The Cafe 2
John MacLeod
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Why are people so angry?
What are the roots of
our present fury?
Alison Prince
In a recent Guardian, Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate, delivered a scathing take on the old Louis MacNeice poem called ‘Bagpipe Music’. You know the one – ‘It’s no go the merrygoround, it’s no go the rickshaw,/ All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow’.
Duffy is so incandescent about the axing of all funds to the Lancaster LitFest, several respected small publishers and the Poetry Book Society that her tumble of words barely matches MacNeice’s impeccable scansion. However, she pulls it together for a blasting final verse.
It’s no go, dear PBS. It’s no go, sweet poets.
Sat on your arses for fifty years and never turned a profit.
All we want are bureaucrats, the nods as good as winkers.
And if you’re strapped for cash, go fish, then try the pigging bankers.
The current Westminster government will probably fall through its own incompetence rather than because of any screams from the literati, but Duffy’s skit usefully highlights the skilled use of fury.
I’ve been mulling over the question of rage ever since Kenneth Roy wrote his SR account (1 March) of a railway journey that brought him into contact with the least attractive side of the proletariat. Boorishness and inarticulacy at that point came together in a mindless demonstration of not giving a damn for anyone else, and Kenneth was understandably indignant.
It’s a manifestation familiar to many users of public transport – or indeed, to anyone non-drunk and not young who ventures to walk down Glasgow’s Buchanan Street on a Friday or Saturday night. (I speak from personal experience.) It is as though one ventures through a valley of inchoate, aggressive self-justification, springing from a background that the drinkers would probably describe as ‘shit’. A blame-object in a woolly hat, no matter how inoffensive, offers an outlet to those who feel that they need to prove, loudly, that they are having a good time.
The rowdiness seems based on a rackety confusion that is terribly close to a form of Alzheimer’s. As in dementia, the sufferer has no way to understand the structure of what is going on. Circumstances are wished on him or her by meaningless outside forces, and the only way to deal with them is to escape into whatever mental bolt-hole offers itself. The confused elderly find refuge in memories of a childhood when things were distinct and clear, and fend off the terror of the baffling present by insisting that they are perfectly okay, it’s just that the outside world has become ridiculous.
Unlike the poet laureate, rowdies in streets and on trains have no way to shape anger into an effective weapon.
The same inability to understand why things are as they are runs through the superficially competent young, causing them to feel that the general set-up deserves all the aggression that can be thrown at it. A Catch 22 sets in, for their resentment makes them more unpopular and confirms their suspicion that the world is against them, but getting wasted on a Saturday night and horrifying a few sober citizens brings the temporary satisfaction of a spiteful, meaningless thought, ‘Take that, you bastards’.
Education has in recent decades turned away from the Socratic idea of teaching children how to think rather than what to think, and this has had a profound effect on the way people see themselves. No wrist-slapping or tuts of disapproval will change the fact that many people have abandoned what we used to regard as an accepted sense of values. A highly commercialised society rates its citizens only in terms of spending capacity, so the kind of thinking that leads to questioning and criticism is unwelcome.
The most heavily supervised country in the world, we are now expected to be as near as possible to 100% obedient. Understanding how the system works is not the business of the masses, so confusion and random sulkiness now combine as a psychological pandemic among those not immunised against it by a thought-provoking education.
Unlike the poet laureate, rowdies in streets and on trains have no way to shape anger into an effective weapon. At school, they will have been taught to concentrate on getting correct answers, even if by a lucky tick in the right box. Compliance with government regulations and a cautious eye on the league tables have imposed on schools an overwhelming fear of downgrading and humiliation. Few head teachers, trained as they are in the current system, have the confidence or creative energy to promote alternative thinking. Those of us who come from the vibrant post-war era of excitement about education watch in dismay, and do what we can to inject some fresh thinking.
While giving an author talk in a secondary school last month I saw again how vital it is to break through children’s tired resistance to ‘subject matter’ and speak (and listen) to them as fellow human beings. Despite the obvious gulfs of age and experience, there are more similarities between us than there are differences.
Status has always governed us, from feudal times onward, but even in the harshest centuries of subsistence farming, there was an element of creative skill. This is the first century in which humans are valued only as purchasers. Some dissent, persisting in the belief that to be alive is an astonishing and wonderful thing in its own right, but this idea is increasingly seen as aberrant. Creative people are theoretically admired (though mostly in the hope that they will produce something newly saleable) but unorthodox views of the purpose of life are most definitely not on the official agenda. This, I have no doubt, is why poetry has been so savagely penalised in the cuts to arts funding.
When it was suggested to Churchill in 1940 that he might cut arts funding to help the war effort, he growled, ‘Then what are we fighting for?’.
Big arts institutions such as the Edinburgh Festival can argue that they make profits for the country, but poets obstinately work for little or no money and spread disturbing ideas that have nothing to do with wealth creation. It is probably all the more worrying to those in charge that poetry in recent years has seen an unprecedented surge in popularity. Can’t have that, chaps. It’s no go the laughing in church, it’s no go the Heaney / All they need is News Corp and a girl in a bikini.
When SR readers find themselves shut in a small space with rowdy people who never read at all, they come face to face with unusable anger. It’s a deeply unpleasant experience, but one that we have to think about. The time-honoured shrug-off of ‘I blame the parents’ won’t do. Most parents try hard to make a decent job of bringing up their children, but if they themselves are confused and truculent, they have no insight to hand on, and will never know why they end up with exhausting and hurtful teenagers.
Suppression won’t do, either. The police are terrified of public uprising, so they crush any expression of mob feeling through superior violence of their own. The government has no coherent strategy except a basic conviction that abstract money is more important than people. It is only a matter of time before we follow cutting-edge American economists into assuming that international money should be freed from the piffling stuff that people actually use for buying food and Taiwanese T shirts, but meanwhile, economics and sociology have never been further apart.
So what is to be done? Clearly, we need to defend the humanitarian values that we loosely call ‘culture’. Winston Churchill (whom I could never admire after I knew he deployed tanks against striking miners in Tonypandy) was at least right about the arts. When it was suggested to him in 1940 that he might cut arts funding to help the war effort, he growled, ‘Then what are we fighting for?’. In that desperate time, we thought of ourselves as a vast family with a lot of precious stuff to lose, even though most of us lived in conditions that would now be considered deeply sub-standard.
If Cameron’s glib concept of the ‘big society’ is to mean anything at all, it can only be through care for people and the communities they live in. We are currently seeing the opposite – a pack of over-indulged young men hacking savagely at the tiny support measures that make life possible for people with no privilege. This loveless, vindictive behaviour can only breed further isolation and anger, expressed through acts of stupid violence by the unfortunates who have no knowledge of how to use the power of justified rage. Millions of them, sprawled with their feet on the seats of trains, will never know that a woman called Carol Ann Duffy spoke for them.
Alison Prince is an author and editor in Arran
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