all we make is entertainment
You know why I like the Manic Street Preachers? Their songs actually mean something, unlike all the Bieber/Girls Aloud/Cher Lloyd/X-Factor shite that gums up MTV with brainless lyrics about meaningless tween love affairs and shaking your arse about the place. Postcards From A Young Man is one of my favorite Manics albums: it’s good to listen to, but also contains a few songs that really make you think. One is the sublime All We Make Is Enterainment which I’ll come back to, and also Golden Platitude which captures perfectly my feelings regarding the Liberal Democrats, a party I was formerly a member of. Indeed, they’re good to listen to while I consider some things.
So let’s think about All We Make Is Entertainment first. For those of you who haven’t heard it, here it is:
It works as a rather devastating critique of our current situation. The lyrics speak better than I could ever put it:
We made so much and we let it all crumble
To safeguard our rights to make us more human
Oh this country is but an empty shell
A clearing house for heaven, a clearing house for hell
And the sun will still keep rising
Always deflecting, always disguising
Was there ever another place
Did we ever really exist?
All we make is entertainment
It’s so damn easy, and inescapable
“We’re so post-modern, We’re so post-everything”
If you ask someone today what we make in this country, I can’t guarantee you anyone could tell you. We make some pretty good computer games, we make some world leading foodstuffs (Scottish Whiskey ftw!), but one of our biggest exports now is… TV formats. The Office, Torchwood, Being Human, The X-Factor… we’ve sold quite a lot of those around the world, and indeed it seems that every time the US needs a new show is looks for something here it can plagiarize reboot in order to make up for Hollywood’s dearth of original ideas. Considering the history of UK industry, I find this rather sad, and it’s at the crux of the problem with the entire UK. If all we make is entertainment, how the hell can the working population of the entire UK share in this? I don’t think there is any way people really can as such. Sure, we can all appear on The X-Factor to be ritually humiliated for the entertainment of the TV-addled masses, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m actually amazed at the fact that no politician has seriously picked up on this and actually done something about it. It’s the key to everything that’s wrong with the UK at the moment. Why is unemployment so high? Why did cities across England go up in flames? Why do we have a generation of young people who fear for the future and look at old age with dread, rather than looking forward to a well-earned retirement? It all comes back to the fact that there’s nothing here whatsoever for most: you may want to work, but is the work there? Nope. We have a lot of McJobs, but they don’t offer the dignity and security that so many aspire to. There’s a lot of talk of “aspirational values” and how “we’re all middle class now”, but that’s just shite belched out from PPE graduates who’ve never worked a day in their lives at a real-world job outside of the ivory tower of politics, and just believe that they can fix things with a speech about the Hard-Working Families of Alarm Clock Britain, a bunch of stereotypical people who don’t really exist. There are real men and women and families, and they are worried about the fact that no-one gets it.
I left a permanent, but dull job, to go and do what I wanted to – the much-vaunted MSc I waffled on about for ages. Well, I’ve done it and I’m out the other end now, and what have I got? Well, congratulations and not a lot more at the moment. I’ve taken a while to pick myself up, and today I went and signed on for the wonderful experience of claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, where I go and go through an interview with someone who looks down their nose at me for claiming money from a system that I paid into while I worked. It’s illogical and stupid… and is one of the reasons that so many feel such anger at everything currently.
Could some change come about that could fix everything? I felt that the Liberal Democrats could actually do that. I saw a Labour party that was in love with the City and appeared to be the same as the Tories, both in love with greed and there to cater for the powerful, rather than normal people. I guess I was naive, and thought that the Liberal Democrats were different. Here was a party that said it would stand up for civil liberties, and would try and redress some of the great wrongs visited upon the population by governments of both flavours. I went and read about liberalism, and realized that this was what I believed. I still do… but well… Golden Platitudes again captures it perfectly:
The platitudes they all dissolved
They got too deep, got too involved
The platitudes just interludes
To break the trust with me and you
Oh what a shangri-la
Oh what a shower we are
Oh what a mess we’ve made
What happened to those days
When everything seemed possible
With no-one to tell you no
Where did the feeling go?
Where did it all go wrong?
As can be seen, I was initially happy to see the Lib Dems in government with the Tories. I thought that finally, we’d get common sense from the government and that the presence of Lib Dems in government would ensure that the worst excesses of the Tories would get held back. That was… naive. Instead, we see that the Lib Dems basically serve as the footstools to the Tories, giving them a majority to rip apart the NHS in England, push through welfare reforms that punish the vulnerable, and generally act as if they won with a stonking majority. They did not. I decided that I couldn’t continue to fund the expenses of that via my party membership, and I let it lapse.
I’ve been picking myself up after the disappointment of not getting a PhD place in physics (again) and finding myself having to contemplate jumping back into the rat race. However, after thinking about it, it’s an opportunity in some ways. I’ve gotten salable skills out of my physics education, and I’m hopefully quite well-positioned to do well. There’s also a lot of stuff I’ve been wanting to do as well but never got around to due to studying and trying to pass exams, so now’s the time to do so. It’ll take some effort to get all of it done, but I sat down, worked, and managed to scrape together the financial and personal capital to move to another town and do an MSc, so I can do it again. I can lift myself up out of the load of gloom that seems to have enveloped society, and start feeling good again.
If you’re detecting a certain political bent here, you’re not wrong. I’m thinking things over right now, but I think I might have found something that I can believe in and can actually see working properly. But, more of this later. It’s 12.30 in the morning, and my brain isn’t really functioning well enough to elucidate right now… stay tuned…
