Inselaffen Klatsch

These days I'm really into the English gossip. Its tension is different from American gossip’s, more overtly class-based. I have no idea who the people the inselaffen are gossiping about are, because usually they’ve done much less in a professionally public sense than American gossip objects have – lots of Page 3 girls and footballer’s wives and reality television stars, whereas in America you usually have to be a singer or actor or something for people to care about you. Fantasy is still important in America - the fantasy that the aging Ciccone bint is Madonna, that sad old sack Terry Bollea is the Hulk, that the fat dead narc Elvis, like Jeebus, fucking lives. You've got to be a member of a disproportionately rich family or an ex-con, at the very least.

There's something grimmer, more cynical in England - I'd say more realistic, but sometimes fantasy is more honest than decontextualized reality. And no reality is more decontextualized than reality television. Reality television has taken off in a different way there than in America, in a way that some commentators describe as a celebration of mediocrity (a bit rich coming from Paul McCartney, considering his seminal contributions to pop music over the past 30 years, but I'm shooting at clay pigeons with no Wings here.) I’m not trying to be cruel when I say that if their gossip is anything to go by, it's because the English have an obsession with useless people.

I believe this is because of their monarchy and aristocracy – the remnants of a bunch of gluttonous, arriviste armed thugs who burst in from Scandinavia, and then France, Wales, Scotland, the Netherlands, and then Germany, and monumentally enriched themselves at everyone else’s expense over more than a millenium now. And over the last few hundred years, serving absolutely no function for good or for ill except for being the sort of figureheads who help reinforce the status quo – which is a purpose I find profoundly useless when the status quo has been such shit.

There's no real fantasy associated with monarchy or aristocracy, just a decontextualized reality - you don't think, I wish I was a princess because then I'd be a great singer or dancer or football player or actress or politician and I'd be so great everybody would love me - no. Chicks wish they were princesses so that they would be princesses. For the same reasons English people wish they were reality stars - to be rich and famous and influential beyond their talents or intelligence. The difference being that the English monarchy and aristocracy managed to enrich themselves and impoverish the other classes so entirely that they became the arbiters of taste instead of its challengers.

And the present breed of English arrivistes, while managing to accrue multi-million pound fortunes, haven’t taken over to the degree that they can be the arbiters of taste; they’re very much a fucking taste challenge. They're 'chavs'. Chavs. What a word. You’re not allowed to say proles anymore because we're supposed to be living in some sort of post-Marxist world, and anyways they’ve got too much disposable income, even in that impoverished iniquitous shithole of a pseudo-European nation, to be proles in the way the bourgeois were educated to regard proles. So the bourgeois rename them chavs and don’t have to ask themselves hard questions about their place in the class conflict. They're just celebrity gossiping. About rich chavs. Not proles. No biggie. And all the while this profound fear and disgust and jealousy at the thought of yet more idle, useless barbarians taking over . . .