U.K.'s Miserablist Madness: 'Down With Us!'

For a reason story, I interviewed Brendan O'Neill of Britain's spiked-online last week, whose favorite adjective turned out to be "miserablist."

It's a handy word to describe the existential, anti-advancement gloominess of much of the traditional left, a world where progress is never considered a valid cause for rejoicing as long as not every last person can benefit from it, and as long as there are potential downsides to the upsides (of course, true miserablists never stress the latter and only have eyes for the former).

The mindset reaches its apex in the whole wretched Adbusters scene, mostly populated by the sort of moping, misanthropic, free-trade-loathing nihilists who'd gladly shoot themselves if it wasn't for the fact that purchasing a gun and bullets would give aid and comfort to the military-industrial complex.

Has progress brought us cheap and plentiful clothing? Child labor. Does it enable people whose parents never went on vacation more than fifty miles from home to travel to the ends of the earth? Pollution. Has DNA science given us genetically reinforced, bug-resistant wheat and vegetables? Cue the Joy Division tracks, 'cause Frankenfood will kill us all.

Saturday's London Times carried a number of fine examples of the tiresome trend, none more jaw-dropping than columnist Giles Coren's malevolent diatribe against McDonald's. His article is so breezily nutty that it would give Morgan Spurlock pause. The headline in the actual paper called McDonald's counter staff "Spotty, Ugly Losers" (the Times toned it down somewhat for the online version).

What's Coren so upset about? In a word, uniforms.

The announcement that Bruce Oldfield has redesigned the staff uniforms at McDonald's seems to me the most futile exercise in turd-polishing since Adolf Hitler looked in the mirror and thought to himself: “Hmm, maybe I'd look better with a little moustache.”

Ever since the world woke up to the obesity, heart disease, cancer, impotence and misery that a fast-food diet inevitably leads to, McDonald's has done everything in its power to deflect attention away from its hamburgers and on to other things.

McDonald's exemplifies everything that Coren, a former Times restaurant critic, despises, thanks to

...products that lie at the heart of Britain and America's very serious obesity crisis, not to mention the litter crisis, the deforestation crisis, the animal welfare crisis and the nasty smell up and down your high street crisis.

He forgets to blame the burger chain for the clubbing of baby seals, and for the terrible injustice that is Gordon Brown's bunions.

Briefly, Coren does wonder why people go to McDonald's, and his answer is that it's not simply because they like the food, or that it's an efficient option if they have just fifteen or twenty minutes to spare, or that it's an affordable treat. No, the attraction of a Big Mac and fries is apparently that it's comfort food for self-hating, inebriated losers (ugly and spotty ones, I'm fairly sure):

We usually go into McDonald's because we feel terrible. Drunk, hungry, hung-over, barely £2 in our pocket, all self-respect out the window, we push past the weeny bike thieves and kitten-stabbers gathered in the doorway. We keep our stomach together despite the slide of our feet on the cow-greased floor (is there ever not a sign up telling you the floor is slippery?) and the smell of a Swaledale field at the height of the cow-burning epidemic.

"Cow-greased floor"? Note how McDonald's famous insistence on cleanliness — a trait that Coren would surely find laudable in a Michelin-starred restaurant — is turned on its head by his linking the slippery-tiles sign, the very symbol of a place that's just been thoroughly mopped, to a slicked-up slaughterhouse killing floor worthy of an Upton Sinclair novel. The linguistic dishonesty is as brazen as it is transparent.

Just a couple of pages further in the same newspaper, we find a piece by columnist Janice Turner in which she bitchily discusses the revelation by former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott that, while still in office, he was a binge-and-purge bulimic. This news gives Turner license to declare all of England an "eat-shop-purge nation of bulimics" because some people are shopaholics who own 50 pairs of shoes, or they throw out old mushrooms that are probably quite edible despite being slightly "manky."

On these grounds, Turner declares the West "decadent" and complains that our erstwhile "respect for food" has been "eroded by decades of cheap produce." Yes, let's blame the West's "rot" — such as it is — on cheap food. Makes perfect sense, at least if we forget that, in a severe economic downturn a century ago, millions of destitute consumers might have had to eat a mixture of mud, oil and sugar to quiet their growling stomachs; these days, no matter their deplorable income, the poor find plentiful carrots and peas and green peppers, all for a song. Horrible, isn't it?

I had further occasion to reflect upon England's miserablist tendencies today when a British judge, sentencing two lowlife thugs who had stabbed a young man to death, remarked that the crime

...raises serious questions about the sort of society which exists in this country.

What on earth makes presumably sane people — especially sane people working inside a justice system that surely makes no secret of its own successes — issue such alarmist, down-with-us drivel? Violent crime in Britain has been on the decline for decades. In 2007, the risk of becoming a crime victim in the U.K. fell to the lowest number in at least 26 years.

The paradox is obvious: The more successful and peaceful western societies are, the greater the number of utterly disconsolate miserablists they seem to produce. England — clean, safe, organized England, its Tescos and and John Lewis food emporiums so magnificently stocked as to almost pulverize my 80's recollection of the country's depressing fish/chips/curry culture — now seems to have a particularly large and vocal contingent of these people. Clearly, they have taken root, among other locations, in the nation's newsrooms, where they whinge on their word processors as if possessed by the fused spirit of Kurt Cobain and Eeyore the donkey.

You don't have to be a Pollyanna to find their bleatings crass, condescending, and robbed of reality.

Comments

[Martin Owens]

Ever since the agricultural and industrial revolutions put decent living standards within the reach of just about everybody, the aristocrats (by birth and self-appointed) have been going crazier and crazier in their attempts to distance themselves from the commoners. Tom Wolfe wrote about it in THE PAINTED WORD: they scout around for a theory or a policy that nobody else can understand, so that they can then turn around and castigate everybody else for not being as enlightened as they are.

As a longtime student of swindles and con games, I am amazed at their ability to get paid for this.

[tomk]

Rogier- Your perceptions of the "wretched Adbusters scene" and the "existential, anti-advancement gloominess of much of the traditional left" seem to me to be far removed from reality. I have followed the links and spent a bit of time at them and I just don't see it. I'm sympathetic to much of their (adbusters, leftists, etc.) thinking, as I'm sympathetic to libertarianism, but name calling and knocking down straw men doesn't seem terrifically useful, though I suppose if I shared your animus, I probably get a kick out of it. I did enjoy a few of Brendan O'Neill's articles.

Anyway, just to affirm Martin Owens' perceptive comment, I'll quote the French Situationist theorist Raoul Vanegeim-- "when consciousness rots, ideology oozes out".