Just some quick thoughts as I prep my ten-book poetry workshop marathon for the weekend. I can’t help looking out at the world every so often.
This whole ‘She was blocking the road, she deserved what she got’ — ‘She disobeyed the commands of a law enforcement officer’ — ‘She FAFO’ — ‘She had no business being at a protest, she should have been home with her fatherless child’ — ‘paid activist’ — ‘ran him over’ — '
The comments are terrible! Hundreds of them, thousands of them, everywhere — and from English people! (Of course some of them are bots — another vexed question.) I’m unclear as to whether the rank and file of British citizens realise how close this stuff is coming to being imposed here, what a thread we’re hanging by, what a knife-edge, what a turn of a steering wheel — the hate is everywhere and the judgement, and in particular what is troubling me is explosion of comments like the above, like a volcano eruption of bile, pouring through the brains of our neighbours & out into the streets —
I know, I know. We’ve had all this same bile from people outraged about a tin of soup being poured on the glass covering a painting, about people blocking roads to protest against the actual destruction of our entire planet. I know. We seem to vastly [sic] prefer the petty. Maybe blocking the road for four minutes is the worst thing you could do.
Here in Faversham and elsewhere in the country there’s been a lot of talk in recent months about ‘British values’, in the wake of the flagging jamboree that was ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ — Hoist the Petard, more like. Competitive flag-loving going on all over, ‘how dare they claim to be the patriotic ones', ‘we’ll show them how much we love our flag’ — Billy Bragg made his little inclusive England flag… Sorry, this is really rough, I’m not worrying about sentences — second-worst thing you could do. ‘Protect Are Women and Children’.
I’m not into flags, they leave me cold. Including Billy Bragg’s one. Fellow-feeling isn’t about flags any more than it’s about skin colour. Or eating the same food, though a curry certainly is the same food. (& in America a taco is.) And British values can’t be something that just resides in traditional middle-class Home Counties English culture, the cuppa, the Christmas carols on a snowy morning, the faithful hound by the fire. I’m not sure this vexed question can ever really be answered, unless we were to posit that the quintessential British value is a certain irreverence, a disrespect for authority — and that goes back way past Wat Tyler, or John Ball.
This isn’t feeling anything like the country that gave us — in pretty much the least-PC examples I can think of — ‘Porridge’, or ‘Only Fools and Horses’, or ‘Minder’! Or even the Doctor.
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