I fare-dodged my way out of Grays on the Fenchurch Street train, which primarily transports commuting city workers from Essex to the City of London. Stopping at Chafford Hundred—the new estate they built opposite the street where I grew up—Purfleet, Lakeside, Rainham, Dagenham Dock, Barking, and Limehouse. I’d hide in the toilet under my gelled quiff, with my own “Out of Order” sign on the door, a cross between Del Boy and Matt Goss, puffing skunk, counting stops.
Now I glide in the back of Mick’s Mercedes. Mick would be “my driver” if I employed possessive determiners before people and if he exhibited a modicum of professionalism. Instead, he is my mate, who drives me. It is still, of course, in reality a long way from where I am from—child of a single mum, on benefits, drug addicted—as we journey down the A13 past the disused Ford factory where my nan’s husband, Bert, worked, past the marshes where there was talk of building Euro Disney. I was naturally devastated when they went for Paris instead—I mean, fucking Paris?! Walt must be spinning in his grave, or cryogenic chamber, or wherever the hell it is they keep his brilliant Nazi corpse.
The reason for this trip down memory lane—or memory pain as I tend to call it, because my past is soaked in misery and rejection; it rejected me, then I rejected it—is that my schoolfriend Sam asked me to open a Mind shop. Mind is the mental-health charity that he works for, and I, with my history of mental illness, plus the fact that he’s a mate and the irresistible pun “open your Mind (shop), man,” feel it’s worth risking a visit to the scene of the crime. The crime of being born, which is the manner in which I regarded my birth as a troubled and troubling adolescent.
Grays wasn’t great when I grew up, but a lot of that might’ve been because I was looking at it from inside my head and I reckon I could’ve been reared in Tuscany and rendered it a tragedy, the way my nut operated. I had a tendency for misery. What Grays is and was—and as the name suggests, aside from my self-aggrandizing melancholy—is a normal town. You could say a normal, suburban, Essex town; you could say a normal British town, or a normal northern European town, or even a normal town in a secular, Western democracy.
When I was a kid, that meant the town center, where I was due to “open your Mind, man,” had a market, chain stores, and local businesses. People did their shopping there, hung out, you know, normal stuff. When I disembarked from my tinted capsule of privilege, I was shocked to see how much Grays has changed. I mean, we’re not describing the sacking of Rome here, not the desecration of the sacred treasures of a glorious city-state, it was always a bit of a dump, but the chain stores were gone, the local businesses were gone, and the market had shut down.
Now there were pound shops, betting shops, charity shops, and off-licenses. The people of the town I’d left twenty years ago were different: More of them were drunk; more of them were visibly undernourished—more than that, though, I could feel that there was a despondency among the fifty or so folk assembled with listless anticipation around the barrier outside the Mind shop.
The more callous among you might say that was as a result of my impending visit, you swines, but it wasn’t that. Something had been taken from them, and I could feel its absence. More shocking though than this sad deterioration is that Grays, this lesser, depleted Grays with its food banks, Wonga loans, and escalating addiction problem, is still normal.
This is happening everywhere. The richest 1 percent of British people have as much as the poorest 55 percent. Some people like me were in the 55 percent and are now in the 1 percent, but, mostly, normal people are getting poorer. Globally it’s worse. Oxfam say a bus with the eighty-five richest people in the world on it would contain more wealth than the collective assets of half the earth’s population—that’s three and a half billion people.
Though I can’t imagine they’d be getting on a bus with that kind of money or be hanging out together, I bet there’d be a lot of tension, jealousy, and petty bickering on that bus:
“My corporation is bigger than your corporation.”
“Yeah? I’ve got my own media network!”
“YEAH!? I’ve got an elite organization that controls global politics.”
“Stop this bus. I want to return to my subaquatic palace with my half-fish brides and sing a song about the supremacy of marine life.”
The last example might be from the Disney film The Little Mermaid. Walt’s frozen noggin is definitely on that bus.
In America, a country that, let’s face it, has really run with this whole capitalism thing, the six heirs to the Walmart fortune have more wealth than the poorest 30 percent of Americans. There’s six of them! They can’t even form a football team, how are they going to stop a Revolution when we act on the unfairness of that statistic? Unless the entire system is rigged to maneuver wealth to an elite group of people, then ensure that it remains there.
What you just read is crazy. Insane. Unbelievable but true. As real as your hands that are holding this book (Kindle/tablet/intra-neural-brain hologram, if it’s really far in the future), that information is as real as the breath that you are inhaling.
Six people whose dad was “good at supermarkets” have more money than hundreds of millions of struggling Americans. A bus full of plutocrats, royals, and oligarchs have as much money as every refugee, war child, and potbellied, rough-sleeping person on the planet.
You can hear that is crazy, you can see that it’s wrong, you feel that this is beyond disturbing. We’re told there’s nothing we can do about it, that this is “the way things are.” Naturally, of course, that verdict emanates from the elite institutions, organizations, and individuals that benefit from things being “the way they are.”
More important, perhaps, than this galling inequality is the fact that we have a limited amount of time to resolve it. The same interests that benefit from this—for brevity I’m going to say “system”—need, in order to maintain it, to deplete the earth’s resources so rapidly, violently, and irresponsibly that our planet’s ability to support human life is being threatened. This is also pretty fucked up.
I mean, if someone said they had a socio-economic system that creates a hugely wealthy elite at the cost of everyone else but it was ecologically sound, we’d tell them to fuck off. What we’ve got is one that is systematically inflating the wealth of the elite, rapidly suffocating everybody else, and it’s destroying the planet that we all live on. I know you already know this. I know. We all know. But it’s so absurd—psychopathic, in fact—that we obviously need to reiterate it.
These elites, these loonies on the diamond-encrusted fun bus, they live on the planet with us, they’re basically the same as us. So they’re in trouble too—unless this bus is equipped for space travel and they plan to wait until the earth is a scorched husk, then blast off to a moon base.
As I perused the new shelves bearing secondhand goods in a charity shop in the run-down town where I’m from, I thought about this stuff. The hymen ribbon that I’m supposed to cut is slung unsliced across the door. The volunteers have half-empty glasses of supermarché champagne, collectively willing it to be a good day.
Two uncomfortable certainties, though, loiter like bailiffs manacling the bonhomie: 1) taking care of mentally ill people is not the job of a charity but the state; and 2) this charity shop isn’t going to fucking work anyway. We already have charity shops. One of the few areas in which we are well catered for is charity shops; they’re cropping up everywhere, like zombies rising from the graves of the dead proper shops.
We keep our chins up as we plod through the ritual; scissors come out, applause, people bowl in, mill about, pick up a tragic jumper, weigh up a porcelain duchess in the palm of the hand. A councillor says something, a mentally ill person on the long road to sanity says something, I say something—I’m a few paces further down the road.
A church-fete-type lady rosily thrusts a pair of women’s jeans at me: “These’ll do for you, Russell.” I buy them and we laugh. Really, though, I’d like to scratch the record off, to rake the nee
dle across the grooves and say, “What the fuck are we all doing?” What gravity is this that holds us down, who installed this low, suffocating sky? I get that feeling a lot, like I want to peer round the corner of reality, to scratch the record off, to say I know there’s something else, I know it.
I know this isn’t the best use of our time here. “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” sang Leonard Cohen. You can see it; just behind reality, there is a light, you can feel it. Just behind your thoughts there is a silence. He knew the answer was there, that’s why he became a Buddhist and fucked off to live in them mountains. Either that or it was because his management nicked all his money.
I was particularly attuned to these ideas whilst frolicking in indigenous poverty because I was guest-editing a British political magazine called the New Statesman. They’d asked me what the theme of the issue would be. “Revolution,” I said. So they pulled together a variety of journalists, philosophers, and activists to contribute on aspects of the subject. Naomi Klein’s article described an ecological conference where the requirement for radical action was spelled out.
Brad Werner, a complex-systems researcher (which sounds like a job that would be hard to monitor for a supervisor—“Oy, Werner, are you researching that complex system or are you dickin’ around on your phone?”) speaking at last year’s American Geophysical Union (which must surely use pornography on the invitation to have any hope of luring trade), said that our planet is fucked. He researched our complex system—the earth, I suppose, is a complex system—and concluded that we, the people who live on it, are fucked. I’m not even joking: His lecture was titled “Is Earth Fucked?” so the American Geophysical Union isn’t as square as its name implies. They do swear words and everything.
What Brad Werner said, though, is that the capitalist system is so rapacious in its consumption of earth’s resources and the measures that have thus far been imposed so ineffectual, that the only hope we have of saving the planet is for action to come from outside of the system.
They are not going to do anything to prevent ecological meltdown; it contravenes their ideology, so change has to be imposed from the outside.
That means by us. All that Kyoto stuff—reduce carbon emissions by “x” by year “y”—is not worth a wank in a windsock. It’s a bullshit gesture, the equivalent of the salad they sell in McDonald’s. Too little, too late.
It’s like giving Fred West a detention.
We know we can’t trust these fuckers to behave properly. Look at the tobacco industry: They knew they were killing their customers for decades before they coughed up the carcinogenic truth; they’d be blagging us to this day if they thought they could get away with it.
You can bet we’ll go on a similar journey with mobile phones. That hot tingle in your ear is not a sign that all is hunky-dory on the lughole front.
James Lovelock, the bloke who came up with Gaia theory, that the earth is one symbiotic, interrelated organism where harmonious life forms support or regulate each other, says we shouldn’t bother with recycling, wind turbines, and Priuses. It’s all a lot of bollocks, he says—not literally, though he might’ve if he’d been at that crazy, hang-loose festival of cursing, the American Geophysical Union.
Now, I don’t reckon Lovelock is saying sit back and enjoy the apocalypse, I think he’s saying we require radical action fast and that radical action will not come from the very interests that created and benefit from things being the way they are. The one place we cannot look for change is to the occupants of the bejeweled bus. They are the problem, we are the solution, so we have to look inside ourselves.
I left Grays in luxury this time, climbing back into the cradle of Mick’s car. A Mercedes. The anesthetic of privilege, the prison of comfort. People want departing photographs and autographs, more scraps, more crumbs. A bloke around my age, clutching a baton of super-strength cider, puts his arm round me. I used to drink White Lightning. I am mugged by his breath as our eyes momentarily meet. I shut the door on my past and the present.
I was a little winded by what I’d seen. Going back to the place where you are from is always fraught, memories scattered like broken glass on every pavement, be careful where you tread. I meditated, feeling a little guilty that I have the space to.
A space for peace, to which everyone is entitled.
“It’s alright for you in the back of a car that Hitler used to ride in,” I imagined that drunk bloke saying. I’d have to point out that it wasn’t literally Hitler’s car, that would be a spooky heirloom, but it is all right for me. I do have a life where I can make time to meditate, eat well, do yoga, exercise, reflect, relax. That’s what money buys you. Is it possible for everyone to have that life? Is it possible for anyone to be happy when such rudimentary things are exclusive?
They tell you that you ought eat five fruit and veg a day, then seven; I read somewhere once that you should eat as much as ten, face in a trough all day long, chowing on kale.
The way these conclusions are reached is that scientists look at a huge batch of data and observe the correlation between the consumption of fruit and veg and longevity.
They then conclude that you, as an individual, should eat more fruit and veg. The onus is on you; you are responsible for what you eat.
Of course, other conclusions could be drawn from this data. The same people that live these long lives and eat all this fruit and veg are also, in the main, wealthy; they have good jobs, regular holidays, exercise, and avoid the incessant stress of poverty. Another, more truthful, more frightening conclusion we could reach then is that we should have a society where the resources enjoyed by the fruit-gobbling elite are shared around and the privileges, including the fruit and veg, enjoyed by everybody.
With this conclusion the obligation is not on you as an individual to obediently skip down to Waitrose and buy more celery, it is on you as a member of society to fight for a fairer system where more people have access to resources.
A Newsnight producer calls. “I think it’s really interesting that you’ve never voted,” she says. “You should talk about that tomorrow with Paxman.” I agree, bemused that it is regarded as unusual.
The idea that voting is pointless, democracy a façade, and that no one is representing ordinary people is more resonant than ever as I leave my ordinary town behind. Amidst the guilt and anger I feel in the back of the Führer-mobile, there is hope. Whilst it’s clear that on an individual, communal, and global level that radical change is necessary, I feel a powerful, transcendent optimism. I know change is possible, I know there is an alternative, because I live a completely different life to the one I was born with. I also know that the solution is not fame or money or any transient adornment of the individual. The only Revolution that can really change the world is the one in your own consciousness, and mine has already begun.
2
Serenity Now
WE HAVE FOUND OURSELVES IN AN INSANE SITUATION; THAT IS irrefutable. How is this unfair, exploitative system maintained? Quentin Crisp, the English fop, wit, and subject of Sting’s song “Englishman in New York,” said, “Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.” Well, David Cameron, Donald Rumsfeld, and Rupert Murdoch must, in spite of their dish-face, dishrag, anodyne-plus appearances, be packing like Elvis Presley to hold this carnival of inequality together.
There is no logic in adhering to an unfair, destructive system unless it’s at the sizzling behest of the inconceivably sexy. The most potent tool in maintaining the status quo is our belief that change is impossible. “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Winston Churchill quoted this on being informed he’d been voted out of office in spite of Britain’s victory in the Second World War.
Supposedly he said it in the bath, which is a tough environment to conjure up epigrams from, especially if you’re also trying to keep a cigar dry. How convenient for the elites that thrive in this hegemony tha
t there is no viable system but the one that places them in a tower of ineffable privilege. How fortunate that there is no possibility of change. How extraordinary that any alternative that is offered is either studiously ignored or viciously discredited.
Coming to believe that my life could be different, that I could be restored to sanity, was an integral step in my recovery from addiction. I believe it is vital too on a social scale.
You’ve probably noticed by now that I keep alluding to God. Unless you’re that bloke on the yacht and are only paying cursory attention to this book as the sisters begin to squabble and the bubbly begins to flatten. To be honest, oligarchs are not the intended readership of this book. If you are one, I’d like you to gently place the book on the deck, for posterity, and leap into the briny.
The reason I keep mentioning God is because I believe in God. A lot of people are surprised by that, what with it being 2014 and this being a technologically advanced secular culture.
God is primarily regarded as the preserve of thick white people and angry brown people. Since Friedrich Nietzsche (deceased) declared, “God is dead,” we’ve been exploring the observation of British writer G. K. Chesterton, who said, “The death of God doesn’t mean man will believe in nothing but that he will believe in anything.”
I’m a good example of that: at thirteen a believer in Lakeside, at eight a believer in biscuits, at seventeen a devoted wanker, at nineteen a fanatical drug user, before winding up in the monastery of celebrity.
After the troubling Mind-shop epiphany I went back to my old school, to see if it was as bad as I remember it or if it had somehow managed to burrow downwards from the gutter. Whenever I’m in front of young people, I sense the authority figures present prodding me to deliver a kind of “Just Say No,” “If I can do it, you can,” “Pull yer’self up by yer’ bootstraps” monologue of individualistic triumph over adversity.
Revolution Page 2
