Ideolotik, Part One

Happiness and Frankin-sense

There are so many reasons to be contented in this world.

For one, common sense has made an illustrious return. Where once there stood madness in the evil Cobra Commander figures of George W. Bush, CEOS, and NeoConservatives, now stands Barack Obama, Small Business, and John Maynard Keynes. So what if we are now lacking a scapegoat, a cathartic totem behind which we can hide our own historico-liberal ideologies. It simply does not matter. The benevolent nation-state is making its triumphant return.

It is also a new era of cooperation. Harkening back to Woodrow’s League or farther back to Westphalia, the G20 descended upon London last week to film a special episode of Robin Hood, robbing from all of us and giving to that most impecunious of fellows, the IMF. Who cares that the 1 trillion plus dollar injection of capital may not actually stimulate, it’s the simulation that counts. Plus what really matters is that we know they care. That is why we need more adverts - quirky little Wes Anderson shorts, accompanied by delicate, Feistian indie pop, depicting mild-mannered cosmopolitan bankers as common sense superheroes. After all, as Angela Merkel said, "this is a historic opportunity afforded us to give capitalism a conscience, because capitalism has lost its conscience and we have to seize this opportunity"

While we are busy indulging in this newfound pleasure, we must not let our felicity be shattered by a discontented few. After all, protest is nothing more than contrarianism, like sarcasm to wit, the lowest form of fitting in. Just look at the liberal bourgeoisie with their couture multiculturalism and hollow humanitarianism. Their supposed morality is a listless, anti-common sense, cool. Plus, masks are the new Hansel. First it was headbands, then it was moustaches, now it’s masks, black balaclavas concealing misinformed minds weaned on Naomi Kline and M.I.A. Hopefully, this political artefact of dressing up and registering disgust through the most pre-modern of means is only an anomaly to be consigned to its proper place in the history of fancy dress, posited right between wigged Girondins and fatigued Black Panthers. For modern man, there shall be none of this reckless idealism, only real pragmatism and our most precious common language of civility, the vote.

And so too just as the vote has levelled greedy authoritarians and absurd passions, we must follow the John Grays and Michael Manns, and allow democracy to destroy the myths of utopianism, not in one swift humane act, but slowly, tortuously, like Che Guevara’s hopeless slog through the wilds of Bolivia. Only then can we truly revel in the small steps and crawls through which change comes forth. We must not let vague spectres of race and class, of unjust wars and doleful discrimination, mar the victory of Barack Obama and his new version of American Exceptionalism. Myths too, of immoral national acts and the confining element of context, must be banished and replaced by new myths. There is no time for Mandela-style truth and reconciliation committees or tribunals on the overlooked interplay of race and class, only a narrative of great figures working together, slowly and efficiently, toward their common national, first, then international destinies. We must incant only the first words of “I Have a Dream” loud enough to silence Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence” - ignoring his hope for a “radical revolution of values” in which “we must rapidly begin a shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society coming “to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”