Take Responsibility And Understand That Nads Are Not To Be Hoofed

For eight long years we sat and laughed at George W Bush and his mouth-born balls-ups, printing quotes on t-shirts and creating head-slapping compilations of his inadequacy on You Tube. In fact, Dubya creates more ‘memes’ during his tenure than any other single person I can think of.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone create a record-breaking animation show called ‘South Park’ that satirises some of the most ridiculous traits of the western world, and go on to write the song ‘Blame Canada’ as a scathing observation of the American blame-culture and foreign policy. It gets an Oscar nomination.
Paul Verhoeven directs Starship Troopers, a thinly-veiled celluloid middle-finger to the socio-political ethos of modern warfare.
Channel 4 tackles political and corporate corruption in the Dispatches documentary series. It becomes lauded as a groundbreaking, no-holds-barred current-affairs programme.
Before he became ‘uncool’ to the cultural idiot, Michael Moore brings Chomsky-style political and social narrative to the masses in any easy-to-digest-without-freaking-out format. Oscars are won.
Chuck Palahniuk writes Fight Club, a fictional ride through modern social and psychological breakdown. Dealing with the vacuousness of modern consumerism, it becomes a prominent and much-quoted feature of early-noughties culture.
Green Day release the concept album ‘American Idiot’, a rock-opera that chronicles one man’s struggle in corporate America. The album reaches #1 on billboard charts worldwide selling over 10 million copies.
Etcetera.

And not a single bit of it made a blind bit of difference. I can guarantee you that many of the people who watched Fight Club on DVD sat there with their feet up on a Swedish minimalist sofa during the reel, feeling indignant as the narrator sarcastically talks of Ikea’s ‘versatile solutions for modern living’, yet completely missing the irony of their current situation. They probably even hit McDonalds afterwards for a beef-flavoured sugar-rush. Without the beef flavour.

Amazingly, the general populace doesn’t have to sit through political lectures or read books about socio-economics to get a gist of what’s going on. It’s spoon-fed on a regular basis through subculture and entertainment. But the only effect it seems to have is one of providing quotes during social gatherings, so that one can feel ‘clever’ during pseudo-political discussions. To most, the state-of-the-world-address is now as pertinent to our society as an episode of Mock the Week, and usually holds less interest for us.

So, most people who converse about socio-politics are basically taking small bites of information to spit back out if necessary. At no point do they swallow. It seems that apathy rules when it comes to genuinely having a firm grasp on the application of ethics and morality – probably because most people know that if they allowed themselves to truly understand their situation, they’d have to have second thoughts about buying that personalised number-plate. And who wants to understand the terrible impact of pointless acquisition when the front of their Ford Focus could read ‘B16 DOG’?

But, if I’m honest, I know that it’s not completely our fault. We can only learn via our close environment, and our direct environment isn’t exactly open to free debate or the provision of truth. Our culture is one that talks of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ – two philosophies that have been completely redefined via complicated language and politics, until they’re no longer recognisable as their literal selves. Not that we’d know it of course. But that’s the point. Cake is only cake because our grandma and Delia Smith have told us as much. Democracy now means ‘being allowed to vote for someone from a public-school club who shouts a lot in a very expensive London-based building, whilst their mates wave pieces of paper at the opposition party and yell ‘wyeeeeaaarrrr’ a lot’. Our confusion is therefore understandable.

But our choice of ignorance isn’t...

...Because I know that we are smarter than this. We self-impose ignorance, because it means that we don’t have to take responsibility. And we get caught up in the same discussions, using the same clichés to make a point.

“Who do you vote for?”
“I don’t vote”
“What!? It’s your democratic responsibility to vote. Wars have been fought to protect your freedom to vote”
“Bollocks. Wars have been fought to maintain the status-quo of our economy and ruling class. Nothing else. It has sod-all to do with democracy, freedom or otherwise. If you are really interested in why wars have been fought for the last few hundred years, go read the plethora of books on the subject.”
“If you don’t vote, you don’t have the right to an opinion”
“That’s just being silly. It’s like this. Voting politically has an inherent flaw. Choosing between political parties is like asking me if I want a kick in the balls or a punch in the face. I refuse to vote for someone to do either.”
“There’s always a lesser of two evils”
“Maybe. But why choose evil at all? Isn’t that like saying that you’ll only rape someone when they sleep because it’ll be better for them?”
“So, what’s the alternative then smart-arse?”
“I don’t know. I’m not qualified to say. Give me time and I’ll educate myself enough to form an opinion. But right now, I just don’t want to give somebody the thumbs-up to kick me in the spuds”
“You liberals are all the same...”
“And you are hilarious. I’m as much a liberal as I am a Conservative. Can you only characterise people through standard, predefined political alliances? As far as I’m concerned, every ounce of the ‘set’ political and social spectrum is dog-balls. Left or right, hippy or elitist; If you live your life as any of these definitions, you are submitting yourself to ignorance to avoid the responsibility of thinking. Society evolves and is transient by nature. Therefore, as a free thinking human being, you should evolve and work within this transience.”
“If you don’t agree with the system, vote to change it”
“You have just made the most stupid statement you could possibly muster at this precise moment in time. If I voted, I would be taking part in a system that is corrupt in its entirety. It’d be like protesting against vivisection by punching an ox. I don’t want to have anything to do with the political system of this country. Politics in all forms is corrupt. Every last iota. It’s a system that allows a ruling class to create legislation to dictate to a subservient class. It’s simply a cleaner form of slavery. This, my friend, is a fact. I am not voting for slavery.”

At this point in the conversation, I’d expect the other person to stare blankly at me, scoff, then decide that it’d be much easier to go home and watch ‘A Question of Sport’ rather than give me or my views further consideration.
And for the record, I do go to the polling booth. But instead of ticking a box, I draw a big middle finger over the ballot sheet and artfully scrawl the words ‘no confidence’ or suchlike underneath. Spoiled votes are counted, meaning that my dissent is recorded alongside the usual conveyor of neat pencil-ticks. And I can guarantee that if enough people drew artful swearwords on their ballot-paper, the political world would start to sweat a bit. At the moment, the political stratus has no idea what goes on in the ‘real world’, and the ballot is the only bit of paper that guarantees to get your opinion through the doors of Downing Street. It’s the perfect solution for the non-apathetic non-voter, or citizen who feels like they don’t have choice.

Moving swiftly back to my point: Even if we weren’t to look further than popular entertainment, there is enough ‘education’ to at least help us understand the western socio-political climate to a half-decent degree. And anyone with even the thinnest sliver of conscience will see that we currently sit in the middle of a cultural balls-up. So we have absolutely NO excuse when the media glaringly inform us of global inequality, famine, death and destruction which we get piped to our televisions or slapped in the pages of newspapers on a daily basis. When all of the information we receive comes together, we should be motivated or at least shamed into actually standing up and making a point about it in a loud, clear voice. This is called integrity.

But then again, the car needs servicing and there’s a nice shirt in Burtons that needs to be purchased. The world can wait until later.

Dee.