Gonna Have a Revolution

Maybe it’s my age, but I’m not really feeling it when it comes to the radicalism vibe these days. But perhaps that’s to be expected. You supposedly get more conservative as you get older anyway. 

Plus, revolution is far less attractive when you’ve got a mortgage and your kids’ university education to pay for. Interest rates don’t react well to the overthrow of the state. I’ve got no skin in the game here, no reason to don a petard. 

But maybe there’s more to it than that. Looking at today’s student radicals with their green politics and Antifa marches, I can’t help but feel I’ve missed out on all the fun. It makes me think of a line from a Philip Larkin poem: “everyone young going down the long slide to happiness, endlessly.” My English teacher used to quote that when he was my age. Thirty years later, I know exactly what he meant by it. 

For all the tribulations they face, at least today’s young live in a time when history is genuinely happening. To paraphrase Marx: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of the case in favour of paying retrospective slavery reparations to Black people.” Doesn’t have the same ring to it, but there’s no doubt we’re living in epochal times now. 

For my generation, though, the world was never so high octane. All in all, my student days—the period after 9/11 and before the 2008 Financial Crash—were marked by a feeling that it was more exciting to put your toes in a food blender during an episode of Murder She Wrote than do anything halfway political. 

Back then there wasn’t much that threatened to flare-up in an acne attack of countercultural rage. There was the Iraq War I suppose, but as radical movements went it never really took off. It was more like a forgettable shag than a torrid affair; more Chris De Burgh than Birkin and Gainsbourg. 

For my part, I decided to head off to the Far East in search of enlightenment, a place where something was actually happening; an Historical moment with a capital H; an epoch-forming era I could witness first-hand, because nothing of note seemed to be happening anywhere else. I prayed for something, anything, to kill the tedium—a cause, a shaman, a political hate figure. A shooting range to fire all my youthful rage at. 

Where were our generation’s burning effigies of Thatcher and Nixon? We had Bush and Blair but they weren’t the same. Neither of them were people you could genuinely hate, not with any great passion anyway.  

Bush, you suspected, was the kind of random guy you’d meet in the pub who gets talking to everyone and somehow manages to avoid annoying them. Inexplicably seduced by his banter during a boozy session, you’d laugh at his wisecracks enough not to feel self-disgust afterwards—even if you didn’t much care for his views on UN resolutions. If you invited him over for a barbecue, he’d have everyone doing tequila shots and dancing the conga before midnight. 

But for us Millennials, he was the absolute worst of the bunch. He was our Hitler. Our Pontius Pilate. Our Darth Vader. It seems laughable now when you contrast him with the sushi train of political hate figures today’s young have to pick from.  

There’s no limit to the stuff they can get angry about these days. It was the same for my parents’ generation in the 60s and 70s. Not so for us millennials. Where was our rolling stock of existential crises? Our Climate Emergency? Our Cuban Missile Crisis? Our Vietnam? 

Why didn’t we get to tie flowers in our hair and sing Give Peace a Chance? Why couldn’t we have bought the world a Coke? Why didn’t it occur to us to superglue ourselves to the chassis of a Toyota Camry? Why oh why didn’t we hurl biodegradable orange powder over the world snooker quarter-finals? 

Like the Boomers, Gen Z have no reason to complain about the lack of things to complain about. The list goes on ad infinitum. Ah, how I would have killed for an iota of their misery twenty years ago. How I pined for revolution. How I longed to put on a petard.

But looking around me now, sensing that we may be on the precipice of a dangerous historical tumult, I feel like one of the characters in that W.W. Jacobs horror story. The one about the monkey’s paw. Given to them by an old friend, he warns them of the object’s dark power. Three wishes it grants you, he says. All of them coming at a terrifying and ultimately tragic cost. 

Well, yes. I think the moral of the tale is pretty clear.