Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Saturday, 11 February 2017
The political importance of having fun: why protests should be enjoyable
I was at the women’s march
in London on 21 January. On the walk from Grosvenor to Trafalgar
Square, people brandished their home-printed placards: WE SHALL
OVERCOMB; FREE MELANIA. A friend had made one jointly with her toddler
that declared in glitter: PEPPA PIG FOR PRESIDENT!
I’ve been on plenty of marches but never one in which such diverse
political groups came together, split and mingled, preserving their
individuality without contention – I thought of Audre Lorde’s
injunction that we should “recognise, accept, and celebrate those
differences” – and none in which the sentiment was so much fun. It was
only people who weren’t there who suggested that political action was
incompatible with having fun; as if we weren’t miserable enough – and
that had to be proved through performance. For the first time in weeks, I
was cheered by the atmosphere of encouragement, kindness,
determination.
Fun is a double-edged sword. While I marched, I thought of the women
who couldn’t be there: the ones in insecure jobs; in low-pay service
roles providing fun for others on weekends in shops, bars and
restaurants; the women doing unpaid care work, making life fun for
children, for the elderly, meaning they don’t have the freedom or the
cash to get to a march. Although to lambast the imperfect representation
at political protests is so often to deny the circumstances that make
them necessary: yes, we were privileged to be there. But privilege alone
is no guarantee of enjoyment. Later that day, the US-based British
writer Hari Kunzru tweeted a photo that showed the Trumps gazing glumly
into some official banquet: “End the patriarchy,” he wrote, “because –
well just look at it, it isn’t even any fun.”
Fun, as Angela Carter noted in her 1977 essay Fun Fairs, is cheap. It
has nothing to do with privilege. It is vulgar, immediate, democratic,
DIY. Fun is punk. It costs as much as – what? A piece of cardboard on a
stick? A tube of glitter? A few felt pens? Happiness is social, calm,
established. It relies on society getting it right, providing us with
stability, freedom. When society begins to limit or remove these
provisions, in the meantime, in-between-time, ain’t we got fun? The poverty-stricken tune of that name
is a sharp little Brecht’n’ Weillish austerity melody, based on a
repeat musical phrase that could be churned out of any street
hurdy-gurdy. But it is redeemed by the lyrics: interchangeable,
updateable to fit the zeitgeist. First popular in the 1920s, the song
had a resurgence as a swing hit at another period of radical instability
in which a brave sense of irony was required, the 1940s – until
baby-boomer versions foregrounded the lyric intro that contextualises
the singers’ poverty as cheerful new parents, the song’s political teeth
finally pulled.
In the interwar years of the 20th century – a period our times now increasingly resemble – in The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
wrote about the song’s popularity: “There was a turbulent feeling in
the air. To that time belongs the song with the memorable refrain:
There’s nothing sure but The rich get richer and the poor get children; In the mean time, In between time, Ain’t we got fun?
Ain’t We Got Fun?
“People had not yet settled down to a lifetime of unemployment
mitigated by endless cups of tea,” Orwell wrote.“They still vaguely
expected the utopia for which they had fought.”
Yes, fun is a stopgap, a make-do. It is not echt. “A bit of
fun,” is particularly British phrase that relates to the French concept jouissance
as Dairylea does to Camembert. Fun is for the poor, and as such, it is
ripe for our use in fighting a government that, by identifying
Britishness with keep-calm-and-carry-on austerity, is making us morally,
culturally, and materially poorer. By jettisoning the conditions
necessary for happiness via decently funded healthcare, education, and
culture, what they have left us with is fun, and we had better have fun
while we can.
Make no mistake, in the US and the UK, fun is being deliberately targeted. Benjamin Wittes, of the US Lawfare blog,
wrote that Trump’s recent foray into “the symbolic politics of bashing
Islam … is not a document that will cause hardship and misery because of
regrettable incidental impacts on people injured in the pursuit of a
public good. It will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of
thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to
do.”
Plato writes in The Republic that the guardians of the state should
avoid laughter, “for ordinarily when one abandons himself to violent
laughter, his condition provokes a violent reaction”. Philosophers and
psychologists have attributed fun to to a combination of aggression and
play. There is no doubt we need to channel both right now, and should
not deny the link between then. It is impossible to be angry and happy;
it is possible to be angry and have fun.
But fun is not only a consequence of resistance; fun is a mode that draws us to resist.
Plato did not dismiss humour from his Republic, but decided that fun
was incompatible with his idea of full citizenship: “that such
representations be left to slaves or hired aliens,” – like the nannies
and strippers, the waitresses and carers, the women least able to march
last month. Fun is an unsteady citizen, a perpetual migrant, a
border-crosser, a barrier-breaker hardly ever welcomed by the
establishment that must nevertheless acknowledge its necessity. To have
fun – which, Plato implies, involves cultural transgression,
transmission – is to acknowledge that we are not bounded by national or
class identity. To pay particular attention to fun is to begin to
consider the way fun is produced, to think how it might be made
differently. Having a laugh can smash down walls. Sometimes resistance
can be fun.
Citizens of Everywhere is a project by the Centre for New and International Writing at the University of Liverpool. @CitizensofWhere #CitizensofEverywhere Half the fee for this piece will be donated to Asylum Welcome
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