Each weekly edition of the “New Statesman” is currently closed by “The NS Q&A”, a short interview with a celebrity or public figure, with the same questions posed to each of them. From time to time, as a form of calibration, I like to indulge in answering the questions for myself mentally. One of the questions which has constantly come back to me of late is the simple “when were you happiest?” While “right now” is a common answer, which might be surprising if not for the fact that the interviewed individuals are typically successful and seemingly well-adjusted characters, the answer which keeps creeping back to me personally is at the age of 8 years old. It’s a specific moment in fact; late 1996, sat with my Mam during the school holidays at Teesside Park’s cinema, basked in the technicolour opening credits of the Michael Jordan-Looney Tunes mash-up “Space Jam”, one of the quintessential 90s kids’ movies. To the sound of Miami bass group Quad City DJs’ bombastic title song, the smash-cutting creds spliced with triumphant footage of Jordan at his NBA-dominating peak were a wide-eyed jamboree, the ultimate pop cultural crossover from probably the biggest sporting superstar in human history, at his very zenith. As I shall explain, this is an archetypal example of how ignorance is bliss.
In hindsight, I appreciate the function of this sequence; to the very young and impressionable as I was at that moment, this was an irresistible transmission of the soft power of sports propaganda to simultaneously obscure and remould inconvenient truths into something more palatable. Irrespective of the complicated relationship Jordan had to race, as touched upon by lockdown’s excellently watchable documentary “The Last Dance”, the entire spectacle could not be a finer packaging of the American Dream as imagined at its most utopian. To 8-year-old me, the United States was the unquestioned powerhouse of Earth and its citizens enjoyed the finest lives imaginable, and we in the UK benefited similarly from being the nation’s best friend. Moments like this were what made me understand international polarity in these terms before any history book could truly help me to dissect the way in which this information is formulated and propagated. These are the seeds which sow Western exceptionalism and also UK exceptionalism specifically, and undoubtedly contribute to explaining phenomena such as the political upheavals of 20 years later; the relationship with the US as the average UK voters interprets it undoubtedly assisting to power the turn to Brexit, built on the idea that continental Europeans are ‘not like us’. The overarching feeling I recall colouring my childhood, against a backdrop of thrilling pop music, Hollywood productions and what might selectively be described as the peak of neoliberal politics all across the English-speaking world, Francis Fukuyama’s infamous “End of History”, was the feeling that whatever darkness might be out there, everyone in the UK and US would be just fine, eternally. It was almost Heaven.
The moment when this nascent worldview was shattered in my mind remains both with me and possessed of the utmost clarity; five years later, during the 9/11 attacks. I clearly recall coming home from school to the rolling news broadcasts and pitching out on my bike for a while, a feeling of sombre devastation prevailing, and the answers to what had happened seeming far beyond reach. It wasn’t quite an “are we the baddies?” moment in the style of Mitchell and Webb’s famed sketch, but it was that afternoon that I realised that I, and things, would never be the same. I don’t believe that even at that moment, I ever bought into the narrative which was subsequently used to justify the war-mongering which would so irreversibly undermine public trust in Transatlantic institutions. As unbearable as that roll over the cliff edge of history was, it did not feel, even to a 13-year-old me, like an unbridled evil had been unleashed upon the world. Like many, I wanted to know who would want to strike their most venomous blow against Babel, and why they would need to do it. I realised that whatever those reasons were, this surely could not be borne purely out of anarchy. Shade came into my world, as all notions of pure black and white seeped together.
These are questions of what constitutes society, how societies think and move and how certain people are drowned by them rather than being washed along with the current like the majority. To my mind, a cabal of angry, disaffected, overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white agitators, both young and old, have recently worked as useful idiots in combination with an age-old ancien régime of press barons, financiers and their respective marionettes in politics and media (many of whom hold certain views for money) to fatally compromise the relative, communitarian stability upon which Western societies had been maintained, even if such underpinnings were in truth already reduced to a mirage by the Thatcher/Reagan axis and the unravelling of the post-war consensus, and even if electoral expressions of and support for this suicidal impulse have been enacted by a much broader range of Boomers at the ballot box. The characteristics of whiteness and maleness have also upheld among the wider support base for this politics of misanthropy, even as one scans the demographic chart for age and other variables. It strikes me that the most steadfast advocates of this model of chaos, which is nonetheless thoroughly calculated in its aims and spread at the head of this complex, socially incestuous serpent, are utterly ignorant as to the vast and powerful forces of capital, culture and ideology arrayed against them, blasting with the ferocity of a hurricane such that it is no longer possible to comprehend how those winds prevail against their own best interests as well as those whose interests they have been so effectively, mercilessly moulded to attack. It is a meticulously and expertly designed politics and public discourse of jealousy, hatred and division, and we’ve seen in recent years that it works.
On the point of gender equality alone, the sentiment is best embodied by the following quote from Scottish comedian and writer Frankie Boyle. While Boyle’s comedy once pushed at the very furthest limits of decency with jarring, blunt-force observations deployed under the guise of satirising and examining what we allow to pass for entertainment and culture, which were pitched marginally the right side of acceptability for me like so many of the very finest stand-ups have been, his subsequent blossoming into a much more trenchant and analytical political operator in the vein of his hero Bill Hicks has delightfully validated my long and exponentially growing fandom of his work. The following is likely the most beautiful and true statement I have seen him make to date, from his 2018 show “Prometheus Vol. 3”:
“I’m going to tell you honestly what I think about feminism…I genuinely think, if you’re a young guy at the moment, feminism is the only thing that has a plan for you. Capitalism doesn’t give a fuck about you, materialism doesn’t really care if you live or die. Feminism includes you, and when I see guys, particularly young guys, attacking feminism, do you know what it looks like to me? It looks like when the fire brigade go to a really rough housing estate and they get stoned. That’s what you’re doing; you’re stoning the fucking rescue services”.
So this is where we find ourselves in 2021, as the plague years rumble into their second calendar, exposing every faultline our system, constructed by design to appear teetering to the many while remaining remarkably resistant to reform or change at the expense of the elite situated at its apex, is nevertheless built so precariously atop; at the confluence of a so-called society where hoping for a progressive, meaningful, moral and righteous centring to life, envisioned and enacted in a harm-free manner, is obstructed and discouraged by virtue of its supposed and seeming unattainability, and of a capitalism whose main objective towards the average directionless young person, and males in particular, is to so aggressively sell the fantasy and ultimate objective of being a hip hop star (supplanting the previous fast-expiring rock star dream) or sports icon, despite the practical impossibility of such an eventuality (à la “Fight Club”, an often controversially interpreted movie which first informed my understanding of cinema as art, and which I have always since held close to my heart as a liberal, empathetic, philosophy-shaping, anti-capitalist lodestar, in sharp contrast to the many apparently reactionary ideologies some attribute to the film and its fans).
Compassion is an increasingly elusive quality these days, but I understand how misguided young men in particular end up in such disastrous predicaments, despite the genuinely dangerous poison spouted by the people I am thinking of, when only two potential trajectories seem to loom ahead. The first is a pointless existence slowly fizzling out, which undoubtedly drives people into the warped, conspiratorial communities which are driving contemporary conjecture and political outcomes to an ever-growing extent, especially in the US, where the homegrown “Paranoid Style” of politics described by Richard Hofstadter has barely ever seemed as prominent. The other is perishing more suddenly in some unimaginable, unanticipated, inconceivable historical event where multiple strands of our twisted, seemingly uncontrollable narratives collide so ground-shakingly. To this day I cannot gaze upon a gorgeous, cloudless blue sky without being reminded of the same New York horizon violated so horrendously that morning in September 2001.
Many people, the majority in fact, reconcile the aforementioned reality with their everyday lives and spend their time as happy and contented as they can, which I admire. Having peered through the looking glass and seen what I’ve observed, I can’t imagine ever being able to do this the way I did when I was 8 years old, under the glare of perhaps the greatest sports legend of all time, the Looney Tunes and a mighty empire of agitprop broadcasting its messages so brilliantly. That perception, to me, is the real black-pill, and it rejects all misogyny, racism, homophobia, inequality and hate of any kind, while embracing hope in the face of stupefyingly long odds. Things have flipped significantly in 24 years, and this is what “Space Jam” will always surprisingly evoke to me.
Roads To The North 