THE INSUBORDINATE SUBORDINATE

By Ishmael Fiifi Annobil


Britain and the rest of the Western world have come under its spell. We are all delirious from its infusions, and we cannot budge lest we lose some important detail. But it is no realism, this animal. It is merely a sick joke gone too far; buoyed by our endemic illiteracy, which renders us incapable of higher sight and thought.

The damned thing has brashly taken over the entire window, obscuring the light and landscape beyond. It even presumes the right to divide us along cultural and racial lines. Worst still, it coerces our indulgence. I am talking about mainstream British journalism today: the maddening tyranny.

Let us start this moan with television. Let’s put aside the numbing fatalism of its daytime insurance commercials for a minute, and go straight for the jugular. Here in Britain, we now have a spate of political discussion programmes that mix kitchen sink dialogue with pseudo-polemic. The guests are often jaded populist politicians, who presume their comeback to involve giving in to the banal agenda (it has nothing to do with the war).

Naturally, the subject matter is mere gossip and titillation without the breasts and up-skirt shots. And because these bubble gum commentators obviously think they address a constituency as dim as themselves, we are all subject, continually, to lower whim – programmes that may well have some potency in a torture chamber; excruciating deadness carried on by vulgarians. Naturally, language, too, has had to be dumbed down a notch.

The ‘highpoint’ of this descent occurred recently, during a piece of popular dross, Big Brother. A contestant niggled a Bollywood star with ‘racial’ slurs - then kaboom! The ‘supposed’ public response was extraordinary (I say ‘supposed’ because British TV phone-ins have just been found woefully flawed and corrupt). The ‘nasty’ contestant was turfed out of the Big Brother house to a zero reception, and she giggled nervously to still herself.

The sheer mass piety against her was stomach churning. Surely, Britain cannot be that anti-racist! Surely, the whole nation could still remember how the same disgraced contestant had played dumb and won the title of the ‘dumbest of the dumb’ on the same programme not so long ago. The irony was that she, the patently non-full-Caucasian, was the racist, and the rest of the nation was naturally indignant. Pah.

But what is this all really about? Is this the idealism (and realism) we pay for with our hard earned money? No. What happened to the glory days then? Where did the well-informed presenters and documentarists, and even humorists, go? Are they still alive and seething like me in their closets? Possibly, but I won’t hold my breath just yet. Socialism has fallen, we don’t have anyone to outshine anymore, we are at war, and the natives need entertaining. Opiate to the gagged? No - hell no.

But who are the natives really? Are they halfwits? Are they the type of people that like their kids to learn the Queen's ‘Bad’ English and swearing? No. The Natives of England go to school compulsorily till sixteen, and many go on to the many brilliant universities the land has to offer. So the odd ones out must be the television producers who seem curiously inclined to keep the natives delirious and daft. They are completely out of the social loop.

Bad news has become the order of the day. TV anchors report lengthily from hallowed murder scenes where young Black kids have fallen to ‘black-on-black-crime’ or ‘race-killing’ (notice the ‘subtle’ difference). The War as we know it has changed names a few times, too; first, The Iraqi Invasion, then Iraqi War, and now, War On Terror. As if to make it up to the natives, there is pre-watershed sex of all types and tragedy on the screen.

Most TV drama rides on a new, nihilistic consciousness – tragedy for a rush. Nasty death tolls its bell at the heels of each drama, matched in diligence by rape, promiscuity and social disengagement and dysfunction. Then there are magazine programmes that specialise in the casual denigration of Africa. The idea is to tell the poor Brit that he/she is relatively well off?

One recent show recently announced it momentous quest to build a game reserve in Kenya! Rather than laugh at the utter stupidity, I wept instead. Thanks to such people, Britain has a new mantra: “Teach Africans to help themselves”. And this demeaning mantra comes from a nation that is thoroughly nonplussed by psychotic house prices, rent, poll tax, homelessness, bad inner city education, race talk, immigration politics, two-faced politicians, ostentation politics (Queen’s Honours), drugs, ostracised youth, and a legal system that discriminates willy-nilly against fathers.

Interestingly, if investigated, one would find that those African countries are better off on most grounds, barring the thieving ways of their own politicians. But that won’t stop the new crusaders; musicians who know everything there is to know about economics, politics, philosophy, agriculture and medicine. Theirs is a simple philosophy: Cancel the Debts. They are not to know that the African masses are countering this with their own Where Did the Money Go? campaign.

These fledgling crusaders are just like their politicians - they see Africa on a macro level only, thus discounting the fact that Africans have always been great business  people whose legendary enterprise, wealth and dignity have sustained on the micro level throughout history. Neither do they understand that governments over there have usually used the loans and aid money as campaign funds, not to mention the sexual debauchery, because Africans  do not rely on government to look after themselves and each other.  Most Africans own their own homes, from palatial affairs to humble huts. They gave up long ago. The average African citizen will not feel any different whether loans are cancelled or not.

The culmination of that debt cancellation campaign was an international concert designed to showcase the piety of Caucasian musicians and exclude ‘Black’ musicians. When tackled about the exclusivity, the forcible crusader-organiser revealed his fictional impression of African musicians, as being rustic aboriginality without the benefit of credible a modern sound. "Well done, Mr Geldof,” one imagined the press saying. It has to be said, however, that a west-country glasshouse rainforest did host a few of those aboriginal players (in their natural habitat, one presumed).

Soon after that, that same Geldof described (flippantly) on daytime TV how it was he came to be enthroned a chief of development in a Ghanaian town. He had been scouting a place for his documentary on Africa, when he was cornered by kingmakers and hoisted to the chieftaincy of Bisease. In that case, one wondered how it was that there was quite a durbar around his 'investiture' and why his regalia fitted so perfectly.

As to the monumental documentary leading to his chance enthronement, it was the vehicle for some quirky observations about African history and geography that would make even insincere Mongo Park turn in his grave. And, oh, did Geldof also speculate on the possibility that ‘us’ Europeans discovered the wheel? Or did I hear wrong? Forgive me if I did. It’s the grandiloquence and sophism, you see. It gets in the way. He must have lost me somewhere.

I don’t blame him, really. I blame the duplicitous African politicians who make their ascendancy on anti-West rhetoric then switch to lining their own pockets, once they are in power. They would naturally facilitate the false enthronement of any Tom, Dick and Harry if that lets them sniff cash and fame. The exclusion of African/African-American/Afro-Caribbean musicians from Live8 holds no meaning to those African politicians at all.

Why? Well, Geldof advocates the cancellation their debts. What’s more, they hate their own people that bad, see? Let’s be honest, they must hate their own people enough to steal their monies and render them hospital-less. They prefer the rapture of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with international stars and footballers, rather than crouch elbow-to-elbow with their own intellectuals and technocrats. Waste of space, as my Cockney friends would say. This strange breed of politicians have turned the whole African continent in a beggar colony.

TERRIFIED NATION: POLITICKING AND WHACKY JURISPRUDENCE

The vogue topics in Britain for the last few years are multiculturalism and the refugee issue. The very uncanny juxtaposition of these eerie issues leads to an overwhelming jitteriness in the people. Nowadays, even one’s own college classmates tell you, a foreigner, that “Britain is just too small to accommodate everyone”. Hearing this piece of provincialism from the lips of people you presumed to be equally educated causes you to reassess everything, including your friendship with them. You also wonder if they care to know what the Spaniards think of the British yobo-riche invasion of their beautiful land (what with the crass hedonism and puke).

One such friend is dating an Asian, so I wonder if she’d like the Asian sent back ‘home’ or be exempt on account of his shacking up with a xenophobe. I recently asked her if she knew the number of Brits leaving the country each year to seek employment elsewhere. She said, “No, but…but…” “There are no buts, mate,” I thought. “You are just making out to be patrician, and you are not”. That done, I scratched her number out of my address book.

Meantime, we are being scared off our own streets by armed youth, whose charter for tyranny happens to be the timidity of politicians. Everyone is scared to take down the miscreants. They are scared of being called fascists or racists, maybe because they are. The police have been forced to become public relations people rather than executers of the law; well, they have made some gross mistakes in the past and, occasionally, those populist TV stations reveal a few of their dodgy ideas about and against ‘foreigners’.

But such media diligence cannot really be noble – it is mere teletainment, and the discussions it often sparks are themselves part of the agenda of transient titillation. The British press just won’t allow Brits to live in a race-free world! They need the rush. After all, there is something called divide and rule. Only, they cannot rule anybody, so one wonders what the motivation is. I often wonder if this is being done by people who are insecure about their own origins. But I am a mere rookie in psychological matters, so I could do with Freud’s help here.

The scary thing about the armed youth is the impunity. I recently saw two indie boys running for their lives from a flank of teen ‘highwayboys’ (all hooded and purposeful in their pernicious mission). I managed to catch up with one of the victims, who said shakily: “I can’t even call the cops…they punched me up and took my phone and wallet…Can’t even get a bus home now.” If such teenagers can be allowed to impose their will on society and get away with it then what on earth are we waiting for. Shouldn’t we just hand over our keys to them and evacuate altogether?

Add that tyranny to the colony of Senegalese drug pushers at Camden Town and you’ll get the hemmed-in feeling. Poised like meerkats, they seek to make eye contact with you from afar, holding out their doleful eyes to you like beggars. Sometimes, they even succumb to natural needs and proposition girls rudely in the street with the audacity of a rebel army. The question everyone asks is, “If I can see them, why can’t the police?” A street trader told me he knew the answer: “The police are focusing on the buyer, and not the seller. That way they make a bigger harvest – sting operation by proxy, see?”.

As I write this piece, Crimewatch, BBC’s premier crime-busting show is running a catalogue of harrowing crimes against humanity by thugs, including one in which a robber throws a baby six feet across a room. Another tells of the murder and burning of a young Polish lady. There is also the young Asian man who was blinded in one eye by a racist dog wielding a snooker ball in a sock.

But, before all that, we are shown a reconstruction of a biker gang’s bag snatching spree throughout Central London, ending in a tragic ride-by attack on a student cyclist. She falls into a coma, and loses her mobility forever. In all cases, no one is coming forward. I wonder why. Interestingly, we are shown CCTV footage of all the crimes! And before I can say tut-tut, I see a reconstruction of a very evil thing: a youth jumps into a verbal argument and stabs a person furiously to death, right in front of people. Still, no one knows him? No? Well, a local bard recently posted a poem of clues in the killer's neighbourhood, and the police are onto it.

This country is under siege. Political aspirants are doing their usual thing about it – promising legislation when they get into power. Right there, we should know what politics is about. You hold your party tricks close to your chest till you get into power then throw them away for the sake of more important matters of state: war, for instance.

But this problem is traceable to a few things. First, Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s union busting Prime Minister, closed domiciliary mental hospitals because she 'knew' the patients could be cared for properly in the community. To do that, the genius had to ignore the long clinical history of psychiatry. Since then, Britain’s incidence of street stabbings has risen.

The second factor is the automatic, judicial bias against men in family matters. Fathers are shooed off their own children just because they have a problem with their wives. The few men that get together to fight for their paternal rights are treated by the press like oddballs. Their publicity stunts are ridiculed in the press, even though St Geldof had argued their case in a documentary (eloquently, I must add).

The upshot is predictable. Bereft of manly support, those women overfeed and pamper their kids and let them do as they please. In the mind of a betrayed, hyperactive child, doing as one pleases includes knifing people for their mobile phones. But that can’t be all. No, it can’t be. There must be something more ghastly than that. Mental illness. It is the sort of thing that harasses the betrayed and lonely. Schizophrenia.

But, before we give up totally on British youth, it has to be mentioned that they are, generally speaking, some of the most intelligent and creative generation this writer has ever known. They are an intellectual pleasure to listen to, and they have managed to muster a very colourful subculture, characterised by cutting-edge concepts and a vibrant trade culture. Their artistic output shows a better sense of contemporary history than that of the generations before them, and they have media nous.

And, despite their inability to rally politically as the generations before them did, they have genuine autonomy. They have taken hold of their own minds, and so theirs is a very bristling world of possibilities and entrepreneurship. Above all, they are genuinely more tolerant than any generation before them, and therefore less likely to grow into bores or conservatives like their parents (who did all the political rebellion and free sex and drugs in their youth). Despite their demeanour and adventurous sartorial choices, these kids are not hippies. Prince Charles is their biggest fan. He assists their entrepreneurship by granting them soft loans and grants through his Prince's Trust. See what I mean?

But they need help. They are more likely to be killed by someone their own age. Those among them that are distorted enough to wield knives and guns have to be separated. They must be profiled sensitively, but profiled they must be, and placed under relevant remedial care. The plainly evil ones (not mentally disturbed), however, must be billeted with the army till they turn a new leaf. Who says journalists only know how to criticise?

EDUCATION

Black inner city high school students tell me that female Caucasian middleclass teachers are mostly responsible for their disorientation in the education system. According to them, this archetypal Cassandra sits in judgement, primed to doubt and disagree with the student at all costs. She is unshakeable from her prejudices, can’t be impressed by any genius, as she suspects it to be second-hand or a fluke (“a little island of ability”), and she is ever eager to make that whining phone call to the student’s parents. Unlike good teachers (the male ones, I am told) she fails to link lethargy to hunger, or jitteriness to fear. She only sees malingering, drug abuse, and congenital imbecility. She is a fascist. Case in point is a relative’s classmate who was failed by his school, but impressed Oxford University enough to win a place.

If all the above is true, then this middleclass teacher is in the wrong job. This pedagogue needs training in the vicissitudes of immigrant and ‘working class’ life in Britain’s inner city. She has to be told that her actions make her responsible for the failure of this kids, and for the mayhem they cause once they have tossed off the 'yoke' of education and are faced with the one social reality: how to make money.

These wayward (or forsaken) children’s eyes show no fear. They care not about the law, because they want out, anyway. They roll their eyes over you on the bus and make sure you show fear before they leave you alone. And whatever you do, do not look them straight in the eye. Some say it irritates them to be looked at that way, and others say they are incapable of reading facial expressions properly. And I say it is a lie. Yes, they can read our faces, and they can read guilt, not fear.

They can’t trust us. They think we hate them, and so they put our jitteriness down to self-knowledge. And they know they can take us at will and get away with it. Besides, the prisons are full, and they are too young to be jailed, anyway. In any case, British judges are being directed by the state to temper their sentencing with the realities of prison space. The penal acreage has shrunk, and so has our confidence in the system’s ability to check and balance society.

Occasionally, we receive a knee-jerk reaction. Not very long ago, a shopping centre got the prime minister’s unprecedented imprimatur to ban hoodie-wearing youth from its premises. Then we were launched into another round of debates about prime ministerial prerogative. Of course, he knew that hoodies do not create crime, and if they did then no criminal would advertise their intention by wearing one. And yet he dove in, because he yearned to realign with the domestic front, after the invasion of Iraq. He was purposely courting controversy. But it didn’t happen for him.

SLAVERY AND BEYOND

Britain recently scoured history to find things to mark the centenary of the abolishing of slavery with, and came up with one person, William Wilberforce. Yet still, the media was agog with events and historical titbits, all under the well-known slave ship metaphor. Teachers made their pupils swap their names for numbers then dragged them into some virtual trip, shackled at the ankles and wrists to show empathy. Empathy with whom, really, you may ask? Which descendants? Those of the Irish, English, Chinese, Slavic, Indian, or Jewish slaves? No, just the African ones.
 

Despite the narrow historical context, the show led to something more current: modern slavery. Even then the slave ship motif is the banner, though modern slavery is supposed to involve all cultures. As always, somebody must be doing something slick. Somebody is still bent on focusing slavery on Africans, somebody wants African-Caribbean people to feel something different in their make-up; to listen out for some slave gene knocking closely behind their march to self-actualisation, so as to be shaken them off the route. For that matter, we are being driven down a single lane to a single kraal, where only hapless Africans squat like animals in tragic ignominy. This wasteful lark has no end.

Historical misdeeds must be remembered, but not by omitting the identities of all the victims, and thereby making a single group seem congenitally pliant and vulnerable. Otherwise, it is a lie. Someone has to tell these race-junkies once and for all that Europeans sold Europeans, Africans sold Africans, the Chinese sold Chinese; Indians sold Indians, till it all became a devilish international commodities market. Most Caucasian Americans do not know their origins, not just African Americans. Ditto Australians, who have latched on to the term ‘transportation’ as though it differentiates them from slaves.

Sadly, the whole ecstatic affair was used to fete the venerable Christian, William Wilberforce, and no one else. So today, the average Brit still has not heard about anyone like Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglas, two of the many African American operators of the legendary Underground Railway, who smuggled slaves against serious odds to freedom in Canada, etc. Neither is there any mention of the Native Americans who harboured and assimilated runaways (the great Native American grammarian Sequoia was the product of such assimilation). All in all, we were left thinking that Europeans were looking after the African even back then. We were also expected to think that no British person refers to African-Caribbean as slaves today. Nonsense.

The strange thing is that we all seem to be allowing the misinformation and crude revisionism to happen to us. We are subject to the palimpsest data of a media gone mad, which is hellbent on priming our minds repeatedly with populist anecdotes and perversion. We know nothing, and posterity will know nothing. We are told Egypt is in the Middle East, and not in Africa, for instance. Are we really that docile? Could this just be because we cannot get a word in edgeways, even if we try? If so, then who is the watchman against our dissent? What is his motivation? Is it a personal vendetta or something grander than that? Who pays him to make a huge section of the human community feel perpetually insecure about itself and its history? And why?

This same canker overwhelmed the long wake after the passing of Pope John Paul. The media busied itself speculation on whether the world would have its first Black pope, whereas every historian knows that there have been a few African Popes already, including one or two of the reformist Pius’s, and that the founder of European chivalry and Christian Martyr was an African army general, St Moritz; not to mention the fact that many Roman Emperors were African.

REWRITING HISTORY

This is deft revisionism; it excludes Africa instantly from any of the defining moments in human development. Add that to the fervour to “teach Africans to help themselves”, and you have a picture of the African as a human mastodon roaming the deserts behind the advance guard, wide-eyed, struggling to make sense of the world around him. No wonder his progeny is so dejected, despite its great intellect and inventiveness. And if the essence of humanity is the ability to contribute to society, then those that are stymied by such prejudice and misinformation have no chance in hell.

The same applies to the great Jewish Diaspora. It's great contributions to the awakening of humanity from the medieval morass is left by the wayside as though it were fetid meat. The numerous TV programmes elucidating the defining inventions and discoveries that made the modern world have totally ignored the Jews. Strangely, these programmes are usually presented by a British Jew! This is a sick joke.

In fact, nowadays one wonders what the role of the journalist is. Is it the dissemination of the truth, or is it showbiz? Is it a parrot’s job? The industry is on its knees in a political gutter. Great investigative correspondents are sacrificed on the altar of war, and the whole journalism fraternity sits by like sheep. Instead, journalists have resorted to reporting government spin like whores, allowing themselves to be bullied by dubious establishment spin-doctors.

One wonders what these journalists are really afraid off. Whatever it is, it must be strong enough to make them abandon truth and the vocational instinct for corroboration. It must be strong enough to make them let themselves to be used for propaganda against foreign governments, such as Zimbabwe - that country is said to have banned the Western press and yet we always get actualite footage from there whenever an opposition politician gets done over. If my knowledge of Africa is anything to go by then there is more to the Zimbabwe story than that. That is not to say the Mugabe's of Africa are saints, but it is the journalist's duty to let them be heard by us, the audience, or we all stand to lose our self-respect as moderns.

1n 1966, a handful of Ghanaian military officers accepted $27,000 Dollars to overthrow the Great Kwame Nkrumah, while he was trying to mediate in the Vietnam War. Before that, the world was treated to a Zimbabwe-esque tale of woes about him. Soon after his overthrow, Ghanaians were treated to grotesque cartoons of their great leader as a cannibal, etc. For their part, those sponsored homebreakers only managed to drag that nation into economic hopelessness. It is a classic African tale. No wonder Africans refuse to admonish Mugabe.

SHOWDIZZINESS

David Beckham is a lucky man. The media is obsessed with him. So are those pop cretins that the press forces us to look at. Not so lucky the masters of universality, like Michael Jackson, who dare to undermine the forcible divisions between the peoples of the world. They are persecuted and prosecuted by the press, even after they are acquitted by sensible jurors – the press obviously knows better.

And the damned fever is making some people rich. Paparazzi agencies are swaggering all over the place, niggling humanity with impunity. Insane trivia and the persecution of former spouses of pop stars are the order of the day. An amputee divorcee’s private quest to have a share of the family coffers is played out as if it were the myth of the gorgon, with journalists happily playing the imps. Worse still, we are all meant to giggle at her whenever we see her! Presumably, she is not human anymore; just an object of our disdain. Sadly, even the most respected members of the fourth estate are slowly succumbing to this inferior trend in journalism. Divorce settlements make primetime news.

The minute details the press is capable of when it comes to the denigration of ordinary folk is unreal, and yet the same press knows nothing about the vagaries of politics and the hanky-panky that foists the lower grade politicians on us. The fact is, when you dumb down culture, you dumb down human dignity and aspiration. Full stop. Britain needs a proper dialogue with its people, and not some fast-paced celebrity journalism that is as subject to the weather as a spring-clean.

THE CURES

The government has to give the youth of this beautiful nation a chance to tell us about their condition, and to help us find the solutions. It must encourage and invest in good education across the board, for no one needs to tell them that it would assure a better future for all. For that matter, student loans must be abolished immediately.

British television needs to bring back the ferment of yesteryear; put the ever eloquent David Frost back on the plane with one of those pompous world leaders; scour the earth for the iniquities of man against man and expose it; reinstate superb programmes such as Talking Point and Face to Face; recommission the numerous panel discussion programmes that used to tackle issues unashamedly. The entire media industry must be commanded by their watchdogs to tell the truth about all cultures, and to promote learning.

Broadcasters must hand over youth programmes to youth developers and presenters, and get rid of those old, greedy people playing hip just for money. For good measure, the youth must be given grants to open their own entertainment facilities, for they are treated like vermin by night clubs throughout the land. And, oh, pubs don't make children drunkards - any African will tell you that, for they go to pubs with their dads and drink soft drinks. The advantage here is that children learn from contact with adults, and also learn from their mistakes. This country must stop alienating its youth. They are human and must therefore be treated with respect and trust.

Above all, journalists must find a way to actually subordinate the subordinate - tackle politicians in the name of the old adage vox populi, vox dei, for we put them up there to serve us, not their egos.

Images:
1) Westminster at night, photo by Ishmael Annobil
2) Hoarding Board, Hamsptead Road, Camden, Photo by Ishmael Annobil
3) Punks at Camden Lock; photo by Ishmael Annobil
4) Cross-section of a slaveship (origin unknown)