It’s very blood-warming to hear someone
with a world-view—literally a view of the world as a system, like a 3D graphic
to be printed out in plastic and presented at a science fair— wittily put it
out there.
For my part, I might manage an article or
two, certainly not a whole book— before that warm dutch-courage feeling starts
burning in my stomach: not so much the fire of revolution, more acidity. That’s
probably why I should be a civil servant.
It isn’t that I disagree with how radical
she’s being (and of course I can’t criticize the tense strength of that word-cascade);
in fact, I wish I wish I had the courage. But I don’t, and I don’t, and the
world as she paints it is both too real and not real enough. I can’t use it for
bread and butter (and I prefer those to chapatis, sadly) and I can’t avoid it
behind the editorials of my centre(-left) newspaper. In that world, not
something but everything is wrong; and everyone, poor sods, is suggesting you
speak to their manager, because they know the problem can’t be fixed but hope
its only their own incompetence that says so. They have to have faith in their
own incompetence. I can’t live with that.
I’m Christian, because I believe in
Competence—though not my own. Also, because I believe in Justice, and a morally
right way of doing every damned thing—which means each of those things matters,
and I’m not shirking or shying by doing them. In fact, the boot is quite on the
other foot. I’m doing Something by not shirking even them. And with my eyes
firmly planted downwards once I get into the corridors of power, I’ll
strategically tread on toes and unshine shoes: I’ll conduct my little
revolution against the symbols of power in the washrooms of privilege. I’ll
wriggle my way into the affections of the closed-circuit (cameras), and then do
some leaks of my own out of a first-floor window.
I make myself sound a worse prospect than I
am. But that’s from taking on her vocabulary—this firebrand stuff doesn’t suit
me. For me, the positive program: healing the sick and comforting the dying.
And that, in it’s turn, means I look death in the eyes—of one particular
person— and tell it in my best hospital voice that it doesn’t win. That it
can’t use its mirrors in glassy expressions the world over against me and mine.
And I patiently explain that the group ‘mine’ involves a heck of a lot of
people around here, so if he will excuse me, I must go and supervise the
doorstep delivery of this month’s rational food supplies. And after that I go
home at six-thirty and have a drink and a cuddle, and read Mills and Boons for
an hour or three. I don’t have to live in the wrongness of this world
full-time, but because I can not, I can go back to it at 9.30 am with less of a
roaring hangover. It might be a less atrocious world with people who can face
atrocities with composure, but it might be a more atrocious one too. And then,
of course, they say it takes one to know one.
