Saturday, October 26, 2013

The 900 Million Queue




In the “Seven Deadly Starbucks” (7DS) I try to have a look at the primal sin of anger.  Anger is of course something that affects us all as individuals.  I, for one, tend to loose it, when I’m made to wait.  Standing in line for coffee, standing in line at an airport, delayed by someone driving.  The ambiguities of working across a language mean there is greater room for misunderstanding. 

China, I suggest, has also been waiting in line.  China has miraculously managed to drive some 300 million people from subsistence level living, through the check out counter, if you will, to something like a middle class existence.  Or at least from; "Will there be enough to eat?" to “I’ll take the pink phone.”  Warts, and there are many, notwithstanding, at no time in human history have so many people migrated to comparative wealth, so dramatically.   And there is three fourths of the population, another 900 million or so, still in line. 

Elites who have made it through the VIP express check out, and are now actually wealthy are keen to protect what it is they’ve secured.   The queue is unfathomably large, tempers are flaring as there is now some movement and nearly everyone wants the line to move faster.  People from elsewhere in the industrialized world, are concerned with so many people making their way through.   If another one to two hundred million people make it through every decade, to the point where they have cars and refrigerators and all sorts of choices, just like other middle class people have, the earth may not be able to sustain things. 

Chewing on all this, cleaning up after last night’s party it was a fine time to bump into Russell Brand this morning.  A dear friend back in Los Angeles had sent me a link of the hirsute Mr. Brand speaking with Jeremy Paxman of the BBC.  The tube title suggested the two of them were sparing off and indeed they were.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLYcn3PuTTk

I don’t see many movies.  I don’t watch television.  I don’t really know Russell Brand’s work.  I’d seen him once before on some bit where he was funny, but lite.  I’d read his thoughtful obituary comments when Amy Winehouse passed , which I appreciated as I was and remain a big Amy fan.  But my friend was suggesting I watch this as it had resonances of Bill Hicks, and that is another matter entirely.  To my mind Bill Hicks was one of the most disruptive and meaningful comics I’ve ever heard. 

And I was very pleasantly surprised by what I saw.  Mr. Brand is trying to walk the precarious line between cheeky humor and poignant social commentary.   And he navigates the path, despite Mr. Paxman’s persistent and reasonable jabs with exceptional dexterity, successfully appealing to the interviewer’s own humanity and sense of frustration, but ultimately claiming his own voice to the other’s detriment. 

As a piece of performance art, it is remarkable.  As a platform for what to actually do it is rickety rhetoric.  But as he rightly points out, that’s not his role.  He’s painting with broad-brush strokes giving sonorous articulation to a very real and endemic sense of frustration.  So, I’m sure, did Robespierre.  When pressed for specifics Brand reached for something vaguely “socialist” which sounds fine as a tonic to “corporations” but is unlikely to do much, in my opinion, to satisfy his important north star-like goals, in a highly competitive, increasingly multi-polar world.

It’s easy to pick apart at a reasonable, real-time attempt to explain something layered and vexing.  Where I don’t agree, I’d like to anchor it.  As I told my friend, I would enjoy the chance to discuss with Russell Brand off line, off camera, etc.  I wonder what he thinks of China. I’m not sure Mr. Brand is trying to secure followers per se or even lead.  What I do appreciate is that he claimed and vigorously defended his position and his right to fundamentally disregard the electoral process, and much of the way “the system” is run.  In this, he reminded of my teenage heroes, Crass. 



Crass were an anarcho-pacifist, vegetarian punk band from the class of 77’ who lived on a farm outside of London.  Their albums were wrapped in posters that had, in the words of one critic, “shock slogans” like “Fight war, not wars” and messages like “do not pay more than 1.99 pounds for this record.”  I was about fifteen or so when I first heard songs like “Banned From The Roxy” and I do believe the world stopped for a moment, as I pondered what they were saying for the first time.  It was an angry, intelligent call to reject all participation in “the system.”  I came to ardently believe, this was true.

And I set about considering, as a sixteen year old, a life disassociated from implication in “the system.”  I realized that Crass and others were influenced by thinkers before them and got my hands on Peter Kropotkin, Encrico Malatesta and Emma Goldman, (right there at the Poughkeepsie public library!)   And of course I still wanted to buy albums, and drive cars, and wear things like leather jackets, and as with teenage zealots throughout the ages, I struggled. 

I attended a wonderful Quaker high school there in Poughkeepsie, The Oakwood School, where I talked incessantly with everyone, all the time, about anarchism.  I carved out a position safely off the spectrum where everyone else was wrong, and naïve and implicated.  And I could win arguments, or at least exhaust other people into saying “yeah, you have a point.”  I can remember walking home, thinking I should get a loom and spin my clothes like Gandhi.  A wise teacher and a calloused veteran of the anti-war movement pulled me aside one time and reminded me, “John, don’t think you’re ever going to escape from being “implicated.”  You have to walk home on Cemex’ concrete, don’t you?”

Fortunately, by the time I reached my undergraduate institution, (I strongly considered moving into an anarcho-vegetarian squat in the Lower East Side, instead.) Wesleyan University, I began to have doubts about my zealotry.  Healthy in retrospect, but terribly painful in the moment, I wasn’t enjoying making the same argument over and over that everything around us was an abomination.  More importantly, I found lots of capable people who didn’t buy it and made compelling counter arguments.  I wasn’t winning these discussions and I had to stop and think and be honest with myself.  There was a great deal I still needed to learn.

All zealots, I should think, need a support program of some sort to reacquaint themselves with nuanced conversation and confront a world of uncertainty, without the steel rails, of faith or absolute conviction.  And the call of absolute moral clarity, purity and certainty remains forever seductive.  When I see Russell Brand artfully, humorously and convincingly defend his disdain for the electoral process, it is attractive. 

And there are many millions of people in the industrialized world who’s frustration with the status quo of ecological degradation and ever widening genie coefficient’s is quite real and pungent.  But the 900 million people waiting in line in China, for example, and the CCP who are stewarding them through the check out forcefully, at a breakneck pace, don’t particularly care, yet, about England or France’ struggle to protect a middle class life their parents earned.  Perhaps François Hollande and his “socialist” platform in France at least the rhetoric he ran on, is something more like what Russell Brand would like to see.  (perhaps not.)  But England, or France legislating a massive redistribution of wealth, doesn’t seem like it will do anything but ultimately accelerate the decline in overall living standards, in a competitive world, where Chinese for example, don’t care about France perception of what a civilized work environment should be.  The French have every right to fight for it vigorously, but in an interdependent, competitive world, it may not be defensible. 



Sitting in Beijing, watching Russell Brand zing Mr. Paxman with an eloquent, forceful critique of the status quo, feeling the zealot’s pull, I wonder what he knows about China.  Is it just dismissed in his mind as some massive draconian polluter?   I’ll afford the benefit of the doubt that the movement in his mind is for all the world’s people.  But China’s rise, the movement all these hundreds of millions of people through the queue, towards the choices that he and I enjoy, is not going to stop for England nor the United States’, factions left or factions right.  Another civilization has begun to assert itself and we must find a way to work with it effectively.  To that end, I think it is incumbent for social critics, left or right to learn about Chinese civilization and its momentum.  It’s coming.  And a traditional socialist critique offers little to China, whose rulers are well acquainted with that particular tradition and are culling together something old and something new.  温故知新[1]






[1] wēngùzhīxīn: to review the old and know the new (idiom, from the Analects) / to recall the past to understand the future

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