A piece full of interesting things from Allison Pearson, which is a relief in a week so far filled largely with comment pieces on Peter Mandelson¹.
“I send my warmest wishes and several thermal vests to Anne, who has turned off all the power in her flat and is living by candlelight after getting a string of bullying demands from the appalling energy supplier npower.”
A fascinating anecdote: it would be nitpicking of me to point out that this is only tenuously related to the Credit Crunch as it is either a) the result of error on npower’s part, or b) the result of high global commodity prices rather than a lack of liquidity in the financial markets. So I won’t – I am sure we can let it through on grounds of family resemblance: as the Crunch worsens, we will all be switching off the power rather than pay npower. Anne Myall is thus ahead of the curve, and is some sort of heroine.
As it transpires, this is exactly the thinking:
“I suspect Anne won’t be the last to make a stand. One thing is clear amid the smoking wreckage of the banking system: the era of Competitive Consumption is over.”
thus introducing a previously unsuspected link between Myall’s electricity bills and competitive consumption. Now Anne foreshadows an era in which we will all be switching off the power, rather than pay npower for the electricity we consumed competitively. While on our two foreign holidays.
Now I fully realise this is meant to be a humourous piece, so I can’t expect it to hang together as if it were a cogent article. So what does it matter if the first half doesn’t sensibly introduce the second? And why does this sort of frippery come under the purview of a blog looking at fear and despair?
Humour’s interesting because it rests on common assumptions – the absurdities have to be accepted as such by the audience if the punchline is to work. As a result, in telling the joke the joker reveals a lot about the world of themselves and their audience and the ideas that inform it. The ‘A-Z’ approach allows Pearson to touch on all sorts of themes dear to her reader’s hearts, showing us all sorts of interesting things.
Such as the premise:
“With two million headed for the dole, bragging about two fancy foreign holidays a year will be socially unacceptable.
Please welcome, instead, the age of Competitive Thrift.”
Bragging is fine, and previously bragging about consumption was fine. Now we’re all going to be poor, it’s distasteful (although it wasn’t when it was just other people who were poor). Which is one worldview.
Or take the acceptance of the consumerist ideal of beauty:
“without our expensive cosmetics, we’ll all be looking as rough as Amy Winehouse the morning after”
Note that the cosmetics are all that’s standing between you and [for the sake of this article, the unarguably unattractive] Amy Winehouse, when not looking at her best. Which, even controlling for humorous exaggeration, is a dark view of women². See also the laughs garnered by the suggestion that women were ever stupid enough to wax.
Or the rather revealing comment on Nookie:
“Cheapest form of home entertainment. Could even lead to pleasing surge in declining British birth rate. “
Which on the face of it doesn’t work – having a baby is a very poor solution to having too little money. To have ignored this would seem to suggest that the first sentence was there in service of the second and that we’re suddenly into a point about identity and national identity. Why is this lining silver: because more British babies will be born, the British standing in stark contrast to the ‘Afghans on benefits’ which appear later.³
I could go on: there’s the snobbery of the ‘Lidl’ comment (we used to do it previously but felt it was beneath us), the tortuousness of ‘Rationing’ (an exciting new game show with a title unrelated to its subject matter), the strangeness of a taboo on It girls in a newspaper obsessed with celebrity, and so on. But I won’t. Even if you accept the premises, a joke can go on too long.
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¹ To summarise: the Mail is not a fan
² Sorry to get all Marxist on you, brothers and sisters, but here’s a silver lining: the potential for tighter consumer spending to emancipate us from the fashion-beauty-media complex. The lie that you need products to make you look beautiful is one that generates misery for profit in a way unparalleled by anything short of the arms industry.
³ For those not convinced this is a race thing, try replacing ‘Afghans’ with ’scroungers’ – suddenly we have a point about the welfare state and not one about immigrants.
