Monbiot and the Morlocks
In which the Guardian’s George Monbiot encounters the underclass and shows how his worldview is quite different from yours:
A group of us had occupied a piece of land on St George’s Hill in Surrey… Our aim had been to rekindle interest in land reform. It had been going well – we had placated the police, started to generate plenty of public interest – when two young lads with brindled Staffordshire bull terriers arrived in an old removals van. Everyone was welcome at the site and, as they were travellers, one of the groups marginalised by the concentration of control and ownership of land in Britain, we went out of our way to accommodate them. They must have thought they had died and gone to heaven.
Almost as soon as they arrived they began twocking stuff. A radio journalist left his equipment in his hire car. They smashed the side window. Someone saw them bundling the kit, wrapped in a stolen sleeping bag, into their lorry. There was a confrontation – handwringing appeals to reason on one side, pugnacious defiance on the other – which eventually led to the equipment being handed back. They wound their dogs up, making them snap and snarl at the other occupiers. At night they roamed the camp, staffies straining at the leash, cans of Special Brew in their free hands, shouting “fucking hippies, we’re going to burn you in your tents!”
We had no idea how to handle them without offending our agonised liberal consciences. They saw this and exploited it ruthlessly. Eventually the police solved the problem for us. Most of the cars parked at a nearby attraction had had their windows smashed and radios stolen, and someone had followed their lorry back to our site. As they were led away, my anarchist beliefs battled my bourgeois instincts, and lost.
Do read the whole thing. It brings a tear to the eye. And tune in next week when George tries to reason with the tattooed Neanderthal burgling his house.
Update, via the comments:
What’s almost – almost – touching is the implied revelation, i.e., that members of Designated Victim Groups, with which Guardianistas feel obliged to side whatever the particulars, can in fact be obnoxious and predatory scumbags. Apparently this thought hadn’t previously occurred to George and, by golly, the news troubles him. All of which suggests a well-rehearsed imperviousness to reality. One Guardian reader praises Mr Monbiot for his “refreshing honesty,” which rather gives the game away.
Maybe George wrote the article to show us how difficult it is to be virtuous, indeed heroic, at least as he conceives such things. I suspect, though, that any moral lesson is quite different from the one intended. You see, George believes in sharing, by which of course he means taking other people’s stuff. Yet he’s remarkably unprepared for that favour being returned. Say, by two burly chaps with neck tattoos and ill-tempered dogs. And as these burly chaps were members of a “marginalised group,” and therefore righteous by default, George was expecting noble savages. Alas, ‘twas not to be.
For more of George’s ideological crises, see here and here.
Update 2:
Oh dear. Mr Monbiot is now being assailed on Twitter for writing such a “racist” article. However, the people doing the chastising – including an indignant, self-described “agitator” – have yet to explain exactly why the article is racist, despite being asked. One of the chastisers is a “Marxist, knitter and student of critical theory.”
Our moral and intellectual betters, obviously.
>Let’s do what George says.
Not what he himself does.
ANARCHIST, n. A moonbat (especially the Ur-bat himself) who blithely and self-righteously ignores the laws that inconvenience him.
LIBERAL, n. A moonbat who believes that self-identification with a group automatically imbues him with that group’s positive (perceived) characteristics.
LEFTIST, n. What moonbats call themselves while amongst themselves but vehemently deny being in public.
MARXIST, n. See LEFTIST.
FASCIST, n. A moonbat who is comfortable with crony capitalism (often secretly benefiting from it) but who publicly insists that the gubmint is a necessary control on the excesses of the free market, as the control rods are to a nuclear reaction.
Think instead of how happy these Ethiopian peasants are, with their quaint little shelters made of leaves and packing cases! Isn’t it just adorable? George just knows this, you see.
I dunno, I’d throw the moonbat a bone and say he may be right, if only because the primitive societies are incapable of seeing a better way, thus their imperviousness to change. I recall something Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent Of Man concerning nomadic societies, the only literal quote I could find being:
“It is not possible in a nomad life to make things that will not be needed for several weeks. They could not be carried. And in fact [nomads] did not know how to make them… There is no room for innovation because there is not time, on the move, between evening and morning, coming and going all their lives, to develop a new device or a new thought – or even a new tune. The only habits that survive are the old habits. The only ambition of the son is is to be like the father.”
Ignorance is bliss, but then Lenin’s advice, “Learn, learn, learn” is it any wonder George is confused. Happiness is a choice, though not always the best one.
“Forget about the disease and Stone Age sanitation, the squalor and child mortality, the stunted average lifespan, the limited options in life and subsequent tedium.”
I always love it when someone starts telling us about how healthy everyone was back before we had all these processed factory-farmed GMO pesticide-slathered blah, blah, blah.
You know why so few people before the 20th century had problems like morbid obesity and gastric reflux and gluten allergies and arterial blockages? Because before the 20th century, if you got any of those things you died.
You do have to marvel at George’s readiness to tell other people how happy they really are, what with the terrible alienation caused by double glazing. Like his Guardian colleague Oliver James – another anhedonic hypocrite stressed by the contradictions of being a well-heeled middle-class lefty – Mr Monbiot wants us to believe that “wealth causes misery.” Yes, wealth is bad for “us” – by which he means bad for you.
Another Guardianista Edward Skidelsky made similar noises recently, fretting at length about pre-washed salad before telling us that the state should “create conditions favourable to simpler, less acquisitive modes of living.” Pre-washed salad is bad for our souls or something, says this sociology lecturer, and so the state should make more of an effort to tell “us” how to live. And then there’s Madeleine Bunting, the Guardian’s Saint of Perpetual Sorrow, who weeps and wails about “hyper-frantic consumerism” and “our preoccupation with things; our ever more desperate dependence on stimulants from alcohol to porn.” The presumptuous “we” is a Guardianista staple. They can’t resist speaking on our behalf and telling us how terrible and empty we feel. Because they, our betters, just know these things.
In February, Mr Monbiot belched his contempt for those who dare to disagree with him, dismissing such people as morally and mentally inferior. It’s what professed egalitarians do. “The other side,” he told us, is “on average more stupid than our own.” “Conservative ideology,” he added, “is the critical pathway from low intelligence to racism.” And all of this in contrast with noble liberals like himself, who are apparently “self-deprecating” and “too liberal for their own good.”
Let me get this straight. Monbiot is a leftist, an anarchist and a liberal. Will someone send him a dictionary?
Oh dear. Mr Monbiot is now being assailed on Twitter for writing such a “racist” article.
I don’t see any racism, just a lot of stupid.
Jacob,
I don’t see any racism, just a lot of stupid.
If you follow the various indignant Tweeters, you’ll find plenty of self-flattery: “So, presumably George Monbiot decided to be a bourgeois liberal because anarchist circles would be constantly calling out his racism.” But as yet, five days later, there’s still no clear explanation of why George’s article is “racist.” Apparently it just is. Why, one Tweeter wonders, couldn’t Monbiot’s story “just stay untold”? Another priggish soul tweets that the story should only have been aired “in the appropriate setting and not for personal financial gain.” The nearest thing to an argument seems to be this: If you’re, say, mugged by a gang of black youths, you shouldn’t write about it – ever – for fear that everyone will immediately assume that every single black youth is actually a mugger. (In that respect, it’s rather like Laurie’s ostentatious fretting over how to mention a rude lesbian waitress without leading us to believe that all lesbian waitresses are surly and obnoxious.)
Evidently, the brave new world of identity politics and “social justice” requires a certain amount of euphemism, evasion and dishonesty. There are endless qualifiers to add and Things We Must Not Mention™. For the Greater Good.
Is “Chav” a race?
Monbiot’s Twitter assailants remind of the reaction to Viz when they published a strip called the “Thieving Gypsy Bastards”.
From Wikipedia:
“The comic was reprimanded by the United Nations after featuring a strip called “The Thieving Gypsy Bastards”[19] During the resulting court case, UK newspaper The Sun ran a story revealing that the principal Roma man who initiated the action against them was in fact also being tried for (and was later found guilty of) handling stolen property.
I’m still surprised he didn’t simply blame the capitalist system for exploiting these hoods. We all know that the capitalist system creates unnecessary demand that fuels “property crimes” like the ones described, right?
‘Another lefty literally mugged by reality’.
Except in this case I don’t think he’d be able to spot reality at the police ID parade afterwards, assuming he wants to participate in an oppressive bourgeois spectacle such as ‘law enforcement’.
Oh how this latest drivel from Moonbat made me laugh …
No, please don’t be more than almost touched. His anguish over having heaved a sigh of relief when the boys and girls in blue did their job is still amply sufficient to make him special and superior. And I suspect the Guardian pays him enough to enable him to weather a fair amount of twocking.
I wouldn’t rule out the possibilty of him one day announcing out of the blue that he’s turned conservative. Let’s hope not, he’s much more fum as he is.
He may also be fum but I meant fun.
And what the hell is twocking?
It’s George’s way of saying “thieving” whilst simultaneously distancing himself from the bourgeois judgementalism implicit in such language. Like I said, special and superior.
My, you are a vindictive lot. The article is a kind of confession, after all.
For anyone who doesn’t think George has suffered enough…
http://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/apocalypse-close-an-amusement-chapter-one/
‘I wouldn’t rule out the possibilty of him one day announcing out of the blue that he’s turned conservative’.
Well his parents were Tories, and I get the feeling that his ‘green’ activism is just a surreptitious way of keeping the hoi polloi in check.
You can’t have that cheap flight for your two-week family holiday, because that will kill the planet, sir. But I can have all my transatlantic jaunts to promote my books because I care.