COVER -> DAY ONE
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Writing about your own provisional history -- it becomes less provisional over time -- is as inevitable a part of ageing as attending ever more funerals. Over time obituaries become less sepia.
The funeral I would have liked to go to recently was that of Alberto Korda, the Cuban photographer who took the iconic photograph of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, revolutionary show-man and martyr. Korda took up photography so that, in his own words, he could be closer to beautiful women but it was not long before he was moved by rural poverty and transferred his affections to the Castro revolution. His picture of Che was ignored by his own editor and was later picked up by a publisher just at the point when its subject died in Bolivia. It was soon de rigeur in the wall displays of bourgeois students all over the world. Korda made no money from the picture but, in a richly symbolic transaction, he sued a vodka manufacturer for using the picture and spent the proceeds to fund child health care.
What at least in part explains the Che phenomenon was the Vietnam War and partly, too, the advent of Bob Dylan whose 60th birthday fell in the week of Korda's death. Dylan, more directly than Che, spoke to a generation, which was rich enough to be radical. Students were not driven to protest by poverty nor because they had read and understood Karl Marx but because it provided a script which was nominally idealistic, culturally distinctive and financially cost free. You might occasionally toss a dollar into the Socialist Worker hat but nobody knew if you didn't. It was also ravishingly heterodox, provoking hostility from elders who should have known better.
I hesitate to describe the protest phenomenon as "Post Modern" because, critically considered, the term is meaningless but we must be living in the first ever age when collective street theatre passes for political commitment.
In the age of mass media, when we can all be simultaneously aware of an event such as the death of Princess Diana, we can create an ephemeral emotion within an ephemeral spiritual community, which bursts spontaneously into life and then almost as quickly fades. What started as a chanting blue jean placard has become a granny bank of posies. Again, the elders ought to know better; to lay flowers in memory of a sad princess is no substitute for responsible, incremental community reform and for those who really want radical reform Che is hardly an appropriate role model for our post-industrial society.
Empathetic gesture and political abstention are two sides of the same coin. We are either too rich to care but too greedy to be contented or too poor to think it matters. In spite of the commonplace sociological stratification the middle is disappearing, turning into a chasm. Our politicians cannot, whatever they say, give us ever more of what we want for even less taxation while, simultaneously, redistributing to the poorest. In this we are playing a dangerous game of collusion but perhaps now, with the Bush tax cut, we will be rumbled at last. Sadly, Marxism is correct in this sense that the poor may have to take part in some genuine and violent protest before we arrest greed's ratchet. This is a poor sequel to the age of Che and Dylan. Bill Clinton was as good as it got.
Our post-industrial calm is deceptively self-satisfied. We are in need of radical institutional reform but as long as the economic growth continues the rich will go on accumulating and the poor will calculate the relative advantage of picking up the crumbs or overturning the rich man's table.
The fact that getting on to half of the population does not vote may be perceived as a sign of apathy, but callous indifference on the one hand and alienation, again to borrow from Marx, on the other would be a better diagnosis.
In the age of digital connection an increasing number of people are disconnected, from the political process, from the needs of others, from a realistic sense of what is possible, from a frank self- assessment.
Politicians flail, journalists thrash, plutocrats pillage, bureaucrats burrow, citizens grasp or smoulder, according to their position and their prospects. We can no longer take unthinking comfort in the platitudes of the consultative spasm and the rhythm of the ballot box. Yet institutional reform seems as far away as Pluto.
I remember the first time I saw Coriolanus back in the days of Dylan, smack in the middle of what became known, quite foolishly, as "The Swinging Sixties," violently disagreeing with Shakespeare's depiction of the common man's view of politics. It might have been like that in Rome or even Elizabethan London, the thought followed, but it is much improved now.
Looking back I may have to confess to self-deception or, perhaps being more kind to myself, it is a matter of time making trends clear now that were obscure then. Surely the democratic high mindedness of Roosevelt and Kennedy was simply a response to an industrial society which had reached the point where the majority was both educated and indigent. Now that the majority is, as first recognised by Galbraith, educated but affluent, the ballot box isn't much use to the poor unless political leadership can inspire a moderate degree of altruism.
Yet altruism is poor social cement, mutuality being much better. Altruism too easily turns to dictatorship so we will have to look for new mutuality models as the gap between the rich and the poor widens.
The crudest form of mutuality from the point of view of the rich is insurance against being plundered. Better to take out the insurance now than wait for a new Dylan and a new Che to stir up discontent. This time it might be for real rather than the self-referential posturing of the 1960s. Do not look for this in Seattle's protest nor in the 'think tanks' scattered around Capitol Hill. The coarseness of our wealth will be answered with the coarseness of poverty. For all its faults, the final flowering of romanticism in the age of Dylan and Korda had some sort of strategy but what we have to fear now is the random violence of despair.
