Living by the sword.

Or more pertinently, the cane.

The Daily Express (living up to their reputation as a bastion of morality) are today claiming that over half of the adults in Britain - the Express claiming over two thirds of pupils themselves - are calling for the return of corporal punishment in the classroom, in an effort to curb the rampant disrespect and irritating mannerisms of the latest generation.

Let us be clear though. Whilst it would be a simple thing to think that stricter punishments will de facto equate to a deterrent against unruly behaviour, this is not, indeed cannot be as easy a subject to understand as that.

How many of you have parents, or know parents of friends, who teach? I do. They are all people who care about helping children progress themselves, in an effort to better the position they're in at the moment. In a microcosm of current social attitudes, teachers as a whole seem to believe that personal progression is key to achieving potential. Most of these people are moderate liberals and are nice, polite - if not usually middle class - people. I struggle to see my mother, or even some of the teachers I had at secondary school, raising their voices very much, let alone a cane. It is undoubtedly true that there is a marked difference between verbal warnings and and physical punishments. There is also a very serious question to be answered: Who will administer the punishment? Certainly not the hack journalists who're more interested in churning out tag-lines and causing consternation than they are in the actual outcome, nor the parents who have relinquished all responsibility for their demented off-spring.

These kind of measures would actually require the hiring of people who were specially recruited to mete out punishment, assuming of course that the current infra-structure of the education system was to remain untouched- merely built upon. Should of course the proposals for tougher teachers be enforced then it is entirely likely that the voices of moderation and empathy within our schools will be swept aside in a tide of rising aggression and borstal-like behaviour (on the part of teachers and pupils alike). Proponents of this kind of hare-brained scheme sound like they could do with being re-educated on the daily struggles in the class room, on both sides of it, before claiming that there can ever be such a simple answer to such a large and complex problem.

A doomed generation (and David Cameron's Horse)

‘Most smart people tend to feel queasy when the conversation turns to things like “certain death” and “total failure” and the idea of a “doomed generation”. But not me. I am comfortable with these themes.’ – Dr Hunter S. Thompson

A doomed generation indeed. As the wheel of history comes around, for another cheap shot in the back of the British public, it bears a different face, and yet bears the same cruel mark, high on the forehead, come straight from the Book of Revelation. Reagan and Thatcher may be gone, but their legacy of indifference towards a youth that they knew nothing of, and cared less about, continues. Thatcher broke the back of the Miners and the Print workers during the Eighties, in a series of decisive actions that left Britain with psychic scars which foment a range of explicit feelings to this very day; Cameron is too slick for that kind of crass action. The middle classes would never allow it. You could practically see the stink of fear, lying heavy upon him as soon as the threat of student protests began in earnest during the long, cold, December days. For the rest of us we felt a new sensation, a tingling, faltering sense of hope, hope that there was passion left in the British public - long thought to consist solely of Butlins RedCoats and sales executives – and that things may not be as bad as they seemed for most of the early 2000s, a decade mired in commercialism and blandness, in politics as in everything else.

We grew up with Tony Blair- a man who hid a war behind a smile and his decency behind a war. He led the way to the bland personality politics of our time; for all his faults, no one could accuse John Major of that. Cameron went one further though and hid himself behind two wars and another politician - the pasty white blob of Nick Clegg would do well to get back inside whatever cage Cameron keeps for him, in the dank underbelly of Number 10; whatever happens with the Alternative Voting (AV) referendum, Clegg needs to side-step the next volley of bloody stool that the country throws at the coalition; we need to see Cameron take a hit for once. The Liberal Democrats have yet to act as though they know that Cameron has turned their party into an enormous Trojan Horse; from here on in it’s only a matter of time before the raping and pillaging of middle England begins, but the Lib Dems are an active Horse, and want their share of the loot; the beating their credibility has taken over the last year has taken a heavy toll on their collective psyche.

We are amongst a whole generation of young adults left to languish under the cruel ministrations and voracious stupidity of the coalition government like rotten fruit lying beneath the fetid weight of a compost heap. This week in the United States, McDonalds, that bastion of integrity at the top of the service sector, had to turn down 938,000 people during a recruitment drive. Of the one million applicants for their part time, minimum wage jobs, only 62,000 were successful, but the question remains – why were one million people, in the prime of their mental health and faculties, applying for jobs that will see them flogged and debased by the general public within weeks of donning the grease laden apparel and hair nets?

The answer is a simple one. Desperation. This is what the bankers and politicians of the Western world have driven these people to, and the people know not whence they came to be here. Greed is a plum of a word to sum up the beginning of this debacle; ruin is all that awaits us at the end. This is a terrible state of affairs and one that needs correcting. A tide of crazed youth is hard to control when twice or thrice a week they aren’t forced to learn some kind of domesticity at the business end of a burger grill; dwell for a moment, on where we’ll be when even fast food ‘restaurants’ (and I use the term loosely) can’t afford to take on any more of the brutes, when off come the hairnets and stained aprons, and out they spill onto the streets, half starved and blinking in the light of the sun like mewling troglodytes. If the Millbank centre couldn’t hold them back will Canary Wharf be any different?

The age of restlessness.

I’m waiting. Nothing really happens, but since I’m not expecting anything to happen this doesn’t surprise me, though I am agitated. Restless.

I’ve begun to notice that everyone I know, with a job, hates their job. Everyone seems to hate their job, and the money they earn. These are people being paid to do, to behave, to (however temporarily) think, what, and how, someone else wants them to; this servitude (for what else must it be called?) makes them unhappy. The term ‘wage-slave’ is a little more succinct than I first realised, though that’s not the end of it; without a job, without a servile yoke- the civilised noose, if you will, to give meaning through its meaning, I spend time doing what I want to do, and yet I am unhappy with that. People rarely make themselves happy if they can help it.

A day spent reading American Psycho makes me feel strangely relieved, though it heightens my agitation; over the course of the day I have been accosted by ‘celebrities’, and I use the term loosely, affronting me on behalf of more companies than I care to remember. I miss hating things. I miss being passionate, even in that way towards something. Being passionate, even in a negative manner, was still to be passionate. Hate doesn’t come easily anymore, so I moan and complain, and dredge up excuses to create unease and dislike. Being negative means that I can hold onto that once bright spark, that spark which used to consume me ceaselessly, and keep me ticking and turning and burning over like a man possessed (or perhaps pre-possessed; a being destined to choose the wrong answers. Though at least I chose something) Burning like a man aflame- a man too busy to stop drop and roll.

Like a car in the desert I have no real destination, only endless expanses of dull potential waiting for me- open to me like the dark of a heavy night, like a door, like a tunnel- quixotic, promising, and yet eternally mundane. A dark potential like the mouth of a grave. This was to be the first time that I came to realise that there was no real, no tangible, difference between the two sides of the civilised coin: the ever-hungry career minded toads/ the jobless, feckless, unwashed masses of the unemployed. The lines within society had become blurred, and each side remained as fetid as the other.

The first day after she was gone I made sure I stayed busy; you couldn’t have paid me to make me come to terms with the roiling, rolling, awful, pit-of-the-stomach-is-so-empty-it’s-eating-itself feeling I had going on. Most of the time I found that I was beginning to enjoy the time I had to myself- not the time with myself; never by myself, for fear of my broken core realising just how broken it was, stamping its feet, impatient, why wasn’t I doing anything to sort it out? Love is a strange word. I was a broken person, but I don’t mean that I was a blob of rampant, despairing emotion, unable to hold back the lip quivering, bowel shaking, flood of tears and recriminations, oh no. I was a broken automaton, an ant, if you will, flailing berserkly, in a blind panic-rage as the routine of its life is ground to a halt by the errant leaf. I learned to tell the time by stomach, though often I would pretend to be too busy to eat; this helped assuage my objectionable conscience, irked as it was at my betrayal of social norms- my unwillingness to co-operate and advertise the good teeth, the fine musculature, and the damnable intellect of my own corporeal, bodily temple.