FraserWords

As anybody who knows me will tell you, there is no shortage of things that make me angry. People who can’t reverse. Hospitals. The dawn chorus. Arguing children. Media scrums. Cruelty to animals. Bad manners. Michael Gove. Placing profit above happiness or the common good. Council tax. George Osborne. One Direction. The Voice. The England cricket team. Overcooked vegetables. Born-again Christians. Zealots and bigots of any colour or creed. People who use the phrase ‘meet with’. Crufts. London Fashion Week. Any Fashion Week. Eric Pickles. People who are famous for being famous. The presence of blended whiskies in this world. Mick Hucknall. The price of a pint. Tony Blair. EastEnders. Jackets on dogs. Undercooked bacon. Overpriced 4×4 cars. Personalised number plates. Father’s Day. I could go on. And on.

But last week I found something that made me angrier than all of the above, in fact, angrier than I’ve been for a long time.

Channel-flicking, I came across a Channel 5 programme about the greatest double-acts of all time as it showed some clips of the immortal Morecambe and Wise. “Fine,” I thought. “All’s right with the world. Of course Morecambe and Wise have been voted the greatest double act of all time. Only Laurel and Hardy could complete. Eric and Ern were truly the greatest contributors to the sum of human happiness since them. I am happy and will now change channels lest anybody catch me out watching Channel 5…”

But. As my digit hovered over the remote, the voiceover declared “and now for the greatest double-act of all time…

What? Somebody above Morecambe and Wise?

It grieves me to have to break this to you – for I know none of you will have been watching Channel 5, and if you were, consider yourself disciplined savagely – but the greatest double act of all time was then revealed as…. Ant and Dec.

Yes. Ant. And. Fucking. Dec.

I know these list shows are cheap TV designed to get the hard-of-brain nattering around something called the office water-cooler, so clearly I am hard of brain to consider this trivia. But. Could anything, anything, better sum up the banality of our age?

Rolling, rolling

It would seem the possible signals from flight MH370 may finally have stopped (though there may now be an oil slick, apparently). Does this mean the news reports will stop?

Don’t get me wrong, I feel as sorry for the families of those lost in this air crash – for so it must have been – as anybody. But it sickens me how we in the west treat air travel as more serious news than so many other calamities in the world. How many people died in road accidents, for example, or of malaria, during the search period covered wall-to-wall by the world’s media?

It’s strange, the pull air travel has on the media. The teachers’ strike last month got virtually no coverage in the national media at all, and certainly nothing that treated the action as anything other than an inconvenient disruption for parents.  

But get an airport affected by strike action and it’s rolling live news coverage, dealing with the reasons for the strike and interviewing all those poor rich passengers holed up at Gatwick because they were too dull to change their travel plans and turned up expecting to be permitted to choke out their aeroplane pollution regardless.

I suppose it’s because the media is staffed by affluent westerners to whom the right to fly around the world belching out fumes is absolutely vital.

The other Big News Story Of Our Times is of course Oscar Pistorius. Celebrity is the reason for rolling live news coverage of his trial.

The magic of celebrity! All the issues raised in his case – firearms legislation, men’s behaviour to women, crime in South Africa – may only be viewed through the prism of celebrity. Dozens died in black townships in the week of Reeva Steenkamp’s death, for a variety of reasons. But none of them did televised sport. I doubt any of them were blonde models.  

It is the league table of news. Planes, beauty, fame and guns – the heady cocktail of ingredients that put any story right there at the top. Nobody has to think too hard. Everybody can indulge a little sanitised voyeurism. News as entertainment. News as tranquilliser. News as diversion: while the voyeurs watch Pistorius snivel and cry, there’s no danger of them noticing, for example, how many people have fallen into debt because of the bedroom tax, how many disabled people have been hurt by Atos work assessments.

Happy birthday

John Steinbeck would turn in his grave. He could take real life and make great art to inform, educate and entertain, and his words echo. The Grapes of Wrath is 75 years old today, a firm candidate for greatest book of the 20^th century and a novel that speaks to us as loudly as in 1939, in its depiction of the capitalism so beloved of the west. The Americans banned it and burned it. Never forget that.

So let me leave you this week with the words of a very great man; read ’em and weep.

“The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

“The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side-meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It’s wool. It was my mother’s blanket – take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning – from ‘I’ to ‘we’. If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we’.”

“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.”

And perhaps my favourite of them all, a motto for us, brothers and sisters:

“You’re bound to get idears if you go thinkin’ about stuff.”