Misunderstanding

I’ve been reading your blog, said Ilona, our cleaning lady, and I absolutely agree with you. It’s become virtually impossible now to tell the truth. Truth is a crime today. Take blacks for example. I mean, Negroes. We all know that in terms of intelligence they lag far behind us. It’s a well established scientific fact that their intellectual capabilities … I mean, you wrote about it, didn’t you? You did. You were brave enough to admit that in your blog and I admire your candour.

Ilona came from Budapest. She is 35, fluent in five European languages and has a degree in art history from her local university.

What? – I said. What? What are you talking about? Who are ‘us’? What kind of nonsense is that? I never wrote about black people. I never wrote about their intellectual capabilities. I never wrote that they are in any way different from ‘us’ whoever ‘we’ may be. Are you mad? All I wrote was that we shouldn’t invest too much meaning into such human characteristics as skin colour or race, or nationality, or religion. It messes up our own capacity for judgement. We should write about people, not about their attributes. All I wrote is that inverted stereotypes are the same old stereotypes. It doesn’t help if you convert a negative stereotype into a positive one. A stereotype is a symptom and we should at the very least try to understand what does such a symptom mean, what is behind this symptom and what kind of a bigger picture does it fit into. Only when we see living people, complex and contradictory, are we able to sort out some of our problems, if we still have any.

This is precisely what I mean, said Ilona. I think we should care more about our racial purity. I met a man once, he was from Latin America. From Chile, I guess. He wanted to marry me. I said no way. You may be good in bed and you may be a good glazier and a good ceramist but I’ll never have children with you because I don’t want my children to be underachievers. We, whites, I said, shouldn’t mix with the people of colour, no matter which part of the world they come from.

And what did he say? – I asked.

He said that he was white, said Ilona, but he wasn’t. I also liked what you wrote about the Jews. They do control the world.

Oh, no, I said. No, they don’t. And I never wrote about ‘the Jews’. All I wrote was that we should at the very least support Israel no less than we support other countries in the Middle East. I mean, what is Israel if not an ultimate success story? I mean, the country and the people deserve our support. If we allowed OPEC to be created and if we trusted all those terrible dictators with trillions of our money, if we launder our regular financial ejaculations through any fixer we could find overseas, I mean, we should, at least, extend at least a part of the same courtesy to a single democratic country in the region, shouldn’t we?

Right, said Ilona, because they control the money. Our money. We make money with our blood, sweat and tears and they control our money and use it to control all the people around the world. They are no better than the Nazis because, you know, the Nazis were just the people who cared about their own country.

What do you think about David Cameron? – I asked.

I think he’s gay, she said. What do you think?

Well, I said, I think that he lacks ideas. This is what I think. I think that he lacks vision. This is why he painted himself into such a dead end. He doesn’t seem to care about anything but a miserable competition with a minor political force. He is obsessed with UKIP. Thanks to this obsession and to this stupid rivalry and to all the limelight it receives the conservatives managed to elevate an obscure fringe party to the position of a major political force. There was nothing strange about UKIP exploiting the national prejudice to their own political gains. Every radical political group does more or less the same, be it about class or ethnic background, or whatever they can put their hands on. What was strange is that a major political party took this bait and pulled those marginal oddballs into a position of great political influence. What is this if not the evidence of total cluelessness? I mean the conservatives have no ideas about economy, about foreign policy, about reforms or about our future. All they seem to care about is immigration because ‘there are too many foreigners in our land’. This is why we should close our borders for European plumbers and keep them open for Rotherham gang rapists. Great thinking, but what else should you expect from a PR man apart from such smoke, mirrors and Potemkin villages? This is why he goes down next year although it’s kind of unfair because the Labour don’t seem to have any ideas either although, to be honest, they don’t even pretend to have any. Which may be not such a bad sign, after all. It may only mean that we as a country are now in such a good form that we can easily and comfortably do without any government at all. I think that many rich countries suffer now from their governments much more than they gain from them. All our governments today are almost uniformly incompetent, pesky, myopic, petty and stupid. You know, Belgium had no government for about three years and it only served them well. I think it wouldn’t hurt much to have some freaks on the top of our system for the next term if only to show us what we have taken for granted all these years.

Absolutely, said Ilona reaching behind the radiator with her duster. Absolutely. This is precisely what I think. We should stop all those barbarians from abroad from coming here. You’ve nailed it.

Light

Tried to change a lamp. Last time I called the electrician and the man from Bulgaria – a former philosophy professor judging from his look – did it in less than a minute. This was kind of a challenge.

Many years ago I used to do it myself too. With those now all but forgotten incandescent bulbs this was a fairly unpretentious operation. Once a year I’d move a chair, retrieve a bulb from the secret stash of three or four and change the dead one. That was it usually, if you don’t count the very first time I did it and put my pliers into the lamp-socket just to check if it was under voltage or not. With a quiet sound the pliers exploded in my hand. I still have a little scar, a white dot on my chin from a little drop of molten metal which landed there. But apart from that profound experience it would later generally take five minutes on average and set me back something of a pound a year or less.

Armed with these sweet recollections I started with this new one, mounted in the fake ceiling. In a minute the tips of my fingers were almost chopped off, the lamp mount was sitting in the ceiling the wrong way and some considerable part of the ceiling around the hole came crashing down on my head. I didn’t know it was so feeble. The house I live in was built of red bricks and sandstone many generations ago and it doesn’t look delicate or infirm at all but I suppose that any recent additions to this formidable edifice were made of dust and saliva. And I didn’t change the wretched thing. No way.

Now, time and again I do try to change lamps around the place I live. I have two types of them: those purplish little round monsters with two little pedicles on the back and the tubes.

The tubes are remarkable. You can only handle them with a piece of cloth, no less. You can’t touch the damned thing with your bare hand. They break when you try to put them into their places. The electrician whispers some more inaccessible passages from Barthes or Adorno, or Wittgenstein in Bulgarian under his nose when he does this. The packages promise you something akin to the life eternal, vaguely, if you don’t use them more than two and a half hours a day, this in a very small print on the back. They go three times a year on average, they cost a fortune and you can only buy them online.

I think I understand the politics of this ordeal. People print a lot of money to finance their ridiculous lifestyles. They need this money to circulate. People also need light. What’s the better way to collect some revenue than to restrict their own access to some absolute basics of their lives, especially if you do it in the name of humanity? In the name of humanity I now have six spotlights in the place of one lamp. In the name of humanity my wiring smells funny and my switches blow once in a while from all the power I use.

We invest in some huge overhaul of the entire industry and it pays back all those trillions we add every year to the global money stock. As we need all those revenues more and more desperately with every coming year we have no time for such niceties as natural development, inventions, experiments, competitive market and so on. We just push what we have at hand and hope that all those lamps emitting ghastly futuristic light heavily tinted with the shades of violet or green will get better with time. They either will or we stop noticing and adjust to the change, as we always do. I mean, if we survived the last century what this little nuisance can do to us?

Blogs

Do you follow blogs? Do you read them? Do you post comments or take part in online discussions?

I do follow two blogs. One of them belongs to a retired English accountant. The man writes utter nonsense sometimes, as if his retirement were too much of a burden for him. This is not personal nonsense though; this, for the most part, is a highly stylised literary gobbledygook very finely written by a person who can truly appreciate the most delicious bits of belles-lettres. This man embodies for me an aesthetic principle, an ideal of the perfect artist described in one of the Philip K. Dick novels as a robot floating in the interstellar space and shooting mysterious objects in all directions for no apparent purpose.

Several years ago I read a blog where the author described in minute detail and in a very funny tone some of the least important occurrences of his daily routine. Usually he would publish a post of several lines about a slightest rearrangement of things on his desk or about a sudden, brief and unfulfilled urge to make a totally needless telephone call to his uncle. It was magnificent but this blog has long ceased to exist.

Another such publication I follow more or less daily for even less obvious reasons is an American conservative blog. The general attitude of the blog seems to me reasonably belligerent, all things considered. By reasonable I mean that the opponents of this blog may be completely unhinged. What makes this argument truly dramatic, in the academic sense of the word, which implies that both sides of a conflict must be equally justified in their competing efforts, is that I can easily understand the other side, the liberal one.

Another criterium of a true drama is that the argument must be all-important; it must determine the very existence of all the people involved. I mean, people around the globe follow this political process even more closely than I do and either start a world war or wait for the next turn of the US electoral cycle, depending on the outcome of the debate. Sometimes they err and the war stays local, but the quality of the debate is invariably very high.

I never post comments though. I did but soon found out that it doesn’t make any sense at all. People don’t discuss things to find out some basic truth about their lives. This is what I thought and this is why everyone taking part in any discussion would always turn upon me the moment I pointed out to them this painfully obvious truth. It is as appropriate as taking part in a discussion onstage while being a part of the theatre audience. You may be well aware of the solution to the problem but I really doubt that anyone around will appreciate that.

This is why the comments are usually the weakest part of any publication these days, especially after the armies of paid trolls descended on these battlefields. But even without all the mercenaries these discussions are pointless if they are not confined to some very specific topics, say, a printer malfunction or a baby rash. When arguing about more general things, especially the political ones, people don’t want solutions. They know them all too well long before they start a bunfight.

Usually they just want to spar a bit, to let out some steam in a friendly death match. They may seem to be at each other’s throats, ranting madly and frothing at their mouths but don’t you be deceived: this is all as cordial and familial as it gets. Don’t spoil the fun with your silly candour. Just sit and watch how the world goes to the dogs while you’re having a break from making it a better place.