Wednesday, April 01, 2009

World's Problems Solved By Multiplyed Pop Forces of G4 And 5ive

Oh yay! It's happened again. I've got all confused and don't know what to think about things. This week: G20 protests and anti-capitalists in general. Incidentally, I am making a small concession in their crusty direction by ruminating upon this subject not in one of my local dens of capitalistic fuck-piggery (RIGHT KIDS) Starbucks, but in an independent and groovy cafe-type thing. Even though it's so twee it's literally making me break out in hives. And yes, I mean literally. Cutesy blackboard menus scattered with chalked hearts? Check. Loaves of gorgeous-looking crusty (not hippy) bread idly lolling about the place like organic wheat Bacchuses? Check. A "pram station" to encourage that bilious of social sub-stratas, the "I claim I'm letting my child roam free to express his individualism but in fact I'm just ignoring him which is neglect bordering on child abuse" yummy mummy? Checaaaaarrgh!

So yes - I know exactly what to think about this so-saccharine-it-should-be-on-Gilmore-Girls caffeine zone. I don't know what to think about the anti-capitalist protesters. First of all. I may have a similar level of knowledge and understanding of the current economic crisis as a rusty and unloved garden trowel, but even I can glean that if capitalism was a person, it's currently experiencing the moment 30 seconds after that "pretending to topple off a cliff to freak people out" gag goes horribly wrong. Why protest about it now? Rebranding Coco Pops as Choco Krispies didn't work and died a death, and no-one's still protesting about that, wearing cartoon monkey masks and squatting in Tesco Express. OK, I concede that it may have got us into this mess - capitalism, not Coco Pops - but ranting at a storm as the clouds disappear over the horizon strikes me as pretty damn pointless.

Even though the protesters are totally right. And I can see that, and I agree with their principles, and of course the world would be a fine and beautiful place if there were no fat cats and no greedy bankers and everyone had a daisy drawn on their face and danced with free abandon in the streets. (Oh! Mother of all shudders) But they're just so annoying! When I was watching the footage of the protests today, watching the dreadlocks shake and the hippy bums parking on the tarmac, I slowly turned into a 1950s bowler-hatted Tory, until I found myself screaming at the television "Get a haircut! GET A JOB!" They annoy me in exactly the same way that animal rights activists do. How come they only ever want to save cute and fluffy animals? Foxes, polar bears, bunny-wunnies... I never see people camped outside Boots showing me graphic pictures of snakes being experimented on, or claiming that giant venomous scorpions have rights too. They're worse body fascists than Heat magazine.

So I remain confused. I like a McDonalds once in a while, and want the banks to lend me many hundreds of thousands of pounds to buy into the bourgeois capitalist notion that I need to own my own home, but I also like smashing windows and shouting at horses and the general process of "daubing". What to do, what to do...

2 comments:

James Taverner said...

Erm..."sub-stratas"?

Loser.

Nice blogging, as ever.

justrestingmyeyes said...

You think something as trifling as grammar and word meaning comes between me and a juicy bit of alliteration?

I can't even read and you know it, you racist! x