Friday 11 November 2016

WHO NEEDS DYSTOPIAN NOVELS WHEN YOU'VE GOT 2016?

I was very tempted to start this post with the sentence "Well that's it now then - the whole world has gone to shit and we might as well camp in our nuclear bunkers already." But, for the sake of positive thinking, let's just pretend I didn't.

First we had June 24th - EU Referendum Day here in the UK. We'd had months of poisonous, xenophobic bullshitty bullshit about 'taking back our country,' splattered like cow dung over the front of various 'news'papers that were - surprise surprise! - mostly owned by the same crooked corporate fat cat who wanted the UK out of the EU, because - and this is a direct quote from the man himself: 

"When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice."


(Let's just stop and think about that for a moment, shall we? Do you think a man who runs a massive media corporation - the man who once counted The News of the World among his publications until it collapsed under the weight of phone-hacking and police-bribing charges - should be in a position where he can boss the government of an entire country around? I don't. Sounds a bit too much like a Mafia boss for my liking. Isn't The Actual Government supposed to be a bit more incorruptible than that?)

But if there was a theme to the way that vote eventually went, it could be summed up in one phrase: 'Sticking it to The Man.' For many of the Brexiteers, that Man was personified by the EU itself - those pesky Bureaucrats in Brussels, making all their stupid, wacky laws that were so unfair and designed to deliberately pick on the British people. Except that, if you asked Brexiteers to name any of those laws, they either couldn't or could only spout the ridiculous ones they'd read about in a Murdoch-owned newspaper about non-bendy cucumbers or the like (which had long ago been proved myths invented by froth-mouthed right-wing hoaxers.) Meanwhile, the plethora of EU laws that have massively improved the lives of millions of Europeans (including the British) and would never have even come into being, never mind been enforced, without the EU... well, Brexiteers couldn't name a single one of those. (A lot of the laws focus on things like employee rights, environmental issues and commercial/manufacturing hygiene standards, as it turns out.)

For the rest of the Brexiteers, the Man was The Government, the ones who were currently in power - you know, the same ones who'd been doofing up running the country for the last two terms. They seemed very keen on staying in the EU - so what better way then, for the Disgusted of Great Britain to give them a massive two-fingers-up by voting for the very thing they don't want? Hah yeah, power to The People! That'll learn ya, ya posh douchebags!

This is the equivalent of burning down the house to piss off your parents, only to realise later on that all your stuff was still in there at the time.

But enough of that. It's done now, and there's no turning back, and the next job for those of us who voted Remain is to try and bite our tongues as the Brexiteers hop up and down in fury because invoking Article 50 is actually going to take ages and be a total nightmare, which is why nobody who knows anything about European politics wanted it to happen. (And what all of us really want to say to those angry Brexiteers is "because you thought it was all going to be soooo easy, didn't you? That good old British Blighty was going to be able to walk up to Angela Merkel and say "right then, we're outta this gig, but here's our list of all the EU perks we'd quite like to keep, 'cos they're pretty fab..." And she'd roll her eyes and smile and say "Oh, you little tinkers! Go on then, we'll let you, because we're really gonna miss you and, frankly, I don't know how we're all gonna cope without you on board anymore..." Yeah, well.... no.)

And then along came the American Presidential Election. And the misogynistic, homophobic, racist, tax-dodging, Tango-ed Bad-Hair-Day-Made-Flesh that was Donald Trump.

At first everybody laughed at the idea that he could actually become President, especially when there were so many other - jeez, any other - candidates to choose from. Comparing his chances to the proverbial snowball's in Hell seemed like letting him off lightly. But the opposition got whittled down, until it was just him and Hillary Clinton...

That's when a lot of the UK Remainers started to worry. And I mean, really worry.

I had friends in America who assured me "it's okay, he won't get in. There aren't enough Americans who'd actually buy into his hate-fuelled rhetoric to let him get in." They were so confident, believed so deeply that tolerance and sensibility and all the things that made America great would prevail.

And I tried to smile and hold onto that hope too, but it was hard to see and hear through the wailing sirens of deja vu. That's what we believed about Brexit, was all that was clanging in my head. Please, for the love of God, don't make the same mistakes we did...

So, while many of us here in the UK were as dismayed as many Americans when The Trump stormed to victory, we weren't entirely surprised. Don't feel bad, those of you who didn't vote for him - we know it doesn't mean you've morphed into a nation of hair-trigger bigots. You've been through hard times in the last few years just like us, and you wanted to see an end to it as much as we did. The corporate fat cats and mega-rich media vampires knew that, just like they did in the UK, and they fed you lies and propoganda about how to fix things and who could fix it for you. They fed it to you like the farmers feed those poor geese who end up as pate de fois gras, so that it was getting shoved down your throat every hour of every day whether you wanted it or not. And all the people who felt like they'd lost the most, and were angry about that and scared about how much more they were still going to lose, ate it up because they wanted to believe there was a way to make things better. The propaganda made them believe Trump's way was the way - even if it was dirty and cold and divisive. Those people are in for a rough ride too, when Trump finally struts into the White House and does precisely nothing to make their lives any better (but plenty to make it worse, probably.)

If 2016 were just a novel, I reckon most people wouldn't believe it. It's too ridiculous, they'd say, too farcical to think that things would really go down that way in the more enlightened times of the 21st century. It's more like a parody than a modern fable for our times.

Well, it looks like now we're living the parody. Perhaps the best approach is to strap ourselves in, shout and point to every violation and contradiction so that no-one misses them from now on - oh, and try to hold on to our collective sense of humour. It may well be the best weapon we've got left.