Five times a week I take the monorail into the city: the
monorail train rises from its concrete lair and crawls like a rattling
corrugated iron centipede above the uniform rooftops of the suburban tenement
blocks, mostly inhabited by manual labourers who make this city run. I am a writer, as poor as dirt, and I live
among them, commute with them.
The advertising agency I work for is in the heart of the
city. And gradually the landscape
changes from drab, brutalist concrete to steel and glass – crystal spires, skyscrapers of all shapes
that pierce and/or prop up the horizon; beacons to wealth based on incorporeal systems that
largely reside inside the heads and hearts of the rich, a system that has
become impenetrable to everyone else.
As we near the celestial metropolis, the wide-shouldered
money men in their pin sharp suits embark, and we are obliged to relinquish our
seats. There was a story in the
prole-art newspaper last year about a money man bludgeoning a pregnant lady
from the tenements to death with his umbrella when she refused to give up her
seat: it didn’t make the national news of course, because its par – rather,
this sort of behaviour on the part of money men is considered natural: Darwin’s
computer generated visage you can see super-imposed onto the facade of many a city
institution.
The authorities, what you might once have called the
‘government’, have become dominated by money men, their wealth made variously
in nuclear energy, arms manufacture, space travel and private security. They have all made a lasting metal-fisted
impression on what you might once have called ‘society’. After all persistent interpersonal
relationships have been replaced by apersonal antipathy among the various
peoples of the city, forcibly imposed from the top down with the rigour of an
industrial steel pounder.
My boss is Franklin . He has the imagination of a gnat and the
interpersonal skills of a wasp - not that it matters: as long as Franklin is able to micro-manage, which Franklin does to the nth degree, as well as run
copy deadlines to the minute. If I am so
much as 1 min 02 sec late submitting a piece, say, on the company’s latest
hypodermic truth serum (the company I work for is in the aforementioned
business of private security), he’ll give me a penalty point, which can result
in more work, or docked wages. I have to
pop caffeine tablets on far too regular a basis to keep up with my present
workload. And I can barely afford to
resole my shoes.
Every quarter we’ll be visited by the Big Boss. His name is Joel T. Stronginthearm; I am not
sure if Stronginthearm is his real surname, or simply an invented tough-guy
moniker. Joel T. Stronginthearm stands
on a podium at the far end of our half acre office and speaks to us via a
microphone. It is supposed to be
inspirational, it is supposed to show that the mighty rich Joel T. Stronginthearm
is taking an interest in poor little copy writers like me, it is, in fact,
depressing. Effective anti-depressants,
however, have long been annexed under an authoritarian initiative to ensure the
latest and best innovations in medicine are issued (almost) exclusively, at
least preferentially, to those over a particular (and near unobtainable) income/productivity threshold.
The canteen where we take our allotted fifteen minute
break for lunch – just enough time to stuff a decomposing sandwich made from
reconstituted cardboard, or close to it, down your gullet; just enough time to
escape the scrutiny of Franklin, but not the perennial feeling of worthlessness
– remains, like the monorail trains, unsegregated: the money men, law men,
politicals (call them what you will), are not stupid. These people realise they have to be seen by
the proletariat as a part of the
wider community even if they are apart
in their heads and hearts, which is where reality for so many these days is
constructed and compelled. Moreover,
these people find the whole idea of a big society, originally fostered by David
Camereton (who for us proles is a latter-day Chaplin-cum-Hitler), positively risible.
And yet, yesterday afternoon, as my day continued
inexorably, I at least found a little head space to day-dream. I met a girl, a woman, the other day in a
down at heel café, surprisingly well-dressed, and she smiled at me. Acknowledgement: it is all I require – I am
not special, but in a sense, I am unique – and hope, for whatever it is worth
these days (I haven’t checked the share price, for people like me cannot afford
shares in Hope Incorporated), hope fluttered for a moment; the bird of hope, an
undernourished, coal-blackened canary that cries ‘Po-tweet!’
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