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Everything Is Our Fault. Everything, I Tell You!

Nick Abbot indulges in a bit of self flagellation.

By Nick Abbot

26 Feb 2012, 12:40

Here is a list of the things that are our fault:
1. Everything
2. See 1, above.

 

The scale of our complicity in all that ails us is staggering. We should be ashamed of ourselves. Or in jail. If only Kenneth Clarke or any of his predecessors had embarked on a prison building programme, when we had the money to do so, we would all be each other's bunk mates right now.

 

Even things we did not know were down to us have turned out to be our lapses. Take the failure of the banks to haul themselves out of the mire they made, despite the lorry loads of cash we gifted them. Their continuing dis-ease is not because the managers are out of their depth and don't know what they are doing. Neither is it because the boards of these banks are clueless now that the good times are over and can't think of anything to balance the books except firing more people. No, the reason that the world's financial titans are flailing around, drowning not waving, is because of us - the boss of our Royal Bank of Scotland told us so. He said that the criticism that we have levelled at the bank that has cost us the future we had planned for ourselves, is the thing that is keeping them down. It is because we, the ungrateful public, are sniping at the bank that it is causing it to do so badly. Nothing to do with the current management or the company's history of folly on an almost unimaginable scale. When they went about building temples of glass and steel to their own glory, installing solid gold taps in the executive wash-rooms of their company jets, had herds of flamingos brought in the pretty up the atria, spent fortunes on modern art that nobody looked at and installed bejewelled swizzle sticks in the bars of the management lounges, that was just good business sense. We are the ones that ruined a good company because of our negativity. So now you know. Feeling apologetic yet? Or just apoplectic?

 

Some things are actually and truly down to us, though. The homogeneity of the High Street, for instance. We bemoan the disappearance of the unique local boutiques of yore. Where are the sole traders that gave our towns their character? The sort of shops where the owners were the ones that served you and knew your name and asked about your mother? It's the evil multinational corporations that have moved in and elbowed them out, shut them down, ruined the family concerns. Well, yes and no. They have done all that but only because we made it happen. Do we want apples that look like they have grown on a tree, in the open air, subject to the forces of nature, or would we rather something that was perfectly round and even of colour and didn't taste too much like anything except sugar? What's our favourite bread? Is it stone ground, hand baked and misshapen, or is it beige and bland and uniform and machine sliced?

 

Would we rather wear something different and individual, or do we prefer clothes that are churned out in the hundreds of thousands so that we can all look the same, in our beige khakis and our £3 t-shirts? Do we choose music that has depth and is challenging or do we consume the blandest ersatz wallpaper tunes to put on to obscure the silences, rather than to actually listen to. Again, it is beige – there's a theme here – it's not much of a colour but it is definitely our favourite – all we consume seems to be a shade of it. It is inoffensive and uninteresting and that's the way we like it.

 

People complain that there are no independent coffee shops any more – squeezed out by the iniquitous mega chains but the reason for that is that when we drink coffee, we would prefer it to be  in the form of a milky bucket of baby goop, rather than the thimble of acrid drugs that real coffee shops sell. We want burgers that are identical in Cambridge and Cairo, except we won't go to Cairo because the food is weird and they don't make tea like at home.

 

The advance of the multinationals and the steady disappearance of anything that could be classed as local, or artisanal or different or special is not the fault of the big brands that are taking over the planet. That really is our fault for wanting them to do it.