Stepping up to the bar i ordered a mojito. The barman proceeded to take a glass, drop a mint leaf in, drop a slice of lime in, drop a couple of cubes of ice in, and then reach into the fridge behind the bar and cracking open a bottle poured the greenish coloured liquid it contained into the glass then garnished it with a black plastic straw… and I did protest but no matter what I said he simply pointed to the label of the bottle and insisted that it was a mojito… yes, it had the ingredients of a mojito, but to make a mojito one must actually muddle the mint (preferably 6-8 leaves not one) and the lime (again preferably more than one) in the bottom of the glass with some cane sugar before adding ice, stirring, adding rum (traditionally white though I have a taste for the dark rum) and again stirring, and then top this off with carbonated soda and once again stir, then garnish with mint leaves and a straw if necessary. Now the essence of a mojito lies in more than just its ingredients. Just a roast dinner requires not only the food but also that it is cooked in a certain way, this being essential to its truly being a roast dinner.
However No matter what I could say, there it was, the truth written indelibly on the side of the bottle. The puddle in my glass that i was looking at was actually a mojito, whether I liked it or not. Yes this was a mojito but only in the sense that a macdonalds burger is a steak sandwich… and we know this, despite the best efforts of our senses to tell us otherwise, because it says so it on the side of the damp from grease cardboard box that it comes in.
As I sat sipping this puddle out in the car park of the bar on this dark frost night – as smoking indoors is of course already banned for our benefit… - I had to admit that it was more than the mojitos and burgers of the world that have suffered a similar fate and that it is only our own lazy blind determination to believe what it says on the side of the tins that makes this so. We all know in our hearts that a macdonalds burger is not even fit to be served to animals as is backed up by a rumour that circulated claiming it was only the cost saving habits of one diligent farmer who was found to be feeding macdonalds burgers to his cattle that caused the original out break of mad cows disease in the UK – or so I heard…
No, we’ve let this become an equation for our entire lives. It just took longer for the hardened old drunks of the pubs who know their drinks to be broken and then retrained in the ways of the shopping mall. In the end we will all conform. And There really is no other way. At least that’s what it says on the sides of the tins that we live in, that’s what it says on the labels of our clothes – our adopted skins in this life - and that’s what the high priests of the corrupt banks tell us and it’s what the politicians are saying in a million different ways when they take 1000 billion pounds sterling from the tax payer and give it to the self same institutions that have already squeezed every penny out of those same tax payers (and the uk population crippled by debt, enslaved to their repayments on loans, cars, fridges, fridges to go in their cars, TVs and sofas, houses to put their TVs and sofas in…)., it all seems a bit like getting mugged, then going to court and loosing the case despite the fact that you can see the defendant sitting with the bulge of your wallet in his pocket, then having to pay the legal fees for the mugger’s lawyer… but hey, that is just the way it’s got to be.
We are told we live in a shining example of democracy, what’s more, a participatory democracy. That is what it says on the side of the tin. That’s what the politicians will shout till they’re hoarse to make you understand, that everything is ok, and your government is in control…
Well if an election every 4 or 5 years in which we play out the pantomime of selecting a party that best represents our views and hopes while all the time knowing that all the political parties get their funding from the same people anyway pulling the purse strings; but suppressing this and telling ourselves people died for the right to vote… Actually now I think about it why the hell does Gordon Brown wear make up? I think the very fact that he does wear make up tells you a lot about his role in all this. Anyway, back to point, in our laziness we believe what it says on the tin, we repeatedly believe what the politicians tell us despite the fact they are constantly being caught out telling lies about the most serious of state issues.
“I do believe in democracy”. What does that even mean? I believe it exists or my beliefs abide within democracy? It seems to be a very hollow sentiment actually.
I do not believe what it says on the tine of Westminster, not anymore at least, for they are, pretty much down to the last single soul, greedy self interested liars, thieves and murders of the highest order, and it has been shown enough times already to safely assume that this is true. Many of the present government and their associates are war criminals and ought to be tried at the Hague (where if I and hundreds of thousands of others have got this all horribly wrong they deserve to be able to clear their names). I’m afraid voting in this situation is futile and will not achieve change. Case in point being the USA where the country was so obsessed with the colour of the president’s skin that his policies have not been examined, nor have his financial backers (again he deliberately deceived his supporters as to the origins of his funds) and so the incarceration of freedom continues unabated while the nation marvels at the new tin and what its label says....
But I do believe that democracy can work. It just has to be the relevant type to the society. That is the vote has to be relevant. Today, as is clear to see, the votes cast in the elections of the West may as well have been tossed into the Atlantic Ocean for all the difference they actually make to the running and policies of their respective nations. And for once the clue is in the labelling that our governments do, where we can obtain a lot of valuable meaning.
The governments no longer refer to their populations as “citizens”. The governments refer to their populations primarily as “consumers”. And herein lies the point. Citizens vote : consumers spend.
Just note how awkward it is for most consumers of the west to speak about politics. There are a great number of people who have attended the great universities of the West, have graduated and gone on to jobs of influence and power, who cannot really define the difference politically between the left and right wing, who could not explain the social contract, and who probably couldn’t pick out the major political figures from a photo line up. But they are successful people in that they earn good salaries working steady jobs. They spend appropriately and maybe even save a bit for a rainy day. They are mall creatures more than political or social creatures in the real old sense of the words (i.e. friends on facebook do not a social life make). They may find themselves up in arms at a price rise at the petrol pumps but have next to no opinion on the War in Iraq.
However it’s not all one sided and the fault of the mall creature. For it is, logically speaking, not possible to make a free choice if the information on which you are making that choice is false. Election campaigns are a dubious mix of myth making and smearing the opposition. Nobody can be expected to make a real decision based on this (some would say that’s the whole point...).
There is another way though that has not been written on the tin, although its there, ever present and has very real effects. Effects that begin to cause ripples immediately and also in direct proportion to your stake in that society.
If you receive a burger that is below the standard of what you know a burger ought to be, then drop it on the floor, step on it and leave. Never return to the hole that served it you either. Boycott that place for life. Relay your experiences to others and explain that they too ought to cast their “vote”. Of course as with all early democracies there does not exist sufficient information about the products that we give up massive proportions of our lives to obtain. In this case, there will need to be established a type of Wikipedia which would be a live, constantly updated file of information and photographs concerning every company and corporation on the earth. It would be added to in a similar way that wikipedia is by people of the world – with the necessity of course for objective verifications to avoid it becoming the tool of industry. This would be one – of many potential – sources of information on which people could base their decisions. This would punish unethical business practices, highly polluting industries and products, immoral investments (such as profiting from war) with the peacefully but firm retraction of votes (i.e. $$). If citizens vote in polls, then consumers vote with their dollars.
What I am advocating is the creation of a new form of democracy. I advocate that a powerful and effective new platform be created to accommodate this Meme right in the heart of the consumer world. I advocate that we bring democracy to the Shopping Mall Generations and let them go crazy voting the only way they’ve been taught how – with their wallets. Let’s see how Mall Creature who has been starved in a moral vacuum will react when it is presented with an easily accessible resource on which it can make it’s own moral decisions. Let Mall Creature itself be able to scratch the surface and see what lies beneath and watch what happens.
You have to understand also that Mall Creature has been living in a closed world where Nike means more to them Steinbeck or Baudelaire, where a 2 for 1 sale lights up their heart and not a stanza of Kerouac or passage of Satre. Mall Creature has been so starved of light that it exists most happily in the white lights of Mall and in front of the dream boxes of television sets. The Mall Creature is numb and worried from working too many meaningless hours in jobs that offer no security and only the constant threat of homelessness and repossession keeps them in line. The constant weight of debt has enslaved them and made it difficult and too frightening to take any drastic measures.
However, I believe that by providing such a platform of information the balance may begin to tip once more into the hands of the Mall Creature – who is only a conditioned human being. Mall Creature is not a different species, just a part of the human species that has been trained in a certain way. And the problem of this is that the training has very deliberately excluded the moral from the equation. But if it were possible to drop the moral choice (from which comes the imperative to act on that knowledge) right into the middle of that whole world construction then I believe that it would be a positive thing.
More precisely how this would be achieved. To create and platform in which the details of every company and corporation in the world could be logged. Like an encyclopaedia of companies. It would detail working conditions of its employees, sweat shops etc with photos and images, first hand accounts and so on, the wages of CEOs and other levels of employee. It would detail investments that the company had, stocks and shares it had interests in, it would detail the lobbying groups of industry and what they lobbied for. It would detail the carbon foot print of the company, of each product where possible, it would detail its profits and of course the donations of profits to charity and community. It would detail its involvement within war zones and under developed nations. It would detail the number of shops and where they were. In fact there is no limit to exactly what could be detailed on the site. What it would try to achieve is to be a mainstream information service that would unlock the lid of the corporate world. The only information that Mall Creature gets about these companies comes from the company’s own advertisements – yea it’d be great if we could all write our own reviews…
To take this action is now a real imperative for the human species to move forwards again for we allowed ourselves and our children to become stagnated in the dry corridors of the Malls and Hypermarkets and Supermarkets and Petrol Station forecourts, and all at the cost of the environment, the natural world and roughly 80% of the world’s population. It is time we stopped simply complaining and started to take direct and meaningful action to begin to fix the problem that is us all.
Hector "hollywood" Swanson.,
hesq.,
Dr. Zimbadean.,
Hector "hollywood" Swanson.,
