The indiscreet charmlessness of the bourgeoisie. Bauer. Gscene magazine.

The indiscreet charmlessness of the bourgeoisie          Gscene Magazine. 2015.

Don’t you just love it when the papers warn us about the spreading denizens of skid row and the shunting of the mobile masses making way for the new homeowners. Land where the homeless slept one week, as if by magic, becomes worth millions overnight. Ah, the alchemy of the wasteland.

What’s actually happening is that ‘skid rows’ across the world are growing. But somehow not morphing into the surrounding areas - they use exactly the same footprint but grow at an ever-expanding rate. And as these communities become even more of an ‘eyesore’ more middleclass homeowners encroach on the areas like vultures (I so wish we would have bought here ten years ago…) and so the homeless are relocated yet again. Of course the problem with this expansion is that the space just turns it into a ghetto, with people on top of more people, eventually disbanded by law. (Actually, so we don’t see that eyesore from our new dining room window - call the council!)

Of course these same people wouldn’t have touched Hackney or Streatham ten+ years ago. Hackney et al was filled with the low-lifes they so desperately needed to avoid. Hackney represented the bottom rung of society in the same way Rachman once did to the residents of Notting Hill - two black and mixed-race areas considered slums in the 1950’s. So, where did those first generation diaspora communities go?

‘Oh - elsewhere…’ comes the clarion call from the nouveau bourgeois.

It was the same in Harlem when all those white people bought up the brownstone cold-water, walk-ups in the 90’s, then waited up to ten years before the areas became gentrified by oiling palms at City Hall. They were actually waiting for their investments ‘change of use’ contracts - from crack-house to banker-palace - before they would consider moving in. Most bought off-plan, that is before they’d even seen the property. It happens all the time,  however not on houses built over a hundred years ago.

“Go to Harlem? Just give me the floor plan and I’ll see you in ten years!”

In the UK, the embourgeoisment of the land-grab is now reaching saturation. It seem that there will be no financial crash leading to more homes for the poor. There will just be now a sprawling mass of middleclassness which will look to the average eye to be ‘progression’. Meanwhile, we won't consider where all the homeless people have gone. We passively watch on as all that 20^th century social reform turns to béchamel before our very eyes.

This is unless they too are bought out by Saatchi. Like Hirst with his diamonds and Tracey with her particular brand of McFeminism 

This sinking back into bourgeois entitlement or ‘The Bourgeois Zeitgeist’ as the poet Gerry Potter aptly calls it, will not follow through. He’s right when he says these ersatz values permeate every single crevice of our very existence. And then to think, the media have got it all wrong, the homeless and the born poor don’t even want this so-called mobility, they just want the money. Their money ‘Step aside Cameron, I think that’s my house you’re spending…’

Unfortunately, like the suffragette movement and the anti-slavery drive that preceded it, the change will only come from the compassion of bourgeois consciousness. And usually from a solitary soul, be it Wilberforce or Pankhurst.

This bourgeois barmcake was firmly in place at the end of the 19^th Century, before the middle class was even invented and was reinforced by the growth of capitalism. It has become again the Zeitgeist - the spirit of the age - to hoard both capital and property, but this time its different. Back then, the specter of modernist thought, radical socialism and global social reform were bubbling under. Now sadly, they’re not.

Social reform translated into the hubris for middle class people to own their own homes and spread out to the suburbs. Then, along came that damn working class aspirationalism - aspiring to some outdated middle class model which of course only bankrupted them.  Hells legs - the nastiest trick in the book is to sell you something you already own. Just like Thatcher did during her rein of terror.  

Culturally, we are in a cesspit of mainstream blandness where it’s going to take a coagulation of millions to make up a single unit of vital force. (cf Quentin) At least, that is, in the mainstream. What may happen, something that won't be seduced by The Bourgeois Zeitgeist, will be the movement of artists, writers and poets; as there was Van Gogh, Genet and Lorca - those who refuse to be bought off simply because they are the ones who put their heads on the line. This is unless they too are bought out by Saatchi. Like Hirst with his diamonds and Tracey with her particular brand of McFeminism. 

 

In the late 19^th century, the writer Emile Zola mentioned in passing that he’d had it up to the back teeth with all the shite on the Parisian stage – nonsense that only luxuriated in the profits of industrial progress. He announced publicly that he wouldn’t get through another summer with the constant round of cheap pap of Boulevard Theatre thinly disguised as culture.

However, toward the end of that summer, Henrik Ibsen premiered his new play Ghosts and things changed. Ghosts is the fine story of a bourgeois family with inherited venereal diseases. In this case the bourgeois audience left their own lavish dining rooms in opulent Oslo and witnessed a staged version of their own lives but vile, rancid and decaying under the strains of its own heredity. This symbolism summed up the culture and the zeitgeist perfectly and became the rock that eventually cracked the mirror. And after this play, this piece of art, things were never to be the same.

Hurrah! Die Mortel ist alle! Gscene Magazine. March 2014

Hurrah, these bricks sure are tasty! 

Stepping away from all things Kardashian, it’s becoming more and more transparent watching how the government is financially shafting us all. Whether you have any money or not, they are increasingly finding ways for you to spend and be taxed on it. In return we’re sold a vision of bricks and mortar as food. 

Hurrah! Die mörtel ist alle!  

Hang on - I think I broke my tooth on a door handle.

Are you are a homiliionare? Yes? Well then, that’s the rest of your financial life sorted out, Phew! Well, I’m happily not a homillionare or a homomillionare. The 20 year old equivalent of myself today only has a real future of homelessness and not so much as a Walk-in centre to their name. (Of course by then Theresa May will have implemented her far-reaching surveillance to stop those awful terrorists. A handy offshoot being that it will be a great tax pull as you are questioned by the Inland Revenue for using your debit card).

Between now and your old age – i.e. the time you can cash your house in - there will already be a whole host of stealth financial legislation to ease a continuing financially crippled system (hang on it can’t be financially crippled - I own my own 'studio' flat in Wigan. And it’s already worth £750.000 !!!). I’m sorry, you won’t be able to eat your house after all. That’s all part of the lie we’re caught up in.

What will the government do when they’ve exhausted Capital Gains Tax (or taxing the tax you’ve already been taxed on), Bedroom tax (Duh), Window tax (Duh), Poll Tax (you can’t vote if you’re poor) Stamp duty (what stamps? Green Shield?) VAT (Erm.. value?). And the beat goes on.

The transparency of the financial system for the poor (and by poor I mean anyone who owns a home worth more that 2 grand) means that you will be hounded as time goes on when the government has to find more and more ways to generate capital. The only place they can get more capital from is – you. Your capital. Not by raising taxes, but by introducing more. And you’ll accept it and move on because, well,  you have no choice really, do you?

To live in any country is to be subservient to its elected government - we all know that because we elected them. But the question of social support or, lord forbid - reform, is now moot. It’s gone into reversal with the advent of the surveillance laws. Laws which themselves are used to generate income, thus rendering all homeowners as the new poor. As we know every Englishman’s home is his castle. Hence all those horse brasses and faux stone chimneystacks. I’m sure English women may have a subtler approach, but as the trappings of what once were working class cultural tastes subside into an acquired version of yesterdays nouveau riche (get your arse off there – that countertop’s genuine granite) so the myth betrays us. Let’s face it, if someone said when I was a child that one day I would be living in a one million pound bedsit I’d never have believed them. (Yeah, and I’ll be James Bond one day too) But that was in 1970 when today's one million pound home was only four and six and a loaf of bread a tanner. Financial deception abounds. I can almost hear the economist Keynes turning in his gay grave.

Hurrah! Die Mortel ist alle! (Hurray, the cement has gone) is of course a shout back to the anti-Third Reich propagandist, John Heartfield. Although Nazi Germany appeared affluent when Goering stated in 1935 that iron ore was making the Reich strong, Heartfield parodied him because, well, at the end of the day people couldn’t eat iron ore. (But come on - they had money in their pockets and new autobahns – so things were definitely on the up!) The good old Nazis were excellent propagandists. They conned an entire nation into believing that they had never had it so good (a sentiment later picked up by tory PM Harold Macmillan). After a disastrous recession in Germany people wanted to believe anything, especially when they had real results (did I already mention motorways?) Well, the Reich also said that every family would have a Volkswagen Beetle to drive on the new motorways and that didn’t happen. But at least they didn’t sell everyone a Volkswagen on higher purchase. 

Now, replace the image of Goering with that of The Right Honorable George Osborne MP and think again about house prices

Now, replace the image of Goering with that of The Right Honorable George Osborne MP and think again about house prices. Remember, an empire only feels good when you are told so by the leaders and their cohorts. And you now own your own house. And another one in Spain! All on a mortgage. Hurrah!

The problem for Keynes was finding a ‘working class’ who would accept regulated wages. This was not to be the case - hence the continual increase in taxes since the 1930’s. Keynes never factored in Thatcher’s vision of the ‘free economy’ as much as he could visulise the emptying of the fire-grates of Treblinka seven years later. But the ideas about workers pay that Keynes proposed was put into place by western societies - something which was extorted by every government since. It was also based on an early 20^th century model of industrial production which has now ended. Now, the only form of empowerment for the 'poor' is to give them their own houses. Well not give exactly - mortgage to them by a corrupt financial system. Hurrah! This makes the banker rich. 
And when the banks fail, who bails them out? 

Hurrah! We the people!