Pouring milk on troubled waters

Finally, my colleagues have become aware of the word 'hipster', the pejorative du jour of the last seven years. They appear to have grasped the rules with which it is generally applied quite well too: never directly address another with the term, ascribe general attributes of hipsterness (having a beard, a tattoo or anything vaguely trendy) to indistinct groups of others not directly known to you, maybe rib your peers by pointing out the attributes that they have in common with these vaguely designated others, etc. I am aware of all of this because amongst my colleagues, the inference is generally directed towards me, being the one with the biggest beard and having recently lived in East London. Although such behaviour is new to my colleagues, it is a version of a game many of us have been playing for years: always happy to apply the epithet to others, never even willing to countenance the possibility that it might apply to us. I remember going to Portland (Oregon) in 2011 and being amused to find a local magazine editorial confronting the H word head on: "Hipsterhipsterhipsterhipster" it began in an attempt almost to exorcise it, before going on to explain how Portland was not Portlandia. And it was right too: Portland is great city with much to offer beyond coffee, beards and bicycles. However, I was reading this article in a room at the Ace Hotel, where the bored receptionist, seemingly made entirely of slender limbs, had done everything but slam a typewriter on the desk in order to impersonate his Portlandia double when we'd checked in. He wouldn't have intended that association (in his defence, I think the Portlandia episode might have come later - in his prosecution I think it might genuinely have been based on him), it simply arrived as negative association from external observation. And from the fact that he was a bit of a dick. 

That miserable git from Shooting Stars recently wrote a terrible article about how much he hated Hipsters. One of the biggest failures of this article was that he was entirely unable to identify his quarry: ultimately settling for the people that had been foolish enough to take on the activities his generation had just grown out of. If that isn't a crass 'young people are rubbish' I don't know what is. The problem with Will Self's article is that he fell straight into Hipster identification trap: find an other that you don't like/understand and who are probably measurably cooler than you (and very much in the way that these things can be measured, or at least can be perceived to be) then apply the favoured pejorative of the time to them. In a desire to get past lazy journalism, Self went a step further and attempted to explain just what had caused this most nebulous of pejorative others to exist. Of course it was at this point that it became clear that he was really just talking about people younger than him, in much the same way as I'm sure previous generations labelled all young people 'hippies', except that hippies were an identifiable subculture. No one goes out of their way to be identified as a hipster. Or do they? 

I've been looking at this whole thing very much as if it were a given that the H-word is simply a nebulous pejorative applied to anyone irritatingly more fashion conscious than you and not an identity that people wish for themselves. And then I saw the Channel 4 News cereal thing. Firstly, it was the first time I'd heard a news presenter identify hipsters as a subculture, responsible for shaping parts of the socio-cultural landscape. Secondly, there were the owners of the cereal shop themeves, who were a walking, talking cliché: fullsome beards, check; slick back quiff-type hair, check; sleeve tattoos, check; ridiculous concept boutique that no right minded person can imagine ever spending money in, check; utter obliviousness to the greater social context into which they've dumped their massive offence-turd of clueless consumerism, check. This last was fantastically illustrated by the man terminating the interview ("can we stop the interview, I don't like the questions you're asking") when the interviewer pointed out that they were in Tower Hamlets, one of London's poorest boroughs and that the actual local residents might struggle with paying £3 plus for a bowl of cereal. I guess I'd always assumed that there was a bit of a responsible future-looking attitude to the hipster mentality - riding bicycles, eating locally grown heritage blah, etc. - but I guess that's just me falling into the trap of ascribing certain value-sets to a broadly and poorly defined other based on observations of a few people that I have selected as my representatives of that other. Most likely I have chosen those with whom I can in some way identify (after all, I wanted to stay at the Ace Hotel in Portland), yet I do not always like what I see. Similarly Will Self only saw younger, more hirsute and irritating versions of himself. It's as if we look in a mirror only to find our reflection beguiling and repulsive at the same time. 

Of course I presume that only vacuous idiots would see their reflection in the cereal guys, with their by-numbers approach to life, but just because these people are visible and idiotic does not mean we can ascribe crass stupidity to an entire group of people, especially when we have so comprehensively failed to define that group in any other way. Many people that the majority would define as hipsters have set up bakeries and craft breweries, markets and butchers; many of these things may be in some ways novel, but they are not novelty, or crass or stupid. They are simply taking something already extant and looking for new experience in it: it's what young people do. Does it say something about our society that we want them to fail, that we want to find the most shallow of motives in everything they do; that when we do find the shallowest example of this minority we hold them up as an exemplar, damning the whole?

Parmesan

The level of the debate surrounding the photo of a house with a white van in front of it and some St George's flags hanging from the windows was exceptional. Of course I mean exceptional in that from the very beginning nothing of any substance was said. 

Firstly, Emily Thornberry posted a picture on Twitter stating that it was in Rochester. Then everyone (not least Ed Milliband) decided to read all sorts of negative connotations into this and blame them on her and get all upset about the Labour Party sneering at the working class. 

Just in case the working class aren't clear on this: everyone is sneering at you, even the Labour Party (but probably not as much as anyone else who claims to speak on your behalf). It's OK, you get used to it, I should know, I'm a member of the liberal intelligentsia, and everyone sneers at us too. At least as the working class, everyone usually sneers at you in private whilst publicly asserting your unassailable right to do, say or act however you like because you are the only social subgroup to be considered genuine; the rest of us are lying to ourselves. This at least is what I can glean from my (admittedly limited) interaction with the popular press. 

As saying that you speak on behalf of the working class is a cardinal sin, all parties involved in any 'debate' concerning the working class tend to spend most of their time trying to accuse the other parties of having the audacity to patronise the working class whilst trying to avoid being accused of the same thing themselves. Although in many ways, this makes such debate more complex and nuanced than most modern political debate, if anything it means that even less of the actual issue gets discussed. This is an achievement of sorts, just not one that should be celebrated. 

The level of debate surrounding politics at the moment is so low as to be utterly meaningless: no one even bothers introducing proper policies any more, they just make up some headline grabbing crap that'll never actually make it on to statute and then ram all the ugly stuff into the small print. When it actually gets debated in parliament everyone is so busy shouting empty platitudes at each other that genuinely fractious legislation can sail by without anyone batting an eyelid. It's like government exists at two levels: the hilarious press circus and the bit that quietly gets on with selling off our assets to its mates. What's really odd is that I'm sure there are some very clever people in parliament (not all of them obviously, otherwise how do you account for David Cameron), but they all seem so shit scared of being presented as idiots that they never dare say anything intelligent. 

I don't have a cure for this because it's fairly deep rooted: we went to war in 2003 based on evidence that everyone knew was made up; we just chose to ignore the blindingly obvious, like we'd collectively stuck our fingers in our ears and gone 'lalalalalalala, not listening...oh look we invaded a country illegally, whoops'. So if we can ignore the massive steaming, humming dung heap that was the 'case for war' in 2003, is it any wonder that no one has pointed out the fact that nothing in the last Tory election manifesto has actually even been hinted at in the last five years. I'm sure the excuse would be coalition government, but you can't blame everything on the Lib Dems, even though the Tories have made a pretty good fist of it. The truth is that for some time now an election manifesto has been a fairly meaningless way of grabbing headlines without actually having to commit to anything. 

So where does this leave us? I think we should accept that the content of the the debates around the elections is basically meaningless and that there is nothing we can do to change this. Indeed I think we should embrace this fact by demanding that politicians take all spurious claims to future policy out of their debates and instead simply pick a topic for debate like they did at school or Oxbridge. I think next May our politicians should stick to one topic and only debate which is the best cheese. 

Privilege

I was at a pelican crossing the other day whilst a large number of people were crossing the road. As soon as the lights began to flash amber, the chauffeur of the car at the crossing began to drive, effectively pushing the still crossing pedestrians out of the way. Although the chauffeur briefly acknowledged the pedestrians' immediate compliance with his rewriting of the laws of the road (allowing him not to have to run them over), I doubt if his passenger did or if she was even aware that this was in defiance of convention or law. After all, why should the rights and safety of a bunch of pedestrians get in the way of her arriving at her destination fractionally earlier? 

It may be that I am in some way more sensitive to it these days or it may be simply the case that it occurs more, but I have noticed an increase in the number of people who seem to think that wealth gives them more rights. This is a mistake: wealth brings advantage, it does not bring precedence. At least it shouldn't. It should not change your position as a citizen in that the same laws should apply to you. Of course we know that this is not always the case, we know that there are those with enough money to pay to avoid the inconvenience of having to comply with the law. In the 20th century - with the wealth of the colonial period still sloshing about - perhaps we would have expected this to be a thing of the past, or a state of affairs restricted to tin pot dictatorships. However, as the UK slips back into its place as a medium sized country buffeted by global market forces, we tend to take on more and more of the values of the tin pot dictatorships we used to look down upon. This is not a phenomenon that is exclusive to the UK though, throughout the world, there appears to be a subservience attached to wealth that goes beyond simply reverence. 

At a political level (and this is certainly true of the UK) there is a continual undignified scramble to get wealth into the country regardless of whether that wealth stays in the country or benefits the country in any way. This seems to be driven by a more general perception of wealth as good in some way other than the potential of it disseminating itself amongst others. It seems that we have been told that wealth accumulation is a good thing so much that we believe wealth to be some form of abstract moral force for good, rather than simply a resource that has no moral value except in its use. This perception seems to extend to the wealthy, who appear to believe that their ability to accumulate (or inherit) wealth makes them some sort of übermensch, soaring above the concerns and petty ties of the rest of us mere mortals. Unfortunately, because we are presented no alternatives, we aspire to be like these people, assume that this is possible or even probable and therefore cannot see why they should be party to the petty restrictions that we ourselves will happily rise above once we achieve their elevated position. We allow our media to lionise these people, presenting their lives as the utopia we seek and as a result we come to believe that they must be in some way better than us. It is a 'better' that we believe we can aspire to, but it is a 'better' none the less. So we sit like expectant children and lap up any wisdom that the grownups impart, safe in the knowledge that they have all the answers. We defer moral authority to them in the same way a child does to adults, but we are not children. We have allowed ourselves to be infantilised by the unfulfilled promise of shiny things and assurances that there are those more worthy than us. 

Of course the narrative of the right is that I'm just a bitter lefty, jealous of others, but I beg to differ. I am not jealous of the wealth of others, I count myself perfectly well off. Of course I could always do with a bit more, but I would think that wouldn't I: I'm conditioned to. My issue is not with others' wealth or with others accumulating wealth, it is with those who think that wealth entitles them to more than those without wealth beyond the luxury that wealth brings, or that it gives them primacy over others, or makes them better people. It does none of these things: no one should mistake the fawning of sycophants blinded by the glare of their wealth for a change in their societal rights and obligations.