IS IT time perhaps for a short madness? A short madness is how Horace described anger. Shakespeare was also typically wise on the subject, though uncharacteristically incoherent. Translated into English, he said anger lets down your guard and also that, left to run its course, it just burns itself out in exhaustion.
This week, a more modern bard, at least in the medium of film, identified a curious lack of rage at injustice and poverty in today’s society. Ken Loach, whose new film I, Daniel Blake is released today, told The Guardian: “If you’re not angry, what kind of person are you?”
A good question. My guess is that it depends on how much you’re affected personally. The Scottish proverb says the hungry man is an angry man. Alas, the corollary of that says the replete person is an apathetic one.
If something doesn’t affect us personally, we don’t get angry. Or, if we do feel wee stirrings, we don’t know any more what to do, other than go online and tweet into the ether.
In the grey and allegedly real world, meanwhile, political organisations are too byzantine; trade unions have few rights; workers are on self-employed contracts; hardly anyone holds meetings any more; and the route to getting something done is too full of obstacles, not least engaging with a barrage of abuse from the status quo’s deranged defenders.
And that’s before we get to the schism and egos of political organisation. The purpose fades from view. The road becomes a muddy track. The will is sapped, the anger exhausted and proven to be pointless.
As for the hungry man himself, he may feel angry, but he’s too weak to do anything about it. Even if there did happen to be a meeting, he couldn’t afford the bus fare, and he probably doesn’t have the internet now either.
I, Daniel Blake, billed as “a film for our times”, tells the story of a 59-year-old joiner denied sickness benefit by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) – an organisation surely deserving depiction by a new Charles Dickens – after he suffers a near-fatal heart attack.
Later, his jobseeker’s allowance is suspended, and he has to rely on a food bank to survive. There’s more to the drama than that, of course. We know the above narrative well enough already from the news. But its subject matter is nevertheless something so outrageous that I feel exhausted just mentioning it.
It is the great scandal of our times. That a government department, part of the welfare state that we set up to protect us – paid for it too, like the joiner in the film – should take away our means to eat and heat is beyond understanding.
I don’t even remember how they – the Tories, obviously; do I need to give these bad guys a black hat? – got away with it. Presumably, there was legislation. Presumably, the opposition at Westminster was characteristically lame, or even acquiescent.
True, those thus persecuted can apply for repayable loans representing a fraction of their benefits, but the DWP does not encourage this and, often, does not tell claimants about it.
As it happens, a new play, Can This Be England?, deals with similar issues.
It is written by Angela Neville, a former jobcentre adviser who refused to sanction someone in hospital and who says staff – increasingly in revolt – were given “brownie points” for cruelty.
Again, there’s material for a new Dickens here, except that this is a whole Department of Beadles, a veritable Bureaucracy of Bumbles.
The staff had targets – scourge of our age – for getting people off benefits. I’ve tried telling anyone who’ll listen (at the last count, one, and that was me, talking to myself instead of tweeting influentially) about how targets lie at the current rottenness in our society.
How maddening it all is. And it’s a long madness now. Five decades ago, Loach’s landmark film, Cathy, Come Home, caused outrage about homelessness and led to social change. He has less hope for I, Daniel Blake.
While seeing positive signs in Podemos, Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn (and, having indicated previously support for independence, presumably the SNP), he believes today’s lack of social cohesion militates against righteous anger.
He adds: “Who would have thought in the 60s that it would be acceptable and normal to starve unless you got charity food? It’s grotesque that we now accept this.”
It is. It is truly dreadful. It is the story of our times.
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