Selfish Whining Monkeys: How we Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy
Copyright
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First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2014
Text © Rod Liddle 2014
Rod Liddle asserts his moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN 9780007351275
Ebook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007351305
Version 2015-03-10
Dedication
For Alicia
Epigraph
… remember that I am an ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.
William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1 Aeroplanes
2 The Tower of Arse
3 The Waiting
4 Move
5 The Culture of Narcissism
6 Married With Kids
7 Grand Theft Auto versus Boredom
8 And All Women Agree With Me About This
9 Class
10 Deference
11 Faux-Left
12 Juristocracy
13 Cloistered Elites 5, the North 0
14 Choice
15 Hairs, HAIRS, Growing Out of Your Spinal Column …
16 The Muon and the Elephant in Your Sitting Room
17 Deutsch–Amerikanische Freundschaft
The End
Index
Text Permissions
About the Publisher
1
Aeroplanes
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back.
Philip Larkin
I got an aeroplane for Christmas when I was six years old. Not a real one, but a heavy tinplate thing with chunky red flashing plastic lights on the wings and some sort of noise box which made a sound like one of those heaving 1950s vacuum cleaners, a piercing shriek like it was undergoing a hysterectomy without anaesthetic. I’d seen it in, I think, the toy department of Selfridges in Oxford Street on the annual trip to town where I got to visit Santa’s grotto and choose my present for the year. I can remember right now standing by the counter piled up with all these unimagined and beguiling toys and seeing the aeroplane up on top, lights flashing, screaming away – a big BOAC passenger liner – and being utterly, if momentarily, captivated by it.
‘Why would you want a plane?’ my mum asked with a sort of perplexed distaste as we stood there. None of us had ever been on one, nor were likely to. Aside from the unimaginable cost and the fear of flying, my family didn’t really hold with abroad on account of it being too hot and full of wogs. My dad had been abroad only once, briefly, to shell bits of Belgium during those interminable, drawn-out final stages of the Second World War. I still have a replica of the MTB he served on, carved with rough approximation to detail out of the brass casing of a German shell which had hit his boat but – mercifully, for my dad and by extension me – not detonated. They shelled Belgium after it had been liberated, according to my dad, because they simply couldn’t abide the Belgians, devious and bitter people and, if we’re being honest, far, far, worse than the Krauts. So in early 1945 Dad’s MTB anchored in some Belgian port, I forget which, and took potshots at the church tower from the stern cannon, and when they went onshore they pissed in the streets because that’s what the Belgians were habituated to, apparently. Awful people, almost as bad as the French.
Many years later, when I went on a work trip to Antwerp, I kept my eyes trained upwards in case they started throwing buckets of piss out of the windows, as my dad gravely assured me they would. No proper sanitation in Belgium, you see – an echo, in my dad’s mind, of John Betjeman’s bitter little list of stuff which made Britain distinct:
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains.
My mum had never been abroad, not even to kill people. A little later, in the early 1970s, she said she quite fancied visiting Egypt because they were at war with Israel and she didn’t much like Jews. But she never went.
So, anyway, after this short cross-examination in Selfridges I got my plane, pulled off the wrapping paper on Christmas Day and ran around the house with the thing with its lights on and the engine making that fucking demented noise, swooping down every so often to attack our amiable half-breed dog Skipper who, after a few moments of this torment, bit me deeply on the arm and then cowered behind the settee, tail wrapped underneath his arse and backbone curved almost in a semi-circle, because he knew he was in the shit, with me howling holding up my arm for all to see. And yet as it turned out Skipper was exonerated, my mother correctly assuming that the dog had been provoked beyond all reasonable limits and I had got what I deserved. So I stood there crying at the injustice of it all while Skipper – out of contrition or hunger, who knows? – licked away at the blood still pouring from the gash on my arm, the edges of the wound slightly blueish where his dumb and blunt half-Labrador teeth had merely bruised, rather than cut. But the licking was OK, because dogs’ tongues were antiseptic, according to my mum. ‘Better than Germolene, a dog’s tongue. You don’t need a bandage,’ she had said. I don’t know why, but I’ll always remember that purple-blue colour around the wound. It seemed exotic and in some way more severe, more of a grown-up wound, than if it had just been blood.
The plane lasted maybe three days before the huge clunking batteries gave out and my interest in swooping around with it – carefully avoiding the dog now – gave out too. And I had a sense, by about tea-time on 28 December 1966, when the family at last scuttled itself gratefully back from the sitting room – which would next be used twelve months hence; hell, you could still smell the pine needles in June – to the warm cluttered chaos of the parlour, that it had been a wasted opportunity, this growling, flashing plane. One trip to London every year – we lived twelve or thirteen miles away in Bexleyheath, and my dad worked in town during the week, but aside from Christmas we never, ever, went in ourselves – and one big present every year, and I’d chosen this thing that just made a noise and flashed its lights. I wasn’t sure what I should have chosen, but the plane definitely wasn’t it. The plane was, I thought to myself silently, shite.
Its very shiteness, of course, is why it sticks in the memory, a forlorn disappointment and also a warning. It nags away at me now when I buy presents for my own kids and they express the mildest interest in something which I know will hold their attention only briefly and will consequently be, for them, a source of long regret. Toys which are flashy, superficial and demand nothing from their owners, like those rides at Alton Towers or Thorpe Park in which you queue for hours to be strapped down and flung somewhere for twenty seconds, maybe through water if you’re lucky, and you end up wondering what the fuck it was all about, all that waiting, with the furious wasps buzzing around a thousand hideous onesies smeared with ketchup and the dried-out sugar from soft drinks and the whining, the incessant whining, about how long we have to wait for stuff.
But actually I shouldn’t worry – because there are three cupboards upstairs full of discarded toys with corroded batteries, and three more full of toys which are still, intermittently, used. The occasional duff present is of absolutely no consequence to my children. The problem these days is wondering what the hell I can buy the little bastards that they haven’t already got, wandering confused and desperate through Hamleys and Comet and Dixons, while they themselves are disconcertingly blasé about presents: nothing you can give them excites them, no matter how much you spend. At Christmas and on birthdays I check with the mother of my two boys – we’re divorced – and she’s as much at a loss as me. What can we buy them that will induce that immensely gratifying gaze of awe and delight, that look you want to see on their little faces on Christmas morning? A Ferrari, maybe, or their own country. Buy them Chad, or Belgium. Would that raise a smile, get them excited for a moment? But on Christmas morning what they really want is a lie-in, just to sleep ever onwards. And it’s not their fault, any of this. They don’t clamour for gifts; quite the reverse. They don’t clamour like I used to clamour, back when presents were exceptional and therefore it really mattered what you were given.
The plane banks sharply to the left, too sharply for my liking. My plastic beaker of warm chemical urinous white wine and half-empty packet of bowel-racking nicotine-replacement gum slides across the plastic tray table and I see the cheerful gay cabin steward with his impeccably neat number-one cut frown suddenly halfway down the aisle as he temporarily loses grip of his big trolley of scratchcards and duty-free chavgifts and booze and the whole thing careers onto the shoulder of some placidly dozing woman to whom he copiously and noisily apologises. You watch their faces, the cabin crew, and when they look worried, when they look startled, you worry too.
I don’t fly well. I have to suspend my disbelief when I get on a plane. Here we are, 38,000 feet above Paris. The weather was fine when we left Freiburg, it was predicted to be OK at Gatwick; but there’s always that mysterious clear-air mischief lurking in between, up here beyond the clouds in this desolate and silent realm – a ‘bad, evil and dangerous place’, as some sixty-year-old American crop-duster pilot told me when we were thrown together in cattle class on a scheduled flight to San Francisco not so long ago. He never flew above 10,000 feet. Up to that level, he knew where he was; beyond it he was lost and scared – it’s too cold and too weird up beyond the clouds.
So I watch the cabin crew and listen for a change in the timbre of the engine noise, which might well mean we’re fucked, or – this always has me frightened – after the distinct lack of emphasis with which the landing gear supposedly locks itself into place, when the tray tables have been obediently stowed and we’re nearly at the end, that prolonged muffled whirring and growling and the lack of that satisfying click.
I don’t fly well. Like everyone – nearly everyone – I don’t want to die, and flying all over the place seems to be tempting providence, to be tweaking the tail of death. It seems to be, you know, pushing it a bit. At least on a plane I am so terrified by the prospect of airborne death flapping its big black wings above my head that I temporarily forget the stuff that plagues me the rest of the time: the black crab in the brain, the sterol noose around the heart, the scarlet blood in the stool, the sudden lurched slump and slurred diction occasioned by rapidly detonating blood vessels, the fire in the basement, the flight of piss-stained concrete stairs, the mugger’s knife.
My kids – well, the two boys – sit strapped in next to me, oblivious and insouciant, one of them reading Lord of the Flies (and identifying, I fear, with Jack), the other one trying to fashion a paper aeroplane out of his boarding-pass stub. They fly very well indeed, never a complaint from them, packet of pretzels and a Coke and they’re fine for however long – an hour, thirteen hours, you name it. CAT makes them grin and take the piss out of their father for the beads of sweat which line up sentinel-like on my brow, for the suddenly gripped armrest, dry mouth and hyperventilation. They’ve been doing it for so long now, since they were born, I guess. Long and short haul, across the world and back in time for The Simpsons. Lucky, lucky, boys. Their mother isn’t with us – we’re divorced; did I mention that? – she’s on a different plane, heading for New York. Their stepmum and stepsister are somewhere in the middle of the plane, where it is technically slightly safer if we land on water, but also where the stale flatus tends to congregate, I’m told. This was an Easter break, Vienna and the Black Forest. A treat for them, we explained. A bit of culture, a modicum of fun here and there, the opportunity for the kids to absorb a broader perspective on foreigners than the one with which I was raised. And it works, I think. Although the boys are still prone to say something embarrassing about Hitler very loudly in German restaurants.
My long-term memory, which used to be pretty good, has become, of late, frayed and elliptical, its edges gnawed away by increasing age and a continual drip feed of alcohol. My short-term memory, which was never terribly good, is pretty much shot to fuck, for presumably similar reasons. The distant past, which I was once sure of, has become a sly and shifting place, a different country in which not only do they do things differently, but they also do things differently as to how you think you remember them doing things, if you get my drift. Now only the generalities remain, along with one or two flashes of total recall – like the toy plane, and the dog bite – so bold that they almost blind, so perfectly brought back that one begins to get a bit suspicious, to doubt their veracity. Sometimes, too, I remember stuff without recalling where it is I remember it from, some strange electrical impulse in the synapses, much like the one that made my old half-breed dog Skipper, when he was especially tired, circle the carpet wearily three or four times and then paw compulsively at the shagpile, as if it were a shallow, dusty depression in the Serengeti surrounded by lethal enemies a million or so years ago, rather than covering the floor of a 1950s-built semi-detached house in Middlesbrough with The Likely Lads about to come on the TV and an almost unending supply of Rich Tea biscuits.
It would be easy, given this conveniently acquired vagueness, to be nostalgic about my childhood and – contra Sartre – all that remains of it. Given, too, the fact that I was undeniably happy as a kid. But when I look back, nostalgia is not the first emotion which makes its damp and cloying presence felt – although nostalgia is always hovering somewhere in the background, like a flatulent ghost, and I suppose that from time to time it will need to be banished with a big stick. No, the primary emotion I feel, looking back at the years when I was a child, is one of immense guilt: that I do not do things as well as my parents did them; that my basic sense of morality is unhinged and at best equivocal, whereas theirs was, essentially, anchored, and furthermore anchored in decency. No matter how many places I fly to with an agreeably open mind, and with the kids dutifully in tow.
I suppose this seems a strange thing to say, given my parents’ views on a whole bunch of stuff, not least the poor old wogs. I don’t possess their views about wogs, or at least not all of them. In fairness to my mum and dad, their opinions were not quite as bilious as I may have implied; it was a more nuanced thing, more subtle. My mum, for example, quite liked Caribbean people, because she considered them to be ‘cheerful’ – and even Malcolm X and Papa Doc didn’t serve to disabuse her of this notion. On the other hand, she couldn’t abide ‘Indians’, by which she meant everyone who lived between Aleppo and the Burmese border just east of Cox’s Bazar, at which point they promptly became jabbering, slit-eyed, robotic and cruel Chinks. Chinks, then, were quite bad, although not so bad as Japs. Japs were cunning and cruel automatons.
Then there was her mild animus against Jews, which I found utterly inexplicable even when I was very young – but which presumably had its fascistic roots in her East End of London upbringing. I remember well the Yom Kippur War – with my dad and me cheering on the Israelis, whom we admired for their appalling travails, their Western-ness and competence, and my mother howling support for the valiant Arabs, who were nonetheless still wogs, of course, but sort of honest and steadfast wogs, unlike the Jews. A bloody rare thing, honest wogs. That’s how we viewed these new TV wars between competing angry wogs, back then: as a sort of Champions League semi-final, take your sides, may the best man win, let’s hope it goes to penalties.
My dad, meanwhile, had a vague fondness for ‘Indians’, a contempt for Americans, a visceral loathing of the French except for General de Gaulle, for whom he expressed qualified admiration, and a sullen disdain for the rest of the world’s people, ranging west from Monmouth to Copenhagen. I mean, really, west to east – Monmouth to Copenhagen, via Americas North and South, Asia and Africa. Everywhere, that is, except for New Zealand and Australia, and also – because of that nice Christmas tree they give us every year – Norway. It wasn’t racial hatred at all, mind; just disdain and utter contempt.
And yet once, in the year before he died, my dad told me he’d always wanted to visit Valparaiso. As a kid he’d seen it on a map, and heard it spoken about, and it somehow conjured a beguiling exoticism of a place far away where exciting and strange things might happen. Like me, he had a thing about maps, wanting to know where everything was, how all these awful, contemptible places full of dubious people connected up. And so somehow, staring at a map years before, he had got it into his head that exciting things might happen in the Chilean seaport of Valparaiso. It had never occurred to me that he wanted exciting things to happen. He had always rather intimated that he preferred that they wouldn’t.
But, all things considered, my parents held a somewhat narrow and rancid view of the world that seems determined to exist beyond our shores, one undoubtedly occasioned by the Second World War – a struggle in which we were opposed by bestial enemies and hindered by cowardly and devious allies, but nonetheless prevailed, as you might expect. And also, one supposes, occasioned by the vestigial tail of our old empire left dangling inside their brains. Whatever the causes, this is all I have on them, my parents – this lofty disdain for billions of people, a disdain shared close to universally among people of their social class and age. Not a raging racism by any means – until the 1980s, my mum and dad voted Labour, and would rather have voted Communist than NF – just a meme rooted somewhere deep inside, and which was usually not articulated at all, just sort of there, and ever-present.
But this is all I have on them; about everything else, they were right. And I, and my generation, seem by contrast feckless and irresponsible, endlessly selfish, whining, avaricious, self-deluding, self-obsessed, spoiled and corrupt and ill. We are the generation that has spent the small but hard-earned inheritance we got from our hard-working parents (mine went on that most irresponsible and selfish of all of our new and expensive freedoms, divorce lawyers), and are now busy spending the money we should be leaving to our kids. And while our own children are temporarily materially indulged, and deprived of that most crucial human right, boredom, they are otherwise neglected, too often considered an encumbrance. My generation is the one which will not wait for anything, because it feels it has the right to have everything now – and this is true not simply in material terms, although that’s bad enough.
Again, this isn’t nostalgia, a demand for a return to the values of 1964. A friend of mine up in Darlington died of polio in that year; another friend, back down in South London, had rickets. I don’t see much benefit in bringing back polio and rickets, still less smallpox, which I remember being terribly scared of back then.* And the various processes which have inculcated in my generation its sense of entitlement and adherence to a sort of endless and witless moral relativism have not all been for the bad, either. It is hard to argue against longer life expectancy, greater affluence, safer workplaces, the freedom to escape from a hopeless marriage, the rights of women to be treated equally, and so on. But a certain moral code has been lost along the way, which has contributed lately to our country becoming close to bankrupt, a nation of broken families clamouring about their entitlements siring ill-educated and undisciplined kids unfamiliar with the concept of right and wrong, where there is an ever-diminishing sense of community and belonging, a perpetual transience, if you fancy a cheap oxymoron.
This kind of complaint is often seen as one of those rather tired why-oh-why right-wing arguments, invariably followed by a finger pointed at those jabbering long-haired liberal bores of the 1960s, with their Marcusian and Gramscian idiocies, who rewrote our education system, demanded the new divorce laws, took over the criminal justice system and so on. And sure enough, there will be some of that in what follows – but it is not even half of the story. At least as many of the most repellent aspects of my generation, of where and how we have become so palpably wayward, so fucking full of ourselves, are the consequence, directly or otherwise, of that singularly grim and vindictive Conservative government of the 1980s. And when those two philosophies come together – they are not so distant as you might think, both concerning themselves, primarily, with self-empowerment – the result is especially toxic; a determination to do away with everything – society, authority – but ourselves.
And then again, there’s plenty more that is, on the surface at least, politically neutral. This is why it is so hard to deal with our malaise; because it is the product, in part, of two schools of political thinking which are usually regarded as in opposition to one another – and also of stuff that fits into neither political camp very comfortably. It is a waywardness, then, which muddies all the established paradigms. And, furthermore, all of it contained within a paradox: peace, freedom, affluence, comfort and security are all, you would argue, agreeable entities. But they have caused us a lot of problems, and – as we shall see – they have not made us terribly happy. Peace has made us complacent, freedom has made us irresponsible, affluence has made us acquisitive, comfort has made us neglectful of others, and security has made us – oddly enough – tremblingly insecure. I suppose you could advance the argument that our selfishness has been imposed upon us, much as obesity has been imposed upon the hulking fat tattooed chavmonkey standing in the queue at Burger King for his two supersize cardiocheeseburgers with bacon, double fries and vat of Coke. That would be a very now argument, very 2014; that none of it is our own fault, but it has happened ineluctably, and it could not be otherwise, and perhaps the government should give us some help as a consequence, maybe send us on a course, sort out some counsellors or give us some more money to deal with it. Well, fuck that. We are not totally powerless, not entirely at the mercy of external forces. Our existence precedes our essence, and not the other way around, yes? It is pointless and, I think, cowardly to try to exculpate ourselves on the grounds that we are passive recipients of cultural change which has been imposed upon us, without our connivance. The philosophies we cheerfully embraced came from somewhere; they did not manifest themselves, unbidden, out of the ether. But one way or another, there is something lacking in us; something which previous generations possessed.