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On Being Different and Why it’s Important
by William Bowles
 The class war is still with us and it’s still just as
vicious, all that’s changed is the location of the battles and the
weapons being used. The war is not primarily over physical resources
but over values.
That said, there are still over five million people in
the UK who live in abject material and spiritual poverty, especially
the old, the under-educated and of course people of colour.
Many are
relegated to so-called Sink Estates, they are the under-belly of the
‘good life’, and for the most part out of sight of ‘ordinary, decent’
people. These are the demons who haunt the pages of the Daily Mail, the
Daily Express and the Sun, ironically the tabloids whose readership are
the same people they blame for every ill that befalls us.
But
search in vain for a real working class view at these disgusting, lying
rags, for all are university grads with useless degrees in
‘journalism’, well schooled in doing the dirty work of Capital.
Since retrieving my record collection from
New York, I’ve spent hours, days, plowing through my collection, not
played in almost sixteen years. Not only that, I also discovered all
the master tapes of music I wrote (with my former writing partner) when
I lived in New York.
The discovery has awakened old yearnings to
get back into writing music (if not actually playing) again. Music has
always obsessed me since I was a little kid when around about six or
seven I went to my first Jazz Jamboree at the Granada Kilburn, an
annual event my dad helped organize for the Musicians Union Benevolent
Fund.
Going backstage and mingling with the musos at such an
early age hooked me on jazz permanently but perhaps just as
importantly, my love of jazz signaled something equally important that
made me aware that I was ‘different’, and not just because I grew up in
a family of communists. (I still remember quite vividly standing in the
wings mesmerized by the singer Cleo Laine, resplendent in a glittering
red gown doing her thing on stage.)
Being ‘different’ is not something tolerated in our society. Of
course there are outlets for those who don’t ‘fit’ but always within
strictly defined circumstances. The arts come to mind and especially
the theatre but in the mainstream of society, being ‘different’ takes
on an ideological significance and especially if, like myself you came
from a working class background with its strict demarcation of roles
and stereotypes.
So growing up was a bit of a double whammy for
me for not only were my politics (and from an early age) not ‘normal’
but I was into ‘weird’ music which none of the kids on my block were
into at all. Worse, I was opinionated and forever questioning just
about everything around me and even worse, I was working class with a
Sarf London accent, and given the strict class divisions in English
society that defined you and your ‘intelligence’ by how you spoke,
reinforced my being different not only from my so-called peers but also
from so-called intellectuals who invariably came from middle or upper
class backgrounds.
My sense of isolation was complete even as I
traversed my surroundings, went to art school and discovered an outlet
for my talents. But even at art school (perhaps the last bastion of
free and untrammeled education at that time, the 1960s), I was still
the odd one out, working class where most of the students were middle
class.
Now I know I’m not alone in having experienced this,
there are many I’m sure who went through comparable experiences and as
I got older even my sexuality didn’t ‘fit’. I wasn’t like all the other
boys (though I tried to do an imitation, to ‘fit in’). Yeah, sure I
chased babes and had girlfriends from quite an early age but I had (and
still have) a strong ‘feminine’ side, one that through shame and guilt
I tried to hide (like I didn’t have enough problems).
The upshot
however, is that I’ve been both ‘blessed’ and ‘cursed’. ‘Blessed’
because being ‘different’ gave a me a very different take on events and
‘cursed’ because it put me on the outside looking in no matter where I
stood and engendered what I was later, much later, to identify as a
deep-rooted fear, a fear of rejection.
But an investigation
reveals a much deeper motivation as to why being ‘different’ is not
tolerated within our capitalist society and it’s simple, being
different makes you dangerous and difficult to control, perhaps best
expressed through the gender roles we are taught from the very second
we are born.
Thus everything the state does, through all its
agencies, from the family to education, is designed to break you down,
to get you to conform, being ‘yourself’ is simply not permitted. Now
before I get accused of selfish individualism, without our conformity
all the chains that bind us to the status quo melt away. The supposedly
immutable becomes mutable, everything you have accepted as being
‘normal’ takes on an entirely different connotation and open to
question.
However, all is not as it seems, the apparently
immutable nature of what it is to be human, indeed all the assumptions
about who we are and how we interact with each other are revealed as
social and economic constructs.
The truth of this is all around
us. The carefully constructed social relationships built by industrial
capitalism are unravelling at a fast rate of knots, from the family to
gender roles as the nature of capitalist economics undergoes yet
another transformation.
The state’s response has been nothing if
not predictable, especially its treatment of the family, focusing
exclusively on working people in an attempt to shift the blame for the
breakdown in social relations principally onto the parents. Thus the
emphasis on ‘family values’ even as the traditional family
disintegrates under the pressure of a changing working environment.
That it’s largely poor, working people who are the recipients of the
state’s desperate attempts to maintain the status quo is never
mentioned in the media coverage.
Worse still is its attack on
the youth who have been effectively criminalized en masse utilising a
series of ‘laws’ including the outrageous ASBO (now being extended to
cover even more areas now deemed ‘anti-social’).
The media for
its part have played their role very effectively in demonizing the
youth; witness the current hysterical headlines about ‘knife crime’
even though violent youth behaviour in the UK is not only amongst the
lowest in the developed world but has been dropping for years.
Yesterday,
5 June, I happened to catch BBC Radio 4’s AM news programme and heard
the former head of the implausibly named Youth Justice Board accuse the
BBC of demonizing the youth, remarking that until recently, a stabbing
was regarded as local news, not warranting hysterical national
headlines. The interviewer sounded outraged at the suggestion that the
BBC was a party to this demonization, yet it’s obvious that ‘Auntie
Beeb’ is acting as the state’s social engineer in this regard (as it
has done for generations).
The paradoxes are legion. On the one
hand the government relaxes alcohol licensing laws allowing effectively
24-hour drinking and at the same time goes on a hysterical tirade about
‘binge drinking’ (again with the state/corporate media doing its bit to
demonize the youth). The point is, the youth (especially working class
youth) don’t give a shit about the so-called values the state tries to
impose on them. They wear their ASBOs like a badge of honour. This is
class war 21st century-style.
The latest wheeze on this issue is
our new Mayor Boris (‘Bonkers’) Johnson’s banning of alcohol
consumption in public (they have something similar in New York City,
it’s called the ‘brown bag’ law and they’ve had it for years, drink the
alcohol but keep the can/bottle in a brown paper bag. At least you can
still drink it without ending up with a criminal record). How this
latest attack on our ‘freedom’ to imbibe will work when I nip outside
for a smoke with a beer clutched in my solidly anti-social hands
remains to be seen).
Having reduced ‘education’ effectively to a
series of SATS (the laughably named Scholastic Aptitude Test, imported
from the US and, I might add, yet another aspect of the insane drive to
privatize everything), we nevertheless sees around 30% of (working
class) kids leaving school barely able to read and write let alone
ignorant of the basic facts of history (‘history’ according to New
Labour, only began in 1939 with our glorious struggle to save
democracy). Ask a kid about WWII and he or she will no doubt recite
reams on the subject but that’s about the size of it (when I was at
high school ‘history’ ended in 1914, so we have moved on a couple of
imperialist wars).
The poisonous nature of the propaganda
campaign is perhaps best illustrated by the following: I do volunteer
work with some kids at a primary school a couple of days a week to help
improve their reading skills and we also talk about this and that
during our sessions. I asked one very bright but troubled eight-year
old kid originally from the Caribbean whether he liked living in
England and he shook his head. ‘Why’, I asked. His response was one
word, “stabbing”. I pointed out that stabbings are
extremely rare but it illustrates the power the media exerts over
peoples’ perceptions when an eight-year old responds in such a way. But
what an indictment of our society! Creating such hysteria has exactly
the opposite effect to the one allegedly intended but then that’s the
point isn’t it.
This is a society in a crisis of its own making.
The carefully constructed social contract between the state and its
citizens, built over hundreds of years, with its foundations in the
unitary family (designed to do no more than reproduce labour and keep
us in ‘our place’), is literally falling apart under its own
contradictions. And the state’s response? Criminalize and shift the
blame onto parents (or for many, parent) for capitalism’s failings.
But
just look at who cooks up all this quasi-fascist, authoritarian
nonsense. All are middle, upper middle class people, university
educated with good jobs living in nice houses (and no doubt another one
tucked away in the country somewhere). People who are light years
removed from the people they are busy criminalizing and passing
judgement on.
In this regard nothing has changed except the
people passing the laws are no longer of aristocratic lineage and the
designation ‘obey your betters’ has been dropped in favour of more
technocratic and innocuous descriptions. Many are lawyers (like Tony
Blair) or former corporate bigwigs, in other words, the real dregs of
society.
The class war is still with us and it’s still just as
vicious, all that’s changed is the location of the battles and the
weapons being used. The war is not primarily over physical resources
but over values. That said, there are still over five million people in
the UK who live in abject material and spiritual poverty, especially
the old, the under-educated and of course people of colour. Many are
relegated to so-called Sink Estates, they are the under-belly of the
‘good life’, and for the most part out of sight of ‘ordinary, decent’
people. These are the demons who haunt the pages of the Daily Mail, the
Daily Express and the Sun, ironically the tabloids whose readership are
the same people they blame for every ill that befalls us.
But
search in vain for a real working class view at these disgusting, lying
rags, for all are university grads with useless degrees in
‘journalism’, well schooled in doing the dirty work of Capital.
But
aside from the all the attempts at shifting the blame for our decrepit,
disintegrating society, there are other, equally important reasons for
these attacks on working people aside from diverting attention away
from the real causes for the loss of legitimacy, for when taken with
the demonization of countries like Zimbabwe, Myanmar (or Burma given
that the corporate press still clings to its old, colonial name),
Sudan, China or whoever is the latest recipient of our fake moralizing,
they all serve to focus our attention on everything except those who
rule us.
The responses are now so predictable you can set your
watches by the timing of them. They reach a peak, wash over us and wain
just in time for the next ‘crisis’ to confront us and it appears to be
a never-ending process given the chaos the West has created around the
world.
Meanwhile, the crises of of the West’s own making which
make the generals of Myanmar rank amateurs by comparison, barely get a
mention, indeed, the BBC which leads the wolf pack in this regard has
degenerated into a digital version of Colonel Blimp, with nary a day
passing without some paean to ‘our boys over there’, proving once more
the old adage that those who fail to learn from history are bound to
repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
But it also
illustrates the desperate nature of the crisis confronting countries
like the UK which is retreating from the present into its fictitious,
imperial past as fast as its apologists can take us. All pretence at
objectivity has flown the coop, it’s time to batten down the hatches
and reassert that faded, imperial power, recreate a time when a handful
of civil servants could rule an empire whilst lounging about on a
tropical veranda somewhere slugging Gin Slings or Mint Julips or
whatever it was they binged on.
This essay is archived at:
http://www.creative-i.info/?p=257
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