More Scum of the Iconic Variety
This afternoon was quite mild, especially for the time of the year, and so I opened the living room window a fraction, to ventilate the room. A little while later, I heard conversation, loud talking. Looking out, I noticed that someone had parked their car, a rather flash looking set of wheels, in front of my house: no big deal, we have undesignated on-street parking, and I don’t own a car. I then noticed that the owner of the car, who I believe lives a dozen or so doors up the street from me, was standing in the road (it’s a terraced dead-end street), with his mobile phone on (very loud) speaker on the roof of the vehicle, conducting a conversation while chowing a McDonald’s burger, also perched on the roof of the car. He was washing it down with a can of Bud, which was next to the burger and the expensive-looking phone. Conversation and burger finished, he locked up and went back to his house.
They say that the cream rises to the top. I’ve found that it’s not always the case. More commonly, scum floats. Go figure. It’s my belief in the truth of the latter observation that’s landed us where we are now. And where are we, precisely? Well, it does seem that we’re rather lost if the truth be known, uncertain of our orientation.
Everywhere you may care to turn, there’s evidence of crisis and confusion. One could contend it was ever thus: after all, the great philosophers, as well as those responsible for founding the major religions (not to mention the not to major, and those long lost belief systems), were all precisely concerned with the vexing and perplexing issue of man’s place in the cosmos. Similarly great Art (and by ‘great’ I am by no means referring, necessarily, to canonical works alone) in all media tackles or addresses these existential and unanswerable questions. But their unanswerability does not render them not worth asking or pondering. Quite the opposite, in fact.
But somewhere along the way, we – as a species – appear to have grown rather more certain of our position, of our assured dominance over all things. And that certainty – which I would argue is rather spuriously derived at best – has led, perhaps inevitably, to complacency.
Art has, to speak broadly of contemporary works, especially popular contemporary works, become self-reflective, self-referential, self-absorbed and insular. Pop songs with meaningless lyrics about not being able to pull down the local nightclub or about buying a nice pair of brogues to cheer yourself up (because we are living in a material world, after all); kitchen sink novels told with a postmodern irony, all penned by teenagers and twenty-somethings with no knowledge or experience, and, worse still, no observational or literary skills, and no interest in looking beyond the end of the suburban cul-de-sac they live in with their parents. So with nothing to say and nothing to really worry about, they have time on their hands to fill with the unimportant. And when there’s nothing else, image is all that’s left: image is everything. Which is why everything is ‘iconic’ nowadays. The trouble is, the ubiquity of the term – often misapplied, I might add – has devalued it to the extent that it has been rendered essentially meaningless. Not only is Kate Moss iconic (debatable at best), but black mascara’d eyelashes are emblematic of the ‘London Look,’ apparently, are similarly iconic. There are more iconic buildings than one could ever name, so we’d be led to believe, and it’s not just the Empire State Building, the Guggenheim, St Paul’s cathedral, but various tower blocks and multi-story car-parks, power stations, cooling towers and 60s prefabricated abominations that appeared somewhere in the background in a scene in some cruddy film featuring ‘iconic’ English ‘actor’ Michael Caine which just so happens to be an ‘iconic’ movie of the decade. Only this morning, I was watching the BBC news. A reporter was in Bingley, standing in front of the head office of the screwed Bradford and Bingley. She referred to it as an iconic building. I’d never seen it before, and it looked very much like any other office with a company name on the front. You’re probably getting the idea by now. But you may also think I’ve veered horribly off topic. Bear with me: the point I’m trying to make is that we’ve become so engrossed in the unimportant, so overwhelmingly obsessed with surface, with appearance, the superficial, that we’ve entirely lost sight of what’s really importune, and, perhaps as a consequence – or perhaps it’s simply part and parcel of the same blinkered self-absorption – we’ve convinced ourselves of our own importance and infallibility.
So those who look the part, talk the talk and walk the walk have obtained positions of power, in business, in government (in the UK it’s referred to as ‘spin’ – dressing up some old bullshit in a smart suit and tonking it out with dollops of rhetoric and manipulated ‘statistics’), in fact, everywhere. Let’s get one thing straight: capitalism is not meritocratic. Success has fuck all to do with skill in terms of ability or acumen or ideas and is everything to do with who you know, and with convincing people. And so, once again, image is everything. If you look right, you’ll be lauded as ‘iconic’ – especially if you can grab that ‘just so’ photo opportunity that captures the zeitgeist – and whatever crap you come out with, no matter what insidious shit you represent and no matter how lacking in substance it may be will be forgotten, won’t mater. Take Britney Spears – perhaps better known for her ‘iconic’ schoolgirl image in the video for her debut single and for shaving her head than as the performer of some great pop tunes. Ok, I guess it can cut both ways. But the build ‘em up, knock ‘em down world of celebrity hype’s perhaps another matter for another time.
The trouble is, all these people who’ve blagged or bought or rode coat-tails into positions of power – almost invariably motivated by greed – don’t have a fucking clue. And now we’re paying for our gullibility.
Granted, I’m not saying Bush got into presidency by anything other than deception, error and fluke (and cash... although a second term...? one has to wonder...) but ‘New Labour’ was a con. Style over substance. Conservative policies with a red tie so people would still think there was a socialist tinge to their not-very-left-of-centre ideas. And it took a decade to realise..? But what about the major-league banks and financial organisations? Putting aside momentarily the issue of ‘fat cat’ salaries, bonuses, golden handshakes, payoffs for screwing up, etc., precisely what do these faceless suits do? I mean, really? How do they justify their existences, let alone their wages? And what are their credentials anyway? How on earth does one land a job like that? Track back... their suits. To the outside world, they’re essentially anonymous. But they have power. Which leaves the questions how, and why? I’d wager that they’re very good at convincing people; that they’ve got the lingo mastered, that they’re experts in the art of corporate bullshit. They may even have been to business school. But that’s about it. they’ll also be fiscally greedy mofos, and will have made business decisions based on their desire to own and earn more, and to impress the shareholders. Risky decisions – if successful they’re genius, they’re maverick. If not, they still get a decent pay-off for their trouble, and the higher up the ladder they go, the bigger the golden goodbye. Until now.
Finally, mistakes are being exposed. Fuck-ups paid for. It’s too late, of course. They shareholders, the ones that really matter, are ultimately fucked. But then, we’re all fucked. It was of course inevitable.
Oh but there’ll be bail-outs, right? Well, yes, but that what are they worth? The near-mythical figures being bandied about are truly staggering. And that’s just it. are they near-mythical... or actually mythical? Take the US bailout figure that’s been under discussion: $700bn. Does so much money even exist? I don’t mean in cash: of course it does. I don’t mean in theoretical terms or representational terms. But that’s just it: all money is theoretical. A tenner isn’t £10. The note says as much, in that it promises to pay the bearer the stated value. But it gets passed on, and no-one ever actually claims their £10. The fact of the matter is that they’d probably struggle to do so. Does the £10 even exist? And as for the $700bn... I’d like to see it. it’s all very well offering such sums, but it’s not real money. Which of course raises the question, where is the real money?
Like the iconic film star, model, album cover, or image conscious politician, the money is all surface, image, carefully propagated myth, it isn’t real. But everyone has come to believe in it, to the point that it’s become the new religion: money is the god (and again, the parallels are quite obvious). And because everyone’s become obsessed by money, and our culture – being broadly capitalist by nature – centred around the creation of wealth, the accumulation of wealth and the exchange of ‘money’ for goods and services, and no-one wants to be bottom of the pile, we live in a greed-driven society. Which means that while the so-called ‘fat cats’ are easy targets in the current mess, it’s the bozos out making the sales who are really to blame. They want their bonuses so they can buy the flash car and have the nice holiday loafing on a beach somewhere, and they’re going to make unscrupulous sales to do so. Wouldn’t you?
But wait. Just because you’re offered something doesn’t mean you have to take it. How many borrowers declined loans they would be unable to make the repayments on? There are people on the news daily complaining that they were sold a mortgage for ten times their salary that they couldn’t afford. But they’d have seen the monthly repayments before signing up, and must surely have recognised that they exceed their monthly income... why did they sign up? Because they’re greedy too: they want to present the right image, that of being affluent, in order to get ahead, show their fiscal superiority (even when it’s a lie), propagate the myth. And this is why we really are paying the price for our own gullibility now. It’s time to wise up the marks. And also time to stop the culture of blaming everyone else and for people to start looking closer to home (before it’s repossessed).