The Politics Of Weakness
Circle round the park, joining hands in silence,
we watched the evil black the sky
This storm has ripped the shelter of illusion from our brow
This power's no mystery to us now
Leave your spirit genocide, the cancer you won't remove
We cast our funeral rose inside and bury the need to prove
Our mutilation is to gain from the system
Turn your head away from the screen, oh people,
it will tell you nothing more
Don't suck the milk of flaccid Bill K. Public's empty promise
to the people that the public can ignore
This way of life is so devised
to snuff out the mind that moves
Moving with grace the men despise,
and women have learned to lose
Throw off your shame or be a slave to the system
We see you take another drag,
one more lost soul to raise your flag
The sky is a landfill
We see you take another drag,
we see you take another drag
You like to dance to the rolling head of the adultress,
you sing in praise of suicide
We know you're useless,
like cops at the scene of the crime
With your steroids and your feedbag and your stable
and your trainer
I`ve got a mail bomb for you, Mr Strong Arm
Roll out the stones from all the cemetery homes,
for the violence of a nation gone by
For the politics of weakness and the garbage dump of souls
That will now black the sky
Their yellow haze and crowds of eyes
will plug up the mind that moves
Moving with grace the men despise,
and women have learned to lose
We'll share our bodies in disdain for the system
Oh, we see you take another drag
One nation bends to kiss the hag
The sky is a landfill
Oh, we see you take another drag,
we see you take another drag
I have no fear of this machine.
Because there's nothing like an ENTIRE Jeff Buckley song to kick off a post I'm pretty sure is going to run long. Why fuck around? If we're going to write an essay, let's do it right, eh?
Yes, I have already written this post. Yes, I did lose it when Blogger closed down for maintenance the other night and I hadn't read the front page. No, this one couldn't possibly be as good as that one. I'm dead sober, for one thing. But I'll give it the old college try, and we'll see what we end up with.
This rant has come about for a couple of reasons. First, because people keep asking me about my politics. Second, because reading Jenn's blog left me feeling slightly guilty that I'd made no attempt to cover politics here.
With good reason, I might add. I don't cover straight politics because I don't see the point. From the feedback I've had so far, people prefer it when I just write about whatever's in my head, preferably fictionalising it in some form. The demand seems to be for bittersweet tales about my life or whatever else. The people want to be entertained. And politics is not entertaining.
But I'll do it now, if only so it means I'll never have to do it again.
My educational background is in politics and sociology, by the way, so I do occasionally have some idea what I'm talking about. If I'm slipping, I'll throw in some oral sex gags. I'll be sure to highlight them in bold for you scrollers.
Oral sex gags. Hahahahahahaaaa! See what I did there? Damn, I'm funny. And serious, too. Watch this...
I'll begin with Blair and Bush, but I'm not going to say very much about them because that would be to miss the same point I'm tired of watching everybody else miss. Right now, it doesn't actually matter who the incumbent is in terms of public office. A choice between Blair and Michael Howard is no choice at all. Ultimately, they represent pretty much the same thing. Same with Bush and Kerry, when you get right down to it. The only reason you'd vote the opposition into power right now is because they're the lesser of two evils. It's not so much a matter of voting for as against. That's why I believe Western Democracy is a sham.
Yes, a sham. A waste of time. An oxymoron. Who am I going to vote for in the next general election. Blair? I think not. He's a liar and a thief and a breaker of promises. Howard? He's a Tory. I grew up in a single parent family during the eighties. I would sooner die than vote Conservative. Kennedy? Ahahaha...ahahaha...haha...heh.
Ever notice how Charles Kennedy looks like that kid at school who would hide under the stairs and look up skirts?
The Lib-Dems just can't seem to grasp the concepts of post-millenium politics, and that's why they will never be a viable third party in this country. We're locked into a two-party trip now, just like our friends on the other side of the Atlantic, and with the same problems. The chief of which is apathy.
More people voted during the 2001 edition of Big Brother than in the general election that same year. In fact, 2001 saw the lowest turnout in a general election since before World War I. The reasons for this are as obvious as they are worrying. When Blair's New Labour kicked the Conservatives out of office in 1997, they did so in landslide style. By 2001, the Conservatives were only just beginning to get themselves back together. The election was seen as a foregone conclusion, and nobody bothered to go out and vote. The prophecy was fulfilled with another landslide.
In the next election, I believe the same thing will happen. One reason is the belief that the Conservatives can't win. But is that all there is to it? I think not.
You'd have to be either ignorant or blind not to see that politics has undergone a drastic change in the last twenty to thirty years. The modern age was all about polarisation and experimentation. It was about Left and Right. It was, in a way, several generations of people trying to find Something That Worked.
Nothing did. The extreme left was destroyed by the disastrous failure of Marxist theory when put into practice. The extreme right gave us the holocaust. As the last century staggered to a conclusion, England saw more moderate versions of both extremes, in the Labour government of the late seventies and the reign of Thatcherism through the eighties. Both left the electorate discontented, and when the time came for change, polarisation became a thing of the past.
Politics, however, did not.
Hunter S. Thompson calls politics the 'art of controlling your environment'. I believe this is key to an understanding of Post-Millenium Democracy. Tony Blair and New Labour are in charge of this country now because they were in the right place at the right time. But they're also there because they had the right image and the right policies. Consider this: If politics is the art of controlling your environment, then understanding your environment is everything. New Labour did this spectacularly in the years 1996 and 1997, and that's why they destroyed the Conservatives so comprehensively in the election that followed.
English culture is undergoing something of an Americanisation, and has been for a good few decades. In fact, if we're going to call this thing Post-Millenium Democracy, then we may as well use millenial terminology. I think it's fair to say that globalisation = Americanisation. Both culturally and politically, the USA is the most powerful and influential nation on earth. If it comes to pass that someday we are one world with an international language and culture, we will all be Americans. I don't see that as a radical piece of thinking. In fact, I think it's pretty obvious.
Jerry, Sally, Oprah, Montell, Ricki. There are five names from a larger list that I believe are responsible for the rise of The Celebrity Victim. Don't get me wrong, I'm not holding the hosts personally responsible for the content of the shows, but they're still getting rich off the backs of a bunch of stupid, ignorant people who'll do anything to get their fifteen minutes of fame. These shows are also responsible for the rise of the Big Brothers and the Pop Idols and the Fame Academys and the hundreds of derivative reality TV shows that now flood our screens and fill our newspapers with stories about minor celebrities and talentless, pointless nobodies copping off with other talentless, pointless nobodies.
And the general public wants to see it. The ratings don't lie, folks. If you're seeing more and more of these shows popping up on your screens, chances are it's because they're working. Big Brother, as I pointed out way back at the beginning of this essay, encourages more interaction than a general election.
But these are symptoms of the problem and cultural phenomena that help to perpetuate it. They're not the problem itself. Let me run a theory by you...
Ever watch Jerry or Oprah or any of those programmes? I'm sure you have. Everyone's seen at least one episode of one victim show at least once in their lives. Have you ever noticed how the audience at these shows is almost always composed of about 99% minority groups?
Why is that?
Let's take that curious (and highly generalised) statistic in the context of the current political climate, shall we? Polarisation is out. Left and Right are out. The political ground to be contested is the Centre. It's all about pleasing most of the people, most of the time. Principles can go hang. So, for your 'great unwashed', for your mass of politically uneducated and uninterested voters, what is there? Why would they vote? Nothing's going to change for them, for us, regardless of how the next election turns out. It simply doesn't matter.
Over a century ago, sociologist Max Weber took issue with the theories of Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim. Where they had believed that all action was necessarily dictated by structure, Weber hypothesised that this was not so, and that there were other influences. In order to make my point, I'm going to call on Weber's theories to a certain extent. I'm not going to explain them in grand detail. If you're interested, you're on the internet, for Christ's sake. Look it up.
Whereas Marx and Durkheim essentially saw all action as structure-related, Weber thought there were different types of actions. Two of these were rational action and affective action. The definitions are fairly obvious. Rational action is defined by structural and societal norms. People acting within these norms are acting - as far as the rest of us are concerned - rationally. People acting affectively, on the other hand, are very much into an emotional trip. They're reacting with the heart rather than the head, if you like.
Two of the key norms of postmodern Capitalism are individualism and competitiveness. Traditionally, these are defined in monetary terms. But what happens in a society where the people no longer believe that they're suddenly going to get rich? Or that hard work won't necessarily lead to success? Or that their gender or their race or their status dooms them to a life predestined?
Maybe...maybe they'd be brought up with different kinds of competitiveness. If their culture was based on individuality, on victims, and on the fairytales of TV soap operas and talk shows, what forms might that competitiveness take?
We're all victims now. We're all subordinate to our childhoods, to our insecurities and the various forms of depression that have become so widespread. We're our own soap opera characters, and each of us wants to be the star of the show we call life. Our rational action is to follow the norms of the day, the structures of Capitalism that are (and always will be) dominant. Our affective action is to live in a fantasy world because of the frustration we feel at not being able to control our environment. It's a retreat into a world where we can have some kind of status, that of the Victim. It's a chance to be the centre of attention.
To return to Blair, his timing was a thing of beauty. To a society losing its faith in politics and theory whilst embracing full-on globalisation and our new multimedia society, he was almost the ultimate politician. His policies were easy to understand. They were moderate. They were not the old working class rhetoric of the Labour party, and they were certainly not the domain of the Tories. They were safe, and they were delivered by a young, good-looking (for a politician) man with a toothpaste-ad smile and awesome public speaking ability. Between that and the disenchantment of the electorate, Blair couldn't and can't lose. Now that the second party is finally understanding and attempting to play catch-up, everyone's a moderate. Again, no choice. Party dealignment is the order of the day. There's nothing to identify with anymore, no theories to relate to. It becomes a matter of which middle-aged guy we prefer. It's Big Brother: Midlife Crisis Edition.
Of course, there are still causes out there. Problem is, there are too many of them. Moderate politics, as I've said, pleases as many people as it can, as often as it can. None of these causes is going to lead to a revolution, because none of them - from the viewpoint of Western society in 2004 - is important enough. Those fights that have always had social importance; gender, race, and sexuality, have largely been settled by compromise. They've been given just enough to wipe out the radical elements.
If you're Tony Blair, you could conceivably be Prime Minister until the public gets sick of the sight of you. Your place in the Bumper Book Of Political History is assured. If Politics is the art of controlling your environment, then you da man.
In an odd way, I respect that.
But my voice is one amongst many. These are speculative theories that may mean nothing at all. I grew up ignorant, came to politics via Karl Marx, and then slowly worked my way through books and essays and my own experiences to come to the conclusions I'm drawing here. And you know, even if they're wrong, I'm left with the same feeling. I'm a non-believer. I'm an outsider. I don't really have a lot of time for any of this, and I'd rather construct my own elaborate theories than listen to anybody else's.
No choice. No future. No faith. These are the reasons I'm so full of hate. The only conclusion I can draw is this...
...It's a world of blindess and blandness, friends. And it's not going to change anytime soon. It's a self-perpetuating nightmare. It's a snake that eats its own tail.
Welcome to forever.
(Insert oral sex gag here)
we watched the evil black the sky
This storm has ripped the shelter of illusion from our brow
This power's no mystery to us now
Leave your spirit genocide, the cancer you won't remove
We cast our funeral rose inside and bury the need to prove
Our mutilation is to gain from the system
Turn your head away from the screen, oh people,
it will tell you nothing more
Don't suck the milk of flaccid Bill K. Public's empty promise
to the people that the public can ignore
This way of life is so devised
to snuff out the mind that moves
Moving with grace the men despise,
and women have learned to lose
Throw off your shame or be a slave to the system
We see you take another drag,
one more lost soul to raise your flag
The sky is a landfill
We see you take another drag,
we see you take another drag
You like to dance to the rolling head of the adultress,
you sing in praise of suicide
We know you're useless,
like cops at the scene of the crime
With your steroids and your feedbag and your stable
and your trainer
I`ve got a mail bomb for you, Mr Strong Arm
Roll out the stones from all the cemetery homes,
for the violence of a nation gone by
For the politics of weakness and the garbage dump of souls
That will now black the sky
Their yellow haze and crowds of eyes
will plug up the mind that moves
Moving with grace the men despise,
and women have learned to lose
We'll share our bodies in disdain for the system
Oh, we see you take another drag
One nation bends to kiss the hag
The sky is a landfill
Oh, we see you take another drag,
we see you take another drag
I have no fear of this machine.
Because there's nothing like an ENTIRE Jeff Buckley song to kick off a post I'm pretty sure is going to run long. Why fuck around? If we're going to write an essay, let's do it right, eh?
Yes, I have already written this post. Yes, I did lose it when Blogger closed down for maintenance the other night and I hadn't read the front page. No, this one couldn't possibly be as good as that one. I'm dead sober, for one thing. But I'll give it the old college try, and we'll see what we end up with.
This rant has come about for a couple of reasons. First, because people keep asking me about my politics. Second, because reading Jenn's blog left me feeling slightly guilty that I'd made no attempt to cover politics here.
With good reason, I might add. I don't cover straight politics because I don't see the point. From the feedback I've had so far, people prefer it when I just write about whatever's in my head, preferably fictionalising it in some form. The demand seems to be for bittersweet tales about my life or whatever else. The people want to be entertained. And politics is not entertaining.
But I'll do it now, if only so it means I'll never have to do it again.
My educational background is in politics and sociology, by the way, so I do occasionally have some idea what I'm talking about. If I'm slipping, I'll throw in some oral sex gags. I'll be sure to highlight them in bold for you scrollers.
Oral sex gags. Hahahahahahaaaa! See what I did there? Damn, I'm funny. And serious, too. Watch this...
I'll begin with Blair and Bush, but I'm not going to say very much about them because that would be to miss the same point I'm tired of watching everybody else miss. Right now, it doesn't actually matter who the incumbent is in terms of public office. A choice between Blair and Michael Howard is no choice at all. Ultimately, they represent pretty much the same thing. Same with Bush and Kerry, when you get right down to it. The only reason you'd vote the opposition into power right now is because they're the lesser of two evils. It's not so much a matter of voting for as against. That's why I believe Western Democracy is a sham.
Yes, a sham. A waste of time. An oxymoron. Who am I going to vote for in the next general election. Blair? I think not. He's a liar and a thief and a breaker of promises. Howard? He's a Tory. I grew up in a single parent family during the eighties. I would sooner die than vote Conservative. Kennedy? Ahahaha...ahahaha...haha...heh.
Ever notice how Charles Kennedy looks like that kid at school who would hide under the stairs and look up skirts?
The Lib-Dems just can't seem to grasp the concepts of post-millenium politics, and that's why they will never be a viable third party in this country. We're locked into a two-party trip now, just like our friends on the other side of the Atlantic, and with the same problems. The chief of which is apathy.
More people voted during the 2001 edition of Big Brother than in the general election that same year. In fact, 2001 saw the lowest turnout in a general election since before World War I. The reasons for this are as obvious as they are worrying. When Blair's New Labour kicked the Conservatives out of office in 1997, they did so in landslide style. By 2001, the Conservatives were only just beginning to get themselves back together. The election was seen as a foregone conclusion, and nobody bothered to go out and vote. The prophecy was fulfilled with another landslide.
In the next election, I believe the same thing will happen. One reason is the belief that the Conservatives can't win. But is that all there is to it? I think not.
You'd have to be either ignorant or blind not to see that politics has undergone a drastic change in the last twenty to thirty years. The modern age was all about polarisation and experimentation. It was about Left and Right. It was, in a way, several generations of people trying to find Something That Worked.
Nothing did. The extreme left was destroyed by the disastrous failure of Marxist theory when put into practice. The extreme right gave us the holocaust. As the last century staggered to a conclusion, England saw more moderate versions of both extremes, in the Labour government of the late seventies and the reign of Thatcherism through the eighties. Both left the electorate discontented, and when the time came for change, polarisation became a thing of the past.
Politics, however, did not.
Hunter S. Thompson calls politics the 'art of controlling your environment'. I believe this is key to an understanding of Post-Millenium Democracy. Tony Blair and New Labour are in charge of this country now because they were in the right place at the right time. But they're also there because they had the right image and the right policies. Consider this: If politics is the art of controlling your environment, then understanding your environment is everything. New Labour did this spectacularly in the years 1996 and 1997, and that's why they destroyed the Conservatives so comprehensively in the election that followed.
English culture is undergoing something of an Americanisation, and has been for a good few decades. In fact, if we're going to call this thing Post-Millenium Democracy, then we may as well use millenial terminology. I think it's fair to say that globalisation = Americanisation. Both culturally and politically, the USA is the most powerful and influential nation on earth. If it comes to pass that someday we are one world with an international language and culture, we will all be Americans. I don't see that as a radical piece of thinking. In fact, I think it's pretty obvious.
Jerry, Sally, Oprah, Montell, Ricki. There are five names from a larger list that I believe are responsible for the rise of The Celebrity Victim. Don't get me wrong, I'm not holding the hosts personally responsible for the content of the shows, but they're still getting rich off the backs of a bunch of stupid, ignorant people who'll do anything to get their fifteen minutes of fame. These shows are also responsible for the rise of the Big Brothers and the Pop Idols and the Fame Academys and the hundreds of derivative reality TV shows that now flood our screens and fill our newspapers with stories about minor celebrities and talentless, pointless nobodies copping off with other talentless, pointless nobodies.
And the general public wants to see it. The ratings don't lie, folks. If you're seeing more and more of these shows popping up on your screens, chances are it's because they're working. Big Brother, as I pointed out way back at the beginning of this essay, encourages more interaction than a general election.
But these are symptoms of the problem and cultural phenomena that help to perpetuate it. They're not the problem itself. Let me run a theory by you...
Ever watch Jerry or Oprah or any of those programmes? I'm sure you have. Everyone's seen at least one episode of one victim show at least once in their lives. Have you ever noticed how the audience at these shows is almost always composed of about 99% minority groups?
Why is that?
Let's take that curious (and highly generalised) statistic in the context of the current political climate, shall we? Polarisation is out. Left and Right are out. The political ground to be contested is the Centre. It's all about pleasing most of the people, most of the time. Principles can go hang. So, for your 'great unwashed', for your mass of politically uneducated and uninterested voters, what is there? Why would they vote? Nothing's going to change for them, for us, regardless of how the next election turns out. It simply doesn't matter.
Over a century ago, sociologist Max Weber took issue with the theories of Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim. Where they had believed that all action was necessarily dictated by structure, Weber hypothesised that this was not so, and that there were other influences. In order to make my point, I'm going to call on Weber's theories to a certain extent. I'm not going to explain them in grand detail. If you're interested, you're on the internet, for Christ's sake. Look it up.
Whereas Marx and Durkheim essentially saw all action as structure-related, Weber thought there were different types of actions. Two of these were rational action and affective action. The definitions are fairly obvious. Rational action is defined by structural and societal norms. People acting within these norms are acting - as far as the rest of us are concerned - rationally. People acting affectively, on the other hand, are very much into an emotional trip. They're reacting with the heart rather than the head, if you like.
Two of the key norms of postmodern Capitalism are individualism and competitiveness. Traditionally, these are defined in monetary terms. But what happens in a society where the people no longer believe that they're suddenly going to get rich? Or that hard work won't necessarily lead to success? Or that their gender or their race or their status dooms them to a life predestined?
Maybe...maybe they'd be brought up with different kinds of competitiveness. If their culture was based on individuality, on victims, and on the fairytales of TV soap operas and talk shows, what forms might that competitiveness take?
We're all victims now. We're all subordinate to our childhoods, to our insecurities and the various forms of depression that have become so widespread. We're our own soap opera characters, and each of us wants to be the star of the show we call life. Our rational action is to follow the norms of the day, the structures of Capitalism that are (and always will be) dominant. Our affective action is to live in a fantasy world because of the frustration we feel at not being able to control our environment. It's a retreat into a world where we can have some kind of status, that of the Victim. It's a chance to be the centre of attention.
To return to Blair, his timing was a thing of beauty. To a society losing its faith in politics and theory whilst embracing full-on globalisation and our new multimedia society, he was almost the ultimate politician. His policies were easy to understand. They were moderate. They were not the old working class rhetoric of the Labour party, and they were certainly not the domain of the Tories. They were safe, and they were delivered by a young, good-looking (for a politician) man with a toothpaste-ad smile and awesome public speaking ability. Between that and the disenchantment of the electorate, Blair couldn't and can't lose. Now that the second party is finally understanding and attempting to play catch-up, everyone's a moderate. Again, no choice. Party dealignment is the order of the day. There's nothing to identify with anymore, no theories to relate to. It becomes a matter of which middle-aged guy we prefer. It's Big Brother: Midlife Crisis Edition.
Of course, there are still causes out there. Problem is, there are too many of them. Moderate politics, as I've said, pleases as many people as it can, as often as it can. None of these causes is going to lead to a revolution, because none of them - from the viewpoint of Western society in 2004 - is important enough. Those fights that have always had social importance; gender, race, and sexuality, have largely been settled by compromise. They've been given just enough to wipe out the radical elements.
If you're Tony Blair, you could conceivably be Prime Minister until the public gets sick of the sight of you. Your place in the Bumper Book Of Political History is assured. If Politics is the art of controlling your environment, then you da man.
In an odd way, I respect that.
But my voice is one amongst many. These are speculative theories that may mean nothing at all. I grew up ignorant, came to politics via Karl Marx, and then slowly worked my way through books and essays and my own experiences to come to the conclusions I'm drawing here. And you know, even if they're wrong, I'm left with the same feeling. I'm a non-believer. I'm an outsider. I don't really have a lot of time for any of this, and I'd rather construct my own elaborate theories than listen to anybody else's.
No choice. No future. No faith. These are the reasons I'm so full of hate. The only conclusion I can draw is this...
...It's a world of blindess and blandness, friends. And it's not going to change anytime soon. It's a self-perpetuating nightmare. It's a snake that eats its own tail.
Welcome to forever.
(Insert oral sex gag here)
posted by Michael at 1:14 PM
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