Way back in 2013 something happened in my life – the end of happenings in a friend’s – that shut down my Interdoodlings. Having just fired ’em all back up again, I found the draft of this post and thunk about what I was going on about. It turns out that my rantings about the lack of intellectual rigour on show on the Internet were prescient, in that the lack of knowledge throughout the general public has since allowed the scum to rise: Labour party decimated, UKIP MEPs undermining the EU, Tories doing whatever it is they feel like doing, Silicorporations taking a punt on the gullibility of their end-users, Babylips forging a crack in the EU that is probably unfixable… oych, as the pork-avoiders say.
So here it is in full and unedited… apart from the last sentence.
In response to my last spluttering, my delightful sister dropped me a comment on Facebook, to wit:
“I imagine those are lonely feelings. If everyone around me was stupid I’d be a very lonely woman indeed.”
To which I very nearly responded straight away – mostly to soothe her worried brow, and assure her that of course I wasn’t lonely. Or bitter. Or as frankly disappointed as my last post appeared. And that of course my friends are amongst the most intelligentest people it could ever be my good fortune to rub up against.
But I didn’t, because for all that I don’t want my sister to be worried for me, the idea of fibbing to her makes me go all wibbly.
Having said that, it’s true that maybe I should be much clearer about what I meant by ‘stupid’. After all, many of my friends are cleverer than me, and some of those are bigger than me.
Don’t think I’m about to do a me-turn and suddenly say that of course they’re not stupid: that would be stupid. No, what I’m saying is that people have become lazy and have ceased to use their brains in order to get a grasp of what’s happening around them. And the main ‘culprit’ in making that happen is the Internet.
That includes just about every single one of my friends. In recent years I have had conversations about just about anything, during which my jaw has quite literally dropped, as my interlocutor has said something that just beggars belief. It could have been about bankers, the EU, alternative medicine, broadcasting and yes, even the internet… and they’d say something like, “But we’re spending all that money on bureaucracy!”; “But it worked for so many people!”; “He saved his people from American hegemony!”
Yeah, like anyone I know knows what ‘hegemony’ means. I’ll tell you what it means in this instance: the dominance of a large group of uninformed, uneducated, self-aggrandizing, time-wasting, dimwitted numpties (or as we used to call them, The Bloke in the Pub) over intelligent, sensitive people who should know better. On. The. Internet.
But why do I find it so easy to go into one, and label my friends as ‘stupid?’
Because of the movies.
The movies where history has already been written – say, they’re set in Warsaw or Singapore in 1938, or Hiroshima in 1944, or maybe the north-east of England just as Thatcher gets to power – and you start to get involved in the characters, and there’s a voice in your head shouting louder and louder, “Get out… get out… GET OUT!”
People, the right wing is rising again: the people with money are increasingly protected, the welfare state is being sold off, trade alliances are being replaced with military strategies and pacts, people-tracking systems are being deployed, nationalism is rampant, the Anglo-Saxons are imposing their will again, there is fear and loathing everywhere, reactionary fundamentalism is becoming mainstream, political parties have become almost indistinguishable from each other… and almost no one is trying to fix anything, to make things work, to improve our lives and make for a better world. Rather, the whole world seems to be reacting to the problems we have made by saying, “Oh, it was always fucked anyway, so let’s tear it down and go our own way and keep what we’ve got for ourselves”.
I know, I know, most people who know me expect me to be a funny bugger and write stuff that entertains.
And to be honest, I feel blessed with a life that includes a beautiful wife and a golden child, plus the privilege of living in Western Europe. But the thing I’m writing about now is that I constantly have the feeling that someone is watching me in a movie.
And they’re starting to hear the voice in their head, saying, “Get out… get out… “*
And that is a lonely feeling.
* It’s at this point that I should be asking my delightful sister if there is a place in Hope for us.
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