Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life

by David Mitchell

  In a time of want, we all become interested in where the remaining money is going, and who’s doing well amid the ruins. This wealth-fixated chapter explores anger at a highly paid teacher, the justification for stratospherically paid executives, how a little cash goes a long way in politics, a plutocrat banker’s embarrassment at conspicuous consumption, and some unhealthy ideas for having fun on a budget. Save thinking about those less fortune than yourself for Christmas. The rest of the year is devoted to the livid contemplation of the arseholes who’ve got the cream (to quote the caption from an anal sex video screengrab).

  *

  Not everyone is screwed by the credit crunch. Every cloud has a silver lining, every repossession requires the employment of several bailiffs, suicide attempts keep nurses in work and on each pile of rotting, bloated corpses is a swarm of plump rats.

  Or, to put it another way: “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!” Well, as any drinks manufacturer will tell you, you don’t need lemons to make lemonade. Neither do you need meat to make a doner-kebab-flavour Pot Noodle. Apparently this new addition to the Pot Noodle range is practically vegan.

  Excellent! At last, vegans are being extended the same opportunities to get hooked on cheap junk food as the rest of society. But lemon-free lemonade and meat-flavoured starchy string are exactly the sort of products that are selling at the moment. Everyone is blowing what little spare money they have on crap treats. McDonald’s sales are rising; Pontins is expanding; people are looking for the sensation of wasting money, on a budget.

  Why piss away a fiver on a latte and an almond croissant when you’ll get a similar buzz from a can of Tizer and a battered sausage and have change from two quid? Plus the taste of your treat is nostalgically reawakened every time you burp for the next 36 hours.

  Budget foods are flying off supermarket shelves (that’s genetically modified chicken for you), bookmakers are prospering – presumably because lots of unemployed bankers are trying to keep their hands in – and the number of people doing the pools has risen for the first time since the launch of the National Lottery, for which ticket sales have also increased. So we can expect brand new opera houses and art galleries to spring up everywhere, which is nice because they’ll be somewhere for all the homeless to sleep.

  There are green shoots all over the place, though most of them are green because they died so long ago they’ve gone mouldy. So, in that spirit of optimism, here are some of the businesses that have managed to buck the downward trend.

  Homeless Security plc

  With factories closing, hundreds of disused sites need guarding around the clock. But while all this property is falling into disuse, thousands are being made homeless. “We just took those two wrongs and made a right!” says Homeless Security’s managing director. “The simple fact is that if there’s already a gang of homeless sleeping in a disused factory, another gang isn’t going to move in. So, on behalf of the administrators called in to wind up failed companies, we source a bunch of relatively tidy tramps to keep the place occupied. They’re as dependable as guard dogs and cheaper, since the cider we pay them with costs less than Pedigree Chum.”

  Ice Cold Alex Ltd

  “If I had to sum up my product in five words,” says their chief executive who doesn’t, “it would be ‘Brandy Alexander in a can’. It’s sophisticated, it’s sugary and, if you use reconstituted pig lard instead of dairy fat, it’s incredibly cheap to make. We’re living through difficult times – people are hungry, stressed, they want to forget. Drinking five or six Ice Cold Alexes on the trot may not be what a doctor would advise, but my God it gets you through the day.” And investors all want a piece of it. An investment analyst explains why: “Everybody knows that alcoholism is a problem, everybody knows that obesity is a problem, but this company is unique in having fully monetised both phenomena. I suppose everyone else must have been too fat or drunk to think of it.”

  Bee-in-Bonnet Media

  Formerly the BBC complaints department, this was outsourced and is now a thriving independent company. They’re proud of what they’ve achieved: “The whole complaints procedure needed streamlining. The rigmarole of getting feedback, reading it, evaluating its content and then responding was ridiculous in this day and age. Clearly we needed to get from tabloid-induced complaint frenzy to abject backtracking apology in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. That’s what the licence-fee payer has a right to expect.

  “We’re building great relationships with our media partners, whereby newspaper editors can let us know in advance what they’re going to tell people to be appalled by, with an estimate of the number of complaints that will generate, and then we just email the appropriate WESWEE [media slang for a ‘We’re Sorry We Even Exist’ statement] to the DG’s BlackBerry.”

  Belt and Braces Ltd

  The collapse in TV and newspaper advertising has created a boom in the public-safety-campaign industry. “Suddenly all this advertising space is going cheap, and we’ve secured the government contract to provide the content,” explains their head creative, who, pre-crunch, pulled down a six-figure salary inventing the names of friendly bacteria. “The days of ‘Look out for motorcyclists when turning right’ are behind us. It’s got to be edgy, sexy: ‘Taking drugs is like six different versions of you pissing each other off’; ‘A stroke is a fire in your brain’; or ‘If you break the speed limit you will hallucinate dead ginger children.’ This is the Green Cross Code for the Skins generation. At the moment, we’re working on an anti-gambling campaign which implies that it turns your head into a roulette wheel, meaning that, given time, your brain stem snaps. It uses a lot of CGI. We also do photos of corpses for fag packets.”

  Cats and Dogs Ltd

  Founded five months ago, the company already has four small factories turning domestic cats, which people can no longer afford to keep, into hot-dog sausages. “Animal rights loonies have claimed that we put the cats into the grinder live. I utterly reject that allegation – they’re given a lethal flavourising injection first,” asserts their head of PR. “I just love the irony. People talk about ‘eating a dog’ when in fact it’s cat!”

  And looking to the future? “We’re hoping to throw some gerbils and goldfish into the mix – as soon as we can get the calibration right on the mincer. The last thing anyone wants is a whole eye coming through.”

  *

  “Don’t mention the crunch!” hissed the manic hotelier behind the backs of the party of diners from Goldman Sachs. “I mentioned it just now but I think I got away with it!”

  That’s the sort of thing senior bank employees might have to endure in the coming decades. Top bankers are the new Germans. And the sooner we get to the point where we’re making jokes about the outrages committed in their name, the better. We haven’t got there yet.

  There’s a fascinating podcast from the US public radio show This American Life about the causes of the credit crunch. It points out that what everyone in the banking sector always says about the financial crisis is that no one saw it coming. As Ira Glass, the host of the programme, puts it: “The recent collapse of the financial system has been described as a 100-year flood, a perfect storm, a force of nature. And it is so frustrating to hear it described that way – as something that happened to Wall Street instead of something that Wall Street brought on itself.”

  The show then tells the story of a hedge fund called Magnetar whose business plan is as villainous as its name. The people who ran it realised that the US property bubble was going to burst and found a way both of inflating it further and betting that it would pop. Consequently, they made a fortune when it did. They were aided and abetted by various bankers who, while nominally employed to represent the best interests of customers and shareholders, were actually rewarded for the number of deals they struck rather than their ultimate soundness.

  It’s a lamentable tale of the sort that the US Senate grilled Goldman Sachs executives about. I think most of us suspected that this kind of thing was
going on, but hearing the details is riveting and maddening. Whether or not these business practices were strictly legal, wrong has been done here. Bankers personally took home vast sums of money – sums they still have – exacerbating a problem that has cost the world’s taxpayers trillions to try to fix.

  That money has effectively been stolen from us by people who, if Goldman Sachs and Magnetar are anything to go by, show very few signs of being sorry. It is, of course, fruitless to expect corporations to be moral – they are dumbly, amorally acquisitive – but the people who work for them are morally culpable. In these cases, they weren’t even working in the interests of the banks that employed them, but stacking up bonuses for themselves by selling dodgy financial instruments while concealing from their customers that operators like Magnetar had induced the creation of these instruments purely to bet on their eventual worthlessness.

  We’re all living with the consequences of these actions – that’s why bankers are like the Germans 60 years ago: they are collectively blamed for bringing disaster on the world. The analogy, like all historical analogies, is imperfect – the financial crisis has not had a comparable human cost to the two world wars – but it works in several ways. Like the Germans, not all the bankers knew what was going on. Others opposed it or went along with it grudgingly because they were in an environment where they felt they had no alternative. But others were the bad guys. They did terrible things – things that have hurt millions of people – for personal gain.

  Europe’s recovery after the second world war – its ability to forgive and rebuild the country that had done so much harm – relied on the fact that the vast majority of Germans were genuinely contrite. The American taxpayer poured money into West Germany to put it on its feet, just as taxpayers have done with the banking sector. It was the right thing to do in both cases, but only in the former was it received with the heartfelt apologies and thanks necessary to offset future resentment.

  It’s vitally important that the banking sector fully acknowledges its wrongdoing. It’s not enough for it to say: “Sorry we didn’t see the crash coming, but no one did.” That’s not a real apology and it’s a lie; some people did see it coming, but used that knowledge to worsen and profit from it. The fact that the banking profession was so ethically detached from the rest of society that this behaviour seemed reasonable needs to be addressed, because the creation of a culture in which evil acts appear normal is what happened under the Nazis.

  I don’t hate capitalism – it broadly works. But it only works, and society only functions, because humans are basically moral creatures. When we do wrong, we believe in remorse and forgiveness – in that order. Our politicians have failed to extract this remorse from bankers because they’ve been too busy blaming each other for the handling of the crisis. But that’s like Chamberlain squabbling with Halifax over who was more responsible for the second world war; at worst, the politicians are accessories.

  Unless the bankers are penitent, the German parallels are uncomfortably closer to 1919 than 1945. Like the financial crisis, the first world war didn’t have clearcut goodies and baddies. All the countries involved must take some of the blame for the wholesale slaughter, just as feckless borrowers and shortsighted finance ministers contributed to the crunch. But Germany wanted that war and conspired to ignite it, just as Magnetar did the sub-prime mortgage crisis. It was more Germany’s fault than any other country’s.

  In the muddle and fudge of Versailles, the victorious allies forgot to win that argument. And tragically, as a result of an armistice being declared rather than the war fought to an unconditional surrender, many Germans were left with the illusion – one that Hitler exploited – that they hadn’t been defeated in the war but betrayed from within. This wasn’t true. The German army was thoroughly beaten.

  We mustn’t let the bailout of the banks be the equivalent of that armistice. The fact that banks still exist, bankers must realise, is despite rather than because of their actions. They failed utterly – morally and economically – and their continued employment is by our collective grace. Its continuance should be conditional on their taking the blame for what they did. Otherwise, the economic recovery could be as uncertain and transitory as the inter-war peace.

  *

  “Who’s the richest person in the world?” That’s a question I often asked as a small child. Do children ask that because so many of the stories they get read involve gold? Maybe it’s peculiar to my generation, which was learning its times tables as Thatcher came to power. Or maybe I was an unusually mercenary little shit. I don’t think so, though. In the good times, we admire people with money; in the bad, we resent them, but they’re always interesting.

  I wanted the richest person in the world to be the Queen. It suited my juvenile sense of fairytale hierarchy. To a child’s mind, a world where a nerdy American in a jumper and glasses or a podgy Saudi in a sheet can outspend the posh lady in the big gold coach wearing the big gold hat is a world gone mad.

  Similarly, small children might expect the answer to the question “Who gets paid the most?” to be “The prime minister.” The prime minister is in charge, so it might seem logical that “the prime minister’s salary” means the same as “the most amount of money imaginable”, and that anyone being paid more than that is an evil usurper of the Queen’s treasure. In stories, such villains, grand viziers and the like, get punished. They’re humiliated and made to give the money back. A child might even contemplate, in moments of post-sugar binge viciousness, chopping their heads off.

  But small children are idiots. As each human foetus sloshes into the world, wailing and weeing, unable to walk, crawl, speak or even sit – a helpless lump of ignorant self-interest – society takes a deep breath because, in just 18 years’ time, that blob will be allowed to vote. The professionals whose job it is to get them up to speed are called teachers and, according to newspaper reports, one of them is paid more than the prime minister.

  It’s a credit to the children and parents at Mark Elms’s school that they still don’t want to chop his head off. In general, they seem to think that he’s very good at his job and deserves the money. You don’t expect primary-school headmasters to be paid that much, but he’s brilliant and, to borrow a phrase from the private sector, you get what you pay for. But that’s not everyone’s view. Many are disgusted by the news that, contrary to our expectations, at least one teacher has a high salary.

  How deeply depressing. This isn’t some risibly job-titled council functionary – a “deputy manager of procurement services”, a “bureaucracy maximisation taskforce co-chair” or a “litter tsar”, one of those people responsible for all the “waste” we’re asked to believe that the previous administration encouraged in direct defiance of its own interests. This guy runs a primary school in a grim area that was as crap as you’d expect when he took it over and has got vastly better under his leadership, to the immense benefit of his hundreds of pupils and their families. Why can’t we treat him like the high-flyer his CV proclaims him to be?

  I think most people are comfortable with the idea that if you’re a brilliant doctor, surgeon or barrister, you’ll get quite rich – nearly as rich as a second-rate management consultant or an inept banker. But the fact that we react so differently to a teacher’s pay approaching that level gives the lie to our vociferous assertions that we think teaching is an important job. We don’t think it’s important, we think it’s badly paid. And when we discover an instance where it isn’t, it makes us angry, not glad.

  It even makes the unions representing other teachers angry because, apparently despairing of ever seriously improving their own members’ pay, they’ve focused on dragging headteachers down into the same under-remunerated swamp. One example is cited of a teacher’s career that has involved success, fulfilment and money – a beacon of hope to talented graduates with a vocation to teach but who fear it would leave them absurdly less well-off than their peers in other jobs – and the very unions representing that pr
ofession want it snuffed out, so that teaching remains the preserve of the self-sacrificing or the mediocre.

  The government agrees because this is the public sector which, according to Tory orthodoxy, is inevitably inefficient. The country must live within its means and so can’t pay public sector wastrels at the same rate as their private sector equivalents, even though the main cause of those means becoming so straitened was the credit-crisis-induced recession, a disaster brought on by monumental private sector inefficiency – if the word “inefficiency” is sufficient to cover that thoughtless spiral of hedonistic incompetence.

  Nevertheless, to this government the private sector is automatically better. To suggest otherwise is heresy. That’s why they’re restructuring the NHS in a way that will encourage more private enterprise, despite the fact that, in June 2010, the Commonwealth Fund declared it the most efficient health service out of the seven it had studied – that’s ahead of Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, all systems with more private sector involvement. The NHS might well be, in terms of the results it delivers with the money it gets, the most efficient health service on Earth. And yet the Tories are convinced that hasty and sweeping organisational reforms will make it even more so.

  Meanwhile, paying higher salaries to get more able employees is, in their view, a technique that only works in the private sector. They’ve arbitrarily decided that it’s a scandal if any public servant is paid more than the prime minister. But the prime minister’s salary has always been incredibly low considering the importance of the job. To most prime ministers, the pay is irrelevant; they don’t have much time to spend it and they know they can rake it in with a book deal and a lecture tour as soon as they resign.