Laughing at the present/Thinking about the future
Wuts* are still running the world
* The Wishful Unthinking Tendency
Further lines on the Wut syndrome
A small prologue, if you will allow me.
Some forty-seven years ago, a man who has now mercifully disappeared from mainstream history (called Chubby Checker) invented a dance called The Twist. The first time around, the craze was a huge hit in three or four preppy clubs around the fringes of Manhattan. To help spread the word, Chubby - who was very well named, resembling as he did a large bowling-ball - recorded a single, and put all his imagination into calling it Let's do the Twist. It flopped.
But the next year - 1961 - Chubby had a second go, flexing his cerebral muscles yet again to come up with Let's twist again (like we did last summer). Soon afterwards, Princess Margaret and Tony Armstrong-Jones happened to be in New York. They spotted the craze, and were photographed dancing the Twist. Within weeks, the disc had gone gold, and the biggest dance craze of all time temporarily took over the world.
My hope is that things will go much the same way with my invention, Wuttism, and its adherents The Wuts. Launched last year to a world still full of new credit paradigms, Chinese foldaway camping furniture and Lets All Get Pissed 24/7 - That'll Sort Out the Binge Culture, Wuts as a word to describe the Wishful Unthinking Tendency sank so quietly, the resultant wave would not have troubled a young ant out for his first swimming lesson. I fancy it was a word ahead of its time: given the events of the last ten months, its time may well be here at last.
I am not for a minute suggesting that before too long, Prince William will step off a plane somewhere and describe the FA's David Davis as "really the most awful Wut"; while this would be nice in every imaginable sense, it's not going to happen. More likely is that the growing number of people who have been exposed as Wuts during recent times will finally force the penny to drop among The People at large, viz: almost all of those in charge are Wuts.
Defining the Wut more clearly
As those who know me will be aware, I am not always the ageing curmudgeon dismissive of all things contemporary. Quite the opposite: I count some of today's young Turks among my heroes, not least Jarvis Cocker, whose recent single gets very few airplays if only because it is called C**ts still rule the World. It's a shame he doesn't read nby, as the Wut word is more descriptive than the C word - and the Wuts are far more dangerous than the political pudenda who emerge to dominate our lives from time to time.
This is mainly because not only do the Wuts not want you to know what they're up to - they've no idea what they're at themselves. Seeing the world as they do through a blinkered haze sheltered education and political correctness, every last act of entirely predictable human nature leaves them in a state of bewildered disbelief.
In summary, the last year or so has brought forth the following doses of reality:
* Pay people socialised in a selfish society huge bonuses for meeting credit sales targets, and they will lend money to anyone - however poor and/or crooked.
* Pay foreign soccer players huge salaries previously earmarked for junior English soccer and club youth programmes, and before too long the result will be a mediocre international side.
* Giving people round-the-clock access to booze in a binge culture will not reduce alcohol abuse - rather, it will put increased pressure on A&E, store up huge liver damage problems for the future NHS to deal with, increase the number of pub licences rescinded by the police, up the number of ASBO orders issued to the drunk and disorderly, quadruple resident complaints in the environs of public houses, and a whole host of other entirely foreseeable side-effects too tedious to mention here.
* What goes up must come down. Markets inflated by cheap money will go pop when the cheap money is no longer available.
* Handing the Olympic Games budget to a person capable of signing £6 million of crooked mortgages without even asking what she's signing is a recipe for her doing the same thing with aforesaid Olympic Budget. (See under 'Olympics budget trebles in six months' on various media website archives.)
* Giving GPs a 25% pay rise for working shorter hours may dramatically increase the productivity of medics' laughter muscles, but it will not 'streamline' the service they provide - it will make an already patchy service entirely non-existent. Also, hoping they will invest the money in their 'businesses' is doomed to an after-life in the file marked 'forlorn'. (Although good for sales of 5-series Mercs)
* Deregulating the government supervision of retail banks is unlikely to make them more rather than less honest.
* Any nitwit can have a marketing policy based on attracting savers by the offer of premium rates. But when market rates fall (and borrowing rates increase) he or she will go up the pictures.
* A bloke of very average intelligence educated at Eton is unlikely (in 2007) to be clear on the sky versus ground thing. Furthermore, if his idea of marketing is to become the indistinguishable clone of an indifferent clown, then the chances are he doesn't know that much about marketing, or has shallow advisors, or both. If he, in turn, thinks grammar schools were a bad thing, he should ask of himself, 'pray tell myself why New Labour has relaunched them as private colleges' - except that, of course, grammar schools were entirely free.
Who exactly are the Wuts?
They come in all shapes and sizes, but on the whole are more often found in institutions, government, politics, Oxbridge, most forms of 'management', Surrey, Highgate, financial services, the City trading floor and certain sectors of marketing.
Most of them vote New Labour.
They are confident that everything is going to be alright forever, as a result of which they lose their jobs at regular intervals, and thus never achieve anything beyond a gold-plated, inflation-proof, top-hat, guaranteed pension.
But above all, a Wut is somebody who simply isn't grounded. And the reason they are so dangerousin the current era is that they are constantly bamboozled, cheated and generally ripped off by those with no ethics.
The biggest and best contemporary Wut gathering....
....is called the EU Commission, based in Brussels.
In the face of overwhelming evidence that the last thing ordinary European voters want is a European super-state telling them all to be exactly the same as each other, the Commission and its Wuttist allies in the EU's labyrnthine management warren continue to press ahead with This Great Project of Ours.
The last fifteen years have seen wars fought for nationalist ideals throughout South East Europe, local nationalist movements in areas as unconnected as Brittany, Scotland, Cornwall and The Basque, and firm rejections of an EU-wide constitution by two of its founding members, France and Holland. At the time of writing, a clear majority against any further moves towards unification exists in the UK.
Over time, the Commission has tried to ban garlic, motorcycles, any car capable of speeds in excess of 100mph, vitamin therapies, natural remedies, homaeopathy and seed catalogues.
The Euro (which Britain has very wisely decided not to join 'until the conditions are right') is now distributed as the only currency in twenty-six nation states. These range from former Communist bloc countries and Slav republics not much bigger than Sussex all the way through to world-leading exporters like Germany and renowned inflation importers like Italy. Fourteen of these states have had democracy for ten to thirty years. The next intended entrant, Turkey, has an opposition keen on Sharia law, and an army keen to take over if they show any sign of trying to institute it.
To date, I have not had a single person explain to me why one currency operating in such a drastically broad range of economies is a good idea. The current 'robust' value of the Euro bears no relation at all to the attractiveness either of economies in the EU or the interest rates on offer in the Euro-zone. It remains an aeroplane without engines - a realised fantasy of Wut bureaucrats without the vaguest sense of fiscal realities. The 'strict management guidelines' attached to membership have been broken regularly by every last member - and every year by France, Italy and Greece.
In the context of this Ruritanian nonsense from the Wuts, those in the ethics-free zone are having a field day. Incompetence, poor budgetary management, corruption, favouritism and protectionism combine to make the original idea of a lean, mean free trade area a joke. Behind most of the idiotic legislative proposals, of course, lies national interest of a kind somewhat removed from any form of idealism: the anti-garlic thing allegedly began in Germany, the anti-seed catalogue project in France, the anti-Sherry naming in Spain....on and on it goes, the march of mean-minded, street-wise European politicians gleefully hiding under the umbrella of something supposed to be in all our interests.
Right at the top of this national state cynicism are those who want, as always, the maximum power over the maximum number of people. They are in the process of introducing a marginally repackaged Euro-Constitution, upon which - spookily - there will be no referendum: although in the UK at least, a rejuvenated Opposition is putting enormous pressure on the Trouser Snake to bow to public pressure and lay the plans before British voters for their approval - or otherwise.
What can we do?
This is the easy bit, and yet en meme temps the impossible bit. We all need to decide that this is more important than the X-Factor, Big Brother, the shoe-sale at Bally, and 50% off at that factory outlet. More important than that meeting in the City, in Soho or Leeds. More important than that lunch in Covent Garden.
Then, and only then, will enough of us be ready to take the fight against Wuttism online - as the vegetarians have already done against the mad folks at Mars Foods.
Stay tuned.
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