Freedom My Hairy A***

This is not a free country. Not in any meaningful sense. You are free to walk down some streets without getting shot or raped, and in theory the police can't enter your home and drag you away to be tortured and imprisoned without reasonable cause. But you can't say what you honestly think about something, in most cases, without having the financial interests that run the country falling on you from a great height. Look at the number of people who have been sacked or disciplined by their employer for grumbling about their job on Facebook or MySpace. Look at the number of unofficial gagging orders put down in workplaces across the country when an employee has fallen foul of the bosses, and left. It's made clear to everyone who still works there that if they say anything about the problems their colleague has had, they will be sacked. And then it happens, though frequently another pretext is found for removing them; and it doesn't matter how ridiculous the pretext is, of course, because since the Thatcher revolution employees have no rights anyway.

I have even seen a manager warn employees still on her books not to attend a party given in the honour of a man who left after a run-in with her. Some went anyway, of course, and some of those irreducibly independent people are still in the job, but for how long that will be I don't know. She nurses a grudge like a suckling baby.

These are the Gradgrinds identified by Dickens in one of his books, the dour, unimaginative, middle-level folk who accumulate wealth and position by standing on the heads of those who in more communitarian times might have been their brothers and sisters. For those above the Gradgrinds it's just about the money. Issues of justice, morality and liberty are pure sentimentality. Your freedom, as far as they're concerned, is having a job. Being able to afford food so your children don't starve. Being able to heat your house for three hours a day during the worst of the winter snowfall. That's what you get and you should be grateful for it.

They need more freedom and luxury to motivate them to create the wealth you are given the merest portion of because they are a higher order of being than you. Dionysian, actually, and you'd better believe it.

Why He Walked

I walked out on my job today. I haven't done anything like that for fifteen years but I had no choice. The bullying and intimidation had got too bad. Everybody working in a McCarthyite atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion. Every mistake punished by disciplinary measures from the employer. Nobody dared shit without asking permission anymore because they knew their livelihood might depend on it.

Mine is gone now. I have a few quid in the bank to tide me over. I think I can last three months, if I'm careful. And then, if I haven't been able to find another job, I should be able to claim some benefits.

Oh, how I wish it hadn't come to this. But what can you do when the steel door goes down in your mind and you know that it won't open up again for anything except clean air, new horizons, people who aren't on the almightiest power trip in the history of poison bastards?

The Other Brown

Am I missing something? Scott Brown looks like a greasy, insincere, ageing Estate Agent to me.

But he drives a pick-up truck, so he must be a man of the people.

The health care debate in America confuses me because comprehensive, free-at-point-of-access health care seems such a fundamental feature of a civilised society to most British people, whether they vote Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat.

But I don't get all that "get Government off our backs" business either--and that's a part of the political debate in the UK too. Well, in London. If the Government aren't there to act as stewards of society economically,culturally and sometimes morally too, what are they there for? To me it seems obvious that unrestrained capitalism leaves the few free to prosper at the expense of the many. Look at how Thatcher's letting-loose of the markets in the Eighties freed business to take away employees rights, for pay to go down nearly as far as employment levels and for crime and social disfunction to spread. If we don't like the politicians who are acting as our stewards we can get rid of them. So where's the danger?

Heretical views, I fear, but there you are. Maybe I am missing something. Perhaps the 30 million Americans without health insurance just don't have it because they're lazy and work-shy. And perhaps Scott Brown isn't actually a patronising, manipulative man who harbours a secret disregard for the Massachussets voters and really ran for office just to protect his own interests and those of the businessmen he speaks for.

Polarities & Union

I'm bored of all that large press/small press mainstream/underground gubbins. You're either good or you aren't. The only place worth belonging is in the arms of your loved ones anyway, however sentimental that sounds.

I've never fitted in anywhere intellectually or creatively, from school days right up to these days. I used to wish I did, and tried frequently to insinuate myself into this or that group, usually failing miserably, but now at last, staring old age, disease and death in the face, I've learned to take pride in my difference. It is, after all different. And I've found some happiness unexpectedly, by being me...People still either hate or are mystified by my writing, but you can't have it all. For some reason.

(By the way, it's a faintly comical exaggeration to say I am staring old age, disease and death in the face, in case that's not immediately clear. I am facing middle age, illness and morning torpor in the face really.)

Are You Garrett or Bill? I Really Don't Know

I watched Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid" again the other night. A classic movie, this, unknown by most, which ruined my mind at an impressionable age and made life a lot harder than it should have been! (I should say "lol" there, but I won't.) In my favourite scene--it's my favourite because of the way it's shot, and the Bob Dylan music attached to it, and the Christ imagery Peckinpah chose to use--Billy is arrested by Garrett on the latter's first day as Sherriff of Lincoln County.After he's surrendered, Billy says, "You're in poor company, Pat," and Pat replies, "Yeah, I'm still alive, though." "So am I......," says Billy, with a challenging grin on his face.

Garrett, of course, rode with Billy once upon a merry moon, but took the job of Sheriff and dutifully obeyed the Sheriff's true masters, the local cattle barons (not much changes, does it?), when they ordered him to kill Billy. The story, and the movie, are all about what happens when that time in your life comes when you're sick and tired and you're faced with the temptation to conform to mainstream expectations and secure an easy life for you and yourn. Which is not a quandary for those who've never been out on the margins, but for those of us who have, it's like wrestling the Devil.

Eric Rohmer

Eric Rohmer died in Paris on Monday. One of the great artists of an outstanding era in French cinema. Hollywood can offer very little that is as subtle, as insightful, as memorable, as a film by Rohmer. Look one up, if you haven't done so already. A world of mature delights is waiting for you.

Racism, War & Public Dissent

People seem very black-and-white in their thinking about race, religion and war these days. Which is not intended as a pun. The Government tells us we're all equal; civilised legislation tells us that racism is unacceptable; expressing racist views is a sackable offense in every workplace. And yet as soon as the boss goes away, or the Jamaican or the Pakistani or the Sri Lankan or the Kenyan go away, out come the same old jokes and stereotypes and prejudices that we used to see on tv in the bad old days; which the State congratulates itself we have driven out of modern life. It's been sent partially underground; but it's still there. I hear so much racism and cultural ignorance in everyday conversation it staggers me. I'm sure it wasn't like this 20 or 30 years ago. Back then, of course, we had a common enemy in Margaret Thatcher.

Since then, one hardly needs reminding, the attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre has happened. As brutal and ugly and disgusting a single act as has been perpetrated anywhere in the world in living memory. There were the London bombings too. Radical Islam has set itself against our very way of life in the Western world, and the kind of society it appears to want to impose on us is as alien to the ordinary Westerner as it would be if it came from an unidentified planet at the furthest end of the Universe. There is also the unignorable fact that the footsoldiers of radical Islam are prepared to kill in any number necessary to set their God in place of yours, whether yours is the Christian God, or the God of Money. I think this is where the heightened racial tensions in the country come from. They are motivated by a sense of danger. By the apparent fanatacism of those opposed to us. We are an island race and a former Empire, with all that that history brings. Threaten us and we revert easily to type.

But we are, unless we become the mirror of our fundamentalist enemy, a democracy, and we should not stifle or stamp out debate in our urgency to shore ourselves up against attack. If I disagree with you and you listen to me with tolerance and understanding, we are resisting our enemy by not becoming him; we are showing our enemy that we stand defiant against him. We are leading the world in the manner that we believe is our birthright. And I don't believe that the War Against Terror is best fought by soldiers on the plains and in the mountains of Afghanistan. I think we can defeat those who wish to threaten our way of life without invading foreign countries and taking away the lives of our own, and their own, sons and daughters. That doesn't mean I am a supporter of terrorism. I abhor murder in the name of religion or politics. My criticism of the Government and the System I live under does not make me a Communist or an Islamist or an anything-ist. I am actually celebrating my democratic rights by expressing my views. I am proving that despite its numerous flaws, democracy is the best bad system we've got. I would rather live here, as much as I complain about my country, than in a country ruled by cruel Party bureaucrats or fundamentalist clerics, though it should probably not be necessary for me to make that clear.

Yes

I am too old, gnarly, tired, and yes indeed, perhaps intelligent, to want anything other than a stress-free, drama-free life these days. When the fat lady starts caterwauling in my ear, it's definitely time to get out of the opera.