Eve of Destruction

"Ah, you may leave here, for eight days in space,
But when your return, it's the same old place,
The poundin' of the drums, the pride and disgrace,
You can bury your dead, but don't leave a trace,
Hate your neighbor next door, don't forget to say grace,
And you tell me over and over and over and over again my friend,
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction."

Let's get one thing straight from the start. There is not some sudden unexpected "anti-establishment" mood sweeping the country, or the world for that matter.

The recent spate of political events and outcomes, from Brexit in June to Trump rallying in the polls within the last few days (at the time of writing), have been described by some commentators as an "anti-establishment movement" and a "rejection of global elites." But these are not manifestations of some new deeper insight people have into Machiavellian machinations whispered in the corridors of power. There is not some recent improvement in people's appreciation of their rights and responsibilities and how these are subverted by unaccountable corporate interests, directly or as mediated by the state.

They are not rejecting of global elites. The repeated suggestion that they are is an insult to the intelligence. One, ironically, that is promulgated by global elites. It is a lie repeated by those corporations' media cohorts to confer some renegade appeal to the forces of reaction.  

For these are reactionary, not revolutionary, times.

People who are genuinely interested in change do not choose the likes of Farage or Trump as their standard bearer. Their champions do not lead easy, pampered lives. Their champions are often reviled rather than celebrated, and they are certainly not celebrities. They are rarely wealthy. They don't sit in a televised boardroom and point their finger and declaim "you're fired." They don't use a pint of warm bitter as a prop during a photo opportunity down the pub as they regale us with cosy homespun bigotry and casual, superficially plausible lies.

They are in the jungle with Che. They are on the cross with Christ. They never promote the interests of the wealthy, or of the entrenched, vested interests that reside in anonymous offshore tax havens, safely out of democracy's reach.

Real anti-establishment activists place flowers in the barrels of guns instead of demanding the right to bear arms. They throw the money lenders out of the temple instead of deregulating the temple to grant its financial services a free hand. They read books instead of burning them. They seek connection and dialogue with others instead of demonising them. They respect experts instead of ignoring or deriding them. They exhaustively research, gather evidence, subject that evidence to severe scrutiny, tentatively draw heavily qualified conclusions, actively seek constructive criticism of their ideas. They don't jump to lazy conclusions on the basis of a headline repeating a demonstrable lie, or on the basis of an anecdote offered to support some agenda. They make hard choices. They don't offer easy answers. They make sacrifices. They do not respond to the latest dog-whistle or knee-jerk. They pay the price of keeping the peace, in reputation or blood, rather than asking others pay the price of fighting their wars for them.  

Gil Scott-Heron observed the Revolution will not be televised. So what do we make of these people who are never bloody well off the telly, these Trumps and Farages and Johnsons and the rest? They're no revolutionaries. This is not a revolution. This is not a backlash against authority. Yes, people feel pain. But their pain is being misdirected against innocent scapegoats by the very interests that caused it. This is a coup. This is a shoddy putsch prosecuted by unprincipled imbeciles incapable of understanding or curtailing the forces they have unleashed to deliver their pathetic short term objectives, aided and abetted by a decimated and shell-shocked media barely able to repeat the lies they are fed, let alone challenge them.

And now that the UK Government are illegally compensating multinationals for adverse consequences of Brexit, why not just cut out the middle man, abolish taxation, and offer us all to the multinationals as indentured slaves?  

There is nothing new about this. This is not an anti-establishment movement. This has been on the cards for a long time. The disaster that has been gradually unfolding over the course of 2016 before our eyes has been a long time coming. We now look back fondly to a time when the most we had to concern ourselves with was the possibility that the Prime Minister might have had sex with the corpse of a pig. But the forces, the trends, the relentless drip-feed of hate and lies in the right wind press, the erosion of trust in public institutions, the devaluation of intelligence and education and robust well-informed opinion, have continued for decades to bring us to where we now find ourselves, on the brink of the election of a self-confessed sex criminal to the highest office in the USA, no doubt green-lighting sexual assault there in the same way racist hate-crime has been green-lighted in the UK by the outcome of the EU referendum.

Decades of hysterical bigoted misinformation. Decades of dog-whistles and knee-jerks, prodding us and making us twitch in our stupefied trance, our cathode ray slumber. Decades in which education, critical thought, reliable information, civic concern, altruism, authentic individuality, have all been demeaned, devalued, denigrated, despised, dispensed with, in favour of delusions of consequence-free existence, get-rich-quick schemes, money-for-nothing lotteries, superficial celebrity culture, rewarding selfishness and conformity, luring us towards a myth of comfortable consumerist servitude as salvation from the threat of threadbare freedom and a wilderness of ostracism and ridicule.

The only aspirations cultivated and legitimised in this scenario are shallow materialistic appetites. The only needs that can be acknowledged are for things advertisers can sell you. The only requirements recognised are those whose ultimate fulfilment will leave an unexpected dissatisfaction and a craving for more that continues and grows until it gnaws at and hollows out whole societies and abandons us to inhabit their bombed-out husks.

The great vessel we are embarked upon, this ship of fools, is headed for the rocks. It will take as much to steer it away from them as it took set it on that course.