I can make you hate (38 page)

But the notion of ‘brand ambassadors’ has now filtered into the everyday world. ‘Influential individuals’ – not celebrities, just ‘influential’ people engaged in ‘normal life’ – are being paid by marketers to promote goods, by wearing branded clothing or
enthusing about certain products online. Fairly menacing, you might think, pausing briefly afterwards to wonder why your eyes are crying. But it gets worse. Because they’re doing this with children.

Yes, children are being paid to wear corporate logos while out and about. The news passed me by at the time, but back in July, it was reported that Weetabix had recruited fifteen especially active kids to wear special Weetabix-branded clothing ‘on their busiest days’, in order to show that ‘youngsters who eat Weetabix can pack more into a day than those who don’t’. Weetabix spokesthing Sally Abbott was quoted as saying: ‘Parents know why Weetabix is great for big days but we need to find different ways of getting that message across to kids.’

No you don’t, Sally. You just think you do. And in the process, you’ve got a message across to me: that Weetabix is evil. Until I stumbled across this months-old story, I liked Weetabix. I associated Weetabix with the lovable cartoon Weetabix skinhead gang from the 1980s. I couldn’t eat enough of those guys. Even ate a couple this morning. But now I associate Weetabix with a nightmare vision of a dystopian future in which children are brand ambassadors. Not so appetising.

The Milky Bar Kid was an early child ‘brand ambassador’, but at least he knew his place: inside the TV. He didn’t turn up at your school in his cowboy outfit. Today, if advertisers thought they could get away with it, they’d pay kids to have that cowboy outfit permanently stitched onto their skin. Which would actually be quite cool if you got to be the Honey Monster.

At least logo-branded clothing is easy to spot. The notion of companies paying for ‘online endorsements’ from kids is even more sinister, although parental consent is required. Thanks in part to the media spooking parents into believing there’s a deathtrap full of paedophiles round every corner, kids are kept indoors and bombarded with sales propaganda as it is. They grow up being told, in the most sophisticated manner possible, that
products are the ultimate source of self-worth. A recent Unicef report concluded that British kids are desperately unhappy: they have an abundance of toys and products and a lack of attention from their parents.

And we wonder why the ones who can’t afford these products kick in the windows of Currys and Foot Locker, risk arrest for a gizmo, land in jail for the sake of a shoe.

But now even the ones who recognise how the media clobbers them over the head with an aspirational mallet, who try to filter out the background consumerist dance beat – they can no longer trust their own friends when chatting online. Those schoolfriends may soon be ‘brand ambassadors’. Not even friends any more, but mascots. It’ll backfire, of course. Kids are kids. There’ll be brand ambassadors outed as bitches and bullies. One day a brand ambassador will shoot up a school, and the potato snack company that paid him to endorse its products online will rush out a press release explaining that his actions don’t embody their values, which traditionally involve less screaming and death. And we’ll all be sadder and wiser. And we’ll buy something different. For about three weeks.

Don’t know about you, but I’ve been doing my level best to ignore the increasingly disturbing financial news coming in from – well, from everywhere – for several months now. Fortunately, ignoring the financial news is second nature to me anyway. I’m a helpless business dunce. My brain won’t let me even understand that stuff, let alone find it interesting.

Whenever someone tries to explain even the most rudimentary economic principle to me, I can feel my entire mind glazing over. Entering shutdown mode. Protecting itself from boredom by wilfully slipping into a coma. My eyes remain open, I occasionally
even grunt, but my inner being has wandered several thousand miles away. Sometimes I’m rudely awoken by a cold strand of drool dripping on to my collarbone. If, as I regain consciousness, their explanation is still going, I wipe my chin clean and go back to sleep.

But recently – well, it’s become harder to ignore, hasn’t it? Every other news story seems to open with blood-curdling
proclamations
about Greece or the eurozone or the global economy, and although I can scarcely comprehend the nuts and bolts of the issues involved, I recognise despair when I see it. The business pages read like the ‘down’ entries from a manic-depressive’s diary, in which the situation is bleak and can only get bleaker.

Back in 2008, when the bubble burst, it seemed the financial world had been asleep for years but had now been shaken awake. Unfortunately, it reacted by closing its eyes and trying to resume that comforting dream it was having about endless free money and cake. But it can’t get back to sleep because the alarm’s still going off. Oh, and the house is on fire.

We’d only imagined we had all that money, and now
everybody
’s penniless – apart from the people whose fault it was, the ones we bailed out by forfeiting our own futures. They’re absolutely rolling in it. Which is just as well, because the way things are going they’ll need to spend millions sealing themselves inside a mob-proof steel casing behind a ring of razor wire and trained attack dogs. Seriously, if I were a top banker, I’d plough that multimillion bonus into developing an all-over protective exoskeleton that farts teargas at the touch of a button, just so I might survive an extra fifteen minutes or so when the Grand Reckoning arrives.

In the meantime, I keep seeing articles with headlines such as ‘Has capitalism failed?’ – and I’m surprised by how worrying I find that thought. Don’t get me wrong; anyone with half a brain in their noggin can see drastic change is necessary if all seven billion of us are going to continue to flat-share the one planet.
But the moment you start talking about the complete collapse of capitalism, I start to worry about two things, the first being the future of Shreddies (more on that later) and the second being the prospect of a massive global war.

As a species, we tend to hold massive global wars when we’re having an identity crisis – a bit like a character in a soap opera tearfully smashing up their living room to demonstrate how upset they are at the climax of a particularly harrowing story arc, but worse because millions perish. (If you think that sounds like I’m trivialising the terrifying prospect of a massive global war, you’re right. It’s a psychological defence mechanism designed to stop myself screaming while I type.)

The complete collapse of capitalism would bring on an identity crisis of staggering proportions. You mean we listened to all those advertising jingles for nothing? We memorised PIN codes and coveted ‘brands’ and shuffled round shopping malls in search of personal validation – and we were wasting our time?

And those eerie puppet people who dressed like
Apprentice
contestants and sat on the Bloomberg channel burping out phrases such as ‘collateralised debt obligations’ and ‘securitisation’ and ‘facilitate’ and ‘drill-down’ and ‘going forward’ – those people were boggle-eyed bullshitting lunatics and the entire system was a tosser’s delusion? None of us could ever have guessed. We didn’t have to guess. We knew. We knew.

We knew in our hips and our hearts and our heads that this stuff was nonsense, but we just had to keep going. We had to, didn’t we? Because that’s what everyone else was doing.

But now, to be told the entire backdrop to our lives may have just been a Crayola sketch on a suspended bedsheet, not a real landscape at all – well, that’s a little scary. When I contemplate the complete collapse of capitalism, I feel like a minor background character in a video game – a faceless pedestrian in
Grand Theft Auto,
say – being told the powers that be have just discovered a fatal bug in the software and the whole thing may be deleted any
second. I may not have enjoyed trudging through my dystopian city, but it was all I knew. Will the pavement now be deleted along with the walls? I have no way of knowing.

If the entire global economy goes down the wazoo (or up the wazoo – I guess it depends on where the wazoo’s orifice is located), all currencies may be rendered meaningless. But if we adopt some kind of medieval bartering system instead, how will I pay for my Shreddies? I for one refuse to perform sexual favours at the checkout. Will we still have checkouts? Or Shreddies themselves? Even if we do, I bet we won’t have the ‘Frosted’ and ‘Coco’ varieties any more. Just plain standard Shreddies, eaten from a bowl fashioned from a dented hubcap, purchased in exchange for a hand job during a massive global war.

Anyway, like I say, I’m doing my level best to ignore all that. And so far, I’m succeeding.

Everyone knows there are only two kinds of men who feel the need to drive fast: professional racers and the poorly endowed. Sorry, but those are the facts. Obviously, some men will disagree, but only because they’ve lost all sense of reason, so enraged are they by the teeny-tiny dimensions of their penises, which really are crushingly small – so small they’d still look undersized even if transplanted directly onto a thimble-height scaled-down nude action figure of Dudley Moore.

Seriously, those guys deserve pity. They’d give anything to be packing a huge flesh-club down there – a fearsome, weighty great shank that emits a guttural snarl when roused before ripping through their pants like an escaped boar – but instead they’re cursed with a timid skin pipette, peeping through their pubic thatch like a frightened uvula, or a dormouse foetus, or the quivering tip of a Clanger’s nose. It’s humiliating. And that’s why
they drive so fast. Even if they deny that’s the reason. In fact, particularly if they deny that’s the reason.

Anyway, I’m getting off the (teeny tiny) point here. The reason I bring this
FACT
(and it is a
FACT
) to your attention is the
government
’s plan to raise the motorway speed limit to 80 mph, which is misguided for two reasons. Firstly because it’ll make Jeremy Clarkson smile, which is always a reliable barometer for bad policies. But mostly because it’s just not necessary.

I understand why they’re doing it – it’s a brazen attempt to capture the seething underdicked male vote, and that’s an important group to placate, because let’s face it, those guys are as furious as they are unpredictable – but it seems curiously
self-defeating
. Part of the argument for raising the permitted figure to 80 mph is that lots of people break the existing 70 mph limit: roughly half of all motorway drivers, in fact. Why are they driving that fast? The government seems to earnestly believe these people are in a hurry, which is terribly sweet of them, but we all know that isn’t the reason. It’s to do with pushing the limit, with gently breaking the law.

I can’t drive a car – I’m an inferior human being – but even I understand the psychology of the accelerator pedal. If cars came with two speeds – 30 mph or 90 mph, and the only way to switch between them was by pushing an instant ‘break the speed limit’ button, drivers might think twice about doing so. But that pedal, that incremental, giving pedal … it almost encourages you to push your luck.

Another dumb thing the dumb government seems to dumbly believe is that raising the speed limit will boost the economy. According to Transport Secretary Philip Hammond, ‘increasing the motorway speed limit to 80 mph would generate economic benefits of hundreds of millions of pounds through shorter journey times’.

I don’t think he actually said those words out loud. I think he physically carved them, letter-by-letter, out of pure horseshit.

If Hammond honestly thinks ‘shorter journey times’ are the key to fixing the economy, why hasn’t he kickstarted a campaign encouraging us to take bigger, brisker strides? Why isn’t he issuing us all with stilts? Why isn’t he touring the nation, sawing off our children’s feet and replacing them with wheels? There are only two possible explanations: either he doesn’t care about our economic wellbeing or he knows damn well he’s talking through his hat. Which he wears up his backside.

Incidentally, as well as raising the upper limit to 80 mph, he is also increasing the number of 20 mph zones. So you’ll be hearing far more screeching brakes in future. Don’t worry, eventually it’ll blend unnoticed into the background, like birdsong or gunfire.

The current situation, in which the official limit is 70 mph, but which half the population pushes to somewhere around 80 mph when they think they can get away with it, seems like a fair
compromise
. The 70–80 mph buffer zone of cheeky lawlessness seems about right. Why set it higher?

If anyone really, really wants to drive faster than 80 mph, they could visit a test track, play
Need for Speed,
or simply risk it and swallow the consequences. Driving above 80 is useless in everyday life: unless you’re delivering urgent donor organs, you don’t need to reach your destination that quickly. And if you think you do, either set out earlier, or spend less time browsing for ‘Grab Bag’ size packs of Quavers at the service station.

And besides: zooming petrolheads already have it their own way on the roads: aggressively driving up other peoples’ arses, bleating away with their horns, flashing their lights … seriously, what’s wrong with you people? It can’t just be the penis thing, surely? The anger and the obvious raging inadequacy seems so … raw. Do you need a cuddle, is that it? Should we designate special laybys to be used for cuddle-breaks, just to calm you down?

Come to think of it, that’s probably how dogging started. Fair enough. If that’s what it takes to get people to slow down, it’s fine by me.

Because there’s too much bad-tempered showboating on the roads, and not enough amiable sauntering. When I become minister for transport, I’ll introduce a new motorway lane
specifically
designed for nineteenth-century horse-drawn hay carts – a lane that criss-crosses all the other lanes at random intervals. I’d also position a sniper on every bridge and instruct them to blow the head off anyone who looks like they’re getting a bit of speed up. Or anyone who looks like they’re enjoying the road a bit too much for my liking. Or anyone listening to an album I hate. Or wearing a loud shirt. Or who might be Sagittarian.