Rising East Online

Youth Of Today

All Pose No Politics

—Dan Brooks

Anyone who’s walked through Shoreditch in recent years will have had to sidestep the skin-tight jeans and plimsolls-wearing, hairspray-covered and garishly coloured “inhabitants” who live off of some unseen fortune whilst claiming to be “so poor we can’t afford to live.”

I’m not exactly poor (nor rich for that matter) but I sure as hell can’t afford to live in Shoreditch. I don’t pretend to “rough it” whilst drinking in the Vibe bar or 93 Feet East. Daft as they are, I have always enjoyed the fact that these pretentious types are slumming it in Shoreditch. Because as long as they are in Shoreditch it means they are a safe distance away from me.

So imagine my horror at seeing them in their droves, turning up in enrolment queues in Beckton (read Docklands Campus). Share, if you will, my bemusement at seeing: someone who was born in 1989 wearing a t-shirt celebrating Danzig (who released an album of the same title in 1989), the wash of girls dressed as Boy George/Cyndi Lauper, of males and females wearing impossible colour combinations including purples with yellows, reds and blues finished off by overly large belts that would have shamed Axl Rose in his coke-fuelled hey-day. The list of bad fashion relics really does go on. To be honest it just made me feel old (which I’m not), fat (which I don’t think I am until I stand next to one of these rakes in their spray painted jeans and pointed shoes), and out of sync with contemporary thinking (Am I? Really, do tell me because I’d like to know).

Is there a point to all this posturing? What are today’s political perspectives? What sort of statements are being made, what direction are we now taking and what the hell happened that’s led to a generation of people who use the word “gay” to mean bad, “green” to mean trendy and seem to believe that “offsetting one’s carbon footprint” is somehow going to save us all from certain doom!

Maybe this is merely the rambling of someone in the throws of Saturn Returns (for those who don’t know, this is some sort of hippy belief system that a friend of mine says I may be suffering from as I am approaching 30), or maybe it’s that I don’t see any sort of engagement in the political sphere – in fact all I see is apathy and prancing around in aviator sun glasses whilst recreating an image that was bloody awful the first time round, and is shockingly cannibalistic considering that the era being regurgitated is still well within living memory.

The thing is, as I recall, the 80s were not just a critically low point for fashion but also a crucially high point for political engagement. In Maggie’s Britain the authorities were just as much concerned (if not more so) with ‘the enemy within’ as they were with hostile ‘Argies’ outside.

Who were the ‘enemies within’? Irish republicans, striking train drivers and miners, women of Greenham Common – I could go on, but by today’s standards just those few are overwhelmingly impressive. And what do we have now? Stop the War Coalition, you say. A bunch of second rate political nonentities, I say, who are about as thought provoking as raspberry jam. If this is radical politics, it’s hardly surprising that most people don’t want to spread it around.

But we need to know that, as Pramoedya Ananta Toer put it, ‘Just as politics cannot be separated from life, life cannot be separated from politics. People who consider themselves to be non-political are no different; they've already been assimilated by the dominant political culture, They just don't feel it any more.'

Today I look out on a non-political generation. A generation who lack imagination, creativity, reflexivity, compassion, charisma, anything that makes them stand out from the dross, the flotsam and jetsam, the detritus, the pinnacle of novo-nowt.

If you’ve read this far (10 points if you have and give yourself a gold star to boot!), you might be wondering what is the next step (if there is one) and what should we do collectively. If the present looks so bleak is there really any point in trying?

In my opinion, no. Not really. Ahh, now I see the attraction to apathy! Maybe I should just join the droves and get so involved in the cyber community that I no longer need to see or interact with my meat. But, no, I am not going to give up so easily.

Robert Smith (of The Cure) said in an interview once that the reason his band had their distinctive style is because he had just left school and he was looking at all these people around him wearing their punk outfits and, having just left school himself, he didn’t want to be a part of what he recognised as exchanging one (school) uniform for another. From my perspective the uniform is now the constant – its style might change but its meaning remains the same.

Uniform is now the dominant political ideology. Branding and spin are the mainstays of political success in our media-saturated culture, leading to disassociation from governance and government. We have moved away from a society that communicates its feelings overtly to a society that communicates via the faceless interface of the internet. Through such interactions we have lost a lot of our vocal power and also our ability to engender change. Our voices are lost amongst the countless others who call out through the eternal silence of cyberspace hoping their thoughts will be found and then read. Much like my own effort here in this online journal...

Dan Brooks thinks for himself

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