The History of Crowds.

Today I was interviewed by Juliana Vandergrift from the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of an oral history of the UK toy industry. To be honest I’ve never come across a name that would 99% of the time upstage its owner. ‘Juliana Vandergrift’ is a super model of a monica. She would at least have to be the woman Sven Goran Erickson ditched Nancy Dell,Olio for to have better sex and a decent conversation, or the spy that finally made James Bond celibate. It’s like calling your kid ‘Goliath Hulk’ and expecting him to have a successful career in dentistry. But if I was a filmmaker I’d employ her just so her name would appear in the credits. Anyway Juliana turned out to be a very normal, sensible young woman so I put away my preconceptions of our steaming up the windows of her Bentley Continental in a lay-by overlooking Monte Carlo and rabbited on about the toy industry for two hours. After wishing her a safe trip home to Ipswich, Ipswich for God sake! I watched the student protest on wall-to-wall TV. It’s so easy to see a crowd as just ‘a crowd’ rather than a few thousand individuals each with their own life story, hopes, understandings and motivations; so easy to dismiss them on mass. Strangely, after talking at length about the toy industry, it reminded me of any product you buy. You may see it as an electric kettle that’s just failed, but involved in that product was a small crowd of people from designers to engineers to managers, assembly and packaging. That fault, assuming you haven’t just thrown it across the room at a marauding befuddled buffalo, is probably down to one of that crowd making a small misjudgement. It just helped remind me we’re all in the midst of crowds, of so many different oral histories. So let me tell you about the toy industry.

Downton Abbey.

Downton Abby, it’s the sort of TV you can rest your eyes to, only opening them periodically to admire the dresses. The only downside, unless you achieve complete comatosis, is you can still follow the plot from the dialogue. Here is a smattering as if penned by Misstequilashots (Blog- 11/12/2010)

Downton fuck off pad with servies and doesn’t look nothing like an Abbey is happy before war came but all get uniformed and screw around and one gets shot in the willy which pisses him off cos he can’t marry the woman he loves but it starts working again which pisses him off cos he’s already shacked up with another woman who dies of flu which pisses him off again so he can’t marry the first one who he still loves which pisses him off and then one servy kisses the duke or whatever he is and marries the butler who gets arrested for murdering his ex wife who’s a complete shit unlike the chauffeur who really loves the Duke’s daughter who’s a bit wet if you ask me and wants to take her to Ireland but the Duke gets mad whereas he’s happy about his other daughter who’s stupid and loves the guy who’s always pissed off even though he’s got his willy working marrying a wealthy bastard no accounting for taste as they say and someone who really got shot as in you know to death fathered a baby by a servy who won’t give it up to an arse hole and a nice lady they being its grandparents an’all. The End. Well end of series one. 

The Mule's Kick.

Ah now I understand! Europe is a Mule, a bastard marriage of many countries with one currency. OK there are the obvious problems of the different countries having different economic strengths, surpluses and deficits but it’s not that. It’s that the rest of the world economies are one country, one currency horses and they don’t know what to do with a mule. If a single country Europe would have enough money to fix itself but one region, Germany, won’t fully support the ‘other regions’. The IMF is there to support individual countries but Europe is not one country, and it can’t support one country like Italy without that support leaking to the other countries with the same currency. And other world countries don’t want to help if Europe won’t help itself as a single country, which it’s not. So though it’s in everyone’s best interests to sort this impasse out it’s not in the best interest of any one of the major players. It’s a variation on the Lifeboat dilemma; “Who’s going to jump out, or in this case in, to save us all from drowning?” OK with men, women and children there’s a chance but a lifeboat full of politicians?

Perhaps Greece is right, get out quick and become a single country, single currency horse again, a sort of Trojan Horse backing out through the gate, “Make way please, oh sorry was that your foot, I’m coming through, oops pardon me, thankyou.Just….”

The 1% Bubble.

Oh and get this. Ever since the South Sea Bubble, which as I remember was something to do with a market collapse in turtle testicles, through to the Wall Street crash, a collapse in share prices, to 2008, a collapse in the housing loan market, there has, preceding these events, always been a ludicrously unsustainable rise in some commodity or other. Only when this ludicrousity became undeniable was there a violent readjustment. So what commodity preceding 2011 has ludicrously risen in value? That’s what these ‘take over Wall Street’ sit-ins are about. Where the bottom 99% incomes have risen 10% to 50% the income of the top 1% has risen by 300%. It’s the same old rhetoric but instead of “buy Turtle Testicle stock, it’s on the up” it’s been, “we have to pay the top salaries to attract the top people.” Our new South Sea Bubble is the top 1% together with their ethos. It’s not envy to think they’re not each worth between a few hundred to a thousand nurses, it’s undeniable ludicrousity. And what we’re currently experiencing is the seismic shifts of this bursting bubble as our indebtedness rises unsustainably to feed their wealth creation schemes. So who will step forward to say, “I won’t do it for the money, I want to do this job because I love being able to contribute. Just give me £300k pa to cover anything I could realistically need. For me to take this approach, as many studies have shown, will, contrary to our entrenched beliefs actually enhance my quality of life. Thank you.” But I suspect, just like turtle testicles, once you’ve been the flavour of the month there’s little possibility of them converting into iPhones when the wind changes. 

My Own Euro Crisis.

I go to see good mice friends in Buxton on my trusty but not rusty Yamaha SZR660, carefully putting my waterproofs, wallet and loose change in my backpack. I go onto reserve 5 miles from home then realise I’ve left my pack. No problem, I’ll go back today and collect it. Mothermouse goes to town and I realise I have no money to buy petrol to get to Buxton to collect my wallet. After much searchification of old trousers etc I find £2 and borrow £3 from next-door-but-one. After a pleasant ride to Buxton I retrieve my wallet and don the waterproofs as there’s a slight shower. Two minutes into my return journey the sky goes black and the heavens open. If I close my visor it mists up and if I open it rain gets on the inside as well as the outside. I peer into the darkness through two layers of droplets and mist. This is unhelpful at 50mph in traffic. Now I know how Angela Merkel feels.

Go Papa!

Go Greece! Papandreou wants a referendum and is currently being tortured in Strasburg or somewhere by the Forces of Euro. I don’t know but I get the impression the Forces of Euro want Greece to play ball, i.e. remain in hock to the Empire, while Luke Skywalker Papandreou is heading a plucky effort to save planet Tantuine just south of Thessalonica. Greeks by culture and geography are individuals as with the aforementioned island dwelling bazuki playing gyros seller, their concept of central government could be summed up on a postage stamp. Basically if the gov has got into debt let ‘them’ pay it off, a view secretly shared by the rest of us. So should Greece borrow money so generously offered like a bank’s offer of a mortgage you could never pay back or cut and accept insolvency? I’d imagine with their own devalued currency their tourist industry would flourish as it once did. And maybe the rest of us would be left muttering, “if only we’d had the balls to do that.” Bring back the days when banks refused to offer a lone because “it wouldn’t be in YOUR best interests.”

The Giant Paddle.

So the crisis lingers. The 2008 crisis was about millions of people being provoked into borrowing on a rising house market. When house prises fell their investment turned into a debt many couldn’t pay. The debts were real as were the houses but their notional value inflated and then deflated. Everything was real apart from the arbitrary nature of their value. These debts were finally left with the banks, which in some cases were bailed out by taxpayers. In effect we were all lumbered with the product of over valuation pumped up by aggressive bank lending. And now as in 1928 we are experiencing the very real after effects, slow growth, unemployment, devaluation/inflation and higher taxes. The profits from this over valuation went to the many strands of finance and those wise enough to sell when optimism is too high. Stocks rose in 1927 by 50% in one year and house prices rose dramatically prior to 2008. These rises bore no relationship to any underlying increase in value. So these rise/falls in value act to pump wealth from the majority to the financial minority. It appears that by a million small, uncoordinated individual decisions in capitalism money migrates to capitalists, and in communism money migrates to the centre of the communist structure. Even if we invented some new ‘ism’ you can guess where the wealth would flow. Maybe the strange thing is this is not due solely to avarice but friendship. We want to be good to our friends so if we find ourselves in the centre of the current ism we share our perspective with them. We are not friends with those outside it and leave them ignorant of our good news. This suggests the only ism to work for the majority will be Mixing-ism where society is stirred by a giant paddle placing rich with poor, powerful with powerless, tall with short etc in a sort of constantly changing partners folk dance. Maybe then the million small, uncoordinated individual decisions would benefit the whole.