COVER -> DAY ONE
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Sitting at his knee, simultaneously united and divided by both Aquinas and Marx, my grandfather's resignation in the face of perversity and wickedness infuriated me.
How could this man who had left school at the age of 12 but knew plays of Shakespeare by heart and was equally at home with ancient philosophers and mediaeval theologians tell me that my idealism was a necessary rite of passage and no more? He must have reached a point where the fire of his ambition for his brothers and sisters was tempered to such an extent by a recognition of their selfishness that the balance tipped from active campaigning to saddened observation.
I think I reached that point last week. It was neither sudden nor dramatic. It came as a traveller might have come before the age of steam, daily expected without precisely knowing the day. Its harbinger was a poll which showed George Bush Jr 12 points ahead of Vice President Gore in the polls. The prospect of America at full economic throttle without any Government check turned from a fear to a near certainty. The only slight consolation, an almost self-parodying nod towards integrity, was that it would be better to have a fearless champion of greedy bastards than a cowardly betrayer of homeless bastards.
I can place the exact moment precisely when the balance finally tipped, when the stranger arrived.
I was taking part in a village pageant to mark the Millennium, singing Gregorian chant 'off', pretending to be a yokel singing West Gallery music and processing as a chorister of the Anglo Catholic revival.
It might have been a major set piece from a novel, a cast of 150, all the major village organisations presenting tableaux, the apparent chaos of the two rehearsals culminating in a respectable performance taken in the spirit in which it was given. As I stood with my fellow performers, from tiny Brownies to Parish Council worthies, it struck me that even in my tiny community there are givers and takers, activists and passivists, those who have an urge to enrich the lives of children and those who just want somebody, anybody, to take their children for a while.
We all know the reality of this unfairness, the non-unionised labour that benefits from a union pay deal, the lazy shopkeepers who benefit from an active trade association, the aesthetes who like tidy streets but never join clean-up working parties.
The climax of this sour reverie was the recognition that in my community just about all the altruists were bowing while the parasites were clapping. This was a cultural symbol of much of the script we had just enacted, of kings and nobles consuming and serfs producing.
There is in England a description of the establishment as "The great and the good" but the clear, simple truth is that there are the great and there are the good and they all too rarely coincide in any single human frame. The good went to the chaotic rehearsals and the great expected no less.
One particularly striking aspect of the script was its many references to warfare, from the Norman conquest of England to the Second World War.
The script celebrated the "War time spirit" of the villagers which was, in its way, unconscious irony because, without the two great wars of the 20th Century there would have been no room for the politics of social progress. It was only the Great Depression, a direct consequence of the First World War, which temporarily cooled America's cruel but glittering passion for laissez faire capitalism, and it was only the exigencies of the Second World War that continued to temper its ardour.
In Europe, more accustomed to public sector economic and social engineering, it was also war which generated social change, slaughter now in exchange for free medical services later, a macabre compact.
With no noticeable internal upheaval at my discovery, like someone who says reaching a 50th birthday simply makes them a day older and has no other significance, I went to the pub with some of the cast. They were exhilarated by the performance and pleased with its reception, they had the joy of constructors and creators, the pleasure of recalling shards of magic which no critic can either describe or dispel.
That was my consolation, that explains why I suffered no anguish when the balance finally tipped. Deep in my heart I had always known that to be progressive is a kind of art that involves risk but to be a conservative is to be a critic who feasts equally whether the risk pays off or not.
Being heterogeneous, artists and progressives find it difficult to agree on what must be changed and how --- but conservatives, whose primary life force is selfishness, only have to deal with the dishonour which not infrequently breaks out amongst thieves.
The times are inauspicious for progressive enterprises.
In the West, the poor neither threaten social or economic stability. When they riot they do not stray far from their ghettos and growth is only rarely halted or reversed.
Crises are distant and are either ignored, as with the Rwanda genocide, or dealt with technologically, as with Kosovo.
As dictators Nike, Disney and McDonald have been far more effective than Stalin, Mao and Castro.
Nonetheless, it is only critics who write silly, pessimistic pieces about the death of creative art; artists do not, cannot, believe such a thing.
Nor, through a similarity of temperament, can progressives accept that the causes they champion are hopeless.
The irony is that the greater part of the fruits of their triumphs are most often enjoyed by the passivists, but the joy is that virtuosity and virtue are their own reward. Indeed, the greatest peril to our moral integrity is that we condescend in the fullness of our knowledge to those who condescend to us in their ignorance.
