#49: THE NEW YEAR: RESOLUTIONS AND REVOLUTIONS

Is it really? I mean, is it really going to be happy? And is it really ‘new’? Isn’t it going to be pretty much the same as the last one and the one before that: same old, same old?   Groundhog Year?

You haven’t changed that much, nor has your situation. No Lottery win, no end to austerity in sight yet, in fact they are even admitting it’s going to get worse. Glass three-quarters empty and the NHS tottering like a drunk jay-walking. Another three+ years of smug Tories with their snouts in the trough, telling us that ‘everyone is suffering’ while they fill their pockets from the public purse via ‘expenses’. The Headmistress talking to us like children, Thatcher in leather trousers with some 'caring' words, but no commensurate deeds. Oh dear, I’m depressing myself now…

But it is going to be different this year, very different. Just because of the seismic changes put in place by ill-informed, misled electorates on both sides of the Atlantic. Alienated and just plain pissed-off with politicians and their promises, they gave them two fingers, and voted for idiots who only promised them ‘something different’. Just like the media told them to, with only one or two exceptions. Even the dear old BBC, took its mission to provide ‘balance’ to the logical – but absurd – conclusion: giving equal exposure to leaders and their arguments, when one side had 90% of the world’s economists and experts saying “No, don’t do it”, while other side offered nothing but wishful thinking, perverted patriotism, and the ghastly spectacle of two opportunists and a saloon bar farrago, accelerating the ship of state towards the iceberg. Come on in, the water will be lovely.

Not just the US and the UK: in their street theatre of the absurd, the Italians went the whole hog and voted in an ex-professional Clown, Paolo Gentiloni. You couldn’t make it up. And all the while, Le Pen (La Penne?) bides her time in France while Merkel pays the price for her legendary reversal of her country’s former attitudes towards non-Aryan minorities.

Where will it end, as they say? We all know one way it could end. The End. Over-dramatic? Alarmist? Maybe. But there are two salient facts which suggest not:

1)  I can scarcely remember a time since World War 2 when the world was more unstable, in flux; and the superpowers are led by ‘mad dictators’, macho men or women who like to flex their muscles, out-dare or outdo each other, sometimes impetuously, sometimes through cold calculation (witness Russia’s apparent intervention in the US election, and Putin’s exploitation of the semi-vacuum between Election and Inauguration to move a few chess pieces across the board aggressively). Putin and Trump have some kind of weird friendship going, but it will be an uneasy one. More like ‘keep your friends close, but your enemies closer, I imagine. Neither of them seem to have yet registered that the Taliban, Al Qaeda and IS have changed the rules of the game. That they could, effectively start the world on the road to a nuclear exchange. Quite ridiculous, they don’t have nuclear weapons or delivery systems? No, but they know people who do.

2)   As Trump slowly rose from the swamp, to prominence and popular acclaim, liberals dismissed him as a sick joke. The American People could not possibly vote for a foolish, vainglorious, ignorant bigot, the political equivalent of ‘trailer trash’. As the pendulum began to swing his way, they comforted us: look, they said, even if he were elected, he wouldn’t have that much power. He’ll be trussed up by Senate and Congress and brought to heel. Look what they did to Obama….. I haven’t heard that argument for a few weeks, not since Trump has begun to unveil his trusted advisors and major appointees in Government. Who is the prototype appointee: him, of course. Yea-saying billionaire, CEOs, grateful for their elevation to public office, right wing, reactionary, no background in government or politics, but links to suspect pressure groups, factions, organisations or lobbies who are very political indeed, like the NRA. Big Business goes to Washington, Big Oil and Big Pharma and Big Arms, find they have Best Friends with their hand on the levers of power. It’s a zoo of Big Beasts, and it’s feeding time. Obviously they will all divest themselves of any business interests which might cause a conflict of interests. Not. Just like Trump.

Glass half full: these developments have already generated mass opposition: there is a growing movement of political resistance on both sides of the Atlantic that will protest and contest this wave of government extremism. Bernie and Jeremy (the Ben & Jerry of democratic politics) have started something, the most wide-ranging and well-supported radicalism that we have seen in 50 years. Importantly, it has engaged a youthful cohort that had previously been branded apathetic, apolitical and more concerned with gaming and texting than the state of their society.

We have to acknowledge, however, that they are taking on governments dedicated to thwarting them, and who will be brutally repressive if they feel their position is threatened; and the bulk of the media magnates are in their pockets and will orchestrate the general public against them. One illustration will do:

In the 1980s the British miners went on strike. Mrs Thatcher’s Government tried to crush them, bringing in huge numbers of police to their meetings and demonstrations and there was violence, bloodshed, criminalisation and a huge rending of the social fabric. And the media gleefully covered it all, newsreels and front page photos of bleeding policemen, miners throwing staves and getting thrown into police custody. The lot.

In the middle of it Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader and chief Villain of the Piece in the media coverage, announced that he had information that Thatcher’s intention was to close down most of the mining industry and beating the miners’ union into submission was the central plank of a wider strategy; Others saw it as a much wider test-case: if she could beat the miners, the most doggedly militant of the trade unions, she could bring the whole Trade Union Movement to heel. Which she did.

Scargill was hung out to dry by the media. He was vilified, derided as a militant Marxist, and a paranoid liar for saying what he had. Thirty years on, we discover from recently-released Cabinet papers that this was exactly what Thatcher intended – and achieved. Scargill’s information was a truthful, accurate account of Government plans and yet at the time the media made him Public Enemy No 1, simply for blowing the whistle on Government dishonesty and antidemocratic malpractice.

Happy New Year of protest….but don’t be mistaking widespread protest for gaining political power, they are very different things and play to different audiences.

Why do people make New Year Resolutions? It’s only a change of one digit in the date, hardly a well-spring of revolutionary change in anything. Nothing really to distinguish it from the day before or the day after. It’s just a marker, but an opportunity to start a new era in your life. Ground Zero for a new construction, the point when a new life/you began, or it could do….wipe the slate, give you a clean bill of health for your bad conscience or past failures, you’ll do it right from now on…

Give up smoking, lose weight, eat better, go jogging, running, to the gym more, be nicer to X, visit elderly Y more, keep your room/study/desk tidy, not be so unpunctual, iron things properly, recycle, keep bills, receipts and bank statements together, not put off difficult or boring things, stop watching crap on TV, read books and newspapers more, learn things: a language, a skill, visit more museums and galleries, live within a budget, spend less money in criminally expensive coffee places who pay 0.35 pence a year in UK taxes, give more away, volunteer, keep a diary, give up drugs, clubbing and one night stands….

You may stay with some of these for a while but they seldom make it through to February without you having to say “Well, no, I haven’t completely given it up …. but I have really really cut down, so that’s better, isn’t it? Oh, except for last week when I had a bit of a lapse. And yesterday. Actually, I could murder a Yorkie right now”.

Are we just weak? Probably, but it’s also simply that we are ‘creatures of habit’: one of those clichés which, annoyingly, happens to be true. If you want to predict people’s behaviour, you can just ask them, but they don’t always tell the truth, they say something which reflects well on them, or that they think you want to hear. No, the best possible predictor of people’s future behaviour is their current and past behaviour. Because it shows what they are doing or have done. It’s concrete and proven, not wishful thinking. It shows their patterns of behaviour, what they have repeatedly chosen to do, because they like it…..

There’s the answer. People break their resolutions because, actually they like doing what they do, but you didn’t need a psychologist to tell you that. And despite Brexit and President-Elect Chump, they generally don’t like change very much.

'CHANGE IS GOOD' was a mantra repeated mindlessly in an effort to overcome resistance to change and people's lack of flexibility. It was a a phrase that resonated through my career in Universities as successive waves of ‘innovation’ wreaked havoc with actually doing our jobs properly, as we struggled to adapt to new structures – ‘innovation’ which in some cases actually took us back to 20 years ago, to systems which apparently hadn’t worked then. Also we had to learn a new language, of concepts and terminology, that came along with the new philosophy (that had usually come from the World of Business – which many of us had come to Universites to escape).

 I am not conservative by nature (upper or lower case C) but I often found myself critical of these changes: OK so it wasn’t just re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, but it was time-consuming, expensive and very irritating when there was no proven benefit in prospect: just wishful thinking and a bit of kicking the TV set to improve the reception (the parallels with Brexit here are becoming overwhelming).

Change is good? Not intrinsically good, no. Change for the better is good, obviously, and change for the worse is bad. So until there’s hard evidence, or at the very least, the opinions of people who know about these things that the outcome will be an improvement, don’t do it.  Change is good for innovation in an industrial society; it is bad for the conservation of what is good in a culture. Would you like a piece of my Yorkie.....?

30-odd years ago I had a friend, NK, who ran a shop on Mortimer Street, near my office. He was affable, interesting, knowledgeable and quite wise: an amateur philosopher whose musings were not the kind of moral banners you get on Facebook. Once he asked me what I would choose if he could grant me a wish. I was rather broke at the time, so I said “a million quid would be useful”. “No, try again”, he said. “Alright, good health”, I said. “No,” he said, but I sensed I was ‘getting warmer’. “OK, I said, I’ll just settle for happiness.”  “No,” he said, “what you must wish for is a positive attitude, because everything else you want can flow from that….”

Simple, (and problematic – if a depressive could engineer a positive attitude ‘just like that’ they probably wouldn’t have got depressed in the first place, and it’s a near-impossible trick to pull when actually depressed), but essentially true. It took a long time to take it on board, for me. Until I realised that I had a habit of looking first at the downside of any dilemma or course of action – which then dogs the appreciation of the positive side. I don’t do that anymore and life is better. So maybe this year, resolve to be positive, and change (for the better) will come. I know this may just sound like a cheap self-help manual: I’m just saying what worked for me, and hope it would work for others. 

I'm now going to write a book on how smiling at yourself a great deal in the bathroom mirror helps lift depression.  Apparently it actually does ("studies have shown that...") but I'm guessing it depends on what you see there as to whether you can come up with a smile at all. Perhaps best not to try it on the morning after New Years's Eve, though.

Pain is a season               

And so is happiness

For this very reason

Don’t heed the crappiness,

It goes.

   

In Teresa May's long stint as Home Secretary, she made many mistakes, but the one that stood head and shoulders above the rest was her responsibility for the mass breakout from HM Prison, Albany, on the Isle of Wight in 2013, when over 700 men escaped over 24 hours. May, on grounds of very low costs, had accepted a tender from an Indian/Chinese consortium to build a new prison alongside the old one. The construction was a revolutionary one involving raw materials from India and Chinese industrial mastery to massively compress rice into solid building blocks, 24 inch cubes, which looked like concrete, was very heavy, and gave no clue to their actual constituents. A prisoner's pet mouse gave the game away when its distended body needed two men to carry it away after expiring. The prisoners then simply ate their way to freedom. Most of them were recaptured through a design flaw in the escape plan: it was an island. A few escaped by ferry, posing as polytechnic lecturers on a stag weekend in their ill-fitting cotton trousers and pale blue stripey shirts. Afterwards, a Home Office spokesperson said: "There will be an investigation and those responsible will be promoted to Prime Minister in due course: in any event we will stamp out this Patna* behaviour.  A spokesman for the escapers commented: "To escape in this way was very satisfying at the time, but two hours later we got hungry and just wanted to do it all over again". 

*Readers may recall that the Editor has undertaken to reduce and eventually eradicate the punitive number of word-plays in his 'journalism' but craves your indulgence in this article while he attempts to get in the Guinness Book of World Records with this submission of seven in one piece. It should also be borne in mind that while painful, this addiction/affliction of elderly men, as a disease entity, is less harrowing than the Other One, prostatitis, though the two have a similar piss-taking quotient.

And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.   Rainer Maria Rilke

New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.    James Agate

Ring out the false, ring in the true.    Alfred Lord Tennyson

1) Listen to my dentist, the wonderful MahtaYasseri, and eat less chocolate. Reduce gradually by one bar a day for a week, then VOW not to leave a Mars Bar under my pillow every night, AND set an alarm for 3.30 am.

2) Stop thinking of Jeremy Hunt homophonically.  It is crude and offensive to women, though, in mitigation, stunningly appropriate

3) Stop alluding to Arsenal fans' complete lack of a sense of humour about their side, and concede that they have had so much less practice than their Tottenham counterparts. Also, fill-in sheep-dip in sideway for visiting Arsenal fans: it doesn't cure them but does provide a brothel for local cats to do their dogging, as it were.

4) While I have a slight faith in karma, I think it is time to stop wasting love on people who do not return it, or care. 

5) Persist with personal austerity policy so that teenage daughter flees miserly father and provides the biggest economy of all.

6) Stop befriending people on Facebook who have no Friends: there's always a reason and it's either sad or sordid

7) Delete the word 'old' from my vocabulary.

8) Stop getting murderously angry when I think of someone who has twice told me that that she thinks the Holocaust was "terribly exaggerated", now a criminal offence in Germany.  Antisemitism takes many forms and runs deep, but it is 'a light sleeper' (Conor Cruise O'Brien).

9) Consult this list in one month's time and larf at the hopeless and pathetic aspirations of humankind.

10) Slalom around the control freaks and do WTF I want to do.....