The GaiaTron's Weblog

Poor Britain.

The Britain, poor Britain.

For almost 35 years I have watched the character of the British people change.

To begin with, there was strong evidence of the War in their group psyche: a sense of thrift that bordered on the miserly, their scant perception of the wealth of sensual pleasures available to the human experience, watertight class divisions that separated the educated from the great unwashed.

Then the Europeanisation of Britain began to make inroads in the UK, and things for a while began to change, good food began to arrive and enrich the desert that were British supermarket shelves – hitherto laden with spam, tinned spaghetti and ravioli, not to mention acres of bacon, sausages, baked beans and cabbage.

Cafés and delicatessens began to open-up and at last one could get a passable espresso or cappuccino coffee, in the supermarkets “exotic goods”, like courgettes, aubergines, broccoli and on occasion even artichokes began to appear. Real pasta, in all its varieties, began to feature in British home cooking and Delia discovered such culinary delights as Lasagne and Risotto, where only sad-looking cannelloni – nice though the real thing is - had reigned supreme.

Then the Thatcher-Reagan monetarist “Axis of Weevils” crystallised across the pond, and MacDonald's sprouted in the 1980s fertile humus (no, not “hummus” the Greek-North African chickpea, garlic, lemon juice and olive oil paste, but the nutrient component of fertile soils) of the high streets and modest shopping centres that were England's most endearing heritage.

It was in the “loadsamonee kultchewre”, so excellently portrayed in Harry Enfield's, homonimous character, that the first real Malls made their appearance. In these great, ugly concrete compounds, designed to herd and detain shoppers where the Market wanted them, thoroughly fleece them until they squealed and them kick them out, to acres of parking lots, and out, through queues of slow-moving traffic jams.

Instead of enriching the traditional haunts of the British family, these new money wringing devices, camouflaged as buildings, flogged the "new concept" in shopping - tyhat was already worn-out, old hat in the US - and brought them out of town, into the hitherto pleasant green of England's suburbs. Here they were marooned in multi-storey gluttony of cheap goods, made millions of miles from there, by obscenely low-paid workers (primarily women and children), from precious, limited resources, over-packaged, gaudily merchandised and resold at extortionate prices.

“Labels” replaced quality, “cool” replaced taste and “market forces” replaced customer demand.  The only food to be had was rubbish - yes, rubbish, not "garbage" or "trash", just plain, old rubbish, in plain English! - high cholesterol, mass-produced, reconstituted and pre-digested rubbish, at that.

No longer would you be able to find Yorkshire hotpot in a Yorkshire café' or restaurant, but you'd be assured of finding a burger, fries and shake, less still would you be able to sit in quiet Tea Rooms, to a good cup of Earl Grey tea, a scone, clotted cream and English jam, in Cornwall, but are served instead something called a ”mocacchino”.

Now, there is a word that is a case in point: previously wholly unknown in ANY language, it is an abomination unto coffee lovers and the ancient Gods of Italy – where it would be pronounced “mokakkino”, with a clear etymology linking it to the much more appropriate word “cacca”, (pronounced “kakka”) meaning something of a much more solid consistency, a lighter brown colour and with an equally odorous – alas far less palatable - “fragrance”.

This tendency to re-invent the world, in a Country that was born by the extermination of whole Nations, by a race that evolved from a poorly homogenised pot-pourri of cultures, into one amorphous “kult-chew-re”, and re-branded the poor caricatures of the delicious, exquisite and sublime with names that, while not preporting to be the real thing, somehow implicitly seduce us into believing they are a “new take”, a “modern adaptation” of the old-fashioned, stayed and traditional.

Often they try to do this by what they call “fusion”, that is, the combination of two diverse elements (in this case Moca espresso = coffee + hot chocolate AND cappuccino = frothy milk combined with espresso, to give a dark, milky coffee with a white, frothy topping – the “cappuccio, or hood, of a Capuchine monk, whence it derives its name).

Inevitably they are not. “Mocacchino” is NOT as good as either Moca OR Cappuccino, it is a sweet, cloying mess, usually with the additional sprinkle of hot chocolate powder because Americans just don't know when to stop.

It's the same with everything: “more is more”.. hell no!, as our American cousins would say. Usually, more is too much. Shoes that were either rounded, squared or pointed, have become ridiculously “more” so, to the point that we see laughable clowns, in shoes some 6 cm too long, to the point that they turn up, becoming parodies of the curly-toed slippers on a comedy Turk, or square ones that look as though they were shaped for the box they came in, not the feet they're going on.

Similarly, the golden brown of healthy, tanned skin that is exposed to the sun some 9 out of 12 months, becomes the orange glow of a combination of sunbeds and spray-on, “tannery brown”., as the obscenely distorted interpretation of “brown tan”, in the cheap mirror of bargain basement WAG kultchewre: Gucci, Prada and Versace, badly plagiarised by “dee-zaiynerz” from downtown LA, prototyped by a Hong Kong “entrepreneur” and mass manufactured for tuppence, in mainland China, for the exclusive consumption of ladettes in the Bling Bling Centres of Billericay (Bling-a-Ricay), Bradford (Blingford), Bolton (Blington) and Bristol (Blingstol).

Large loop earrings that looked superb on the sculpted heads of African women, set atop long, sinuous necks, held with enchanting pride and dignity, look nauseating on chavettes' tubby faces, set atop short necks with triple chins, and hair scraped back into the “council housing estate face-lift”. Eyeliner make-up that features on Queen Nefertiti's superb head, smudged around eyes that sink in mounds of subcutaneous fat, dulled by booze and “da weed”, and oafishly, practised "wha'ever!" looks.

American revenge: a Global Warning.

And here we go back to the pot-pourri. In analysing the roots of all this oil-slick spread of vulgarity, we must return to the source: America. The North African love of bling, evident in Jewish, Lebanese and Moroccan cultures, where it had its own niche, has merged with African Americans' need for some status in their own communities, of some indication of their ancient, proud African roots.

Deeply set in the ignorance in which they are raised (as Americans, in the first instance, AND as Black People, in the second) African American women have re-cast themselves as Nubian Queens, irrespective of girth, age and condition. The hybridisation that results from the ongoing interracial , that is producing some of the most beautiful human beings ever seen on earth, who embody the most exquisite features of all human ethnic variety.. only to be “marketed” as cheap, vulgar Barbies, desperately trying to be more white, but with some semblance of African Pride.

The same has happened to music, exquisite, resonant voices, instead of singing naturally, as many would, left to their own devices, are persuaded to warble like a classical Arab singer from the Kasbah, unable to hold a single, pure note and unwilling to train their voices to do so, because it is too much work, too “bourgeois” (not that most would be able to spell or pronounce the word, or comprehend its meaning!).

All this may seem harsh and petty, after all, what the hell is wrong with hybridised beverages, races and shopping centres that breed like rabbits?

A lot! For one, the loss of diversity in the human genome is making us one, homogeneous species, descending to a lowest common denominator that amounts to a race of simpletons, debases all Culture and belittles the greatness of the human spirit that gave us architecture, engineering, literature, art, history and philosophy, by replacing it with bling, computer games, violent movies, porn and slobbish, sluttish “Kult-chewre”.

Superb art and craftsmanship that took some 10,000 years to evolve, is reduced to a bit of cheap, gaudy plastic and a bit of glitter that comes off, after a bit, leaving a worn-out bit of rubbish.  But, so what?   It's disposable and something else will replace it, not five minutes after we got bored with it.

We forget what it cost to come thus far, we “disrespect” generations that suffered untold privations to achieve freedom and independence, who scaled impossibly steep intellectual heights, to produce true genius, often from less than privileged backgrounds.

A people who are prepared to forget the nobility that distinguished their predecessors, are left only with the disillusion of their peers, a race that is willing to throw away the achievement of co-operation, conciliation and striving for the betterment of mankind and for the communal good, is condemned to become slaves of a Globalised Market that eats people and ecosystems.

Even languages are disappearing, like species in decline, the 6000+ human languages that once gave us the diversity of nuance that each language brings to the Human capacity for speech, are now being simplified, wrote Keenan Malik, in his 2000 essay “Let them die”.  In their place, we are assailed by evermore slack, estuarine english, a mix of aped asian and afrocaribbean pronunciation, by white kids that are either racists or wannabee black.

There is no coming back from simplification, once an ecosystem has lost its diversity, once it becomes a monoculture, the only organisms that can go one better, are its parasites. Just as we are seeing a global threat to the commercial variety of banana trees (all descended and cloned from the same ancestor), that is succumbing to a fungus against which it has no defence), humanity WILL succumb to one single parasitic kult-chewre, world-wide, unless it retains the diversity of cultural heritage that is the legacy of our ancestors.

That parasite is The Market, a simplifying force that eliminates what it cannot market, destroying art, science or ideology that does not further its acquisitive aims and objectives.

Thus Da Vinci would not be able to thrive in our world, unable to focus on one, profitable venture at a time, but inclined as he was to abstract, explore and invent as he was. Giotto would not have ever got to the perfect, hand-drawn circle, he would have been made to practice with his set-square, instead, or his PhotoShop.

Marco Polo would not have discovered the Silk Road to China, and Columbus the Americas (ah, now, there is the exception to the rule, that WOULD have been a blessing!).

The very fibre of our Societies is at stake, we need not fear the gradual integration and homogenisation of the Human Race, that may well be our eventual destiny, what we DO need to fear, is the loss of our best genetic treasures, the elimination of all that does not conform to social mores no longer reliant on the need to assist and support each other.

Instead, rooted in a deeply hateful, antagonistic and competitive environment, where overpopulation spurs us ever faster towards, is a future that will reward the most remorseless of hearts, capable of producing a market-based rationale, a Business Case for mass murder of the least able to buy and consume, produce and sell.

Thus, the people of the Amazon, of the Sahel, of the Mongolian Steppes and frozen North, marginal in their productivity and consumption, may no longer be valued by our descendants and, in a 24-billion populated world, be deemed “expendable”, while the hordes of barely human parasites of the overpopulated megalopolis, the unintelligent, uncreative, but teachable drones of monstrous Inner Cities, will be protected, encouraged to replicate their sub-standard genomes, like the heinous vision of Brazil, or Fifth Element: no longer Gods made Flesh, but Flesh made Gods!

I would rather sea the seas rise and swallow the once proud race of Man, all air be driven from the surface of the Planet and our gigantic buildings stand in the harsh radiation of Sol, silent warnings to any race that should bring tourism here, not to follow in our tiny, arrogant bipedal footsteps, but to treasure its diversity, to foster dissent and nurture uniqueness, or else follow our sad fate, to extinction.