Wednesday 17 April 2013

Something Special


"Call her once before you go.
Call once yet.
In a voice that she will know:
'Margaret! Margaret!'"

Wednesday 6 February 2013

Holla atcho Proles




Look at Jonathan Meades. He is the coolest person in the world. Why doesn't everybody dress like that?

In a rare moment not spent reading the Mail Online or re-watching my favourite film, Blades of Glory, I i-playered his latest documentary, The Joy of Essex. It ended with a brilliant if slightly jingoistic tribute to 'The People's Essex', which he presented as a sort of surreal architectural lost-property bin that shits all over stylistic uniformity and where 'DIY resourcefulness and bricolage were employed in the service of a better life'. He also expressed plenty of scorn for the people who don't like it, including 'bien-pensant environmentalists of all shades'. It made me think of a fallacy that I quite often encounter in people who care about other people, one which puts the claims of social equality and those of the environment ('Nature, whatever that is,' as Meades says) and animals in competition with each other. There's an idea that animal rights or the preservation of rural areas are a distraction from more pressing concerns.

There's something in this - environmentalism, vegetarianism, organic food-fancying etc, are the sorts of issues that the bleeding-heart bourgeois have the luxury to get puffed up about, like Zac Goldsmith, or celebrity tub-of-guts Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. The stable feature of the neo-conservative green movement is its blatant hypocrisy: remember the economic fat-times, and the whole vote-blue-to-go-green thing? David Cameron on a bicycle with his shoes being driven behind him? That didn't last long. Even the ones who believe their own beliefs don't even remotely practise what they preach - I refer you to Prince Charles, who I will not even bother to insult here.

These clowns use the green thing to sell us stuff, or reinforce their feudal sense of privilege, or distract from the cartoonish evil of their governments, but we shouldn't let their corruption taint the  causes that they use to conceal it. Of course it is no good sentimentalising nature, but even the most realistic among us shouldn't be ashamed to admit things that are not man-ufactured (oh snap, what a pun!), things like trees and animals, are not only pretty good mechanisms for running a planet, but are also worth protection and love and respect. If it matters that people are comfortable and are spared suffering, with or without the balm of some imposed teleology - Marxist, religious, whatever - then surely it follows that other life forms matter too?

By all means be hard-nosed, pragmatic and anti-nostalgic when thinking about Mother Nature - she doesn't love you, she doesn't stand for comfort and all she ever intended for any of us is an un-palliated death. But any politics that places an intrinsic value on human happiness ought to question the grounds on which it separates this Good from the wellbeing of other animals, and the places where they live.