One year. 100 articles. So we're having a Reader's Party. Come along to Upsidecrown.

Upsideclown banner

Fresh Mondays and Thursdays   ARCHIVE   US

 
 

Fighting the Good Fight

25 June 2001
Matt wouldn't even consider Pepsi.

"We live in a dying world!"

I stand atop a newly vacated plinth, the two hundred year-old general stares stonily up from the ground. I will look out from here again later and see the same crowd wetly glistening orange from the burning arcades, pushing themselves into the water cannon. These are my troops now, general.

"Once, we lived in many worlds. Some would die, and some would prosper. Some would settle new worlds -- and so we would continue: the beauty of nature, the complexity of life, the eternal stuggle of idea and idea.

"But now there is but one world, and it stagnates.

"There is one spirituality. Christianity, hear this! We will make you see there are other gods!

"There is one society. America! We will show you other ways!

"Heros of humanity, let our shouts penetrate their deafness, let our flames dazzle their eyes."

..and so it went on. The speech, the leaflets, the bonfires. The injuries were worth the immediate coverage alone, but to see the seed being planted by the media in so many minds for weeks afterwards, now that was special.

The general wasn't so convinced. "What exactly are you objecting to?" he said.

I object to the ever-increasing sameness of things. I've been to towns in France that can barely cope with cars, that even today are a mess of alleyways and tree-lined courtyards, shops you wouldn't have thought would last a month let alone fifty years, ten thousand lives intricately crosslinked, all with their own concerns, all with their own loves. And then McDonalds moves in and the reek of French fries that aren't even French replaces the smell of fresh bread in the morning.

I've been to Moscow and seen Western beer replacing vodka. I've seen Manchester United tops in Africa and Asda Walmart plastic bags in India.

"But isn't that what the people want? Doesn't the very fact that the burgers sell and the beer is drunk mean that that's precisely what people in these places want to consume?"

"That's a bit rich," I say, "coming from a general whose greatest victory was using his army to sack a city of a hundred thousand" -- which is a cheap shot, but it gives me time to think.

There's nothing particularly great or new about America or Christianity. The basic ideas behind them (democracy and the market, or forgiveness, the soul and a single all powerful god) were around in various forms at their inceptions. But it's a matter of an idea formed just so at the right time in the right place.

The trick is to grab people quickly, punish defectors, and make the very attribute of bigness a benefit in itself. With America around, there is no game but the free market game, and if you're in it you better play by those rules. Stand up in church and bare your soul with Christianity, be damned if you turn your back; oh, and it's a valuable ethical system designed to be inherited. Who would buy a non Microsoft computer? How to be as cheap as McDonalds without having so many outlets?

These aren't the best ideas by a long way, but they've found the trick of being the only ones in town. They profit by not even allowing competition, not just by winning. And doing it globally.

Later in the year, we're marching again. It's glorious: anarchists, Greens, the militant animal rights fringe, protestors of all shades and every nationality. Under a full moon we give every carcass from every butcher in this small town chosen for the summit a decent send-off in the grand square. To the beat of a hundred drums we dance around the cremation pyre as though we had brought down capitalism itself.

"We're doing it for the people," I whisper angrily. The general still haunts me, striding invisible after me as I'm pulled by the crowd around and around the flames.

"We're doing it because we, the people, must stand up against the force of globalisation, let these corporations know that they must give us room to live our own, different lives."

The general pulls me round and I jerk away from the dance.

"One," he spits, "isn't it a little ironic that you band together with disparate groups from all over the globe, just in order to insist that it's a bad thing for people to band together?

"Two," he almost shouts, "how dare you claim to represent the people? How many of you are there here, from all around the world -- ten, maybe twenty thousand? Ten times that live in this town alone, and what do you do? Burn their shops and destroy their livelihoods."

"We are the people," I shout back, and a few others are gradually coming to a stop, staring. "And you controlled an army sponsored by a regime that assumed power, was not granted it. You acted on behalf of a supposed moral society, subduing a city that refused to submit to the empire, an empire that you said would bring with it sanitation, learning, industry. And how many had to die for that? For the children was it? And how many mothers were murdered?"

We leave it at that, and nobody mentions the incident the next morning.

At every intergovernmental conference, at every trade summit, at every treaty negotiation I attend, the general's there. He's insistant. If we represent the will of the people, why don't we try for a democratic mandate? It wouldn't be the first time, he says, that the system has been changed from within.

And if the people really want change, why don't they join us, or boycott Budweiser, or refuse to watch dubbed films, or insist that English words are expunged from their language?

And I answer: These big ideas make people think they're doing the right thing. Advertising tells people the single concept of beauty, and now pornography is the same from Rio to St Petersburg. The pyramid marketing scheme of capital, wages and property ownership locks people in to a system that they've never had a chance to think about. The monetary price of a Coca-Cola is a fraction of the real cost, but how to make an ethical and environmentally zero-impact soft drink in a world that simply precludes the concepts of not buying, not selling, not trading? Individuals have been locked in since birth and they've never seen the sun.

We're back at the plinth. I'm on it, once again, looking, grinning over the massed crowd, liberators. The general's standing on the ground, amidst the rubble.

"So you're saying that people don't really understand what they need?" Yes.

"And you're going to set them free, whether they like it or not?" Yes.

"And it's okay if there's a cost of bringing them into this new world? It's okay if some of them have to be dragged through? Is it worth interrupting, without permission, these other lives?" Yes. Yes! Of course it's okay. How can people be happy in this world? Only voting for the same leader and buying the same product because there is no option B. We're being dominated, and we have to fight back, even if we have to teach the others how to fight first.

And as I look over the burning plaza with its gutted cafes, as I see my comrades surge through the streets pulling down the symbols of the popular regime, looting the shops, wrecking the cars; pulling the chains from the suffering masses, and they may well be indoors now, but come tomorrow we'll have taken this town and they'll be free -- as I look at the fights with police and the battles with shopowners, the families clinging to their comfort blankets of owned property -- as I stand tall on the plinth looking over this city which will soon be ours, the people's, I feel the steady gaze of the general on me, but when I look down there's only some shattered rock where he stood, and I feel a new strength within me.

 

 
     
Previously on upsideclown

top

Current clown:

18 December 2003. George writes: This List

Most recent ten:

15 December 2003. Jamie writes: Seven Songs
11 December 2003. Dan writes: Spinning Jenny
8 December 2003. Victor writes: Rock Opera
4 December 2003. Matt writes: The Mirrored Spheres of Patagonia
1 December 2003. George writes: Charm
27 November 2003. James writes: On Boxing
24 November 2003. Jamie writes: El Matador del Amor; Or, the Man who Killed Love
20 November 2003. Dan writes: Rights Management
17 November 2003. Victor writes: Walking on Yellow
13 November 2003. Matt writes: Disintermediation
(And alas we lost Neil, who last wrote Cockfosters)

Also by this clown:

4 December 2003. Matt writes: The Mirrored Spheres of Patagonia
13 November 2003. Matt writes: Disintermediation
23 October 2003. Matt writes: Topology
2 October 2003. Matt writes: Haunted
8 September 2003. Matt writes: The Gardener's Diary
21 August 2003. Matt writes: The Starling Variable
31 July 2003. Matt writes: Two stories
14 July 2003. Matt writes: What is real?
23 June 2003. Matt writes: Mapping and journeys
29 May 2003. Matt writes: Extelligence
5 May 2003. Matt writes: Religious experiences
17 April 2003. Matt writes: Seeing the Light
27 March 2003. Matt writes: Flowering
10 March 2003. Matt writes: Climax state
10 February 2003. Matt writes: The Role of Cooperation in Human Interaction
20 January 2003. Matt writes: The same old subroutine
2 January 2003. Matt writes: New beginnings
9 December 2002. Matt writes: Packet Loss
18 November 2002. Matt writes: Wonderland
31 October 2002. Matt writes: Having and losing
10 October 2002. Matt writes: Trees of Knowledge
19 September 2002. Matt writes: The online life of bigplaty47
29 August 2002. Matt writes: Divorce
8 August 2002. Matt writes: How to get exactly what you want
18 July 2002. Matt writes: Eleven Graceland endings
27 June 2002. Matt writes: Listopad, Prague 1989
3 June 2002. Matt writes: Engram bullets
6 May 2002. Matt writes: Sound advice
15 April 2002. Matt writes: How it all works: Cars
21 March 2002. Matt writes: Proceeding to the next stage
25 February 2002. Matt writes: Spam quartet
31 January 2002. Matt writes: Person to person
7 January 2002. Matt writes: All for the best
13 December 2001. Matt writes: Life
19 November 2001. Matt writes: Giving is better than receiving
25 October 2001. Matt writes: Ludo
1 October 2001. Matt writes: Gifts, contracts, and whispers
6 September 2001. Matt writes: The world is ending
13 August 2001. Matt writes: The Church of Mrs Bins
16 July 2001. Matt writes: Things I Don't Have
25 June 2001. Matt writes: Fighting the Good Fight
31 May 2001. Matt writes: Code dependency
7 May 2001. Matt writes: Up The Arse, Or Not At All
5 April 2001. Matt writes: The increasing nonlinearity of time
19 March 2001. Matt writes: Hit Me Baby, One More Time
22 February 2001. Matt writes: Space, Matter, Cities, Sausages
29 January 2001. Matt writes: Truth in Advertising
1 January 2001. Matt writes: Six predictions for tomorrow
7 December 2000. Matt writes: You must reach this line to ride
16 November 2000. Matt writes: The truth about the leopard
23 October 2000. Matt writes: Shopping mauls
28 September 2000. Matt writes: Heavy traffic on the road to Utopia
4 September 2000. Matt writes: Sixty worlds a minute
17 July 2000. Matt writes: You, Me, and Face-space

Let meeeeee entertain you

top

We are all Upsideclown: Dan, George, James, Jamie, Matt, Neil, Victor.

Material is (c) respective authors. For everything else, there's it@upsideclown.com.

And weeeeeee can entertain you by email too. Get fresh steaming Upsideclown in your inbox Mondays and Thursdays. To subscribe, send the word subscribe in the body of your mail to upsideclown-request@historicalfact.com. (To unsubscribe, send the word unsubscribe instead.)