A rant about circuses (and bread)
Where’s the good news?
My wife and I were watching the weather forecast. I made a comment about recent evidence that the Arctic ice cover is melting at a greater rate than scientists expected. She sighed and asked if there was any good news. She accuses me of being too gloomy.
Gloomy is now the used term to describe an accurate representation of the state of the world. Kill-joy, that’s me. This is how we slip to our doom, of course. Bread and circuses. Or, to be more accurate in these times of ideologically driven austerity, just circuses. The bread is for the few.
Bad news in the mainstream media is reserved for discussing things that threaten the privilege of the elites and the downward slide to destruction. Corbyn, terrorists, corrupt football managers. Yes, there is a link.
Corbyn and the hope he represents is a threat — obviously enough — to the continued pillage of the country’s economy and the unique position of those squirrelling away the profits from mismanaging the nation’s assets in overseas tax havens.
Terrorists and terrorism — from individuals, nebulous groupings, and that of designated states — provide an excuse for the state of permanent war and internal security measures that again prevent change.
And corruption in football — like drugs in sport — is covered at length because it’s a sideshow at an important circus and allows anger to be safely vented in a controlled environment. Journalists exposing bungs and back-handers and missed drug tests can believe they are doing good work. Look, they say, we may have got it wrong about Iraq and Libya and we fail to report anything negative about austerity and the corporate control of the state but we got our man when we forced the recently appointed England manager to resign. Yippee. Who says investigative journalism is dead?
What do I mean by a circus anyway? Reality TV; sports coverage; celebrity gossip; news reporting that treats us all as very young children. And then there are the things that the presence of a circus renders invisible: serious drama; in-depth reporting; any awareness of the suffering that lies behind the relative wealth and comfort in our society. Actually, the word society should of course be in quotation marks since Thatcher.
Panem et circenses. It’s as old as Rome. In Juvenal’s Satire X he describes using bread and circuses as a route to power for those seeking to bribe the populace. A more modern update is that it distracts the populace: the corporate entities controlling the state no longer need to win power, after all.
Let’s not kid ourselves: the difference between Thatcher, New Labour, Cameron, and now May is not one of ideology but of approach. Conservative and New Labour are simply different labels for the corporate state. This is why Corbyn and his energising of the Labour Party — taking membership to over 500,000 — is such a threat.
Juvenal also suggests that the people have lost the power to know what is good for them. This is the other echo from the past. Neoliberal propaganda is so efficient that many believe there really is ‘no alternative’ to the policies pursued by this Tory government or that proposed by the Blairites within the Labour Party. The message repeated that Corbyn is ‘unelectable’ is based on the assumption that the electorate has no power to think for themselves and that it blindly follows the message of the corporate media.
So the circus approach works even on intelligent people like my wife who despises the Tories and right wing politics as much as I do. It is about playing to the exhaustion of the people and using scapegoats and treats to keep us distracted.
Distracted from the crimes of the elite. Sleepwalking to disaster.
