Junk Mail by Will Self

Author:Will Self [Self, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781522662235
Amazon: B004I6DCXE
Goodreads: 138718
Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
Published: 2006-05-11T23:00:00+00:00

Thatcher is, of course, the real bogey woman of this essay. There was never anything more English than Baroness Thatcher nee Margaret Roberts. She proved once again that anyone in this country who had elocution lessons could aspire to a hereditary title. Thatcher made explicit the peculiar cultural bond that has always existed between the English lower middle class and the English upper middle class, the two groups dancing a gavotte around one another, aping each other's attitudes.

It would have been nice to imagine - what with the monarchy so convincingly working itself via the Method into the mind-set of a tampon - that this quavering chord of snobbery was at any rate being stretched in the present if not snapped altogether. But, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The English obsession with class is in great shape and over the past fifteen years has received a booster course of anabolic steroids in the form of government-inspired promotion of gross economic inequality.

The fact remains that, in the past decade and a half in England, the poor have got resolutely poorer while the rich have got resolutely richer. Statistics came out a month ago (rating minimal column inches in newspapers that had more important things to comment upon, such as new trends in advertising) that, while the middle classes in England have doubled their wealth in real terms, the least well-off have got progressively poorer.

This leaves the bulk of cultural commentators in an uneasy - not to say tendentious - position of having to nip and nibble at the hand that so conspicuously feeds them. Going back to that Potter interview, I think he voiced a sentiment that many of us feel when he said that there was a real demand for radicalism in England in the eighties - it happened to come from the right wing, but the demand for change was insistent.

We got the change - but it wasn't exactly what we were looking for. But to reprise what I said above, a great culture is not necessarily derived from an egalitarian or socially responsible political and economic culture. In the eighties we saw rickets and tuberculosis reappear in our cities; along with new kids on the block: firearms and crack cocaine, and I would argue that as a direct result England came of age as a particular kind of culture.

A year or so ago I did an interview with Martin Amis for an American college review. It was at the end of our conversation that Amis inadvertently identified the nub of the cultural exhaustion suffered by the English middle class - and what underlies it, adumbrates it, gives it substance. We were discussing the notion of 'cool'. The Americans definitely had it, opined Amis. All Americans? I countered, or perhaps only Afro-Americans? They did, after all, coin the term in the first place. Well, Amis didn't know about that, but whatever 'cool' was, it was a quality that the English were incapable of possessing.

I would like to dissent from this view.

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