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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