Luvuly Jubbly

Gives away my mother's age...

I looked about the internet for any mainstream criticism of the jubilee and all I found was huffing and puffing from right wing newspapers about the BBC's coverage of the whole dismal affair. Time was when 'bread and circuses' were worth the candle; when they really did fill your mind with highly superior puff; when reality was truly banished for a day or two. Fat chance.

As the rain fell and the banalities, like a mudflow, heaped up around the sodden masses - braving the weather to be 'a part of history' - the commentary on the British media sounded like enthusiastic jingles from supermarket speakers;
"It's amazing. She's stood all the way from Greenwich to the Tower!"

What drives hundreds of thousands (no official efforts to minimise crowd numbers here) to stand in the cold and rain for hours and sometimes days, in order to catch a glimpse of a super-rich old toff? In past Jubilees left-wing spectators would gloomily imagine the crowds, eventually in their brown or blackshirts, coming out at some future point to support the status quo against a socialist government or some such. Perhaps. The most frequent response to commentators who did the vox pop stuff seemed to be that people wanted to be there because the event was 'unique'; because it was 'part of history'. They wanted to be 'part of history' too.

'History' was obviously passing them by.

There is a famous phrase of Marx's which is associated with bread and circuses. 'Religion' it is often quoted, 'is the opium of the masses.' In fact on this occasion it was only the Arch Bish on Tuesday who dared wallop the bankers and the greedy rich. (Many of whom were sitting in the isles of his church - a church that had recently cleared out the occupy protesters. Thank God her maj did not have to step through them!) The bit of Marx's famous phrase that is often missed is the next bit (as an old friend of mine often bores on about. Sorry if you are reading this!) 'Religion' wrote Marx, 'is the opium of the people; ... the cry for spirit in a spiritless world.'

When Marx was writing he had in mind the new horrors of city slums and the legal slavery of the mills and the mines. He was writing about what that life did to the human imagination and mind as well as to millions of bodies. Check out the new industrial working classes in China, India; in Lagos and in Sao Paulo. 'The cry for spirit in a spiritless world' is an assertion of humanity against - to borrow another phrase - 'the rage of the machine.'

Our inaccurately described 'post industrial' society has its own machine. The market place and its values is allowed to invade every nook and cranny of our lives and our thoughts. Google tells us that it can dovetail its service to our needs when it wants to sell our online identity to companies. Children riot for Rebok. But the urge to be part of something that has some other meaning - a real meaning - remains a powerful one.

The danger is of course that meaning is one thing; message is another. Along with my little part in something grand; my presence at a big event 'that will be remembered' - 'what did you do in the Jubbly daddy?' - came the union jacks, the nationalist nostalgia, the 'proud to be British' flim flam which somehow ties us up all together with the toffs, the idle rich, the bankers, the wretches who cheerfully destroy lives in their pursuit of profit.

The rest of us maybe party poopers, but we are right to feel that some sort of trick was being played on us all.