I speak to you today at the cusp; many things have begun,
many are about to. Many are coming to an end. This new year of Twenty-Fourteen
brings with it a palpable unease, the disconcerting sense that Dystopia is fading
into being, the reality of not a
future, but the future, the One that
shall have been, shall be. The One that we will live our lives, all of us,
within.
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| The Crest of the Wave |
Obscurities, to be sure, but isn’t that one of the greatest
losses of our age: Obscurity? Information is power, but confusion is life; nothing
is clearer than Fascist Certainty, and that is precisely what ascends on the
horizon here in Britain. Pearl-clutching in this vein has become such a leftist
at-hand that I can hear eyes roll and tabs close at my first rhetorical gesture
towards it, but I entreat patience; perhaps if nothing else my lyricism will
hold your attention.
All things recycle themselves—often on a predictable
timeline—and the manufactured terror of marauding hordes of BULGARIAN and
ROMANIAN benefit sponges (to borrow the Daily Mail’s inexplicable
capitalization) has the depressing familiarity of a bad film: I’ve seen that
movie too, and cultural hatred and exclusion are Bathetic at best, Pathetic at
worst—and in practice. Humans are humans; our desires to survive and succeed are
true universals. Who, then—which line among the family of man—genuinely wants to perniciously defile an adopted
homeland? Failure to treat people as people
out of some misguided, misremembered tribute to a convenient myth—Cricket and
cream on Village Greens—can only end badly, in one fashion or another.
Ever-diminutizing Fortress Britain wasting away under some Farage-alike or
literalization of the right’s masturbatory images of marauding hordes of
unwashed undesired Others, neither is a fate to be actively pursued—though
Literally Every Political Party, desperate for short-term populist support,
would have you believe otherwise.
Populism is a deeply dangerous thing, when ‘the public’
seems to those in power to speak with the voice of pandering tabloid pseudo-journalists.
I have already seen Cameron’s ‘auto-on family-safe content filters’ make access
to content and information nigh-impossible—and if you believe they will remain
optional indefinitely I have nothing but a derisive chuckle to reply with. Restricting
access to knowledge and culture under the guise of ‘protecting children’s
innocence’ is nothing new—I come from America, after all—but it is… lamentable, I suppose is the only word,
as political change has become as surely beyond the public’s purview and
interest as the anointation of a new Chinese President. There isn’t even a
counterargument: to engage in a debate over censorship is nearly to acquiesce
to it. It is wrong because it is: to
become a parent is, by definition, to
become the guardian of your offspring’s innocence. I was going to employ the
cliché that the battle was lost before it was fought, but there was never going
to be one; have ‘the cultured
classes’ ever registered anything
beyond pure apathy and impotence in the face of Puritanical nostalgia?
And yet, even as the (white, Christian, isolationist,
faux-moralizing) Great British Public builds its bulwarks against foreigners
and pictures of penises, that selfsame government actively and self-righteously
starves them, to their own thunderous applause. More directly: Iain Duncan Smith
is figuratively a monster. Patrician self-importance and crowd-pleasing “Make
the buggers work for their money”
posturing aside, the man and his Department have pushed nearly half a million honest, regular people into begging for food
from literal food banks over the course of three
years. No more need even be said: the Welfare State is already dead. The
politicians are just fighting over how to most attractively embalm its corpse—shall
it be clothed in the relics of its former self, or ‘evolved with our changing
times?’
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| AUSTERITY |
But enough of the Sceptered Isle; it is relevant primarily
to itself, and my Benighted Homeland of America has never even particularly pretended to care for its poor, tired,
huddled masses, finding it simpler—more Christian, more patriotic—to cast them as contemptible victims of self-inflicted
damnation: “if they don’t want to be impoverished, they should have been born
wealthy: Bootstraps.” Fortune is hereditary to the point of Feudal Lordship in
the Land of the Free—only becoming more so, day by day—and the political class
is literally, actually, unironically
a Vaudevillian sideshow of gibbering, pratfalling morons. Recall, my friends,
that for the better part of a month
this past year—again, literally—There
Was Not a Federal Government. It ceased
to be; the United States was Ungoverned.
Not that that’s even particularly a bad thing, at this
point: I wonder if the shutdown precluded Random Robot Murder in countries The
American People are wholly incapable of 1) locating on a map, 2) conceiving of
as being peopled by Human Beings functionally identical to them, 3) caring
about one iota for one solitary second, or if Random Robot Murder was deemed
‘essential to National Security’? The question answers itself; we are wolves in
wolves’ clothing. Such is the legacy of the Second Bush Administration: a
nation so wracked with nameless, soul-deep terror of Elsewhere and its Brutish
Inhabitants that it invents science-fiction technologies to kill them in droves
for no reason whatsoever—without the political inconveniences and tangible
realities of war.
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| Do Predators Dream of Blowing Up Sheep? |
The legacy of the Obama Administration, on the other hand,
has already become one of fear of its own citizenry. Constant universalized
surveillance and data collection of, from, and about citizens and luminaries in
the US and ‘strategically vital’—that is, more or less random—countries all
over the world is, now, ‘just another fact of modern life,’ to be tutted at,
bemoaned, but never challenged. For what would that even look like? Who among our political classes really wants to give up one iota of power? There is a reason each Presidency is more powerful
than the last, and I leave you to choose-your-own-aphorism to complete that
thought.
Beyond the disgust and anger PRISM—and its
certainly-infinite, yet-unknown sister programs—cannot but provoke, however, there
is a dark sheen of absurdity and inexplicability that I have never been able to
penetrate. To paraphrase the Christmas message from Edward Snowden, the truest
hero of Two-Thousand-Thirteen: when a government wants to know what people
think, the easiest way to find out is to ask
them. But then, they don’t really want to know,
do they? Information is power, and that is all those in charge really want:
limitless, boundless power—over us all, in perpetuity, to whatever end some
eventual ‘man of vision’ decides to apply it to.
To retrace my steps for a moment, I invite you to recall
that the reason There Was No Federal
Government, for the first time in the nation’s history, was that Barack Obama
had the temerity—the audacity, if you
will—to attempt to use it to help
people, even a little, ever. The reforms that have been termed ‘Obamacare’ are,
I grant, in many ways somehow worse
than the predatory monstrosity they were intended to tackle—but that, of
course, is down to the same set of mental defectives who won’t take free money their constituents and states desperately need
out of some nonsensical, primordial sense of duty. Rather these, our elected
representatives, have chosen to spend years
of the time they were supposed to be governing
stomping their little feet and holding their breath and courageously crying out
“No! No No No! I hate you for trying
to help the people who elected you to the Presidency! You are not one of us, in some indefinable way. You
are not allowed to do this, because reasons!” But if their loyalty is not to
their constituents, then who, exactly, is
it to? Ayn Rand? Glenn Beck? Imaginary Ronald Reagan? As with so many things,
one must laugh not to cry.
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| Pictured: Ron, Nancy, and the Present Republican National Committee |
Beyond the obsessions and follies of the fleeting moment, this
year marks the centenary of that truest fountainhead of bitter, nauseous
laughter: the First World War. A few days hence, I had the misfortune, as did
many, of being made aware of UK Secretary of Education Michael Gove’s
nonsensical opinions on said conflict. In brief, he believes it was a time of patriotism,
nobility, and heroes, of good men doing their grim duty out of selfless honor.
Perhaps it was. But it was also, certainly and truly, the greatest tragedy of
modernity and perhaps world history, a global farce whose punchline was death
on an unimaginable scale for decades,
defining the Twentieth Century as one of brutality, conflict and horror just as
surely as one of progress and hope.
My sole true entreaty, my deepest and most heartfelt wish,
such that one can wish on this scale, is thus: that this Century cannot, must not, will not be allowed to echo the last. The West may alternately
cook in its own juices and freeze solid as the planet’s fever rises and our
infrastructure crumbles like a concrete Rome, but my earnest prayer-to-Nothingness
is that we at least be permitted our
decline, that we be given the opportunity
to decay rather then conflagrate in one last explosion of nonsensical rage and
pain. The danger, such as it can be perceived, appears to be in the East:
between Japan and China, between the Koreas, between India and Pakistan. Should
this time be looked back upon, let it at least be said that we conceived of the spark that ignited us
before it was struck—but then, that itself
seems a myopia, an easy at-hand to Other the danger and preemptively deflect
the blame.
In the last estimation, then, I find I have no hope to give
you, only old cynicism for a new age. All must recur eternally, or else conclude
utterly. Metaphorical God Bless Us, Metaphorical God Help Us. Amen.
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