Revolution (10 page)

Today her legacy has been so thoroughly douched that an anodyne brass plaque can be placed in the halls of Westminster, a trite, bland tribute to her heroism. Emily Davison would not be urging the disempowered people of today to vote; she’d be urging them to riot. Has the once-gleaming sword of democracy, this weapon of power for the masses, been so blunted that it is now seen merely as a quilted draft excluder upon which extremists might stumble? To stop Ukip getting more seats in Thurrock council or in Brussels, this is democracy’s endgame? It’s like using Excalibur to put a new plug on a toaster.

It hadn’t occurred to me, coming from where I’m from, that people considered parliamentary politics as anything other than a distraction. I only mentioned not voting in my
New Statesman
article that led to the Paxman furor because I was informed it was noteworthy.

For me, it’s standard. I don’t feel irresponsible for telling kids not to vote; I feel like I deserve a Blue Peter badge for not telling them to riot. For not telling them that they are entitled to destroy the cathedrals of tyranny erected to mock them in the heart of their community. That they should rise up and destroy the system that imprisons them, ignores them, condemns and maligns them. By any means necessary. I might also note that I think it unlikely that people aren’t voting because I told them not to; it is more likely that they’re not voting because they are subject to the same conditions that led me not to vote. The realization that it’s totally bloody pointless.

That the crime of occupying an Apple Store and redistributing its contents is nothing, nothing, compared to the larceny
*
that took
place to get those goods on the shelves. That torching a Nike Town is no crime at all compared to the incessant immolation of the rights of the workers that made the goods within, the burning of the codes that means those that profit from the store do not give back to the society in which they flourish.

I don’t feel inclined to rally youth to put an “X” on a box on a little ballot ticket but on the doors of those who will be spared when the plague descends. For we are at a turning point; the exploitation has now reached a pitch where the disenfranchised and exploited can look to a culpable minority with vengeful eyes. This minority, though, cannot be defined by the color of their skin but by the color of their god. Green. These worshippers of Mammon have with their ascendance into privilege marked themselves out from among us. To tell the multitudinous dispossessed to take the rage of the terraces and the streets, mendaciously aimed by Wapping propaganda and Rothermere smears at society’s most vulnerable and poorest, and take aim at this most deserving target.

The system that exploits us cannot function without us—without our labor, without our compliance, without our consent. If we want a society in which people with insufficient resources are given what they are owed, where are we to look for recompense? To other people who also have nothing? The weak? The dispossessed? People who have arrived here more recently than we have? Or ought we be looking to organizations that have abundance? Excess. Wealth. There is no great mystery to unravel; the solution is quite simple. We must spontaneously cooperate; we must immediately overcome our superficial differences of accent and lexicon and come together to organize society effectively.

The capitalist system is not the result of our collective greed; it is the manifestation of the greed of a few and the manipulation of the many. A global superstructure has been established to ensure the
continuation of the current hegemony. There are some ideas worth voting for, but no party in any civilized nation will propose them, because they are not there to represent us and to ensure the necessary change to protect us and our planet but to simply maintain the current system.

Here are some ideas. I got them from a diverse group of activists, ecologists, and economists, many of whom struck me as eccentric, but these ideas are more fair than the ones that currently govern our reality and are neatly guiding us to Armageddon.

Obviously our ultimate aim is to live in self-governing, fully autonomous, ecologically responsible, egalitarian communities. Where like-minded people—or people with compatible cultures, because all our minds are ultimately alike—can live together without fucking around with what other people are up to. The organs, both ideological and practical, are already in place: We have accommodation, hospitals, transportation, and communication networks. All we have to do is disband the corruption that skews them for the advancement of an elite.

The global treaties and economic infrastructure that has benefitted the eighty-five occupants of the bejeweled bus of privilege can be subverted for the benefit of us all. It’s easy: All we have to do is agree that that is our intention.

I asked lifelong anti-globalization campaigner Helena Norberg-Hodge what to do to change the world.

Helena is mostly concerned with “counter-development”—this means providing practical opposition and alternatives to governments’ and big businesses’ continuing promotion of globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. Helena is interested in people that are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance, and establishing models of agriculture and distribution which don’t contravene obvious ecological laws. In response to my plea for solutions, she promptly sent this list:

Now, you might’ve got a bit bored while reading that; you may have felt a feeling in your tummy of anxiety and a bit of psychological insecurity. “I’m not allowed to read stuff about charters,” your second, critical voice may’ve said. “I was rubbish at school.” My brain did all that stuff, and I plowed on.

All Helena’s suggesting is that global trading institutions and regulations have been set up in partnership with massive companies, probably like those snidey bastards Monsanto, and as long as the rules or “system” remain as they are, rich organizations will get richer and poor people will get poorer.

The last sentence talks about “controlling the private funding of political campaigns.” If you are an American, and why wouldn’t you be, you have never been governed by a party that wasn’t the most well funded during the electoral campaign that placed it in power. Whether you voted for the red one or the blue one, the donkey or the elephant, the brown bloke or the pink bloke, what you got was the richest party in that election. Every. Single. Time.

Now, I don’t want to come over all cynical, but doesn’t that imply that you could dispense with the entire democratic process and simply award power to the party with the most money in its campaign fund? Yes. It does. Maybe not always, just every single time in history so far.

Given that power is granted to the party with the most money, do you think it is likely that the parties in power feel an obligation to represent the desires and needs of the organizations that give them that money? Yes, so do I.

I’ll give you an example of how I saw this unfold in real time recently. About a week ago I was reading
The Sun
, a British tabloid newspaper that stimulates lower, primal-energy centers—like fear,
sexual desire, jealousy, and mindless tribalism—when I encountered an inexplicably upbeat story about “fracking,” the process of extracting gas from deep in the earth to sell back to people as fuel.

The process is controversial, and there are several brilliant documentaries that expertly demonstrate the numerous dangerous effects. Poisoning, flammable water, cancer—the sort of negative consequences a child might guess at if you told them you were planning to explode your way into the earth’s core, extricate gas, and sell it. How can you even begin to claim to own that? On what basis can an energy corporation claim to own gas at the earth’s core? What’s next? Are they going to claim they own our earwax and our uncried tears and start burrowing into our heads for a few shekels?

Out of nowhere, one morning, probably a Thursday, or a Wednesday, one of the days,
The Sun
, apropos of nothing, announced with twitching enthusiasm that fracking is great.

A double-page spread extolling its virtues, with a table-thumping condemnation of those who oppose it—there are massive demonstrations at a pilot site in Balcombe, West Sussex. They even had
Sun
staff dressed up in comedic Batman and Robin outfits, joyously trivializing the issue to anyone who’d listen. That’s odd, I thought; why does
The Sun
, part of an international media conglomerate, support fracking? Is it just a general buccaneering fraternity of capitalists all helping each other out, or is there a more obvious correlation?

I once visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he is forced to live for reasons I’ve never fully understood; in fact, the whole concept of embassies and treaties and conceptual distinctions of that nature seem barmy to me.

That you can just say, “This building is in Ecuador,” and everyone has to go, “Oh, okay,” and pretend they’re not standing in the middle of London.

Or that truce in the middle of the First World War, where on Christmas Day when the English and Germans stopped and played football. Surely the realization that it was a possibility made the war on Boxing Day particularly dispiriting. Unless, I suppose, you’d
been fouled or had a goal disallowed. Then you might think, “I’m glad I get the chance to spray you with machine-gun fire, Jürgen. There’s no way that wasn’t a penalty.”

If we can imagine there’s a bit of Ecuador in London or a bit of peace in the middle of a war, then surely we can imagine a fairer world and decide to live in that.

I asked Assange if he believed in conspiracies, or, more pertinently, “The Conspiracy,” which posits that global politics is governed by a shady cabal who meet in a smoky, dim-lit room and cacklingly manipulate our destiny. He doesn’t, which is remarkable given that he was answering me from internment in a pretend bit of Ecuador as the result of Swedish sexual-assault charges that arose after he exposed war crimes in a Middle-Eastern conflict.

He said that he saw the status quo more as a marauding Mongol horde of capitalists with shared interests charging ferociously in the same direction. The direction of “make as much money as possible” with no other considerations.

I disagree with Julian, but the point is moot: The result is the same. Also, all his opinions are somewhat stymied and robbed of efficacy as he’s banged up in a dislocated lump of Latin America. It was a bizarre experience visiting him in there. Not least because I, as was the custom at the time, went to the powwow armed with a yoga teacher.

I was hanging out with her a lot. I took her along to the MTV Movie Awards, which I was hosting, where at one point—perhaps the summit of my own personal Everest of Hollywood kookiness—she vetoed a joke from my opening monologue. It wasn’t unspiritual or mean; I think it was about Jennifer Aniston. It was cut “for time,” like the monologue was saggy. I don’t know if that makes it less weird.

Tej, her name was, and she was a bloody good kundalini yoga teacher, and the lessons and techniques definitely induced interesting states of mind. Most people would’ve left it at that, but with my tendency for extremism, I first became teacher’s pet and then, in a macabre switcheroo, made the teacher into my pet.

I’ve already told you I’m a sucker for a mystic costume. I’m like a wartime gal with a thing for uniforms, swooning at a G.I., and Tej’s get-up was world-class. Kundalini practitioners dress entirely in white—why not? They also wear a turban as the yogic practice they follow is derived from the Sikh faith.

Tej was a lovely woman and we became good friends; I learned a lot and had a good laugh. A fair amount of that fun may have been derived, I realize in retrospect, from the novel thrill of turning up at unexpected places with a yogi. Like the MTV Movie Awards or the Ecuadorian embassy.

During the production of my let’s call it experimental—with the emphasis on the “mental”—TV show
Brand X
(surely the last punning derivation my surname can provide), the whole of Tej’s yoga class, which consisted of about one hundred people, was uprooted and placed each morning at the studio where the show was recorded. That’s pretty mad, isn’t it? We left the comfort, tranquillity, sweet smells, and fine foods of the purpose-built yoga center to practice yoga in the functioning canteen of a TV production facility. Sometimes when you’re famous you can get away with being a lunatic. Especially if you’re like me and think the system is corrupt and rules have to be broken and conformity challenged. Before too long, you have a scenario where the teamsters who do all the heavy lifting on a TV show are confronted with the daily spectacle of a hundred yoga devotees descending on their canteen.

Anyway, whichever of us is right, me or Assange, doesn’t matter, but it transpired that after I joked about
The Sun
’s fracking story on my online (badly named) news-analysis show
The Trews
and asked viewers if they could help me understand why this extraneous display of mindless propaganda was printed, I received some interesting responses. Rupert Murdoch, who owns News International, of which
The Sun
is a subsidiary, sits on the board of U.S. energy giant Genie Oil and Gas, which specializes in shale gas. That is another, nicer word for fracking. Shale gas sounds nice and natural, like a sea breeze, a gale made from shells. Who could object to that? Certainly not a regular reader of Murdoch’s
New York Post
, which has
run twenty positive fracking stories since 2011. The relationship between
The Sun
newspaper and UK government is well documented and criminal.

The second of Helena’s suggestions concerns our relationship with food production.