Immodest proposals
Who do these people think they are? The post-democratic age is littered with flash mobs, summoned online to some quasi-autonomous gathering, and swiftly dispersed.
They call themselves activists, but they’re passive and don’t achieve anything. Instead they trade in slogans, mouthing the language of protest but not its coherence. Calls for “alternative social and economic structures based on cooperation, ecological sustainability and grassroots democracy” sound like Communism remixed by Christopher Robin. And banners demanding a “worldwide alliance against globalisation” are absurd enough to make my generation’s paradoxes sound rational. “Be realistic, demand the impossible,” we once shouted, before we grew up.
It must be difficult for modern idealists, living in a fallen world. Without a credible alternative, all they have are their bellows of rage. Globalisation is as old as time, ebbing and flowing with changing technology. It’s even given them platforms to bypass editors, and rant at each other all they like. The rest of us can happily tune out.
Occasionally, we’re upbraided for not devoting more of our pages to their delusions. But what’s newsworthy about protests that don’t turn violent? And why should people care about the powerless? What’s big about ideas that won’t get acted on? If radicals want to be taken seriously, they should start with radical steps like being serious.
They say it’s about corporations. But who provides the jobs that none of them want? Others claim the government is spineless, a poodle of masters in boardrooms and overseas. Then they attack it for denying them freedom to attack its spinelessness. Honestly, one of the things that puzzles me about even intelligent critics is their inability to grasp what 800 words means. It means, inter alia, that I simply do not have space for endless discussions of why wastes of space are a waste of time.
Whichever crisis we’re talking about, you don’t have to be a socialist to find things grotesque. From food, water and energy shortages to surfeits of poverty and disease, the puzzle isn’t “what is to be done?” it’s “who is to do it and how?”
In other words, do you change things by pissing outside the tent and making a stink, or by getting real and joining the party of business? It’s no use knowing why things suck unless you also know insiders who get things done. Men of goodwill and good sense, even humble thunderers like me.
I’ve no time for the closed-minded, or determinists who think they see the future. If they really did, they’d be billionaires and I’d be listening to them. Let me show you why these know-it-alls aren’t worth bothering with.
“Activism,” one of them writes, “is not a journey to the corner store; it is a plunge into the dark.” For the slow among you, this means there’s no getting there. And where’s the sense in that? History, this woman continues, “is like weather, not like checkers. A game of checkers ends. The weather never does.” At the end of a game, it’s easy to tot up the score. Someone wins and someone loses and it’s time to get on with something else.
What better example is there than the war in Iraq? Millions of people opposed it before the first bombs fell on live TV. But when it started dragging on like Vietnam, where were the crowds? They’d learned the obvious lesson: nothing changes. I know it’s fashionable nowadays to quote Eastern wisdom, which teaches the exact opposite, but this is in itself the heart of the problem. What could be more disempowering than accepting fate? Yet that’s exactly what these activists propose: “Next time, fail better.” At least when I was young we found this depressing.
Protesters should stop opposing things and start supporting them. It was all very well for Civil Rights types to oppose segregation, but once black Americans got the vote, what did they want? The end of racism? Or the wealth, power and status of white Anglo-Saxons? Extremist views like that got just short shrift. You can force change, of sorts, but only when the Establishment’s ready. Even then you have to fight it all the way to stop the results being diluted. Is a lifetime of struggle really worth it, just to keep a vibe alive that sensible people ditched when they got proper jobs?
If these activists meant what they said, they’d drop out completely. Or start serious trouble, like a rolling barrage of protests with simple demands. Maybe even storm a few newsrooms. Thankfully, Britons aren’t Latins. At worst, we get a few thousand day-trippers, thinking they’re subversive because they share a couple of joints on London streets. If you organise something bigger, I will come. But for now, I’ve got important people to talk to.
