POLITICIANS, POLICE, PLEBS AND JOURNALISTS AND FOR GOOD MEASURE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS

Okay, what have all the above got in common with people who repair cars for a living? Yes you’ve guessed it! Generally speaking they’re liars. Liars who can’t help themselves no matter how hard they try!

But let me say immediately that my sympathy goes to the police. How dare David Cameron’s favourite Doberman, Andrew Mitchell, call one of them a pleb? The police may be into all kinds of generalised lying and violence but plebs and plebeian they’re certainly not! They are polis men, from the ancient Greek meaning men of the city state. Polis men are servants of the state as are their modern counterparts, policemen. In ancient times they served the patrician class, an aristocracy who governed the state and kept the plebeians and slaves in their place. The men of the polis indeed ran the state for their patrician masters. They were neither plebeians nor patricians. Neither a stick on a stick nor a cheesy on a stick but like the Liberal Democrats, something in between!

The police today occupy the same position. They serve the state but they’re certainly not plebs. They control the plebs. Spy on them, break up their strikes and demonstrations and lie about them where necessary like Hillsborough, but they’re certainly not patricians either. They just work for them, existing as an occupational strata mainly comprised of the lower middle class employed to uphold laws made by those above them.

This begs an important question. Why did an irritated Tory Chief Whip call one of them a pleb? How dare he? Who did he think he was… a patrician… a member of the Governing Classes? How on earth could he think that… being an elected politician whose position is determined by the choice of tens of thousands of unknown people… actually made him a patrician? No Mr Mitchell, you’re just another political creep who, like the police person whose status you denigrated, falls into the generalised category of liar. In the broadest sense you both tell lies for a living, something you both regard as telling the truth as you see it. Neither category of occupation sees itself as telling lies. Heavens above! That’s certainly not what we’re here to do. We’re here to tell you the truth… the true facts about the economy and what those other bastards did to stuff it up and make your lives harder… here to present the true facts of the case from our notebooks based on all the evidence we chose to select!    

Politicians and police then have this in common. They never do tell a lie. They simply disregard any evidence that detracts from the story they want to tell! A bit like being a journalist permanently on the sniff for dirt on behalf of the gutter press paper they work for. It’s easy enough to stretch the parameters of truth when you’ve spent months if not years of your life stretching words into suggestions, turning them from unsubstantiated notions into hard sleaze so that shouting at kids in the street becomes molestation. Members of Parliament and policemen just lie but gutter journalists go much further. They demean and humiliate. They’re into dehumanisation and destruction.

They often see their actions as justifiable. They’ve discovered something awful about someone and want to bring their conduct to public attention. Destroy them loudly. But what if their target is innocent? Unfortunately by then it’s too late. So much for the Sun newspaper, its editor, its headline for the Hillsborough Tragedy and its consideration for the families of the dead. Does a concern to expose truth permit journalists to commit criminal acts in order to do so? Does it licence them to hack mobiles, use data bases to defame, to lie? What gives journalists the right to play God with people’s lives?

Politicians, police, journalists… their conduct has too often become part of the generalised culture of lying. It wasn’t always this way old timers may lament. There was a time when you could go out for a walk and leave your front door open… Alas that’s only a piece of sanitised memory. In other words, bollocks! You could never, anywhere, any-time, go out for a walk and leave your front door open, not unless you were asking for trouble. Likewise, politicians, police and journalists tell a story the way they see it. Can’t have the cold hard truth getting in the way to complicate things... Make things more difficult for us... Why, if we think that’s the way the economy needs fixing then that’s the way we’ll fix it… If we think we need three addresses to live at, then that’s what we’ll claim taxpayer’s money for. We need those three addresses to live at because we’re shifting around, shifting around… so that’s what we’ll claim three mortgages on! It’s so we can do our work best. Serve our constituents, represent the people who voted for us in the best way we can. Oh, and because we are so concerned that taxpayer’s money is well spent we’ll rent out all the empty rooms. The money coming in will help us do our jobs better!

And of course, if you’re really smart, you can claim for a different partner in each house. It’s something you need to understand, readers. This is not lying. Not cheating the taxpayer! This is making sure that taxpayers get the best value for money… as Members of Parliament would see it. Similarly, stretching supposition about those you are investigating into hard evidence isn’t lying either. It’s only part of building up the wider picture. Turning an innocent man into a suspect.     

And all this to say nothing about the reasons why politicians, police and journalists do what they do. Manufacture, distort, manipulate and deceive. In a word lie. Why do they do these things? Maybe because it’s easy, because they have the power, and the checks on their conduct are minimal. Yes because it’s easy. Easier than searching for and telling the truth. Naturally, with a coalescence of such forces determining how we are meant to view each other and conduct our lives at a time of severe economic crisis it’s possible that we are inexorably sliding towards fascism.

Fascism British style will not mean a military takeover. Its form will be different and see an ever increasing presence of police intervention in and regulation of public life and personal conduct. The process has already begun with the kettling of demonstrators and pepper spraying and shooting of civilians. Soon it may be further facilitated by journalists manipulating public attitudes and sentiment, it’s path being assisted by the corroborative cowardice of will and conscience by the leadership of the labour movement and whatever liberal politicians remain. A matter which brings me finally to that other lying species of being, the Liberal Democrats.

The Liberal Democrats, bless their little yellow socks, have just had their party conference which, as many of them would like to have us think, was of such world-shattering significance that the Russians and Chinese if not the entire Arab World must have been hanging on every word and policy speech that came out of the beloved leader’s mouth. And that’s to say nothing of Angela Merkel quaking in her shoes over his fighting talk, joke-joke! Could such a powerful populist upset the whole European apple cart?

Talk it up! Talk it up! From the conference you got a real sense of the Liberal Democrats’ power, influence and independence in Government. Yes they were the ones controlling the direction of their partnership with the Tories. Yes they were the ones pulling David Cameron’s strings. If it wasn’t for them it would all be far worse. It was the Liberal Democrats who were preparing the bright future and in time people would see that what they doing to control the Tory rednecks was heroic! Yes the Liberal Democrats in Government were heroic. Sacrificing themselves on the anvil of short term public scorn and contempt so that one day everyone would understand how right, how courageous, how noble they’d been!

If you weren’t already mind-boggled by the bare-faced cheek of it all you’d be laughing your head off in sheer disbelief at such brazen bullshit. Let’s look at Vince Cable’s ‘peoples’ Investment Bank wheeze, funded by a billion capital from the Government. Well where do you think the money’s coming from? I’ll tell you where. It’s from all the cuts in public spending, primarily welfare, that they’ve helped their Tory Coalition partners pass through Parliament. That’s cuts to disability benefits, cuts to the NHS, cuts to payments of child benefit and hardship for the unemployed. And who are the beneficiaries? Small and medium businesses of course. In short, money gained in taxes from the many is taken from the poor and needy and put into the hands of the few. How very liberal. How very democratic. No wonder the Tories are so keen to help.

But that’s the Liberal Democrats for you. Business before Welfare. Then there was all that talk about taxing the rich, taxing millionaire pensioners! Taxing the rich. Sounded great. So very Liberal Democrat. Anything for a cheap headline, yet as everyone knows they’ve only recently helped cut the tax rate for the rich from 50 to 45%. And all those cheesy looking people clustered round Nick Clegg during his final speech looking up at him with glassy eyes! Seriously squirmy! Even when they all know his rating is so low in the opinion polls that he’s even more unpopular than Labour’s former monkey on everyone’s shoulder, the Grim and Grisly Gordon Brown. No, Nick Clegg’s detested for the liar he was with his phoney promises at the last election and the shamefaced master of bullshit he is today.

So, do tell us Nick, what’s the Liberal Democrats’ great masterstroke for winning back popularity? Could it be any more meaningless Green Chit Chat? Could it be the Vince Cable appeal, i.e. the nation’s favourite old uncle put out by the press as caring with your money for voters daft enough to believe he’s anything more than George Osborne’s Raggy with his attacks on the hard won rights of workers. Or could it be Simon Hughes with his anti-Israel views, so pleasing to the anti-Semitic left. Such a cheap shot really at a people who have suffered so much and are now attacked on all sides. But far more than all this is their claim to be honourable. They are sure that people will understand in time that they believed they were honourable! That they’re doing the right thing. Rescuing the economy while acting as a break on Tory excesses.

Well hasn’t that served as a justification for so many? Believed they were doing the right thing. Think of all the nasties who’ve said it. Couldn’t think of anything more honest to say because they wanted to be up there in the public eye basking in the glory of their self-righteousness. The righteousness they gave themselves before selling it to the public. Passing it on to anyone who’d listen.

So how stupid, how gullible can the British public be? The Liberal Democrats are really banking on it. Meanwhile they can promise this and promise that, knowing they don’t have to deliver because if everything fails they can blame it all on the Tories. Now that’s a real special kind of lying. But then they’ve been conniving to get into the hot seat of power for years. They’re opportunists. Political schemers by nature in a world of adventure where lying is the natural order of things. Where lying is life. In journalism, in squeezing every little extra out of motor vehicle repairs, in political conduct, in the habitual application of personal power… All these things are open to the distortion of reality. To the distortion of truth. It only requires a conduit, a means of facilitation. Lying, therefore, isn’t a black art itself, only the servant of evil intention.

ALL THESE THINGS ARE BOUND BY THE SAME COVENANT.     

THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS.

CRYSTALS ARE A GIRL'S BEST FRIEND : THE SUSCEPTIBILITY OF MIDDLE-AGED WOMEN TO THE BLACK ARTS OF HEALING

Of all the people who come to our stall to buy crystals and semi-precious gem trees, tourists outnumber any other group by far. However it is a matter of interest that they are followed by women, aged forty to fifty, who buy enough of our things to register as a profitable category. They not only buy but are more interested than any other group, tourists included, in the occult properties of crystals and stones and in the phenomenon of crystal healing. The question is why? And furthermore, why are they so susceptible to salesmen such as myself who purvey the black arts of this form of the occult and the crystals, stones and minerals that go along with it?

Let me be clear on one point. Women in general are a far more spiritual species of being than men.

That said, alongside other, more pernicious forms of mysticism, crystal healing is relatively harmless, though as I recalled in an earlier post, it does have its bad moments. The activity, however, is suggestive rather than devious and has no real connection with deviance. There are no witches involved, fertility rites, sexual aberration or hard-core nastiness. Crystal healing is purely spiritual with a bit of money thrown in, and may be viewed as a faith that runs alongside other religions. There are no dark arts or practices involved. In fact the healing character of crystals parallels the healing balm of faith in a better world through Jesus and in many cases may be a substitute for it. Many women around the age of forty are looking for something to believe in which their lives are no longer providing. Around this time something seems to be missing. As though what was there before is no longer satisfactory. Perhaps it is they themselves who are responsible. Perhaps it is someone else; a husband, a marriage, a career.

Things aren’t what they were at twenty or thirty. The fires around them are lukewarm. Something seems to have faded. Gone out in them too. Their lives need rekindling. They and their anxieties need something new. Reassurance perhaps, a new aura of youth, a rebalancing. They want to be young again, hormones buzzing, living life again or alternatively finding solace or happiness or a more mature love.

Ah, women and crystals! Having a degree in psychology and a capacity for the arts of the bedside are a far more valuable salesman’s tool than studying the healing properties of crystals at some Psychic College. It is understanding human needs as much as the pseudo-science quackery of this wonderful new wave of bullshit that helps someone like me make people happy and earn a fair living. After all, Sigmund Freud did the same thing only he turned analysis into a fine art if not a science without using lumps of silica dioxide out of Brazil in container loads.

On the other hand there’s always Rasputin! Typical Russian monk! Beard and mad staring eyes. Into faith healing and manipulating susceptible rich middle-aged women, with sexual licentiousness as a side line. But then as I’ve said he was Russian! Our English ways are gentle, more kindly. We’re more interested in earning a shilling than dealing in souls. Anyway he was assassinated for doing his meddling and I’m not into that kind of thing. I prefer to explain, to encourage.

Healing, as I’ve said in the title, is a black art, but it’s a harmless black art on a personal level. Its aim is to help people feel better, happier, more confident. It’s positive in that it gives them something, particularly the ladies I sell to, for just a few quid. Crystals don’t cost a king’s ransom unless they are rare or special in some way. I’m often asked by clientele in this group whether I believe in the healing properties and energies in crystals myself so let me state this for starters. Generally speaking most people have a very limited knowledge about crystals and minerals. If they have any at all it’s usually confined to the Quartz Group.

They’ve heard of and might have seen Amethyst, Rose Quartz, plain Quartz and possibly Smoky Quartz but are unaware that all of these have the same basic chemistry, with additional elements that give them their colour. In the case of Rose Quartz it’s titanium that makes it pink; iron creates the purple hue of Amethyst and manganese makes Quartz smoky. Simple as that. One atom of silica, two atoms of oxygen plus the additions.  Most people have never heard of aluminium-silicate minerals such as apophyllite or stibnite with its prismatic metal crystals of antimony. Indeed there are thousands of different minerals many with their own types of crystal. In short, people’s knowledge of crystals is confined to those that are popular and commonplace.

Crystal healing adepts and cognoscenti have a much wider knowledge. Even so, it is still confined to what they regard as minerals having special healing properties and energies. These include sugilite, mordovite and green apophyllite for example. In the case of ninety-five per-cent of my middle-aged female customers, however, such names and properties are esoteric. They’re interested in the basics. Healing at ground floor level. Peace, happiness, harmony, love and wellbeing. Those are the things sought in the vast majority of cases and I don’t take them down the more complex road unless they’ve been into believing for some time and want to wander further along it. No, I’m a love, peace and happiness man. The rest gets very expensive. So to return to the question, do I believe in the healing properties and energies of crystals? My response is invariably the same. No I’m not a believer myself, but with this rider. In my experience, believing in the healing properties of crystals does work for many and there is nothing to say that it will not work for you. Now if you’re still interested and want to talk, then my conscience is clear and my customers will know I’ve been honest.

Okay, having made my position clear I’m still faced by the fact that large numbers of middle-aged women have problems that they think a clear or coloured Quartz crystal will solve for them. And the reason for this is because they’ve heard it from friends who themselves heard it at a cheese and wine party somewhere or other and everyone laughed and thought it a joke. But on Sunday you headed for a London street market and came across me! The honest chap who clearly knew all about crystals and healing and sold you a lovely pink piece of Rose Quartz for five pounds so you also bought one for Samantha and put it on the shelf in her bedroom hoping it would bring her luck with her university studies. Not that the chap on the market said it would but I do remember him saying that it would make her feel peaceful and calm when she took her exams. And it did! Samantha passed with flying colours so when she came back she mentioned it to all her friends as I did to mine!

Word of mouth can be useful because word gets around but most times it’s women passing the stall remembering something vague they’ve heard about healing and stopping to look for a moment. When my eyes follow theirs I can see what’s catching their attention and guess at their interest. I might break into their thoughts. “We’ve got some fine quartz crystals on the stall today,” or “Our Rose Quartz from Madagascar is really special. We’ve just obtained some super new pieces.” Of course we keep all the best bits under the stall. For special customers only i.e. for people who think that they’re special but in any case, keeping things under the stall out of the way of hoi polloi makes them seem special! Even so, Madagascan Rose Quartz really is special. It’s a beautiful rose colour, translucent and almost glassy to touch.

Many women hesitate to pick things up but I’m always ready for that and nod with immediate smiling approval if a hand stretches out. “Please feel free to pick anything up. You’re most welcome and you don’t have to buy…” Such a gesture is crucial. It makes a lady feel relaxed. If they’re holding a quartz crystal I always advise for it to be seated in the palm of their hand with their fingers wrapped round it. That way, I explain, they can feel its power magnify its ambient energy for cleansing and healing. Then I might be required to explain the powerful flowing energy of the crystal on the table with points at either end. Power flows more freely with those than the others.         

The quartz crystal chat is introductory. A brief familiarisation with crystals before things get inevitably more personal. They want to talk about themselves or a friend, who is often themself, but helps them shy away from making it personal if you see what I mean. A device of ghastly transparency that I’ve learned to play along with i.e. like this friend of yours, has she ever mentioned Rose Quartz to you? It brings peace where there is strife… harmony where there is chaos… I said to one particular lady, very posh, in a grey tailored two piece suit and wearing a necklace of pearls, but then I recalled someone else saying something quite like it. Christ, it was Margaret Thatcher! That was it, right at the moment she hit Michael Heseltine over the head with her handbag! No, better get back to the love and peace. Rose Quartz helps so many people…

I was building up to my come and stroke it behind the stall moment when she asked if she could see our Madagascan. “There’s no need to feel troubled,” I ventured. “Life’s a complex, difficult thing.”

There, I’d just lifted the lid a fraction. I’d say no more. If she wanted to talk then she could.

What I’m saying here is that I give my middle-aged female clientele the opportunity to talk. Nothing more. I never pry. Just gently lift the lid and manoeuvre their thoughts around healing. Above all they shouldn’t be afraid. There was nothing dark about crystals or healing. Their energies were liberating. They brought self-understanding and enlightenment.    

“You sound as if you really believe it,” many say. And then comes the question that has to be answered, whether I actually myself believe in healing? Above all they love honesty. Even though the man selling the stuff isn’t sure himself or doesn’t think they do anything, at least he’s truthful. It’s a great bonding, this truthfulness. If the guy selling it is decent it’s got to rub off. There has to be an element of truth in it all! And with such logic women get to be Prime Ministers and Presidents! And may even wind up ruling the world!

Tell me, what is the phrase that’s so current on everyone’s lips? The little catch phrase that everyone seems to throw out with such gay abandon and so little inhibition. They’re all at it from politicians and pop stars, barrow boys to bankers. Yes of course you’ve heard it. You say it yourself all the time… to be honest! Well it’s a nice easy phrase, particularly for the first and the last of the above occupations. Honesty! Everyone wants to appropriate the notion for themselves these days. You can see the value of this honesty on a market stall selling healing crystals. It doesn’t matter whether or not I’m a true believer… to be honest! More important than that for the middle-aged crystal curious is the purveyor’s integrity. Indeed, in my experience of discussing questions of healing with this group my earnest doubt is more likely to nurture interest than dampen it.

This association of honesty with belief , indeed with faith, underpins so many aspects of commercial life. I’m thinking particularly of the financial services industry. Why, if we didn’t believe in the honesty of bankers and those who regulate their activities we might all rush to get our money out lickety-spit. No, we need to have faith in much the same way as middle-aged women are attracted to the belief that crystalline forms may provide wellbeing. In that sense, banks, financial services and crystals have the same function. They all purport to inspire. The former are backed up by credit rating agencies for a commission and academic economists for a backhander. The latter by a mystical mumbo-jumbo half way to lies.

Alas, as we all know by now, the activities of the credit rating agencies were in no small way to blame for the gigantic financial crash in recent times so it is with no small degree of hope that I look to see my own activities in helping middle aged ladies with their spiritual problems lead to a world dominated by passions liberated by Rose Quartz. And if it coincidentally makes me a millionaire in the process then goody gum drops!

THE HILLSBOROUGH DISASTER: BLOOD ON THE SUN

The context of this post is the decade of the 1980’s. Many of you weren’t yet born, and because culturally, politically and psychologically the time was to have such great consequences for the future, many of you simply may not want to know or be unable to understand what I’m saying, and that’s not being patronising but honest. However some of you in your thirties and forties might remember the hell, and care about what actually happened.

The decade of the 1980’s was about Margaret Thatcher and the police; it was about Rupert Murdoch, the police, striking print workers and the Sun newspaper; it was about Margaret Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch, the Sun newspaper, the police and the Miner’s Strike. And of course it was about the Hillsborough Disaster, the police and the Sun newspaper. Altogether it was about an alliance between Margaret Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch, the police and the Sun newspaper and their clash with wide sections of the British working class,  a majority of whom, let it be not forgotten, voted to elect her on no less than three occasions to be Prime Minister of this country.

Looking back from the thirty years perspective of this present decade and the current revelations of a long time police and media cover up and gross falsification of the Hillsborough tragedy, many of our youth, indeed our own children if we brought them up to care, may be justified at pointing a finger at their elders and asking us WHY? Why did so many of you go along with Margaret Thatcher and her directing the police against striking workers? Go along with Rupert Murdoch and the often vicious, visceral headlines of his Sun newspaper? Why indeed? Those of you in your forties and fifties might have good reason to feel ashamed, but then you really know why, don’t you?

Yes you really know why! Bad as it sounds, you were bought. Margaret Thatcher and her Governments and up for hire judiciary attacked the Trades Union Movement, took away free school milk from the children of the poor and gave you the right to buy the council houses and flats you lived in. Gave you the right to own your own home then took electricity, gas, water and transport services out of public ownership and bought you with the chance to own tiny pieces of them with shares at knock down prices. All that and more with the Sun newspaper and its owner’s alliance with the lady who wasn’t for turning leading the sales pitch to buy you and your soul.

British nationalism and patriotism! A strong Britain at last under the forceful Margaret. We’re not having the Europeans, the Argies or anyone else telling us what to do. You all waved your flags and you loved it. Didn’t mind selling yourself for the right to buy, especially if you came from Essex and the Home Counties in which case you spent much of your time looking at property prices in estate agents’ windows to see whether the value of your house had gone up in the last couple of hours, or loved it even more when all controls and constraint were taken off trading and finance in the City of London where you worked.

Margaret Thatcher’s policies, marshalled and marketed for mass consumption by Murdoch’s newspapers, soon supplemented after his sweet and easy acquisition of a broadcasting licence for Sky Television, were soon running wild while factories, shipyards, mines and indeed whole industries were shutting down and disappearing in the great swathes of traditional working class northern England, central Scotland and South Wales. In less than a decade a rampant finance capitalism replaced much of the manufacturing and industrial capitalism which had dominated Britain for over two centuries.  

The disaster at the Hillsborough football ground was a north of England tragedy which followed the crushing of the mainly Yorkshire Miner’s Strike by police backed up by Rupert Murdoch’s media Empire and orchestrated by Margaret Thatcher. It should be considered from within that context because as we well know today, the Hillsborough tragedy involved precisely the same three antagonists. The police, the Sun newspaper and the Thatcher Government were as much wrapped up in attacking the deceased and the families of those who died, lying about their conduct and distorting the truth as they were years earlier in their attacks on striking miners.           

The context of the disaster at Hillsborough, however, goes much further back. As far back as the relationship between the Sun’s gut-wrenching visceral editor Kelvin Mackenzie who published the lie that football supporters had urinated on police on the day of the tragedy, the paper’s owner and friend Rupert Murdoch and mutual friend to them both, the police. Indeed this newspaper-police relationship originates from the time of police heavy business at Wapping when Rupert needed them to break strikes by print workers and their blockade of his new publishing set up. He’d wanted to introduce new technology that meant the loss of many jobs and ultimately succeeded. Thus was born an alliance between someone who’d fought against organised labour and a politician who emotionally hated it from the time she’d been daddy’s best girl of her Tory Councillor father.   

The alliance, next seen at work during the Miner’s Strike, therefore didn’t come out of nowhere. Margaret and Rupert… the police, the Sun and Kelvin Mackenzie… In the light of what we now know about Hillsborough, a dirty and shameful back-scratching exercise if ever there was one. And just think of the suffering of the families of the bereaved. The dead AND the living. Both fitted up by the police. Both slandered and maligned by the Sun.

The Sun! A celestial body that’s supposed to illuminate. That’s supposed to shine bright but instead shone dark and dirty that day for the bereaved and the dead of Hillsborough. A cold heartless dwarf star without integrity or truth. But hey, so what? Let’s get it clear. Despite everything it said, four million people still buy the paper each day and perhaps double that number read it. Those are the facts and the facts speak for themselves. Whatever lies it told and dirt it spread about dead kids at Hillsborough millions of people still want to read it. They’re not interested in what I say! I might get fifty people reading this post if I’m lucky so for all its decent intention, I have to admit, Rupert Murdoch understands the British public far better than I ever will.  

That’s all part of the tragedy really, for all the families who lost loved ones at Hillsborough. That there are millions of people around in this country today who still buy the Sun newspaper that told such lies about them and those they had lost. Who still believe the police when they make up stories and tell lies about innocent people who die in custody as well as those who get shot. We live in a society that’s already deeply divided and there’s no getting round the fact that it’s fast getting worse.

The police have been lying for years. The media, particularly the Murdoch controlled Sun and former News of the World have been engaged in dirty despicable practices for the same length of time and now the bankers are pissing on just about everyone. But that’s alright! We’ve always got the English football team… the overpaid, overrated ponces of the Premier League… the royal princes, rule Britannia and land of hope and glory… So go tell it to the Hillsborough bereaved who’ve been doubly betrayed. Who’ve always known only too well that there’s blood on the Sun.

THE LONDON PARALYMPIC GAMES. "SO NICE TO FEEL GOOD"

This is a posting that large numbers of people may find distasteful. Even unpalatable. This is because it challenges you to question your personal attitudes to these recent games for disabled athletes.

Don’t worry, it’s not you alone at whom I am pointing a finger but also the television presenters, trackside and events commentators and newspaper journalists gushingly and patronisingly involved and making a sweet living off the London 2012 Paralympics.

In a way you were all in it together. Whether admiring the courage or the successes of the athletes, particularly those who are British, you were all getting something from their infirmities. Sure, they loved your adulation, but adulation is also a two way stretch. Don’t deny that it also made you feel good because you were cheering, supporting something so worthy. In short you were getting something out of it too. The misfortunes of others were also making you feel good about yourselves. Maybe, just maybe making you think how lucky you are to be well, to be whole. In that sense too you were getting something out of these athletes. Dare I say it, getting off on them.

The London Paralympic Games of 2012 for disabled athletes has been comprehensively dominating the news from all the media outlets over the last week. You were reading it, watching it, listening to it, so you’ll know that politically correct attitudes were almost a legal requirement. Quite frankly, watching television presenters fawning over every disabled athlete and drooling over each and every class of disadvantage, borders on the ghoulish. As for the involvement of the British public in this current disability fest, as pointed out above, interest and admiration can run both ways, especially in a nation where drunkenness, anti-social behaviour, child neglect, domestic violence, uncontrolled obesity and abusive conduct are rampant along with attacks on disabled people.

In a nation where people care less and less about each other, the Paralympic Games provided these self-same people with an opportunity to feel good about themselves because for a few weeks they could think they were doing the right thing. Having the right feelings for those put up by the media as worth it. And of course, there was no television channel more self-righteous and worthy to present an Olympic Games for disabled people than Channel 4, home of political correctness. It must have paid serious money to the London Olympic Games Organising Committee to get them because coverage of events has been effortlessly and endlessly broken up by commercial breaks mainly featuring Sainsbury’s, seamlessly announced with superb casualness by Clare Baldwin’s endlessly grinning side-kick. Both of course are politically correct appointees but it is the former who is riveting with her strange almost mechanistic nodding when things are said to her, her cold unsmiling eyes and general lack of any effusive spontaneity or warmth that endears her to so many viewers ever eager for gold.

Yes gold and more gold! It’s fascinating that whenever a silver medallist was interviewed track or pool side they were first congratulated and then questioned about their failure to win and how they felt about it, especially when they only fractionally missed out on a victory. That kind of behaviour was heartless. It put pecuniary gain before sentiment and came across as callous. Couldn’t they imagine how the athlete must felt, having put themselves through so much to lose by only a fraction and then have it rubbed in on national television by some insensitive commentator. Little wonder that their faces more often looked miserable when they walked away.

However, if there was anything really noticeable in these Games it was the delicious contrast between this kind of thing along with the too often patronising manner of the presenters and the downright spontaneity and exuberance of the athletes themselves. Those with neurological disorders such as spina bifida and cerebral palsy are impaired, not mentally ill and generally know better than most of their non-impaired fellow human beings where they’re at, but they are also often possessed by the exuberance referred to above. It wasn’t something sweet to be patronised. It’s more like the freedom most people don’t have. That’s been socialised out of them. Helped them become people who can control their lives and often the lives of others. Given them the authority to become authoritarian.

Maybe that’s why in ultra-conservative, fascist regimes, the controlling authoritarian mentality is well suited for judging spontaneous joyous exuberance as defective. Not entirely human. Well suited for suppressing and murdering such people or locking them away in institutions. The Nazis did the murdering, the British did the locking away bit for years, stopping the practice only recently. Also worthy of mention is that in the 1940s and 50s, countless children from working class backgrounds with seeming learning disorders were forcibly taken from their parents and sent to Australia to work as servants under child labour programs. Today Romania and some of the ex-Soviet republics still practice the same out of sight out of mind trick.

Sorry to digress but I thought you should know. We can admire the dedication and achievements of disabled people in athletics or whatever else they do, but let’s cut the crap and stop pretending we’re virtuous. The truth is that it’s these people who were giving us something, not the other way round for the few lousy benefits that get grudgingly handed out. It’s not something manifest like a performance but a thing that’s rather more subtle. They are showing us another side of the human condition. Something we don’t want to be and in truth really don’t want to know. Okay, once every four years or occasionally on the street, but see it all the time, or live with it? Then perhaps we become rather less accepting.

It’s alright on television every four years and this is home soil after all but have to deal with these people and their problems on a daily basis? Best done in special places privately by carers out of sight, or when you see disability on the street its hey look it’s one of those… Disabled people force us to confront another side of the human condition. Okay, see it. Fine on television. Just as long as it’s not part of our lives.

The London Paralympic Games gave us the chance to see disability in full flowing achievement. It tickled our altruism for a couple of weeks then we’ll forget it. Go back to joining the gutter press carping about benefit scroungers.

Yes we forget. Those gutter press journalists and their mobile phone hacking! Those banker bonus scroungers in the City of London! That last Labour Government who put the infirm and disabled under such threat. Threats and cuts that the Liberal Democrat partners in the present Government are so happy to go along with.

Liberal and Democrat? Yeah, go tell it to the students you lied to, Nick Clegg. Go tell it to those you promised Parliamentary Reform. Go tell it to those who thought you’d get a grip on the bankers. I see you’re wearing a Paralympics badge these days Nick, so why not go tell it to the disabled!

Now that it’s over, with any luck you’ll remember some of the multiple gold medal winners in a few months’ time, maybe even some of the big name stars, but the silvers and bronzes and those who won nothing like most of the athletes, British or not, will sink below the horizon. They’ll remember what they  did and how they competed. Not for you but for themselves. Up there for that big personal moment far more than a mass public audience before the candle goes out. For you it’s an hour, a month or a year. For them it’s forever. You joined in the festival to watch people you’d never heard of just a few weeks ago and be part of their show while the drooling television presenters turned them into temporary heroes.

The act of going to watch these Paralympic athletes was cathartic for spectators in more ways than one. You indulged in flag waving patriotism, indulged in wearing funny clothes, indulged in feeling good about being there, indulged in feeling good about supporting the disadvantaged. Indulged in watching courage in action. Why else did you go? Was it because you really care about these people?

Yes of course we care, you’ll indignantly protest!

Sorry to disabuse you but you really ought to stop kidding yourselves. For most, such a belief is only part of your imagination. A kind of fantasy about wanting to do the right thing, a ghoulish never-land that exists between fantasy and reality that you temporarily inhabit when you see someone walking with a stick or no arm in a sleeve. You’re a disability ghoul like so many others, occasionally escaping into a world of good intentions then choking at the sight of a limb hacked off at the elbow or someone with severe cerebral palsy. You’re not up for it and who can blame you.

You’re just not as human as the disabled are so often forced to become.

 

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