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Pond Scum: The Last Resort

By Steve Finbow

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Well, it had to happen. I’ve been putting it off and putting it off. Jeez, have I been procrastinating. I always say, don’t do today what you can do tomorrow. I boondoggle, I dilly-dally, I hang fire; but now it’s time, I delay no longer. Today, I’m writing about women. That’s right. American women versus British women. No, I’ve changed my mind. Maybe next time. Sight of countless cursors arcing their way to the browser back button – rewind, rewind. No, today’s column is about politics. Oh, yes.

Art By Nicholas Allanach

In two weeks’ time, the UK has a general election. Unlike the US, we have more than two main parties. We have three: Liberal Democrats (Liberals and Social Democrats all mixed up, sort of like a cheesy mashed potato without any gravy); The Conservative Party (The Tories, more of a shit-covered pine cone – very hard to swallow); and then there is the incumbent political party – The Labour Party (a rum baba, topped with pink icing, revolving at the speed of trite). There are also countless smaller parties including RESPECT (a recursive acronym and a backronym – Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environmentalism, Community and Trade unionism) Huh? More like Stalin with a U2 iPod – Koba the Edge. The United Kingdom Independence Party and Veritas are racist nationalists: UKUKUK rather than KKK. Then there are the marginal parties such as Mebyon Kernow – pushing for Cornish autonomy, when tin mines would re-open, children with clay pipes would bestride blind ponies and head for the Devon border. And among others, Plaid Cymru – pronounced Plied Cumry (don’t ask) and Forward Wales (rather than the more accurate "backward"), both promoting things Welsh.

The build-up to the election has been more interesting than commentators expected.

The Lib Dems got off to a great postmodern start. Charles Kennedy (leader of Lib Dems) timed the electioneering to perfection: his wife Sarah gave birth to a baby boy on April 12th, one week after Tony Blair called a general election. So, the Lib Dems created their very own baby for the politicians to kiss. None of that endless schlepping up and down the country, pressing sweaty palms with the hoi polloi and osculating sprogs. They really missed out on the name though – Donald James Kennedy – what about John Fitzgerald or Robert Francis? Although, if rumours about Charles’s pixilation are true, Edward Moore may have been more apt.

The Tories are becoming the Miss World of political parties – swathed in a blue sash, wearing a crown of (empty) promises, they plan to slash taxes and build five new children’s hospitals. Take it – reverse it – they will increase tax and demolish existing hospitals.   Not really, but the world will darken and we will be at the mercy of the bejowled ones, and they will wreak vengeance upon our land, and they will feed upon our souls, and poets in future times will sing of the golden age of Blair Anthony and Brown Gordon. I also read their warning of a ‘pensions time bomb’ as a ‘pensioners time bomb’ and had visions of Oxford Street strewn with senior citizens’ body parts fused with the twisted chrome of their Zimmer frames – a future JG Ballard novel, maybe?

Labour – hmm, every time I think of another term for Labour (this next one would be a historic third), the David Bowie song "Five Years" pops into my head: ‘We’ve got five years, stuck on my eyes / Five years, what a surprise / We’ve got five years, my brain hurts a lot / Five years, that’s all we’ve got.’  Some wag graffitied Labour’s campaign slogan over the weekend, changing ‘Britain forward not back’ to ‘Britain forwar not back.’ Very good.

As with last year’s American presidential election, there is little to choose from between the main parties. Labour will probably win and I will probably vote for them. The two main contenders offer little in the way of meaningful policies and the Conservatives in particular lack any credibility whatsoever. The main interest is whether the Lib Dems can become the second party and challenge Labour’s third-way ideology.

The electioneering is becoming more American. Tony Blair is presidential. His political platform, based on this being his last election before he hands things over to never-a-frown Gordon Brown, is sycophantic and sentimental. But we’re used to this spin, and I find it preferable to the Tory’s night-tangled words and the banal blancmange of the Lib Dems.

There is another Americanisation process occurring during this election – the politics of product – the glamorisation of members (so to speak). Politics has become showbiz here. A friend of mine, Natascha Engel, is standing as Labour candidate for Derbyshire North East. It’s a safe seat and she should win. What are Natascha’s policies? I dunno. But I do know that she appeared in an article in Glamour Magazine. And what was the article about? I hear you ask. ‘The rising prosperity in an opportunity society?’ ‘A stronger country in a secure, sustainable and just world?’ (I like that one, I’m sure by ‘just’ they mean fair or impartial and not very nearly or almost). No, none of the above. The article took female political candidates and gave them a makeover, the before-and-after treatment. And, I’m sorry, Nat, but you looked better in the before photo. Wouldn’t it be great if the world could have a makeover? Slap on some Max Factor; level Birmingham (our one); replace politicians with Pris, the Nexus 6 pleasure replicant from Blade Runner; and make Snoopy pope. But, no, we’d get it all wrong. If the world looked like Tyra Banks, we’d make it look like Richard Nixon. If the world was like a red, red rose, we’d transform it into rafflesia or skunk cabbage – it would smell like rotten meat.

We need to challenge the now, or as John Berger puts it:

In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying
every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere
can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness
and principles. Writers who have neither produce utopian trash.

To end, I’d like to recommend two books that put the razzmatazz of politics in perspective and embody the ethos of the quote above: they are William T Vollmann’s seven-volume, 3352-page Rising Up and Rising Down, an epic study of violence and its consequences (now available in a handy one-volume, 752-page edition); and Pavel Hak’s Sniper, a brutal short novel about the war in Yugoslavia – a war that most politicians here and in the USA ignored, a war in which the hobgoblins were far from imaginary.

Click here to read previous Pond Scum columns.

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Steve Finbow writes out of London, England. He has worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Victor Bockris, and the artist Richard Long. His fiction, essays, and short plays appear, or will appear, in Eyeshot, 3am Magazine, Yankee Pot Roast, uber, Locus Novus, InkPot, Dicey Brown, The Guardian Online, and Pindeldyboz. He is currently working on a novel (Yeah, right).  He can be contacted here.

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