Bubblehammerblog

After doing some casual Mass Observation, such as nebbing on conversations in pubs, on buses and trams, or sidling up behind people in queques, it seems to me that we're experiencing a period similar to the Phoney War at the end of the 1930s. We're told that the economy is in the process of plunging over the edge of a cliff, and that catastrophic climate change is now inevitable, yet it seems no one really believes any of it. You could get the impression that the middle classes are for the most part quietly confident that eating organic, recycling their newspapers, buying a bike or taking the odd bus, and growing a few vegetables is the way forward. The rest, the majority still in work and with adequate incomes, hope that by ignoring such inconvenient concerns they'll eventually go away. After all, as the government says, once the stimulus packages kick in, we'll begin to see an upturn by about the middle of next year.

Meanwhile, it's only March and our next door neighbours, the French, have been out on the streets in their millions twice this year. This baffles and bemuses the British when they see the 10 second clips on the nightly news, and the media make no attempt to explain what's happening. But you hear, repeated like a mantra, that demonstrating is useless - look at the Iraq war demo they say. Of course, I knew that at the time, as I trudged through London wearing an awkward smirk under a Hizbullah banner, beside a bunch of joyful Lebanese teenagers. It had all been decided already. If ever there was a chance for us to stop being so English, brick in some shop windows and torch some cars, that was it. And we missed it. Thousands of human lives were at stake, fer fucks sake.

The long consumer boom has dulled out wits. We don't really know how to believe in very much at all anymore. On both sides of the Atlantic the blather is all about undeserved bonuses for fat cats, the bastards at HBOS, and in the US the greedy fuckers at AIG. As Michael Hudson has pointed out, the bonus shock horror has served the financial elite nicely, deflecting attention from the governments as they shovel unimaginable sums down a fiery bottomless pit, in the hope of maintaining a system that keeps half the world's population in abject poverty while it trashes the planet. The biggest transfer of wealth in history.

And don't you think it's a bit rich, as it were, that all of a sudden we've begun to express a little distaste at undeserved wealth, when as a culture we've created a religion based around the worship of money, celebrity and prestige?

I'm a Baby Boomer, and some of my generation briefly entertained vastly audacious and unfounded hopes. My friends and I were among the halfwits who believed that LSD plus revolutionary marxism might change the world. Bliss it was to be alive in that dawn, and heaven itself to be young. I mention this to point out that the 'pre revolutionary situation', as I would have grandly called it at the time, could not have happened without a generalised mood of crisis. These things don't happen very often. Could this sense of phoney war presage another wave of outrageous audacity - just when such a thing has, finally, become absolutely vital for survival?

As a would-be revolutionary and disaffected troublemaker, I've become case hardened by defeat. I watched as the wave that rose in the 1960s - from After Bathing at Baxters to Volunteers -(you'll know what I mean), gurgled down the tubes. I've watched as the British working class had its arse kicked by little men in suits. One defeat after another. You'd think such hopeful fools would've cleaned their act up long ago. Wait and see though, eh.

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