From top: Covid protest in Trafalgar Square, London, England last month; David Langwallner
I have been asked to do something about Summertime in England since I am here and, objectively and subjectively, involved in much. A watcher at a fin de siècle reset, I have not been expressly asked for optimism but intend to offer some, although said quality will be tempered by realism and clinical cold judgment and I am a cold, judgmental human being at one level.
The Van Morrison song Summertime in England, one of his greatest songs and a perfect expression of his Celtic Protestantism, or is that mysticism, invokes King Arthur and Avalon.
The Glastonbury legend has the boy Jesus and his uncle Joseph of Arimathea building the first wattle and daub church on the site of Glastonbury Cathedral. So mystic, magical, and Christian traits, are all part of the British character and many are evident now, including some deceptive traits such as sorcery and disinformation.
Shakespeare writes in IA Midsummer Night’s Dream:
“Are you sure/That we are awake? It seems to me/That, yet we sleep, we dream…”
And, in fact, the living or the living dead of zombie capitalism are not fully awake but often sleepwalking somnambulistically into the abyss, as the legendary Austrian writer Hermann Broch accurately predicted in a similar age of corporate fascism. A state between sleeping and waking is implicit in Shakespeare’s remark.
It is highly noticeable how many of my legal cases now involve derealisation, a psychiatric condition and potential defence related to being a spectator in one’s own life and living in an altered or hyper real state of reality. Well, what is real and fake, now difficult to judge?
Stay safe with unsafe vaccines of unproven utility with variants to come and the drug companies profit at our expense. Vaccine passports to restrict movement and divide the world and to curtail leisure activities. Checks at every border. Clean or unclean. Infected or impure. The division, cartelisation and obliteration of humanity and the attitude of our power brokers under neo-liberalism. Well, summertime in England.
There is a very famous American book by an American James Agee and a photographer Walker Evans called “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” published in 1941. The phrase is, of course, religious (Jewish) in origin and in its fullest is “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the fathers that beget them”.
I am always, of course, deeply distrustful of the incantation of religious phrases and resistant to same, though I admire Agee greatly and he is curiously relevant for our time.
The book, partially state-funded, chronicles dustbowl America and Evans adds the pictorial record of the devastation wreaked by the great economic depression in the dustbowl of America. In terms of the picture of Walker Evans, it is noticeable how grim the faces are and how anguished the expressions, particularly on the faces of the children, highlighting lives lost or marginalised. Lives lost by neglect and the attrition and degradation of poverty.
Austerity, as is well documented in our present age, murders people by stealth through the gradual removal of all forms of social support. And emergency workers, lawyers or NHS workers, might share the same fate and whatever ramparts of social protection did exist have been whittled away by Covid.
As far as that economic system was concerned, these sharecroppers were surplus commodities, as are you, to many of them. Not one of them.
Les Misérables, adapted from Victor Hugo as a musical, is so intrinsic to the delicate boundaries between high and low art in the UK that it defines in many ways, or did the consensus, of the British culture. The uneasy line between kitsch, depth and lightness and meaning now somewhat lost. More to the point, Les Misérables is about protecting the little people.
The wretched of the earth have nowhere to go in lockdown with lockdowns to come. In fact, the wretched of the earth are the earth. And with variants to come in the endless and, obviously partly fabricated, shock doctrine of our universe.
But should you Stay Safe in your boltholes, or self-immolate in increments, death on the installment plan, or commit suicide as Stefan Zweig and Walter Benjamin, a bow to my Austrian heritage and a presager of the nearest comparable age, did?
Les Misérable is about but the persecution of Jean Valjean by the vengeful prosecutor. Valjean, as in the book, is chased to the ends of the earth for the theft of a loaf of bread while the brokers of power protect those who rape and despoil the universe. Prosecute the petty criminal but presidents get enriched by Goldman Sachs.
Covid, as Mr Farage says, creates opportunity. Well, where there is chaos, as chairman Mao, another presager of Chinese corporate capitalism, said, there is opportunity, and I am sure Mr Farage would understand.
The press, meanwhile, increasingly sanitised and committed to balanced coverage misunderstand balance. There is no such thing often as balance in our post-truth age with an internally censured and corporate press. The culture of dissidence and dissent gradually being marginalised and expurgated from our culture, though less so in Britain.
Thus, the educated and empowered little men and women have much less power than they think. Beautiful, hyper-educated creatures talking about relationships, knowing all the best art and cinema and powerless. Obsessed by marginal consumerist issues.
The justification of more executive powers is extremely dangerous when disproportionate measures are introduced to counteract a wildly overstated emergency, and pander to a worrying trend of compliance, or what is called ‘anticipatory obedience’. Compliance for the sake of compliance and security.
More to the point, precious liberties are now being accepted as tradeable, to use a marketisation expression, for security or survivability. And, increasingly, that is how a docile or controlled population is now accepting.
Now the UK wishes to criminalise public interest disclosures by journalists, curtail protest by subjective assertions and introduce ouster clauses to usurp the jurisdiction of the courts.
Lord Sumption has argued bravely and recently in a codicil to his new book Law in A Time of Crisis (2021) that the over-compliant UK population are surrendering hard-won freedoms and liberties on a misplaced need for security. They are being manipulated by propaganda and increasingly controlled by executive decree and the scale and rapidity with which a nominal authoritarian democracy is being fabricated, breath-taking. I agree. And Ireland even more so.
So, the Les Misérables of the universe of venal corporatism and state authoritarianism need to reclaim what Habermas calls the public sphere and realise as he argues, as did Gandhi and Martin Luther King, that disobedience against tyranny is necessary.
So, in summertime, stay positive and social. Protest, organise, dissent, regroup. Fight for your rights against inevitable environmental and economic destruction. Fight for every penny and every ounce in coronavirusland. Do not allow yourself to be manoeuvred into destitution. For influence and talent is still power and there are independent vectors, however dwindling, to fight back.
It may be futile. As Puck speaks to Oberon about the humans that have found themselves in the forest, he despairs at the human intellect. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the full line is:
“Shall we their fond pageant, see? Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
David Langwallner is a barrister specialising in public law, immigration, housing and criminal defence including miscarriages of justice. He is emeritus director of the Irish Innocence Project and was Irish Lawyer of the Year at the 2015 Irish Law Awards. Follow David on Twitter @DLangwallner
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