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5.05.05
Pond Scum: Englamerica
By Steve Finbow
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Sounds weird, doesn't it? Englamerica – say it enough and it becomes euphonious. Try it – Englamerica. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Englamerica. Englamerica. See. Now you won't be able to stop saying it. Englamerica, Englamerica, Englamerica. What is it, I hear you ask? Well, I see it as some sort of future Atlantis – an island containing the best and worst of both nations.
Art By Nicholas Allanach
IThere are two main cities in Englamerica – let's call one Nylon (New York/London) and the other Baltmanc (Baltimore/Manchester). In Nylon, bookshops are crammed with Don Delillo, Martin Amis, Lorrie Moore, and Zadie Smith; while in Baltmanc, readers have to make do with Dan Brown, Jeffrey Archer, and countless memoirs written by foetuses – ‘My mother was a bitch, she placed headphones on her navel and played Mozart to me; I was born in a powdered wig and have a penchant for flute-shaped objects.’ In Nylon, they eat organic T-bone steak and roast beef; in Baltmanc, they snack on Cheez Whiz and Pot Noodles. (There could be some great food hybrids – egg and bacon pizza – yum. Or some horrid ones – Marmite Jell-O – yuck.) In Nylon, the men look like Sam Shepard or Jude Law, the women resemble Jessica Alba or Kate Moss, all dress in Calvin Klein and Paul Smith; in Baltmanc, the men and women are the bastard offspring of Jabba the Hutt and Jackie Stallone and dress in puce-coloured shellsuits. On television in Nylon, The Simpsons, Fawlty Towers, and Have I Got News For You follow Twin Peaks; in Baltmanc, it’s Manimal, followed by The Anna Nicole Show, Crossroads, and The Goodies. In Nylon, Christopher Hitchens reads the news; in Baltmanc, Michael Jackson reads it.
But that's all a bit elitist, Steve, I hear my many detractors saying. What you're saying is, in Nylon, there's only room for the bright, the beautiful, the pure. Is there no room for the stupid, the obese, and the unclean in your new world? Yeah, there is – in Baltmanc. Not really. I’m having you on, playing devil’s advocate (that always sounds to me like eggnog with chillies in). Englamerica is not a utopia or a dystopia but rather an ectopia, a place where we exclude all that we consider abnormal in society – the underclasses comprise the congenitally displaced.
Once caring and welcoming societies, the USA and the UK have become selfish and closed, intent on promoting a meritocratic elite at the expense of divergence – we are attempting to despumate society. America’s ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores; send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me’ was written for the inhabitants of Baltmanc not Nylon – for Nylon it would read ‘Give me your beautiful, your rich, your moneyed masses yearning to make profit, the golden tans of your teeming banks: send these, the home-owners, sun-tossed to me.’ OK, it doesn’t have the same ring to it but you get the picture. The new underclass is the don’t haves, the ugly, the obese, and the Irish (just joking).
In Claudio Magris's wonderful book Danube there is a story about a 14-year-old servant girl who is tortured to death by her mistress. Magris writes...
What happened to this creature, and happens in various ways to so many other people, negates the history of the world. All the loftiest works of man, if put in the scales, do not compensate for this horror, or erase this indelible stain from creation.
The weak have to learn to frighten the strong, or else to realize – if they wish to, and if they can get rid of their own fear – that they too can be strong and pay back... blow for blow.
He then says something about ‘like the elephant in Kipling’ but, I'm sorry, I've looked at photos of the balding, begoggled, moustachioed imperialist and there ain't no way he’s swallowed a pachyderm. But I digress. The USA and UK are slowly marginalising the fat and the stupid, the alien and the disabled. We are creating an underclass whose only demerits are that they don’t look right, they don’t fit in. One side of society is intent on homogenizing the other – I give you The Swan, Extreme Makeover, Plastic Surgery Live, and even Pet Plastic Surgery – we’re gonna be seeing Labradors with bigger tits than Pammy, Rottweilers with a six-pack Keanu would die for, and Lhasa Apsos with teeth whiter than George Hamilton’s.
If we lived in Nylon, Englamerica, we would no doubt employ a servant (cleaner, chauffeur, cook, dog-walker) from Baltmanc. And, after a while, we would begin to beat them, we would; we’d torture them – we’d make their lives miserable, and then we would kill them or they would commit suicide.
The answer to this, in our society, is not endless biographies of teenage pop stars, or one-hit-wonder manufactured bands, or Waterworld; the answer, my friends, is in books such as Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, or Delillo’s Underworld, or the music of Bob Dylan, or Picasso’s Guernica. And these items should be available to all – to the downtrodden denizens of Baltmanc as well as the coutured citizens of Nylon.
We live in a Nietzschean world. I'm a big fan of Freddie's but there’s no longer equilibrium. Marxian (rather than Marxist) social equality once counterbalanced the Nietzschean will to power. We’re om-bloody-niverous – we consume anything and everything on and in our path to the ultimate solipsistic state. In modern Western society, in Englamerica, in Japermany (I like that one), the (beautiful) individual is in control. I don’t want to live in the meritopolis of Nylon, or the hypopolis of Baltmanc, I want to live in a heteropolis – a pluralized city bustling and bristling with difference.
In the 21st century, we are recreating principles very similar to 19th century Social Darwinism, a dynamics of human perfection. Unless we are very careful, the multifarious mulligatawny of the world we know will be lost in a eugenic broth. Read The Time Machine by HG Wells – check out the relationship between the Morlocks and the Eloi – who do you think is in control?
Click here to read previous Pond Scum columns.-------------------------------------
Steve Finbow writes out of London, England. He has worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Victor Bockris, and the artist Richard Long. His fiction, essays, and short plays appear, or will appear, in Eyeshot, 3am Magazine, Yankee Pot Roast, uber, Locus Novus, InkPot, Dicey Brown, The Guardian Online, and Pindeldyboz. He is currently working on a novel (Yeah, right). He can be contacted here.
© 2005 Me Three
