBC’s Ukrainecast podcast with British-resident Ukrainians who were equipping themselves to return home to enlist. In answer to the predictable question, they all said they had no choice.
No choice. Like Mann, more suited to a life of bourgeois deception than to confronting evil, and like Yeats, who felt himself fettered into a conflict that reached back as far as the Norman invasion of his country and of which he was weary before he even began to publish. But unlike me. I, for now at least, seem to have a choice and I have chosen to be inactive.
Charlotte told me, when she first threw herself into Extinction Rebellion, that she didn’t expect to change anything. She just wanted to be on the right side of history. I understood that, but I still believed in the virtue of political hope and was, at the time, deeply involved in the Labour party. I felt that party politics offered the best opportunity to make a change, but that all fell apart with the 2019 election. At the time I wrote:
So, I’m looking at my position…the idea of becoming a social activist, working on practical projects, rather than just being a political campaigner, appeals to me. Food banks, advice and support networks, and care volunteers are all able to affect lives in a way that…is more useful than arguing over dogma and political tactics…I am ambivalent about Extinction Rebellion, but I think it’s all we’ve got left. We are into a period of resistance, not participation.
Instead, I crumbled when it became apparent that Starmer had lied to gain the leadership and was just another capitalist lackey, pushing the anti-Semitism lie to squeeze out any supporters of real social justice, in favour of returning the party to right-wing conformity.((https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/whet-does-starmer-stand-for/)) Rather than take my energy elsewhere, I retreated.
I have been surprised by how deeply I have fallen into nihilism, and how unable I am to rekindle hope. I have always believed that optimism is my natural state, and that pessimism is a pointless self-scourging: why anticipate sorrow? For the past two years, though, I have felt that our last hope of stopping the end of the democratic era has died, and that the drift towards authoritarian tribalism is unstoppable.
And yet, my ideals have not changed. I still believe that economic equality is a necessary first-condition of a just society. I still believe that the maltreatment of animals is at the core of the rapacious relationship of capitalism to the planet. What I have not done is find, “the private and wordless intensity of an absorbed gaze” that Perry describes as the state in which one might, “suddenly discover yourself to be something other than you had thought”. My fugues have been fruitless. I am as adrift as I was two and a half years ago, when my political hopes died. My courage – my optimism – has been overwhelmed by the sense that the world really is spiralling towards destruction.
Is it just a question of courage? Raymond Williams said that, “To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing,” but I never wanted to be radical. I don’t see my politics as radical: the belief that one life is no less valuable than the next should not be a radical assertion. It is the basis of decency, and its denial is obscene. I think, fundamentally, I’m not suited to political engagement: I’m too self-conscious and too naked; too heart-on-sleeve.
That’s an excuse, though, of course. Yeats didn’t want to be drawn into politics:
…But the strife engendered when an intensely inward mind finds itself cast into remorselessly political times was perhaps more of an epochal predicament than it sounds. The great works of Yeats…are all about a lonely romanticism finding itself forced to enter the public world of ‘what’s difficult’, and finding that one way of attempting the task was to become a man of masks.
((Perry))
What to do? What to do?
I sought permission from Simon and Schuster to post this poem back in March. I heard nothing, and I did nag, so I’m going tp do it anyway. I own the book, and this post only makes sense if you’ve read the poem, so let’s see what happens. I expect I am beneath their notice, but if they do notice me, it will be exciting. [↩]
Last Friday, the day after the election, in a fog of tiredness and sorrow, I went to work, where I dragged learners through English mocks, and fought to believe that anything can make any difference now.
One learner, who manages an incredibly demanding life of balancing the needs of various dependents with a zero hours care job, was late. When she came in, she was, as ever, flustered. She offered her apologies and said,
“I had to get on to the Universal Credit. They’ve only paid half my rent.”
I sympathised and pushed her work in front of her. She completed it in her habitual rush, with her usual betrayal of her intelligence, because her way of coping with a life of overwhelming economic and familial responsibility at too young an age is to do everything in a hurry, avoiding dangerous reflection. We discussed each answer, interpreting how she hadn’t read the questions fully or considered all the options in the multiple choice section, and how, with a few minutes’ care, she is perfectly capable of passing what should be, for her, the formality of this exam. She promised to be early next week, and to take a few minutes to become calm, but I expect she will rush in to the exam room late, pre-occupied by another crisis that she will bravely cope with, as she tries to make the space to better her life.
In the afternoon, she came back for the maths class. I had been preparing for this class for several weeks, laying the ground for nervous learners: it’s the one in which we move from basic calculation with decimal numbers to working with fractions. This is where people give up: they believe that ‘fractions are hard’, and that they have some innate inability to ‘do hard maths’ and this section of the course is always as much an exercise in boosting learners’ self-belief and reflecting on how much they have already achieved as it is about introducing new skills and understanding.
She and my other learner who had turned up – there’s a wave of colds and stomach bugs keeping children off school, and two other women were at home with sick offspring – have developed a friendship that is still at the stage of curiosity about one another. Off-topic discussions, pleasurable as they can be, are a headache for me, as I only get two hours each week to teach a demanding curriculum. I had given them their warm up task – a few questions on what we had covered the previous week – and checked that they knew where they were with it, and I left the room to go to the loo while they completed it. By the time I got back, they were discussing the election result.
I groaned inwardly, and cautioned myself to be like a fly fisherman with a bite: to let it run until I could feel they were tiring and then take control again. A few weeks before, as part of my duty to ‘promote British values’, I had used a voter registration poster in our English class for an exercise on identifying presentational features in a text. At the time, the learner of whom I am writing had asked me my politics and I had explained that I wasn’t allowed to say, and she had responded, after a discussion of why that was sensible for a teacher, that she reckoned I was for Corbyn. At the time, I’d congratulated myself on remaining neutral. Now, as I sat quietly, waiting for my opportunity to get them back on task, she said,
“I was right about you.”
Photo: Isle of Wight County Press (I think)
She’d seen a photo on the local newspaper’s website, in one of the few articles the openly Tory-leaning rag had bothered to publish on Labour’s campaign, that had a picture of a group of Labour supporters gathering for an event in Ryde, smiling, comradely, happy, optimistic. At the back, peaking over the shoulder of the shorter man in front, grinning like a hungover idiot, I was clearly visible.
“You know I can’t talk about it,” I said, shaken.
“Yeah,” she said, “I voted for Boris. I’ve never voted before, but I voted Conservative.”
It was as if she hated me. I know she doesn’t, but that was how it felt.
I haven’t blogged about this election, beyond changing my homepage to a trite meme and linking to a couple of posts I’d heard about through the news. I haven’t blogged much this year, of course, but I did expect that, when the longed-for election campaign happened, I’d be leaping into prolix action, as I had in 2017.
Instead, I’ve been involved, ‘on the streets’, and through the Constituency Labour Party’s own systems. I’ve been the assistant secretary of the CLP for nearly two years, but that has, until recently, only meant being the keyboard monkey for the secretary and chair, both of whom have become friends. Just before the election started, however, the chair withdrew himself from consideration for the position of candidate, having been subject to sustained vilification, including threats to his family, since the last election, and the secretary got himself locked out of the Labour comms system for a mistaken breach of the opaque rules, which have more to do with internal politicking within the national party structure than they do with making the system work.
Thanks to these circumstances, my role became, accidentally, central. Over the last six weeks, I have probably written more words than in the previous twelve months. They just haven’t found their way here. The chair, who had become the new candidate’s campaign manager, told me, late on in the campaign, that his role was taking the fight to the Tories, and my role was galvanising the troops. I hadn’t been told that before, but had simply adopted the job that I didn’t see anyone else doing, or being in a position to do.
Each day after work, once I’d done enough to be sure that I would know where I was for the next lessons, I turned off my work laptop and went straight on to my own computer, where I would often be trapped until after midnight. If the next day wasn’t a teaching day, I would be out with the Cowes and East Cowes branch, delivering leaflets door-to-door, or helping with the distribution of garden signs and posters to people who had contacted the party, asking how they could help. In the evenings, there were many events, most of which were a pleasure: I have spent more time in pubs over the last few weeks than I have for many years.
At first, it was exciting. I was surrounded by people who believe, broadly, in what I believe: that humans are only of any account if they serve the group; that selfishness is a moral and intellectual failure; that the dominant political and economic system is, without question, evil; childish, rapacious and evil, but that elation had, after the first couple of weeks, begun to compete with exhaustion. I did not, however, lose hope, but I began to feel a little let down by comrades whose belief in the coming victory of justice and good sense was tempered with caution.
Two things gave me a different outlook to the majority of people fighting for a Labour victory in this election: my Christianity and my disavowal of social media.
I am not an ardently practising Christian, but I came, through the nineties and noughties, to realise that I cannot escape my faith, and that the arguments against faith that were trendy in those decades, were, in the words of Terry Eagleton, a process of Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching against a system of thought that the neo-atheists wilfully misunderstood and misrepresented. Earlier this year, I joined Christians On The Left. Through the election they have been sending out a daily email, the 2019 Prayer Diary. Written by a theologian who only introduced herself as Hazel, they were wonderfully welcome at a time when I didn’t have the space to read my normal blogs and news for which I receive update emails that, through the campaign, I simply had to delete, to be able to keep up with my inboxes. Each day, though, I read her prayers, and then got on with whatever needed doing.
As for social media, I think my absence from it since July 2017 has given me the clarity to think for myself and to avoid the political panic to which I am prone and which, I think, guided many people in this election. The Tories are crisis capitalists: they thrive on the established P.R. tactic of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD). I suspect, without being in a position to offer evidence, that this was the election in which the capitalists realised their technological dream of controlling people’s reactions from within. I may expand upon that at another time, but I think that, accomplished as we in the Labour Party are at using social media to make ourselves feel effective, it means nothing unless the people who own the media are on your side.
Actually, I did rejoin Twitter for the duration of the campaign. It helped me to keep up with events in the CLP, where a disparate set of groups, spread over the largest constituency in the country (by population), were arranging their campaigning efforts semi-autonomously, and were not always brilliant at communicating outside their social media bubbles. I tried to join Facebook as well, but was frustrated. I think my use of Firefox’s Facebook Container extension, coupled with a disposable email address and a phone number linked to a burner SIM card I had no intention of using again, tipped the creepy capitalist bastards off. I’m rather proud to have been blocked by Facebook before I posted a thing!
A facile pretence of utility and ubiquity have made social media essential in politics, and have, I believe, handed the reins of power over to a capitalist hegemony as completely as any other factor in this election. I had set up my home server, after two years of study and trial and error, less than a month before the election was announced, and would have been lost without the calendar, to-do lists and contacts server it hosts, but I was still obliged to use a Google calendar for shared calendaring with the CLP. We need to look at owning our infrastructure, but it’s a hard sell. People who automatically accept the ‘services’ to which they are tied by their choice of computer system and mobile phone have a hard time understanding that they are being used, when they have put so much effort into just mastering the technology that seeks to control them. The idea that it is escapable defeats them, as the idea that all politicians are not the same defeats people who are struggling to survive in an economic system that is tightening around their lives. There is a simple answer (simpler than the route of learning and self-building that I have used), but how many people will make the effort to do it?
Earlier this year, I read Democracy Hacked, by Martin Moore. A couple of months ago, I read, almost in one sitting, the Edward Snowden autobiography, Permanent Record and, just before the election was called, I bought The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff, which I will now have the time to read fully. If you want to understand what has happened to democracy over the last decade, you need to read these texts. You do not control your data, and, consequently, electronic communication does not, any more, give us a full say in our democracy. We’ve overthrown one tyranny of informational cartels to replace it with another. We need new mechanisms of resistance.
I’m not keen on going into mainstream media’s role in this election. Enough people are already examining that, although I will add a couple of personal observations. Firstly, the full emotional crash of the exit poll was pre-announced by about twenty seconds, for me, by the smirk on the face of Andrew Niel as he talked over the countdown to it. Rattling through his bland script, he looked as though he had a hand stuffed down his truss, so excited was he by the predicted result to which he, I assume, had had early access. If you believe in democracy, honesty or truth, the BBC is not your friend, any more than Facebook is.
Secondly, it dawned on me, as I angrily skimmed The Guardian’s website each morning, that the key figures among its columnists and editorial staff are probably on a lot more than £80,000 per annum and, while they cling to the pose of being ‘of the left’ as their journalistic USP, very few of them will have voted for a party that wanted to raise taxes for the richest 5%. I think their utter betrayal of democracy is a good enough reason to not “support independent journalism” for another year. Let them take comfort from their massive wealth, their second homes and their positions of quisling influence.
There is a lot of commentary on the election leaping out and I haven’t had the heart to try to keep up over the weekend. Yesterday, Saturday, we met other Island Labour members in a Newport pub to have a bit of a thank you session, with the candidate, Richard Quigley, a gloriously happy, funny, clever and warm man, bringing his wife and daughter so he could say his personal thanks. Richard has been a pleasure to support in the campaign, as Julian, his manager, was in the last. In the pub, many of us were talking about how we are now facing the very real dread of the last restraints being released from the Tory plunder of our country’s assets. We’re thinking about the fact that we will not be able to afford ‘health insurance’ when the Fascists pocket the bribes from the Yank money and drug industries; we’re thinking about the fact that those of us who are in public service jobs will probably endure a continued slide into deeper and deeper working destitution, if we are lucky enough to keep our jobs. We are finding it harder to think without real, urgent horror of the fate of disabled people, homeless people, people who cannot find legal redress for rape or harassment and how soon it will be our turn to join them. It’s personal. Dying, untreated, of some wretched cancer, or living with pain that would be treatable if we were part of the 5%, now seems like our common fate.
What we are supposed to do, if we follow the advice that we have told ourselves since Jeremy Corbyn first gave us hope, is to pull together, look to one another, and begin to support those people already jettisoned by the Tories’ campaign of exclusion and abandonment. Some people are talking about it, but we all know that the Blairites will try another deluded attempt to drive the party into impotence by reopening the insane whinges they’ve been picking at since they were crushed in 2015. And, pathetic as their positions are, they have The New Statesman and The Guardian behind them, so they don’t have to be right, just shamelessly persistent.
So, I’m looking at my position. If infighting does get a grip, I may decide to not stand for local party office at the next AGM. Over the election, I have made new friends, or deepened existing ones, and the idea of becoming a social activist, working on practical projects, rather than just being a political campaigner, appeals to me. Food banks, advice and support networks, and care volunteers are all able to affect lives in a way that, while it is not as powerful as political office, is more useful than arguing over dogma and political tactics. And, if I convince a few people to see through the lies of the capitalist hegemony on the way, all the better.
One other thing is troubling me; an issue that is like the ticking bomb that fascists love to use to justify their cruelty. If, by some miracle, the vile Bozo Johnson manages to hold together a government for five years, the timeline for installing a government that will meet its responsibilities to the climate emergency before the deadline that scientists now say is the very latest chance to save human civilisation will be halved. We have to stop the Tories before then. We have to. I am ambivalent about Extinction Rebellion, but I think it’s all we’ve got left. We are into a period of resistance, not participation.
Let’s get back to my Tory voting learner. I can’t discuss her much more closely than I already have, but I can make some guesses about those things that drive her. Not ideologically racist, she has, I suspect, suffered humiliations at the hands of people whom she perceives as different, and came to the Island, partly, to get away from communities that are in turmoil and have been turned against one another by poverty and poorly resourced and led policing, social structures and political leadership. For her, Brexit seems like a triumph of the poor over the powerful – a reversal of the truth, as it turns out, but if your information comes from social media and tabloids, you can continue to believe that.
For her, also, they are all the same. It’s the FUD lie of lies, that says that politics is pointless and the safest and bravest response is to follow the herd. Political voting is confused with voting for a Love Island contestant, where the outcome is similar to a bet: you win if you back the winner.
In truth, of course, backing the winner in this election has guaranteed that the phone calls she gets, when she says, “Someone after money: they can jog on,” will increase. The waiting time for her Universal Credit will lengthen, the amount she is entitled to reduced, so her debts will deepen; the inadequate working protections she has at the moment will be removed one at a time, until she will be paying, not only for her work travel, but for her uniform, her equipment, and, finally, for the privilege of being employed.
She hasn’t yet noticed, I suspect, that the NHS has been privatised. The fact that ‘Boris’, as she calls him, lied about putting more money into the NHS hasn’t got through to her. They all throw figures around, don’t they? They’re all the same.
When she told me that she had voted Tory, I stared at her for a moment, taking in her beauty, her nicotine-stained front teeth, her bravely well turned out appearance that is testament to her courage, given the hours she works, and then muttered that I couldn’t get into it. It was an uncomfortable moment.
She got on with her work, doing well, grasping lowest common multiples and then comparison of fractions, but the moment must have lingered for her, as well as for me. I realised that, for her, I am part of the body of authority that keeps her working and working and working, denying her the right to gain full realisation of her talents and potential and, by confronting my politics, she was asserting herself; laying claim to a dignity she doesn’t realise I already see in her. She’s not to know that I earn less than her, and that, for all my education, I am as constrained and limited by the political and economic system as she is.
Finally, as we were summing up the learning at the end of the class, she brought it up again.
“It bothers you, don’t it,” she said, reverting to her mannered London speech, which is not how she usually talks to me.
I wanted to channel Jonathan Pie, and descend into a rant that would contain all the frustration and pain I had been feeling since ten o’clock the previous night, when Huw Edwards and Andrew Neil had gleefully pronounced my country’s doom. I stared into her eyes for a moment, trying to find the right thing to say. Nothing came.
In my struggle, I remembered Christians On The Left’s prayer email of that morning. I hadn’t absorbed it properly: I’d been too tired and too sad, but one line had jumped out at me:
Be still, and know that I am God
Psalm 46:10
I stopped searching and words came.
“Your vote is your own choice,” I said. “It’s wonderful that you voted. The fact that you have voted, for the first time, is a really good thing. The more people who vote, the more powerful all our votes are. I celebrate that.”
I doubt I fooled her. I suspect that, given the struggles she has and the job she does, she is a perceptive person, who saw how much pain I was in. However, she smiled, packed her bag, and went on to her next obligation, her courage and dignity undamaged by our exchange, knowing a little bit more about maths than she had when she came in.
A month or so back, a friend of mine who suffers from long-term, severe mental illness was attacked by a group of boys on her estate. They took photographs of that attack and posted them on social media.
They are pretty much immune from prosecution,1 thanks to the ‘viral’ response to their post. Granted, they are now pariahs in their close-knit community, and their ugly, stupid act will follow them into their adulthood, cropping up whenever they attempt to make any public progress in their lives. If you believe in mob-justice, then justice might be said to have been done. The state, however, because of the illegal publication of their identities on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, is powerless to take action against them. It can only attempt to protect them from the self-aggrandizing vigilantism to which they have opened themselves by their use of social media and their grotesque immaturity. The legitimate, accountable, democratically-authorised legal system has been short-circuited by a foreign-owned capitalist monopoly that uses the everyday indignities of humanity as grist to its algorithms and regards legal and democratic structures as barriers to wealth creation and the self-actualisation of the cleverest, luckiest and most amoral elite in history.
I saw my friend last weekend. She is terrified. She is not engaging with the community which piously leapt to her defense after years of treating her as a local embarrassment, and she thinks the police are trying to victimise her: their inability to give her a clear course of legal remedy for her ordeal has confused the issue beyond her ability to engage with it. She is also mesmerised by her Facebook feed, which seems to be confirming her long-standing belief that the world is purposed towards her destruction. Horribly, I think that her fear that the hatred towards the boys will swing back to her may be justified. That is the nature of restless, self-righteous, technologically-enabled groupthink.
The rule of law is a mainstay of democracy. Facebook undermines that rule. It is inherently anti-democratic.
A Short History of Social Media and Political Campaigning
The 2015 Labour Leadership Poll was a triumph for people who sought to manipulate social media in the service of meaningful political change: what Jeremy Corbyn called, “…a thirst for something more communal, more participative.”((Cited in Nunns, Alex, The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path To Power, (1st ed) OR Books, New York & London, 2016, p143))
By the 2017 general election, however, the political promise of the medium had begun to be diminished by forces other than the well-directed groundswell of public feeling that had empowered the Elect Corbyn for Leader movement. I am not an unquestioning fan of Momentum, but I think that the campaign to elect Corbyn as leader was a model of how to use social media to a positive purpose. What they achieved in ‘15 was to break the ‘echo chamber’ or bubbling effect of Facebook and Twitter’s algorithms, by pulling in unsympathetic friends of sympathisers, and engaging them in debate and exposing them to sincere voices of political hope.((Miller, Patrick R., et al. “Talking Politics on Facebook: Network Centrality and Political Discussion Practices in Social Media.” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 2, 2015, pp. 377–391. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24371839)) By the time of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and by 2017, the social media companies had realised that this was a loophole in their control of users’ media consumption and had adjusted.
Before Facebook became a publicly quoted company, focussed on advertising spend, it had been chasing engagement over content control, powering for growth, and there was a certain freedom of expression allowed to its users. By 2016, it was chasing the control of what its users were seeing to a far greater extent, refining their offering to advertisers and data-purchasers and trying to present a soothing, ‘mimetic’ (ie, reflective, flattering) experience to users which would make viewing Facebook a comfortable and reinforcing experience to which people would return without worry.((Lanchester, John, You Are The Product, London Review Of Books, Vol 39 No. 16, Aug. 2017.)) That is why they bubble you. It’s not a service. It’s a mechanism of control.
Furthermore, the sophistication of the JeremyForLeader campaign, alongside the Occupy movement and the lessons learned from The Arab Spring movements, had caught the attention of other forces, both within the U.K. and outside it. Academic studies translated to media management policies((Miller, Patrick R., et al. “Talking Politics on Facebook: Network Centrality and Political Discussion Practices in Social Media.” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 2, 2015, pp. 377–391. www.jstor.org/stable/24371839.)) which were adopted by right-wing forces((Schroeder, Ralph, Digital media and the rise of right-wing populism Social Theory after the Internet: Media, Technology, and Globalization UCL Press. (2018) https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt20krxdr.6 )) and foreign intelligence services((llcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkow. “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 31, no. 2, 2017, pp. 211–235. www.jstor.org/stable/44235006)) to undermine the impact of organised popular campaigns. Populism swings in many directions.
In short, the glory days are over for democrats who use social media. An open technology – the internet – that was designed to release knowledge, communication and democratic access from the establishment gatekeepers who had directed public debate since at least the 1850s2, has been co-opted by a new capitalist, plutocratic, neo-liberal elite, to bind its customers into a tower of Babel, in which coherent exchange of ideas is anathema, labelled as TL:DNR.
The Limits of ‘Privacy’ Settings
Know this: a private Facebook group is not private. It is exclusive, in that the labour put into it is restricted to those who choose to sign up to it. This means that it serves as a mechanism of exclusion of those people who, for whatever reason, choose to not participate in social media. However, that ad hominen rant against a comrade to which you succumbed during the Owen Smith leadership challenge is available to the right level of advertiser, if they’re searching for dirt on the Labour Party during an election campaign.
And that situation assumes that you’re wise enough to restrict your rants to a ‘private’ group, and to not share your breathless prose in a moment of vainglory to your main feed. Or that all the members of the group have the best wishes of the party at heart. Or that the administrators have kept up with the constant changes to Facebook’s privacy rules, and that the group is still actually set to ‘private’, rather than just ‘closed’. Or that no one is taking screenshots for malicious purposes.
But you know that, really. How else do the rumours of ‘green infiltrators’ get started?
Unless you delete your account – not just a single comment, but your whole account – and forego logging back into it for two weeks after you have deleted it, everything you have ever uploaded, written, sniped or ‘shared’, is sitting in a folder on Facebook’s servers, available to the highest bidder, and linked to you. Have you ever enjoyed watching someone try to backtrack on an opinion they expressed five years ago in a drunken moment? It could be you. Only the safety of the crowd protects you.
The Great Con
There is a rather mischievous argument doing the rounds in internet freedom circles that claims China actually has more politically effective internet access than the free West. I consider that nonsense: Chinese citizens have definitely scored real successes in changing government policy through internet activism, but they’ve been pretty well educated in staying away from economic, central government and foreign affairs topics. However, the state is not the only enemy of freedom, and in the West, it is not even the most powerful.
As John Lanchester puts it:
Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens…Your eyes are directed towards the place where they are most valuable for Facebook.
The sight of large chunks of a socialist party beavering away, providing free labour to create content for a few American monopolist corporations fills me with despair. It is as if the Chartists had had their discussions about citizens’ rights in the tearoom of the House of Lords. In the light of what we know about how Facebook played (or, as they claim, were played, during) the last American presidential election, we should understand that they have worked out how to neutralise justice movements’ energy and commitment. They want to keep you happy, yes; that is why there are cat videos, but angry people click as well, and division is incredibly easy to sow, if you know where to lay the seeds, and you own the field.
Know this also: social media, particularly Facebook, is as much a product of manipulative psychological theory as it is a product of technology. Zuckerberg actually pursued a dual degree at Harvard: Computing and Psychology. The mechanisms written into Facebook behavioural algorithms are rooted in the theories of conditioned response which underpin the most nakedly dishonest branches of marketing, propaganda and behavioural control. The desire for a ‘like’ or a notification of any kind on a social media app or browser window, is the same conditioned twitch seeking content-free reward as is used by the designers of gambling machines. It is the behaviour of the rat that has been trained to associate a button with pleasure and will starve to death seeking the signifier of that pleasure, even when the actual reward has been removed from the process.
Von Clausewitz said that armies lose when they try to re-fight the last war. The limited, almost-victory of the 2017 election was successful, as far as it went, not because of social media, but because Labour concentrated on what mattered: having control of its content and being clear about what it stood for. The brief flowering of commercial social media as a medium of democratic liberation is over. We need to create our own fields.
We need a CLP Facebook feed, but it should be treated as a shop window, only being populated with content approved by the CLP, in a professional manner: another method among many to spread our Labour ideals to the public. It should be curated, nurtured and controlled.
We do not need a public kvetching arena, which is what our ‘private’ Facebook group is.
Get off Facebook. Start creating our own discussion groups on secure media that we own: Diaspora is a good first step, but a Rocket chat server would be more instinctive for most users and would be easy to set up, and cheap to run, and we would own it in a way we would not own a Facebook page. It would also be free of the pressure to keep up, to keep chasing the approval of an algorithm. It would remove the competitive fury inherent in social media slavery, and it would allow us to discuss again, instead of constantly arguing.
Forgive me allowing myself a little boast, but I feel as though, for once in my life, I was ahead of the herd. I joined the Labour Party because of Jeremy Corbyn, have voted for him for leader twice, and have never lost faith in his power to be a potent influence for good in British life. I have a ‘Corbynista’ shirt which I have worn to local party meetings throughout the Blairite fightback, and I have held out hope, through two turbulent, contentious years, that a lucid, honest politician, who talks about real life rather than rarefied, contained abstractions, could bring British politics back to sanity.
Of course, I am in the lowest twenty percent of median average household incomes, and approximately £500 per year worse off than I was before 2008, which is probably, when we get past the hypnotised fixation with media control, a pretty good driver of mood. I’ve also been working in public service throughout the period in which the Tory hit squads have been “working tirelessly” to destroy them.
Until a couple of weeks ago, being a Corbyn supporting member of the Labour Party was seen widely as an extreme position, but it suddenly appears mainstream, and the violent, corrupt, brutish, hateful extremism that has passed as the political centre-ground for most of my life, just as suddenly, seems like a marginal, confused, farcical and outmoded embarrassment. It’s not gone; it’s still hanging on and still a danger, but a visible one, stripped of its disguising power to confuse. Neo-liberalism is looking vulnerable, fragile.
Nine weeks ago, it seemed as though we were enduring business as usual and that it was fixed and eternal. True, the Labour Party continued to make dangerously reasonable and realistic policy statements, as they had been doing for the last year, but they were drowned beneath news stories that all started with “the trouble with these ideas is that they’re not part of the proper political dialogue”. I was avoiding media, reading the LRB but staying away from the ‘news’, because its hypocrisy just enraged me. Every time I heard a commentator who was, supposedly, ‘in the loop’, I was reminded of my favourite piece of cartoon art.
So, we had a government committed to an ideology that was impossible to pin down, but amounted to the idea that the state and state institutions are somehow inherently evil and must be dismantled. In practice, what that meant was that they had to make life as hard as possible for ordinary people. There was a crisis, which, again, they couldn’t clearly identify, but it involved, variously,
* being threatened by refugees, who were about to “flood” this country and destroy some, again unidentifiable, quality of Britishness. The fact that those refugees were mainly children, starving in abject, wretched poverty in a field in Calais, didn’t reduce the threat.
* being ripped off by an endless horde of people who pretended to be ill, or disabled, or dying, or old, so that they could live at the expense of Tory voters whose property is more sacrosanct than the lives of people with disabilities.
* being incandescently offended by a failure to worship at the altar of the military, or the royal family, or “traitors” not eating fish and chips in a suitably patriotic manner.
The method they chose for addressing the nagging sense of threat they were so busy maintaining was to impoverish the majority of British people and tell us that it was for our own good. In the meantime, the publicly owned structures – our shared wealth – was to be stolen from us and given to various privatisation parasites, prominent among whom were Richard Branson, American banks and Rupert Murdoch’s advertisers, all of whom seemed to be, mysteriously, clients of Theresa May’s husband.
It also meant, as Chris Riddell’s brilliant depiction of the establishment delusion illustrates, that they were compelled to continue making more refugees, by manufacturing excuses for constant, unending war. And, it turns out with only a very little googling, that most of the government had financial interests in that process as well.
Michael Gove. Penfold. Not my image.
It sounds as though it should be a story about evil genius, but the truth is they’re not geniuses. To list the parade of fools who make up the front row of our current government is to court despair: Michael Gove, the Penfold lookalike who dreams of an illiterate peasantry; Chris Grayling, who reversed a decade’ improvements in the criminal justice system in a few short years of amateurish profiteering; David Davis, who is currently humiliating us with his cluelessness in the Brexit ‘negotiations’, and Boris Johnson, who Marina Hyde brilliantly described last week1 as “Britain’s foremost stupid-person’s-idea-of-a-clever-person”. Then there’s the odious and openly corrupt Jeremy Hunt, who never saw a piece of public property he didn’t try to flog and the floundering and out-of-his-depth chancellor Philip Hammond: they’re all dim-witted crooks, propped up by worn-out spin and at one another’s throats because they serve the deepest right-wing lie: look after number one and never tell the truth when a good lie will do. They are, as Frankie Boyle says in the video below, “…some of the worst people in the world…broken sociopaths.”2
The battles they’re really concerned with are not the challenges of taking responsibility for the safety, well-being and prosperity of this country. Rather, they are fixed on their own in-fighting; the maintenance of their individual positions in a deeply antagonistic and futile occupation: professional establishment politicking. It’s a game to them. When we ask what on Earth Theresa May was thinking, calling an early election just after having declared to the EU that we were off, we have to remember: it wasn’t about us. Their game-playing is never about us. It’s about their strange little world, in which their concerns, their insecurities and their weird fantasy bubbles are all that matter.
Theresa May, it turned out, is no brighter than the rest of them. An element of the game-players’ corruption was a sense of entitlement, buttressed by the belief that the Labour Party, having stepped out of the establishment bubble with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader, was out of the game. Who’d listen to a party that wanted to * snort * renationalise the railways?
Anyway, they had the media on their side.
Except, the suspicion that the backbone of establishment power, a uniform and breathtakingly malign press, was on the wane was a key reason why, when May called the election, I had real hope that she had made a mistake. The overwhelming prejudice of the public environment in the UK said that it would be a foregone conclusion, but that didn’t ring true in the way it had in 2015, when the media had actually worked to try to make the election seem tighter than it was. The people I knew, who in 2015 were reliably parroting the approved lines from The Sun and The Mail about Europe and immigrants, had lost track of what they were supposed to believe and had started focussing on the difficulties in their lives. Very few of them thought by this time that those difficulties had anything to do with immigrants or terrorism: they could see that their enemies were the increasingly fascist dole office, the eviscerated council, the absence of the police in their communities, the rising costs of food, electricity and other luxuries.
Perhaps most hurtfully, they saw their children being victimised. They moaned about the impossibility of getting a place at the few good schools around here. They spoke in resentful rather than aspirational tones about the ‘free’ schools, the fee-paying schools and the ‘academies’ that were sucking all the educational resources out of the Island for the profit of a group of foreign investors and that were, effectively, if not explicitly, establishments reserved for the children of people who had large houses and big cars and friends on the Council.
In the children’s centres where I do a lot of my work, the service users were presented with the steady reduction of options. My own learners had gone through the period of uncertainty about their chances of completing their courses. The Tory/UKip council had abolished our council funding, almost as an afterthought, and the contempt behind that act had registered. My learners knew that we were (and still are) hanging on by a thread, and that the abandonment of all these services is a process of calculated insult, class-to-class.
Beneath all these frustrations, there was the nagging knowledge that our positions within society are becoming embedded and inherited: the Samanthas and Tobies who go to the ‘free’ (private, exclusive, racially and class homogenous) school up the road will be richer, happier, fitter and will live longer than the children of my community, however good the teachers and leadership in the local council school are.
Awareness had cut through all the bullshit about immigration and ‘our brave troops’. The word ‘inequality’ had gone from a slogan to an experienced truth in the two years between the two elections. I felt that there was a chance to connect people with politics in a way I hadn’t seen in my adult lifetime and, thank God, so did the leadership of the Labour Party. They pushed fairness, they pushed change and they made the approved establishment narrative seem what it truly is: the visceral hatred of the bullying classes who gain their sense of undeserved self-worth from their loathing of the mass of their fellow citizens.
So, telling the corrupt rich that their shit does smell was the right message at the right time, but what had made it so? Was it really that people had put two and two together over the previous two years? Well, yes, in part. Poor people aren’t stupid, but they have been persuaded, by the very political environment that causes their dis-empowerment, to believe that politics was inherently corrupt and they were powerless. Other voices, [some well-intentioned][5], but many less so, had turned disengagement into a form of rebellion: a political anorexia that imagined it was hitting back while playing into the hands of its abusers.
Certainly, the Labour Party offered something completely new in this election: a genuine, meaningful political alternative from a major party with a real prospect of having an effect. In our first past the post system, it may be nice to vote Green, but it’s pretty useless. Labour, on the other hand, even though it lost the election in terms of both votes and seats, has already shaped government policy to a degree that has scared3 the establishment,4 and its rabid lackeys,5 to their shrivelled souls. Click those three links. I love the undertone of panic in Andrea Leadsom’s stupid drift towards totalitarianism, and even more so the failure of certainty in the Guido Fawkes piece, piercing his habitual above-the-fray affectation. It’s like his smirk has faltered, but then, he’s suddenly got a lot less to smirk about. He’s a true believer whose world-view has just collapsed. What is the point of selling yourself to Satan if you can’t spit on the poor?
Amid the glory of the election campaign’s powerful attack upon the status quo, we suffered four outrages to decency that were all symptomatic of the hatred that is at the heart of neo-liberal capitalist politics: two horrible ‘blowback’ incidents from the genocidal warfare of the capitalist war machine, an attack on faith by a far-right lackey of the ruling classes and a mass-killing as a result of reduced state oversight of housing and safety systems. We must not let the anger these events inspire divert us from focussing on the true enemy: the ruling classes of this country. Magnificently, it seems that the purpose of the never-ending, racist ‘terrorist’ emergency that the establishment maintains has lost its power to sway mass opinion: the response has been, overwhelmingly, to choose love,6 rather than division.
We are, for the first time in my lifetime, fighting fit to resist the divisive power of racist hatred, and we see where our anger should, rightfully, be directed.
It’s not over.
Live a good life, because living a good life is a good in itself. Go vegan, recycle, ride a bike to work rather than using your car.
But, more than anything, it is time to get involved in the political process, and to fight the power of insane, self-serving neo-liberal capitalism.
Tomorrow, Amanda and I and a group of Isle of Wight Labour comrades will be in London, marching for better housing, better wages and better public services. Will we see you there?
WARNING: YouTube! No privacy protections whatsoever, despite all their pop-ups saying otherwise. Click on this and they own you. However, it’s the only place to see this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyFZX39joSM [↩]
Joseph Stiglitz provides a summary of just how bad the democratic collapse in America actually is in an article entitled “How to Survive the Trump Era”,1 on Project Syndicate.
The paragraph that leapt out at me says this:
…the importance of the rule of law, once an abstract concept to many Americans, has become concrete. Under the rule of law, if the government wants to prevent firms from outsourcing and offshoring, it enacts legislation and adopts regulations to create the appropriate incentives and discourage undesirable behavior. It does not bully or threaten particular firms or portray traumatized refugees as a security threat.
In a Guardian comment I posted when I could still stand to read that bloated, Blairite organ, I said that Obama’s main project as president was to re-establish the rule of law in American politics and, particularly, in relation to foreign and military policy. It is clear now that he failed in that task: Guantanamo remains open, NATO, acting as an organ of the American military-industrial complex, is pushing confrontation wherever its whims incline it, and the Calvinist hardcore of the Pentagon have adapted with equanimity to the election of a fascist.
Now, it appears that the contempt for its own laws that has bedevilled America from its Military-industrial complex has slipped into its broader domestic economy. The rot has spread, as it was always likely to.
David Bromwich has a fascinating article in the LRB3 in which he identifies the attitude that underlies Trump’s contempt for both law and politics. It is not that he has any ideological hatred for the institutions of civil democracy, but that he sees them as of minimal importance: what matters is freedom for the rich to do what they will.
In a radio interview in 2015, he recalled his visit to Russia in 2013, in an unsuccessful attempt to close a deal on apartment complexes. ‘I was with the top-level people,’ he said, ‘both oligarchs and generals, and top of the government people … I met the top people, and the relationship was extraordinary.’ Though it may seem a tiny slip, one notices the distinction between top-level people and the top people in government. Oligarchs and generals come first and rank highest in Trump’s estimation; top government people are worth knowing, but secondary. Trump likes the relationship of money to power in Russia – and specifically of financial power to government authority – more than he admires anything special about Putin, whom he has never met and about whom he knows little. Evidence of a vaguer affinity can be tracked in his appointment of four billionaires and three generals to senior advisory or cabinet positions: in his US government the ‘top-level people’ will be identical with the ‘top of the government people’.
I have not posted much about the president, or, really, put my thoughts in order about him. It is time I did. I, like anyone who wishes to believe that the death eaters will not win, must come to some understanding of what it is we face and what we must do save our civilisation. Assuming that you are awake enough to understand that Facebook, Twitter and even WordPress will not unsettle the power of the neo-fascist new dawn, you, like me, will be trying to make sense of this collapsing era, and trying to decide what issues you care enough about to engage with and to uphold, as all decency comes under energetic, hateful attack.
The first shock, as both Stiglitz and Bromwich say, has now passed. It is time to shake off despair and begin to construct some sort of plan, as individuals, and as members of our polities.
I can’t say that I have any clear answers, but I am beginning to try. I can recommend a look at the short list of behaviours written by Timothy Snyder to which I linked back in December.4 It has practical and moral suggestions: the need for courage being primary amongst them. I have also been moved by Bromwhich’s article. Chiming with Snyder’s eighth lesson, Believe in Truth, he explains Trump’s almost magical gift for lies thus:
In Leviathan Hobbes said that what we call the ‘deliberation’ of the will is nothing but ‘the last appetite, or aversion, immediately adhering to’ an action. Whatever the general truth of the analysis, Trump’s process of thought works like that. If Obama often seemed an image of deliberation without appetite, Trump has always been the reverse. For him, there is no time to linger: from the first thought to the first motion is a matter of seconds; the last aversion or appetite triggers the jump to the deed. And if along the way he speaks false words? Well, words are of limited consequence. What people want is a spectacle; they will attend to what you do, not what you say; and to the extent that words themselves are a spectacle, they add to the show. The great thing about words, Trump believes, is that they are disposable.
It is pointless to study what Trump says day-by-day. It is necessary to take a step back and see which of his manic ejaculations he repeats; which become themes. Here in Britain, it is necessary to see which are taken up by the people who would ape him: not UKIP, the hapless farce who will not do anything other than represent the dying wishes of the greediest, most selfish generation in modern British history, but the real carriers of reactive nationalism; the political parties who see as ‘political realism’ the need to ape populist nationalism in order to ‘achieve power’. Nationalism as it now manifests has been a long time in the making, and it would make a good doctoral thesis to study it. Murdoch and his imitators (the deeply odious, surprisingly influential pornographer, Richard Desmond5 being chief among them) have played a seminal part, but it is not entirely, I think, a creation of a malign press. As Bromwhich says:
Neoliberals have spent a quarter of a century arranging the ingredients for the catastrophe. Lenin said of Stalin that ‘this cook will give us peppery dishes,’ and for all the talk of nation-building, democracy promotion, multiculturalism and tribal recognition, globalisation à la Nato has been a peppery dish. There were several chefs involved: Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and their exemplar Tony Blair. They all wanted to convert the populace to an enlightened internationalism, but along the way they forgot to talk us out of nationalism. The military operations that dismantled Yugoslavia and overthrew the undemocratic governments of those artificial entities Iraq and Libya were meant to be an earnest of the goodwill of the global improvers. The trouble is that wars tend to reinforce nationalism, and unnecessary wars, where the fighting is drawn out and the result chaotic, leave people doubtful and suspicious.
Sometime last year, before the Democratic primaries were over, but when it looked as though Hillary had swung it, I wrote on my (now deleted) Facebook account, “I do not want Hillary Clinton to be president.” There is a narrative, amongst the voices who see the past thirty years of ‘left(ish)’ or ‘progressive’ politics as fundamentally unproblematic, in both this country and in the States, that opposition to a continuation of Blairite, Clintonesque pseudo-opposition to the neo-liberal, capitalist rise of oligarchy is rooted in the sort of intolerance against which they feel they are the only bastion. As Rebecca Solnit sees it,6 Hillary Clinton lost because of misogyny; not because of her record as a major architect of the Obama administration’s embedding of commercialised, continuous war,7 or her championing of support for tyrants, or her husband’s disastrous capitulation to capital,8 or the fact that, in office, she and her husband made themselves super-rich.
This narrative, – that only the established politics could safeguard against the new nationalism, and that any voice, from left or right, who dares to criticise the social-democratic surrender to the super-rich is not only responsible for Brexit, the rise of Trump and the declining popularity of the X-factor, but also motivated by sexism, anti-semitism and a love of conflict, – is, patently, a lie. However, I know people, good people, who are convinced of it. They feel that the Blair government wasn’t so bad really, despite ASBOs, PFIs, Iraq, and the final enthronement of Murdoch as king of Britain, because it kept their property values rising for a decade and kept conflict nice and far away,9 mostly.10 What I think they love about the New Labour era is that it was sleek, ‘professional’ and, to their eyes, cool. That aspect of Blairism largely passed me by: I saw New Labour as a coup against messy, committed politics by the sort of people who couldn’t ever manage cool, however much they valued it. Personally, I like my politicians resolutely uncool. They tend not to believe they can get away with things.
So, what to do? I so want to just tend my garden, and be good at my job, and write my novel, brew my beer, love my wife, but this is a time for those of us who care to try to make an impact. I attended a Labour Party meeting last week, for the first time in a while, and will be campaigning for our council candidates, in the hope that, at local level at least, some opposition to the ongoing monstrosity of austerity economics funding billionaire parasitism of our economy can be constructed. I learnt there that the council funding for my job had been cancelled the night before: we bring in some national funding, from a government quango, but how long that will last under a rabid Tory government is debatable.
Meanwhile, I see the support for the people who are my clients being run into the ground, by death eaters who are not even really trying to make excuses for their corruption any more. The Isle of Wight Council has been ceded to a Tory/UKIP coalition of the most miserable, unimaginative graspingness: their only solution to our misery is to build an industrial estate: an opportunity, no doubt, for bribes and in-dealing that mirrors the orgy of corruption enjoyed at national level between politicians and privatisation parasites like Branson, Murdoch and the Prime Minister’s husband.
The rule must be, do not despair. Do what you can. It is hard, but it must be done.
