Last time I wrote one of these pieces our riverbanks weren’t garlanded with bog roll. The Home Office wasn’t breaking its own rules – and other people’s – and describing our situation wasn’t talking the country down. I did notice our sharknado of calamity, but was distracted by catching Covid before the vaccine. My post-viral thyroid gland began gleefully destabilising what had been a perfectly acceptable normality. I called it Nigel – after Farage. I spent 18 months being so sleeplessly speedy that I finally asked a wise friend if this was, perhaps, like being on cocaine but without the fun. He assured me cocaine is also without the fun and suddenly Westminster’s resentful paranoia and spite made a lot more sense…
I also had the thing thing. Did I mean to write cupboard? Did I mean brick? Nouns became random – including the noun noun. For a writer, this was less than ideal. I’ve improved, but when I glimpse Robert Jenrick and think bespectacled semi-sentient buttock, I do briefly wonder if I mean that. He usually provides a helpful clue – for example, by declaring the defining characteristic of housing for refugees should be cruelty. Still, life remains hard to grasp – possibly because legions of information warriors are profitably firehosing threats at me 24/7. And I have brain fog. You know – thing thing.
I read recently that six in 10 Britons now suffer from thing thing. But I saw that in a newspaper of dubious reliability – is it true? I spend a lot of time going downstairs in order to jog my memory about why I went upstairs; nevertheless I am aware our trust in our media has cratered. The BBC is a roiling mess of complicity and self-loathing. GB News calls itself news, but for legal purposes is not news. And the Duke of Sussex is, once again, taking on the press – alleging “criminality” among other things – because if you’re a literal prince with experience of being shot at, you might feel able to win that sort of fight. I mean… if I weren’t very distracted by all these stairs, I’d suspect Britain’s public discourse is mostly a giant human centipede of vile misinformation. Now why did I start that paragraph again…?
Oh yes – to distract myself from our proudly red, white and blue decline in life expectancy. The graves that yawn urgently for all may even mean pension costs won’t be reduced by making us work until we’re 68. More than a decade ago, it seemed we didn’t mind terribly when welfare “reforms” coincided with increased mortality among Britons with disabilities. The attrition moved on to the homeless, the mentally frail, the working poor, the over-working-yet-still-poor… By the time Covid arrived, oldsters and other drains on the public purse being rushed into early graves was apparently no biggie and healthcare workers could pay with their lives for having something as woke as a vocation. But I’m pretty sure I care if strangers die. I’m pretty sure that’s a minimum human requirement. Only, then I look at our world-beating, flag-draped, vehemently pro-death country and it’s both enraging and foggy.
Our various politicos, luxury spivs and influence peddlers have forced me to rewrite the old saying that begins those who can, do. Apparently those who can’t now go into politics, only they can’t do that either, but will charge you 10 grand per day for their incompetence. They’re also crap at showbiz. They remind me of a bank robber I knew once. He genuinely believed holding someone up at gunpoint would give them a break from work and a wonderful anecdote, rather than PTSD. People with broken empathy shouldn’t be allowed to hold up a country. But here we are – at the mercy of wannabe demagogues who use the term loved ones as a rhetorical flourish, not a description of lifelong hope, obligation, care, mourning. It is very hard to be ruled by people with no understanding of love.
And while many countries challenge, depose, even indict, leaders undermining democracy in favour of lucrative chaos, Britain remains muted. Is that because of the thing thing? Billions vanish into a vast fraud vortex, our rights vanish, our alleged Tories interview each other on Schrödinger’s GB News, while our alleged socialists are fine with Thatcherism. Our fascists are darkly well funded, our “freeports” coddle unrestrained corporate power and the London money launderette churns on. Are we just thankful we’re not somewhere between Calais and Dover, sinking for the third time and listening while our kids scream for the help we can’t provide? Or have the terrible people trying to control our country made us terrible people, too? Is hatred of strangers enough to keep us proud and docile?
I suspect not. Opinion-formers were once omnipotent. They won 37% of the electorate for Brexit and then made it happen. They gave Donald the White House. But the more grotesque the fruits of their labours become, the more dissonant are their claims. Less food isn’t more food. Anxiety isn’t freedom. A small, under-scrutinised CPTPP deal isn’t the East India Company reborn. The online nudges, snappy slogans and psyops things are failing, welcomed by reality the way woodchippers welcome fingers.
The lies and smears have done incalculable damage, but they’ve also made numerous Others more familiar, more understood. Pronouns didn’t dismember the NHS, terrified people in little boats aren’t poisoning our air, drag queens aren’t looting our infrastructure.
Poet Arthur Hugh Clough once rewrote the sixth commandment as “Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive officiously to keep alive”. These days, I can’t get those lines out of my head. Our problems lie with the powerful among us, unwilling to strive for the preservation of our lives. The disinformation defending them has entered its panicky, shrill, closing phase. It would outrage me even if I were in a coma, but it’s not worth my despair. I’m tired of my despair being used against me. Only practical love and hope will meet the future with any success. Love. Hope. They’re nouns I don’t forget.
