Wednesday 26 June 2013

Dungheads & pointlessness

I havent written here recently for a variety of reasons including a sense of pointlessness. I thought back nearly 20 years to when my employer decided to victimise me and another union activist for standing up for our colleagues' rights although those colleagues did precious little to help themselves. When this happened, those colleagues paused briefly in their endless asking “What has the union ever done for me?” to declare us both trouble makers who were getting what we deserved – the impetus to obedience driving them.
This morning I thought that I must write though because I read in the paper that young people are turning to the Tories because of their imposition of the bedroom tax. This was in The Guardian and wasnt some wet dream of the Daily Mail.
How could this be? I wondered. The answer would seem to be that those young people are Dungheads, like much of the rest of the population. In no way could one support the policy rationally – i.e. I challenge anyone to make the case. At best it would a demand to be given some of the action at the expense of others without doing anything oneself, like brats having tantrums.
But I am busy and a bit under the weather and was going to let it go. What is the point of writing that people are Dungheads when people are Dungheads?
And then I arrived at the cafe where I work, because it has wifi and where the official propaganda encourages you to work in a quiet atmosphere, to find a dune of shouting mothers and screaming babies occupying two thirds of the tables with electricity and blocking access to all the others with armoured personnel carriers.
I asked them politely to move these vehicles so I could get through and was just waved away. So I said they were selfish and moved a table out and clambered in. Tell him to fuck off, said one.
I worked. After a while one baby began screaming piercingly and was ignored, which is why presumably it was screaming; and I gave in and said For God's sake shut it up.
Trying and failing to be suave, the mother turned to me and told me to go to the library if I wanted quiet.
Clearly she has not been to the library. The library is full of screaming adults and children running riot. That's when it's open.
I said This place is supposed to be quiet.
No it isn't, she said, without hesitation.
So I was dealing with religion. To confirm that there was a mothers' knot of voices as various of them shouted at me their opinion. From what I could gather, which was little, most of them were not relevant to the exchange; but whenever has the believer made a pertinent reply to an objection? It was pointless to reply because their aim was not to reach agreement but to impose their will.
But of course I am wrong. I forget that there are only 7 billion of us, that there is empty cheap housing, places in schools and an abundance of open space. I forget that children are best socialised by being given no guidance.
In due course their attention gave out, they forgot what they were doing there, and they left, a few hurling insults as they left. It reminded me of trying to teach teenagers in school.
And then some business types arrived. I committed some of it to memory but the memory has turned to sludge. None of them were actually making anything or doing anything useful. It was all, as so often, the application of Onanism to administration.
The place is full of people with babies all inordinately proud of their achievement in reproducing, though flies can do that.
As Timon said, More Man. I may as well post it. Perhaps one of my enemies will read it and become so angry they have a heart attack.


Thursday 6 June 2013

A sample of the electorate

I just had an “interesting” experience, sitting in a branch of Caffe Nero. There was some kind of family group in and they were worshipping a child. They shouted and the child shouted. The more noise they all made the happier they all were. The child could speak but they all spoke baby language and the child joined in to ingratiate itself
I had been concentrating on what I was doing, but at the time it was fairly routine. However, it came to a point where the noise the child was making, and it was a child and not a baby, were painful – what is sometimes called ear-splitting. It was way beyond not being able to work. (Caffe Nero say they think one can work in their cafes.)
I called out to them to keep it down and they gestured at me in a sort of 2001 opening scene sort of way and went on encouraging their child to join them in making pre-verbal noise.
This repeated several times and the more that they refuted my arguments with their detailed analysis and rhetoric, the more self-righteous their grunting gestures became.
No one else complained. They just got up and left. People are coming in now. Now there are 6.
You might think the staff would tell them off. Three or four of them were occupying about 1/5th of the entire place. One of the staff has just spent some time returning the furniture to its place where the adults and child had displaced it by running up and down. They were disruptive.
But I infer that the staff are not allowed to tell people off. If they have money, take it off them. That's the policy
There came a moment when the child uttered a really painful scream and I flipped - shouted at them to bloody shut up. The squattest of these early primates loped over and uttered various phonemes. I found it a little bit frightening that someone who might just be human was so incoherent. I asked him what he was saying and eventually pieced together his propositions.
1 That's a child.
It is a fundamental tenet of all bad parenting that children make an unbearable noise and cannot be stopped, that to dispute that is to be stupid and that any child who does not make an unbearable noise is probably exhibiting signs of disease. Furthermore, parents who discourage their children from making an unbearable noise are bad parents.
2 This is a public space and I can make whatever amount of noise I want.
I disputed that and he refuted my opinion before I had finished it with “course I can”. I told him he was anti-social and he said fuck off which he seemed to think was a clincher.
It reminded me even then of a woman who responded here “it doesn't affect you”. When I disputed that, she said “No it doesnt because it's my child and not yours.” Some weeks later I had said to an acquaintance, someone who was becoming a friend, that I wasn't sure I'd be able to spend time in their home because of their smoking. They said “It doesnt affect you” When I said it did, no matter how hard we both tried, she said “It doesnt affect you because it's my choice”
At such times I wonder if there is any point in learning any logic, in learning anything, if we are subject to this sort of crap. Anyway that was the beginning of the end of that friendship.
3 If you want to play, go to the library.
Now I did find that impenetrable for some time; but in my quest to communicate with alien species, I persisted in saying, I confess, what are you burbling about? and eventually noticed that as the creature was saying this sentence it was gesturing with one of its forelimbs at my laptop
To the creature, the noise he and his fellow creatures was making was serious and anything done on a computer is playing. I think that's it. Such play is to be conducted in the library. I think that's it.
And I think that was when I first used the word “moron”. I am not proud of it. I do not condemn slugs for being themselves; but I do remain outraged that someone with such an aggressive and selfish and stupid attitude help to elect the government.
It seemed the noisy one was incapable of understanding that the objection was to its noise regardless of what one was doing
I do not think they are morons. I think they are culpable. I think they have never bothered to think. Before I realised that they only spoke proto Modern British, I asked them “Where do you get your sense of entitlement from?” and one replied “We are entitled”
This is the reality of the electorate
14 people in here now.
Funny way to run a business. But if you have seen some of the regional managers or whatever they call themselves, you'd understand. Up themselves smartarses