Have we sold hard won post-WWII freedoms and rights for game shows? Britain is starting to look like the dystopia of Stephen King’s novel The Running Man.
Rishi Sunak, chancellor in Boris Johnson’s administration of
also-rans, will give his second budget speech tomorrow, on the heels of the
catastrophically poorly handled pandemic and the self-inflicted, newly opened
wounds of Brexit. His family wealth puts
him in the same empathy category as The Queen – with her vaccine exhortations for
folk not to be “selfish” while her family extracts big handouts every year from
an over-stretched public purse.
The reality of what awaits us when we step blinking out of
covid confinement hit me like a truck when I heard some Conservative cretin on
the Tory Broadcasting Company midday news last week. He claimed its not all
doom and gloom for the UK economy because look at all the people now employed
by the likes of Deliveroo. I’m sure your average graduate with £50k of debt doesn't dream of cycling through traffic with the choice of an early death
from car fumes or road accident.
Covid lockdown has exacerbated and accelerated a societal
shift where we rarely meet the people taking our money so they care less and
less about us. In – blog 147 More Less
Contact is making us Horrible, I wrote about the many and ugly dehumanising
aspects of our increasingly contactless and rampantly capitalist society.
I’ve also noted how people are happily going about making
themselves unemployed. Bank cashiers have been haranguing me to go online for
many years. Now, most of the branches near to me are closed or closing. Many supermarkets
have increasingly human-free tills as their profits soar. All this means
increased unemployment.
Cracking open another old chestnut, it was never sustainable
to have so much of the economy based increasingly on nail bars, cheap city
breaks and coffee shops. Brexit has brought that home more clearly than the
challenges of the pandemic. Countries
that no longer make, grow, manufacture real things that humans need, will
struggle desperately in the future. This is part of the new normal that is
being unveiled as Sunak tries to tempt us back onto highstreets which were
first dealt the death blow in the 1990s with the growth of out of town shopping
monstrosities.
I have no doubt that for many months/years, those who brought
us Brexit will stuff as much of the tsunami of economic ruin and social discord
as they can into the box marked ‘covid’ but it did not start with the pandemic.
The broken Little Britain of the
neo-colonialist isolationists who conned us into Brexit while lying/distracting
us with nonsense has simply been fast forwarded.
In the past 12 months we’ve learnt so many new terms –
‘excess mortality’ ‘furlough’; rediscovered old terms like ‘profiteering’ but
cannot face up to dangerously relevant terms – conned/ cheated/ defrauded.
I struggle – as any regular readers of this blog will know –
with the placidity of the majority of those at the shitty end of all this. I
often wonder if folk really are as anaesthetised and diverted by the moronic
hysterical yet incongruously dull slop that passes for 24hr TV. This occurred to me
again as I re-read The Running Man a
dystopian novella from 1982 by Stephen King – one of his most famous ‘Bachman’
novels. In it, the population is brainwashed by a TV model we would recognise –
extreme reality TV. It is shown on something called Free Vee.
“…every Development
apartment had one [Free Vee] – it was the law - but it was still legal to turn
them off. The Compulsory Benefit Bill of 2021
had failed [to make watching compulsory]…”
I love the ‘it was still legal to turn them off’ because I
often get the impression many people don’t realise that.
As the story continues we learn that the moronic but murderous
game shows, watched by millions, are not just a distraction from grey miserable
lives of the majority, served up by an extremely wealthy elite – but a cover
for the real reality that the air they breathe is poisoning them.
Are we as easily played as the fictional masses of Stephen
King’s dystopia?
Have we given up hard-one freedoms, rights and working
conditions – even our humanity for gameshow/reality TV escapism?
Well, we have a clown running government; with his craven cabinet
of cretins dishing out expensive, important jobs to unqualified pals and
lucrative contracts to mates while thousands died and our leader with the game
show host persona is currently quite popular…
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For further reading check out
187 – British boarding schools breed posh sociopaths
Also check out My BOOKS where you‘ll find my own dusty
dystopian novella based on an environmentally collapsed post-apocalyptic world Zero One Zero Two