Friday, April 21, 2006

Fast-Track To America Via Singapore, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv and...

Thatcher worshipped the pugnacious devil-take-the-hindmost individualism of America. Her mob enacted measures to 'individualise' the society principally via the economy. NuLab has continued the process but could be said to conduct it principally via culture & politics (eg the whole Human Rights schtick) but you can feel the ground tremble under your feet so much with factory closures, downsizing, risk-offloading, arguments for perpetual mobility and endless change that you wonder why the apparently-intelligent media elite never seem to construct a coherent narrative out of the almighty juddering that's getting bewilderingly frighteningly evident and all the creepier for its existence's and significance's lack of acknowledgement.

Supposedly there is no limit to the number of people Britain could contain and by Christ lots of 'em want to come to Europe's off-shore super-densely-populated mini-America -

"You're from Britain? Ah, my brother would like to live there. He wants a big house and a BMW" (Egyptian waiter to my visiting Dad 2 years ago).

"The bombs of 7/7 will not stop people coming from all over the world to London to live their dreams" (Ken Livingstone public statement).

He ought to have a little Statue of Liberty built on an islet in the Thames estuary. The British Left, for all its bile against the America of Bush, Reagan, Nixon et al is utterly in thrall to the liberal metropolitan coastal America of PC campuses, individual rights and 24-hr-city-culture where gratuitous meaningless combinations of peoples are made and the spectacle of spectacle can be sociologised long enough to last an entire busy busy hyper-active ultra-frenetic day before grabbing a couple of hours' kip.

"I began to realise there wasn't an absolute distinction between Socialism & Capitalism" (David Aaronovitch retrospectively justifying his neo-con position to a R4 item on ex-Communists).

There are of course lots of synagogues in New York as well as lots of people and speed. Heartland America though, as well as having plenty of suitable hate-targets for the poisonous prig who can bring in a good income thanks to those very targets, has vastly more physical space and consequently a far lower pop-density than Britain. I certainly haven't heard of any need to micro-manage road-usage via eye-in-the-sky satellites emanating from the US as is being mooted over here.

Maybe the whole hyper-individualist multi-culti nightmare would have already gone Chernobyl in the country that is exporting it to the rest of the world, had it not so much space to act as a heatsink for the social pathologies it piles up and up and on top of the previous landfill? Could a far smaller land attempting a mad dash to such a de-ethnicised market state (as [neo]liberal America sees itself) be the first advanced capitalist "failed state" of the era?

"There is no alternative" (Cole Porter song much beloved of the Toad-like Mr Aaronovitch)
The Climate of Opinion

Hilarious and bizarre to see a Conservative Party TV spot commence with vox pop from what looked like a spotty eco-hippy. "Vote blue...Go green" was the slogan. If Bremner Bird & Fortune had done it as a piss-take on how the Tories might revive their fortunes a year or two back the delivery would have been too sharp for the punchline to hit home. Same day as Cameron flies pollutingly to Norway for an eco-photo-opp Gordon 'Tax Relief on Dead Babies' Brown is talking about the same stuff.

Has big-biz given the nod that discussion of climate-change is now worthwhile, even imperative, for the political class? Has the scientific debate generated enough concern in the international commercial elite that the latter's well-being/standing/power/assets are seen as having a slightly raised risk-profile, and so the masses must be acclimatised (ho ho) to being led into another change tunnel? Can't say I've caught much vox pop concern with the environment to provide the mood-music to which these two self-serving cunts are pretending to respond, important as I think it is meself. Now Immigration, Muslim territorialism...that's another matter.