Weasels Ripped My Flesh
Park Lane, 1986 - My English Traits - Chapter 40
If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.
Frank Zappa
A bought mind is a spoiled mind.
George Orwell
They put me up in a very corporate hotel in Park Lane with a distinctively Third Reich design palette of black, silver and red. Air-conditioned corridors of harlequin-style marble were redolent with Black Forest pine, fresh boot polish, and DeKuyper`s Peachtree Schnapps. The yuppies who weren’t rolling in drunk from late lunches at the Marriott were heading gym-wards in purple and grey lycra.
In the days before the phone you picked from your purse or your pocket told everyone in the vicinity exactly what kind of person you were, inside and out, you had to rely on visible accessories such as shoes, clothes, hairstyles, handbags and which design of Swatch you chose to wear on your wrist to signal your social and intellectual status to strangers, close and distant. Mine was the classic white-faced, day-date version with a no-frills black leather strap. Its understatement said everything about how understated I was determined to be.
More astonishing than the spectacular view overlooking Hyde Park from my ninth floor hotel room was the astonishment of seeing white people sweeping the floors, changing the laundry and serving the corporate breakfasts. How did they even know how to do that?
I kicked off my Florsheims, lit a Marlboro Light and turned on the TV. Yes, a television of my own in my actual bedroom, with an actual remote control with actual buttons to skip through them at the push of the actual button. With programmes and news channels from more countries in the world than I had thus far heard of.
If this was neoliberalism, I wanted more of it.
It’s impossible to underestimate the ignorance of South Africans of my generation. We learned a lot more after 1994 when the world briefly gave a fuck about our fate. But before that, without television until 1976, living in one of the most intellectually deficient, geographically remote, culturally curtailed and strictly censored countries in the world, where we had to rely for our general knowledge on our household editions of the New World Encyclopaedia last updated in 1935, what little information we had about international affairs was either wildly out of date, entirely irrelevant, or just plain wrong. We tried to join the dots but there weren’t enough dots.
Which goes some way towards explaining why the remote control that was warming in the palm of my hand in that hotel room in Park Lane in 1986 felt like something between a magic wand and the key to a library of long-proscribed revelations. Or, it occurred to me in my unfamiliar state of foreign and febrile freedom, a divine phallus — smooth, stiff and reassuringly hard — which I could employ to penetrate the veil of antipodean ignorance that for so long had denied me entrance to the lush and luscious garden of worldly wisdom.
A lot of stuff was going on in the northern hemisphere. And the more channels I flicked through, the more there was going on.
The United Kingdom and the Kingdom of the Netherlands were to sign a peace treaty that would end the Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years' War, one of the longest wars in human history. In 1986.
Out of Africa had won Best Picture at the 58th Academy Awards in Los Angeles. I felt undeservedly thrilled. I was also freshly out of Africa.
A company called Microsoft was making some kind of big noise on the New York Stock Exchange. Whoever they were and whatever that was.
Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations Secretary-General and candidate for president of Austria, may have been involved in Nazi war crimes during World War II.
Oh.
I found my mouth salivating with the taste of information. It was strange, juicy, chewy, sweet, sour, sticky, addictively moreish, desperately overabundant and mostly indigestible. It seemed to me then that however much there was of it there would never be enough of it. My tongue had taken to its toothsomeness.
It would turn out that yea, truly, knowledge was the root of all the evil that wasn't caused by blind stupidity. And that, yea, words truly were the shit of the soul. But I wouldn’t know that until London had made a meal of me.
Which is about when my drooling ecstasy of flicking and fumbling was interrupted by a weirdly familiar face of some guy on an American TV channel called CNN. I froze, suddenly struck by the realization that not everyone we had ever heard about in the outside world was either fictional or dead.
It was that hair; that face; that droopy black moustache on the upper lip and that black triangle of glossy moustache below it. A triangle not of happiness but of who gives a shit.
My memory of him appeared through dissolving clouds of dagga in a room where scantily-clad communists were communing around the cover on an LP recently smuggled into Boom Street, Pietermaritzburg, Natal, South Africa, circa 1973. Him, that Mothers of Invention dude, alive and live on my TV in Park Lane, London, England, the United Kingdom 1986:
ZAPPA: The biggest threat to America today is not communism. It’s moving America toward a fascist theocracy. And everything that’s happened under the Reagan Administration is steering us right down that pipe.
NOVAK: Oh, Mr Zappa…
ZAPPA: Yes, MISTER Zappa…
NOVAK: Do you really think…I mean…
ZAPPA: I really think!
NOVAK: All kidding aside. Is this country, with the permissiveness, that we are moving toward a fascist theocracy?
ZAPPA: You bet we are, buddy.
Crossfire, CNN - 28th March, 1986
It was more astonishing than the view over Hyde Park; more astonishing than white people changing the linen; more astonishing even than discovering that the re-released version of Cliff Richard’s Living Doll was still topping the UK charts twenty-seven years after my parents gave my sister Daphne the 45 rpm vinyl of it at New Dell back in 1959.
Yes, right here, live on CNN, was someone who said what he thought. And he hadn’t been censored, bleeped, gagged or shot. Not yet.
And, rising immediately from the shivering roots of that hair-raisingly extraordinary revelation, the even more hair-raising thrill of an hitherto unimaginable possibility — what if everyone said what they thought? What if anyone said what they truly thought?
I didn’t know if the United States of America was a fascist theocracy or not. I wasn’t at all sure what a fascist theocracy would look like or smell like either in theory or in practice. I had never been to the US. But it suggested something akin to the way apartheid was so ferociously implemented in South Africa in the name of God and his apparently Christian principles and values.
Those considerations would all come later. Right then and there what mattered was only that Zappa had said it. Live on television for all the world to see and hear.
After a lifetime of listening to lies, writing lies, exchanging lies, decoding lies and making a living out of inventing lies on behalf of the apartheid state and a wide array of other consumer fictions palatable and not so palatable, the idea of telling the truth, especially the idea of expressing one’s own intimately personal truth, struck me as absurd, inconceivable and outrageous.
And to venture, then, as Frank Zappa just did, from expressing the truth of one’s personal experience to expressing how it shaped and informed one’s political views would not only be outrageous, it would surely be outright dangerous.
The corollary of which struck me with an equal and opposite force: my mind, in Orwell’s words, had been well and truly bought.
No one ever wrote a great book in praise of the Inquisition.
George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature
That any number of great novels have been written in defiance of totalitarianism, fascism and authoritarianism of any and every kind, while nothing of any literary value has been written in favour of them, isn’t and shouldn’t be surprising.
Writers write because they want to express themselves. Constraints that prevent them from doing so are, hence, highly likely to be both the subject and the object of their expression.
Ranged against them are governments with something to hide, religions with something to fear, and institutions with something to lose who will do anything and everything to prevent writers, observers and commentators from thinking, saying or publishing what they think.
The price of doing so in overtly fascist or totalitarian societies can range from deportation to death, with every imaginable and unimaginable variety of cruel and barbaric punishments in between. Thanks to organisations such as PEN and Human Rights Watch, many of these cases are now well-documented and widely publicized.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2001/06/27/persecuted-writers-honored-prestigious-awards
But none of them makes the point quite as explicitly or poignantly as the story of the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, brutally beaten to death in 1977 for the views he espoused in his book I Write What I Like.
If you don’t know Biko’s story you can, and should, read the shocking truth of it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Biko
From Stalinist Russia to apartheid South Africa, from the American South to Communist China, from the South American dictatorships to the African despots, from conservative India to radical Islam, wherever the most narrow political and moral views of the dominant authorities prevail, the written and spoken word will always be both the biggest threat to the status quo and the easiest of all threats to target and proscribe.
Nor is it by accident that the three subjects most likely to excite the indignation of those who interests are entirely vested in their privilege and power also happen to be the three questions most puzzling to young and curious minds, viz:
Why is the world so fucked up?
Who gives a fuck?
How do you fuck if you ever get to fuck?
Aka: politics, religion and sex.
Kill the words that phrase the questions and you kill the hope of finding answers.
The desperation of those who don’t want the truth to get out is matched only by the courage and perseverance of those who do.
In Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and early 1980s, owning or using a photocopier without official permission was outlawed by the state. An underground publishing group called Padlock Editions helped writers such as Milan Kundera to get printed copies of their work smuggled out of the country by typing them manually, one painful word at a time.
During the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964 to 1985), the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo was prevented from publishing over 1,100 (known) articles. To alert their readers to the extraordinary number of stories they weren’t allowed to print, the newspaper began to publish nonsensical recipes in the spaces that would have been dedicated to them. Some of them called for fictional vegetables and kilograms of salt. Alongside them, or in place of them, it also ran an excerpt from a poem by the 17th century Portuguese poet Luís de Camões as many as 655 times. Other Brazilian newspapers followed suit.
These stories are legion. Far less legion because they don’t make the headlines, but just as pernicious precisely because they don’t make the headlines, are the books that remain unwritten by willing authors who are unwilling to write what they think, or who are prevented by unwritten social or political codes from writing what they think.
This point was brilliantly made by George Orwell in his 1946 essay The Prevention of Literature. Unlike 1984 and Animal Farm, which were widely celebrated because they could clearly be read as anti-totalitarian tracts and hence as direct criticisms of Soviet Russia and Communist China, The Prevention of Literature was widely ignored because it was clearly aimed at the West’s tyranny of moralism in general (read, Zappa’s fascist theocracy), and specifically at England’s tyranny of politeness (read the Iron Codes of Ingsoc).
The most telling evidence of this can be found is these three extraordinary paragraphs from the same essay:
The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as it is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary.
All it requires, in Orwell’s words, are:
…the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, and the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books.
And then:
...there is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature, and least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political kind are near the surface of everyone’s consciousness. Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer.
You can’t write what you think if you can’t find any thoughtful things to think about. The soul can’t shit in constipated societies.
Farewell Park Lane and 1986. Onwards to Middlemarch, to The Way of All Flesh, to The Rainbow and to Tono-Bungay.