Not Reading The Room
From the Stage pages of the Guardian, a reminder of which concerns – and by extension which citizens – simply don’t matter:
As if the issue weren’t already foremost in a great many minds, perhaps due to unhappy first-hand experience. Note, too, the conflation of migrants and refugees. As if those arriving in vast numbers, welcome or otherwise, legally or not, were some homogenous mass of human sorrow, and thus, rather conveniently, impossible to refuse.
Readers are welcome to marvel at the conceit that objections to current policy – an effectively borderless nation – can only be the result of ignorance. No other possibilities being conceivable, it seems. And so, the flow of information, of views to be considered, and any expectations of listening, seem likely to travel in one direction only.
Readers will also note the assumption that the indigenous proletariat – those low-status citizens daring to be angry at the downgrading of their home – merely need to have their objections corrected. By drama of a very particular kind. As if concerns regarding rapid demographic transformation and a loss of cultural common ground could only ever be wrong.
As if there were no substance to their fears. No basis for their anger or sense of betrayal. As if it weren’t their neighbourhoods, not those of the luvvie set, being transformed rapidly and against their will – and very often for the worse.
As if they simply have to be told in a slightly different way.
A curious definition of an issue being opened up.
Whether our award-winning actor would be quite so enthusiastic about a compelling drama conveying the “emotional story” and “day-to-day realities” of someone whose home has been degraded and made alienating by the assumptions of people much like Mr Pryce remains unclear.
Though readers are welcome to guess.
This blog is kept afloat by the tip jar buttons below.
That.
Stop noticing things. Consume fiction instead.
They’ll try anything except listening to the voters.
Is Mr Pryce going to invest his own money in this oh so right drama production?
They just can’t help talking down to people.
Well, it’s not as if feelings on the matter have not been made clear, many times, quite loudly. One might say vividly. And it’s not as if the consequences of ignoring those feelings are particularly difficult to foresee. Yet somehow the option of just doing as you’ve been told doesn’t appear on the form.
Again, Mr Pryce and his peers seem to imagine that they live in a society without practical limits, and no human nature, as if the patience of those on whom these fantasies are being imposed were infinite. As if no ugliness could ensue.
As I said in earlier post,
Tribes that apparently, according to Mr Snow, shouldn’t exist.
The disconnect – the inability to read the room – is quite something. And so very Guardian.
And again, Mr Pryce, like Mr Snow, is unlikely to find his own neighbourhood enlivened by Congolese and Somali borra gangs, whose modes of expression involve machetes, and I doubt he’ll find his own doorstep literally being shat on.
And I think we can assume that Mr Pryce and Mr Snow have no recent first-hand experience of public transport and the, shall we say, challenges it can now present.
Likewise, I think it’s safe to say that neither of these men have visited a busy high-street optician recently and realised that they were the only white customer, the only one fluent in English, and the only one paying for their treatment.
Now, you might think that people shouldn’t notice such things or draw any conclusions from them, because that would be beastly and mean or something. But people will, and people do, and wishing otherwise is immaterial.
I note Mr. Pryce, currently playing a former head of MI5 now in a nursing home suffering dementia in the latest season of Slow Horses, hasn’t offered to accommodate and feed any of these “poor souls”.
I suppose berating the great unwashed for wrongthink is preferable to having Ahmed from Goatfuckistan as a house guest.