My Rage Will Set Me Free!

Friday, 15^th May 2020 

Sometimes I need to reset, to let the anger subside and something more peaceful take hold. We all know what happens to angry football managers marching up and down the touchline, red in the face and gesticulating impotently at the events happening of which they are only a tangential part. They fall over and die when their heart says ‘Enough!’

Personally, I like my rage. I am not an angry person but watching this shitshow, as well as being part of it, I feel that manager’s impotent rage stoking my internal fires. If Bozza and his cabinet are the team, then I am screaming at them, ‘Remember what I said about keeping everyone alive,’ and then watching as they score all those own goals and blame it on the referee (science) and then each other.

So, I have taken time to meditate and do yoga and sit in the north wind wrapped up like a polar explorer to get my recommended amount of vitamin D. I need, as we all do, to now and again consider how I am feeling, to take the temperature of my soul, and then act accordingly. Buddhist meditation compares feelings to clouds moving across the sky, impermanent and not to be grasped at or held on to. Unfortunately, I feel energised when my anger latches onto a legitimate target so I can unleash my ground-to-air thought missiles. And a blog post is born…

Anyway, as the world goes on with trying to navigate, country by country, through the pandemic, and moving in and out of lockdown, it seems the right time to consider freedom. I rubbished some of the so-called British values in one of my posts but it appears that during lockdown some of our national traits are still on display: politeness, obeisance, a willingness to make sacrifices for the greater good, the desire to ‘do the right thing.’ What David Icke calls ‘sheeple,’ because they unquestioningly munch the grass next to the abattoir, is an untruth. The public are not stupid; it’s just that we are treated this way by our government and this can induce stupidity: see advice on making a home-made mask out of an ‘old T-shirt’ and not your absolute favourite one.

Freedom – how much is enough? We were nudged into lockdown with a mixture of being asked to ‘save lives’ and fines for transgressing lockdown measures. It was more carrot than stick and it worked. We stayed in, gave up our freedoms. Our motives for doing so (or not) may not have been exactly the same, but the vast majority returned to the safety of their homes and then stayed there, each visit out feeling slightly risky, slightly forbidden. I have always been interested in the idea of freedom, particularly when individuals, or groups, or states wish to curtail others’ rights. What interests me most is how individuals or societies accept their freedoms being eroded or taken away.

Of course, the most obvious example is the concentration camps. When I was younger, these were an object of grim fascination to me. Why, I used to think, did the Jewish prisoners not just storm the guards thereby choosing the moment and manner of their deaths instead of being diminished as human beings to a state where they were objects – shaved heads, identical clothes, a number tattooed on their wrists – waiting to be processed in these factories of death?

Now, I wouldn’t ask the question so naively. Now, I am more interested in how people come to be so broken that they cannot resist. Was it that deepest human desire to survive, shackled to that other basic human emotion, hope? Or was it the opposite: a complete hopelessness, a wasting away of all emotions. Primo Levi, in his seminal book on the Holocaust, If This Is A Man, set out this idea in the title. I can’t remember now if the book contains this phrase and adds the main clause to the subjunctive one but it doesn’t need to be finished; it is a phrase that could be uttered by an Allied general arriving at the concentration camps to see the horror. It is a phrase that perhaps demands an ellipsis as the final condemnation of the inexorable rise of civilisation, of humans as a species whose existence is defined by constant social evolution. Whatever we think we are, we are still animals, driven to reproduce, and to fight over resources, in the same way stag beetles are.

Freedom. The other example, whether fictionalised in film, or presented straight in documentaries, was the king or queen, or unfairly accused, or the Death Row inmate, being led to the executioner’s block, or the hangman’s noose, or firing squad, or the electric chair. Death by state-sanctioned murder, the ultimate loss of freedom after imprisonment, and yet how many of them walk with head held high to place their neck on the block or into the noose or to let their wrists be shackled with leather straps to the instrument of their death. Why aren’t they screaming, shouting, struggling, ‘raging against the dying of the light’? Phillip Larkin said that ‘death is no better whined at than withstood’ and he was right but surely whining is the rational response?

Freedom. I don’t wish to be glib, and there is no comparison between lockdown and a concentration camp, but freedom as a lived idea falls somewhere on a scale depending on your personal convictions. There are the legal definitions that enshrine your rights and there are legally prohibited activities that the state and general society considers anti-social. But that doesn’t push everyone into the same protected bubble, otherwise there would be no crime and no prisons. Same with lockdown.

Our neighbours two doors along are universally despised by the rest of the street and have been busy flouting lockdown measures with all the arrogance and ignorance that have kept them on my hate-radar since they moved in about a year ago. To start with, they have not once appeared on Thursday evening for the NHS clap your thanks. It is not, of course, compulsory, but to sit inside, maybe with the TV turned up to drown out the ‘noise’ just seems like a dick move.

Also, for a while, early on during lockdown, there was a red car parked on their drive not seen before. This turned out to be a friend that had come to stay for a bit. You know, like you’ve been visiting your friends for short stays during these last few weeks. Another black car with a bike rack on the back appeared there for a while, too, but my spying failed me, and the owner(s) could not be identified. And apart from these longer visitors, there has been every type of tradesman in and out of that house for the last seven weeks. Now, it is possible that they have had an electrical fault, a leaky shower, a hole in the roof, a piece of wall that urgently needed painting, and some small trees that were going to fall onto their house. But I doubt it. For one thing, the house was owned by a plumber who built the extension and the pictures when it was for sale showed it to be immaculate.

Of course, my evil neighbours can exercise their right to flout lockdown measures but the consequences of their selfish actions will reach further than the perimeter of their garden. So, I hope they catch Covid-19 – the parents, not the two kids (here comes the jet-fuelled anger boost!) – and if I see an ambulance arrive at No.2, I will be sure to have a quick word with the paramedics risking their lives to say that if there aren’t enough ventilators, then inserting a sewage pipe into each of their mouths will be a karmic resolution to this particular problem. Or I might just say: ‘They’re not clappers. Just so you know…’

Freedom. Have any of you thought during this time of reduced freedom: ‘I wish I had a big gun so I could stand outside the council offices and threaten to shoot the democratically elected councillors if they don’t reopen the tennis courts immediately.’ No? But then you’re not American, are you? Who said the Wild West era ever ended? With a cowboy President at the helm, expect more whorehouses, lynchings, bush-justice, lawlessness, and people ‘beating’ the ‘slitty-eyed China-virus’ by drinking copious amounts of state-approved 100% Proof, Mountain Moonshine: Made by Rednecks, Drunk by Republicans!

A lot of Americans are deeply distrustful of ‘big government’ or being told what to do by someone who lives outside of their neighbourhood. For them, owning a gun is ‘exercising their right under the Second Amendment.’ So, suspicious of authority + big gun = rednecks re-asserting their freedom.

‘If I see a sneaky fucking virus creeping round my house, that yellow fucker gonna get two barrels in his ass.’

And if it just turns out to be the black paperboy…too bad! Yellow virus, black virus, red virus…white power!

Here in the UK, a protest is expected in some major cities this Saturday, organised by the usual assortment of dickheads who really really really wish they had a gun because waving your willy in the air outside of Parliament Square just doesn’t get the metropolitan elite’s attention the same way a ski-mask and an AK47 does. They want the country to open up because it’s a conspiracy or it’s a hoax or it’s just that they feel more important and less useless when they’re shouting at someone about something someone else thought was worth shouting about. This might be the only time I might approve the Met’s use of kettling. Why not push these ‘protestors’ with their ‘My Right To Die!’ placards gently but forcibly towards the Thames. If they drown, they were innocent, and if they float, they’re a witch and must be burnt at the stake.

Some people should be required to have a permit for their opinions. This is, I know, a curtailment of someone’s right to free speech but there are an awful lot of dickheads out there who believe Hitler was misunderstood and who need to be given a DNA test so they can see, actually, that they are the proven bastard of a hundred different ethnicities, their ancestors jumping into bed with every tall Viking and handsome Roman that passed their door, all of it swirling around inside them like a race-blind soup. There’s just no amount of ethnic cleansing that can rid their pimply white arses of their genetic history. It’s just a beautiful psychedelic DNA fusion, man…

So: freedom. How much do you want it? Enough to hand over your personal information to the govt. via a contact tracing app? Enough to sneak a kiss with that partner you’ve been separated from for weeks? Enough to die for?

Me? I just want to be paddle-boarding on the wide blue sea with nobody even within 300 feet of me. Out on the waves, I can neither kill (infect) or be killed (infected). Just me, the wind, the sun, and the water. Totally free.

Latest data for the UK (as of 6pm):

Infected: 236,711

Deaths: 33,998

Celebrity Deaths: Some, but not the right ones.

People I know who are infected: 1 (one of my wife’s cousins)

Song of the Day: ‘Freedom’ – Rage Against the Machine