‘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?
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