August 20, 2011
the social recession
“Eructation of unhealthy souls into the faded air”:
Neil Lawson of the Labour think-tank Compass bleakly admitted: “Society is hollowing out, but not just in the rotting boroughs of south London. The middle classes are anxious too. Many are richer but few seem happier. Mental illness abounds. White-collar jobs are outsourced to India. Everyone looks for meaning in their lives – but all they find is shopping.”
“The reason our children’s lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA,” he said. “So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.”
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I may run this by some of my English friends and see what they think.
In any event, the bad digestion/farting/belching metaphor strikes me as apt in a way I can’t quite explain.
Not entirely unrelated, there’s a book out recently about the “history” of the stomach. Read a review in the LRB. Need to refresh my memory.
An English friend who lives in the Fens could scarcely write to me for days after the riots. He said that “there was a truly weird silence for days, like nothing I have ever known.” The day it started he’d been writing about the riots in eighteenth-century Norfolk, and he found the resemblance was uncanny. Then as now, he said, there was a criminal subtext.
I wish some of our friends and readers in England and elsewhere in the UK and Ireland and the continent would chime in.
I’ve heard a reprise of God Save the Queen playing in my head, but honestly, I do not have any clear sense of how to understand what happened.