A restless winter

“The problem with eggs
Is they haven’t got legs
So unlike your pet stork
You can’t take them for a walk.
Whereas your pet frog
Can be walked like a dog —
But beware the coup
The French will turn him into soup.”
From The Neffertitty Tales by Bachchoo

When Shakespe-are causes Richard III to say “Now is the winter of our discontent” he means that the bad days have gone, contentment is here. Alas! The ambivalence of English: the sentence today would mean that we have entered the bleakest period of our restlessness with not much of spring, what with global cooling, predicted to follow.

“Discontent” is in the context of 2011 precise in its imprecision. Within it is a yearning which hasn’t crystallised into a strategy, far less a demand.
This is not true of all our discontents.
This week in the UK, hundreds of thousands of government employees — teachers, nurses, ambulance men, immigration officers — came out on strike called by their unions and led by people of a generation that understood the mechanisms of political revolt.
Their demands were precise: The coalition government of Britain has noticed the obvious, that people are living longer. It means that after retirement workers will claim pensions for very many more years than they did two decades ago when the system of the rotation of money to pay pensions was devised. This scheme requires that workers pay a small percentage of their salaries and the employers, be they government or private firms, pay an adjunct to this sum which is fed into a pension pot. This money is invested and from that investment pensions, subsidised eventually by tax-payers, are paid out.
It is reasonable to assume that as the pensionable population grows and the earning population shrinks in proportion, the formula needs adjustment.
The government set out to make it, asking workers to pay more towards their pensions and cutting the size of payment they would get to spread it over more years.
The unions weren’t having it and the strike was their way of saying so. Their demand, that the government drop its plans and find the money to stick with the old pension arrangements, is precise but, I feel, hopeless.
Even so, it’s a demand I understand — or shall I say it’s the category of precise demand for which my generation of political agitators, demonstrators, pamphleteers and nay-sayers hit the streets or loaded the printing presses.
We stormed Grosvenor Square, where the American embassy in London is located, in our thousands, facing mounted police to demand that the United States withdraw its armies and end its genocidal war in Vietnam.
We marched in London shouting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!” and in Mumbai shouting “Hamara naam, tumhara naam, Vietnam, Vietnam.”
We were conceited enough to think that the global movement, with most strength coming from the US young themselves, won that particular round against what we characterised as the military-industrial-profiteer-capitalist-usury complex.
Something seems to have shifted in the quality and aims of global protest since then. The discontents have become more general and more amorphous.
It is a very brave Arab population that faces the dictators and their armies and mercenaries in West Asia. There is some precision to their demand that the dictators who run their countries without holding elections — the Mubaraks, the Gaddafis and the Assads of their world and ours — abdicate or are defeated by the will of the people, put on trial or killed. Beyond such good riddance, there seems to be no unity of purpose. The default position is democratic elections with a thousand flowers blooming or a hundred parties, some consisting of one man and his cat, standing.
The question most people ask about the Arab Spring is whether it is being watered by the Islamicists who are nurturing the weeds of fundamentalism under the cover of the flowers of freedom.
In England today and in the Wall Street protest in New York, a “movement” of an anti-everything-unjust has been initiated. It calls itself an anti-capitalist movement and consists of people of all ages, with a definite loading towards youth.
It manifests itself as something of an Anna Hazare assort of camping-out protest: assemblies of plastic tents in open spaces with their occupants determined to live there through thick and thin in protest mode till... er... till... ummm... till... well, till the invading Lizards from Outer Space who have taken over the planet disguised as Murdoch, Obama, Putin, the reptilian Michael Gove and Mr Goldman Sachs (if such a creature exists?) get in their flying saucers and return to the galaxy whence they came...
OK, I admit that the last sentence characterising their demands is a parody of something that a few of the protesters who have camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London actually said to a popular journalist, using those very words about invading lizards and alien galaxies. They may have been testing his credulity but the joke, if it was that, doesn’t make the aims of their protest any clearer or any more targeted.
Very many of us are anti-capitalists, including the leadership of China (Ho Ho without Ho-chi-Minh?). The movement, however, hasn’t demanded that the governments of Europe nationalise the banks, or that all bankers above a certain rank be hanged publicly from telegraph poles — er... I... er... of course, mean mobile-phone transmission masts.
If only these movements would accept my leadership, I could draw up a perfectly feasible list of demands to cripple universal capitalism and herald the dawn of... er... (Note to Editor: Please give me a week, I’ll work out where the world should go after capitalism — FD)
Perhaps the high-minded protesters have subconsciously picked up the aimlessness of protest from Al Qaeda, with its amorphous hatreds. That mob of frustrates kill, maim and bomb without the faintest notion of what it wants — a universal Caliphate? Really? And murdering random people on Madrid trains or tall buildings achieves it?