Thursday, October 13, 2011

Just a note on that occupy wall street thing. Now I am prepared to believe that playing Bob Marley songs on an acoustic guitar and dancing about doesn’t necessarily mean that you are just a carnivalesque hippy who believes “all you need is love”. In fact I’ve  met loads of South Americans  who will quite  happily join in a bit of a folksy sing-a-long and have dreads and stuff and  play the bongos who are also like intensely well read and very serious Leftists who have lived under the kinds of corrupt authoritarian governments and amid the kind of crime and poverty that most British Leftists  have zero  experience of, so I know  that we Brits,  especially we bookish, left-field  Brits get all embarrassed and  uncomfortable and sneering if we see people dancing to the wrong music and letting themselves go and stuff, and holding hands and hugging, but let’s  not assume  that our own general up-tightness is  some  form of greater intellectual or moral authority and that your capacity to access simple pleasures  means you’re not also doing any complicated thinking, eh? Stiffness and introversion might not, after all, be the must useful qualities in those trying to build a broad-based collective.