Malaise

Malaise, a very current sensation.

Every week I write one to two newsletters for work that I then spam out into the world with the help of a small mail monkey. It has been a salutary experience to have done that over the last couple of years. Every week I start with a potted update of what the world has been up to for the prior few days; that has been a constant parade of unpleasantness, as you can imagine.

I try and find some gallows humour amongst the pestilence, gluttony, famine and war that now makes up what has become our very own post Biblical age. Remember those heady days of the late 90s when the good guys could and did win? The End of History by Fukayama had made it clear that neoliberalism had triumphed and the last remaining autocratic regimes like China would go the way of Russia, Levi’s, i-pods and Nikes would be the out-riders of democracy as it swept across the globe. I remember waking up early one morning in a boutique hotel in southern Denmark and watching on the TV news the shiny happy version of Tony and Cherie Blair walk through Sedgefield, savoring his stunning victory over the sclerotic Tory regime. I spent many weekends amidst the hustle and flow of unflappable Hong Kong as the rich of China washed their ever-growing billions through the banks and buildings there, ever ready proof, if proof was needed, that China was accelerating towards democratic normalcy on a bus fueled by commercial frenzy. 

I lived for most of the last ten years in the at the time, searing hot cradle of high technology, San Francisco and the Bay Area which, together with the peninsula to its south, forms the amorphous Silicon Valley of legend.

The hubris of these days probably helped bring about the global clusterfuck that life is now. The very closeness of the impending success, so close we not only read and talked about it, but we could literally smell its approach, it of course smelled like pinot noir. This much fan-fared triumph of the supposed rule of liberalism brought about the subsequent decline and fall of the rumoured empire of hope. You could make a pretty good case that in fact it was nothing but a charade, that the liberal social democrats chose riches for themselves over true egalitarianism, that they never committed to solve the prevailing inequalities and just undermined the left as a viable option for a very critical 10 years or so. 

The financial crash of 2008, or more critically the bungled bail-outs of the rich banks and large companies while destroying the lives of millions of normal people in the US, followed by the hollowing out through austerity in the UK and other places breathed new life into the autocrats. The mirror that was held up to Russia and China that was western success and rich lifestyles was shown to be a pastiche; yes, we have corruption but look at them, they are just as bad! Throw in a couple of self-serving wars and mass destruction of poor brown people, and the moral high ground wasn’t so heady. Failing to be the good guys in Syria, Crimea and Libya just showed the bad guys how weak and divided we really were.

I have seen two similar descriptions in the last couple of weeks of the US and the UK being poor countries with a small number of very rich people. This was backed up in both cases with slightly different sets of analysis of standards of living, quality of life, life expectancy trends etc, but both made compelling cases. We continue to provide a very limited example of how to manage our societies to places with less democracy. The role of society is to provide support to the common weal, the tradeoff for the rights of man is ‘I give you power, you look after me`; whether such gift of power may be via the ballot box or acquiescence to the Party.

In both the land of my birth and the country I spent the majority of my adult years, the most distressing change to me is the acceptance of bullshit. You can make a logical and reasoned argument with someone who holds another viewpoint based on their perspectives and judgements about the circumstances that apply to a situation. That is what politics is, the debate and the compromise. If, however, someone is basing their view or argument on bullshit that is simply self-serving, and that avoids logic or the facts and cannot be resolved politically. The whole of the Presidency of Donald Trump was based on such a suspension of truth by not just the MAGA fanatics, but by every republican who turned a blind eye or held their nose and let him and his cronies enrich themselves. The Facebook fueled support for and provided the microtargeting to get Brexit delivered, it was and continues to be supported by the ruling government of the UK, willfully ignoring the facts that their actions have harmed and continue to harm the majority of their citizens that they supposedly represent. The campaign for Brexit was based on bullshit, and its resulting implementation was turbocharged by the same suspension of common sense. The alternative reading of both situations is that people actively chose to support the bullshit arguments because knowing full-well they were flawed in the general case it gave a small sense of expressing their frustration with the status quo, regardless of the obvious fact that they suited and rewarded personally the key elites they were so frustrated with. How is that different from Xi rewarding the cadres loyal to him or Putin and his chorus of oligarchs?

We also experienced a global pandemic. In a cliched way, this showed humanity in its most Dickensian. It was indeed the best of times, with scientists delivering vaccines in record time, nurses and doctors fighting to save the sick. That it was also the worst of times when ‘mates’ of the cabinet were fast tracked to immense wealth for securing contracts to supply the government with much-needed personal protection equipment, without competitive bidding or any oversight. That much of the PPE did not work in a basic sense of providing any protection or any value for its delayed and very expensive provision other than personal enrichment for a precious few didn’t ultimately come as a surprise. It didn’t seem to be that newsworthy either, for some reason, only Private Eye held up a mirror to the wide-open festering sore of the Tories continuing corruption. Who needed functioning medical equipment when you can have a round of applause and bang on a saucepan down the street.

We have enjoyed the recent implosion of the new version of unconstitutional leadership, Liz Truss is not enjoying much support in denial of her own nominative determinism. It seems like years of the same shit sandwich but ‘Margarine Thatcher’, as she views herself in this latest right wing cos-play at government, has actually been fucking things up for less than one month. Biden, thank heavens, is keeping western democracy in shape and supporting the Ukrainians’ effort to bring down Putin. His administration continues to pass meaningful legislation which is a pleasant surprise after 12 years of minor tweaking at the fringes, but we have McConnell and Trump’s real legacy, the Supreme Court as a constant threat, casting its shadow like Sauron over the land, its black heart ready to pump more hatred and bile into popular discourse. Every time I see Joe Biden he looks one step closer to a comfortable retirement at home, surrounded by Labradors and grandkids, sipping cocoa; but in fact he is almost single-handedly fighting for global peace and stability.  I am avoiding thinking about what happens in 2024, but quietly hoping by then Putin is buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in the forest outside of Moscow following a bloody and painful demise at the hands of his own inner circle.

Who knows, maybe by then we may have also seen the last of what used to be called the Conservative and Unionist Party as it self-destructs following the landslide victory of the coalition of the sane.

Plus, “My shoe organizing thing arrived. Thank God! I don’t want to go on about it but we are back in business”  – I knew I could bring a positive conclusion to the current malaise, after all. Here are some dark songs to listen to as the evenings close in.

Low- “Days Like These” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8QiSZRX8dA

Ethel Cain – “Crush” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu-t3tqDyAY

Arctic Monkeys – “Body Paint” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zgEObNc_-k

Dry Cleaning “Anna Calls From the Arctic” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYNwr7wuRHY

Edwin Collins – “I Guess We Were Young” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7gbFMWZWlo

Ian Sweet – “Fight” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tBnrUBPib0

The Beths – “Expert In A Dying Field” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KACt6YhOyY

Linton Kwesi Johnson – “Inglan Is A Bitch” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isMjvRpAckU

Little Simz – “Point And Kill feat. Obongjayar” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvY31eN3gtE

Big Thief – “Not” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAZb7PpVK_g

Viagra Boys – “Research Chemicals” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7gbFMWZWlo

Amyl and the Sniffers – “Guided By Angels” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z–D1flPLnk