HAPPY XMAS – WAR IS OVER

By Penny Rimbaud

I just got back from New York City, ground zero, cinder-caked, but thanks to zero tolerance (‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’) the sidewalks are now paved with gold and inhabited by cocaine-driven brokers, Prozac-popping investors and Valium-blind shareholders.

The last time I took a bite at the Big Apple was thirty years back when, as a friend remarked, ‘it was classic New York’: bums on the Bowery, muggers in Central Park, litter blowing in filthy sodden clouds down the avenues of tired tenement blocks. ‘Brother, can you spare a dime?’ Well, the bums have gone, mugging is no longer de rigueur, and the tired tenements have become ‘des res’. It’s a great place to be: relaxed, friendly and purposeful, but there’s something missing: ordinary working people. New York has suffered a white collar whiteout. There’s been a cultural genocide, the kind that’s going on in East London: ‘fit in with your wallet, or get the hell outa here.’

Now, I’m not averse to newness, nor to genuine social advance, but when those factors are based on wealth or, as they invariably are, on forms of innate racism and classism, I get a gag in the throat. Just take a look at Spitalfields, Docklands or even good old Stokey. While those with the wallets bray on about urban improvements, those without find themselves excluded and forced out to deprived wildernesses on the edges of the urban sprawl. Where now are the multicultural indigenous working people, the artists, bohemians and bums who established vibrant communities in those once ‘deprived’ areas? Like London, New York is dying a death: death by finance. Colourful diversity is being replaced by the monoculture of the ‘haves’, while the ‘have nots’ are out on their pantless arses. It’s the same old story: while the exclusive galleries move into East London and Greenwich Village (accompanied by bijou restaurants serving anorexic portions of nouveau cuisine), the artists who made those areas creatively attractive are obliged to eke out an existence elsewhere, nervously awaiting the next development scam. It happened to London’s Soho fifty-odd years ago, and recently we’ve seen it in ‘Happening Hoxton’. Well watch out for ‘Wonderful Walthamstow’ and ‘Daring Dalston’. They’re going that way fast; the estate agents’ smirking copywriters are hard at it.

Dennis Tod Interiors N16 When Tory warlord Michael Heseltine first mooted Docklands as a ‘way forward’, most people I knew simply leant back saying ‘dream on’, while accusing me of paranoia for stating that it would be the death of an entire culture. Thirty years down the line and we have Canary Wharf blinking its masonic-topped arrogance onto the lowly beings who inhabit its shadow, we have uniformed security guards pacing the pavements outside the East End’s oh-so-frightfully-trendy bars protecting the rich from reality, and, yes, we’ve got the Olympics, a possible £20 billions worth of them. Remember ‘Back the Bid’? It was just another one of Gauleiter Livingstone’s little jokes, he who originally costed the heist at a mere £2bn. And so, Kenny Boy, who’s going to pay the cost? Ordinary working people. And who’s going to lose their small businesses, their social centres and their leisure facilities? Ordinary working people. And who’s going to suffer the effects of rents rocketing and house prices going through the ceiling? Yes, you’ve got it, and never mind the astronomic rise in council taxes.

There was a time (maybe) when culture was considered to have a greater value than economics, a pre-Thatcherite era when people were placed before profit but, as the Iron Lady so succinctly put it, ‘there is no such thing as society’. So let’s create our own Ground Zero, let’s make the whole bloody planet into one great big World Trade Centre and bury its people in the ensuing rubble. Don’t laugh, it’s on the cards.

A few weeks back, Tony Blair was in Afghanistan, tie-less to show he was one of the boys while, two-faced as ever, letting those disillusioned, ill-equipped boys know that it was there in the desert that ‘the future of the world’s security was going to be played out’.That must be worth dying for, mustn’t it? And never mind the security of those he’d left behind in Blighty. As Blair harps on about world affairs, the fate of the nation he supposedly represents is left in the hands of the giant corporations, and while imaginary terrorists lurk on every street corner, McDonalds and Coca-Cola move in for the Olympic kill. So who’s the real enemy? Blair’s downfall is that he’s working without the raison d’être so conveniently handed to Bush through the modern-day Reichstag of 9/11. Just as Blair desperately wanted, indeed needed there to have been Iraqi WMDs, so I’ll bet he knows precisely how much he’d profit by a Boeing jet ploughing into Canary Wharf. It would give him the justification he so desperately lacks. He’s been crying out for it, and if his relationship with MI6 was just a little bit more amicable, he’d probably have had his way. Let’s face it; a motley crew of Islamic backpackers just didn’t do the job. The point being that just as the invasion of Iraq was sanctioned, if not directly demanded, by the giant corporations, so the Olympics.

It doesn’t seem to matter any more who or where we are, the globalising monsters are out to get us, each and every one of us, and don’t tell me you haven’t been warned in these very columns - ‘remember The Dome? Well watch out East London, you ain't seen nothing yet, [the Olympics] and all sponsored by two major players of the cultural wing of the American Military State – McDonalds and Coca-Cola – first you bomb 'em, then you sell 'em food 'n' drink or, conversely, first you starve 'em and then sell them food 'n' drink (on credit – arms an optional extra). Make poverty history? They've got to be joking.’ And so it goes on.

During my stay in New York I visited Strawberry Fields, the Central Park memorial to John Lennon in which a simple mosaic circle surrounds his iconic late twentieth-century edict Imagine. As I strolled away into the golden sunset, I muttered beneath my breath ‘I wish’. And on that note, let me end with a seasonal greeting courtesy of the Lennon/Ono consortium; ‘War is over if you want it.’ I wish that too.