I've been spending a bit of time in the car recently, as I took some time off of work the other morning to drive to somewhere that I had thought was close but, in typical Helen fuck-up style wound up being hell and gone from our house. I won an ebay toy I'd been trying to get my hands on for a while (they cost £250. I paid £60, all because the person who listed the item spelled something wrong and it didn't make it into main searches. I love life.) I had specified I wanted the slide within 50 miles of my postcode. I think that ebay estimated it was about 50 miles away if, you know, I was dropping acid after failing a rudimentary map reading quiz, where I put Moldova in Australia or some such shit.

So off I went, on smaller roads as the Motorway was clogged, and although I drove through luscious countryside I got stuck behind every over-60 man driving a 20 year old car in a speed so slow it didn't even require putting the car into a gear. I had a lot of thinking time. I had a lot of listening time, too.

I had BBC 2 on the radio, listening to Jeremy Vine. Now, I generally think Jeremy Vine is a shit stirrer and someone who overreacts just to get higher ratings. That, and his voice makes me want to set gerbils loose in my ears to chew out my eardrums just so I can stop hearing his Sloane-y accent.

The topic of the day was the G20 summit which, unless you've been in a news void, you've heard about.

Jeremy Vine takes calls from listeners, and pretty much without exception they were anti-American. Americans, the scourge of society, whose banks caused this problem. America, which is estimated to be able to bounce back better from the global mess than the UK is expected to. America, whose banks with their sub-prime mortgages meant that the U.S. of A is the axis of evil, never mind the fact that banks over here were doing sub-prime mortgages too.

And of course the inevitable came in - Americans are fat. Lazy. Stupid. One caller even said that all that will be left of Americans are their perfect orthodontics as the rest of them melt away in their puddles of fat.

So that's how the global economy tanked then, is it? Because Americans are fat? Well thank fuck someone got to the bottom of the issue and came up with an answer. Give that man a Nobel Prize!

I ignore the ones who having nothing to say about anything apart from how pointless Americans are. Having lived outside the US for 10 years now, it's not the first anti-American rant I've heard and it won't be the last. As a military kid in US Air Force schools we were made to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning and heard how everyone in the whole world, ever, wanted to be an American. Once you leave US shores, though, it's a very different matter. People don't think that way. As I've said, I've only ever once come across someone who wanted to be an American, a Turkish man I used to work with.

I have my own doubts about the G20 Summit. I don't see how 20 leaders can leave a meeting with anything other than a flimsy document saying how one needs to do this, countries commit to do that, this doctrine hopes that such and such can be accomplished. I am hopeful, but pessimistic.

Even the way things are being covered is doing my fucking head in. Log in to American websites and all you see are photos of bleeding protestors and violent clashes. It's a riot! the pages nearly scream. Blood is running through the streets! It's the end of the world! Images of Outrage From the UK!

And then some of the Americans comment on the news repots. The leaders only want to incorporate socialism! Socialism benefits only the lazy! Socialism is evil and pink and wrong and I'll be supporting scammers and you'll take our money away! Really? Because the UK is largely socialist. Yes, I pay a lot of tax, but I don't feel like I'm floating someone else's boat on my dime.

Yet the BBC reports that most of the protestors are good-natured. And of course they should be. Why is it ok to protest by breaking into offices and throwing monitors into bank windows just because you're fucked off? I'm angry at the Swunt, you don't see me behaving like an animal. They've made football hooliganism illegal over here, but hey protetst hooliganism seems to be ok. Maybe I've gotten old, but if you're going to act like an idiot I'm going to think you and your cause are idiotic, too. Go about things calmly and peacefully and I'll listen.

I hope something comes out of this. Industries all around us are tanking. A drive to the hardware store shows 5 shops whose doors have closed. All of the companies seem to be laying off. Food prices have gone up, housing prices have fallen through the floor. A new tax on petrol and diesel got introduced yesterday, and the children's meager bonds that I pay into monthly for them to have when they're 18 are worth less than what I've paid into them. Our pensions have "Tender Vittles" written all over them and we don't even want to know what our house is not worth now. We can't really travel anywhere because the pound has tanked against most other currencies.

So yeah. I'm hopeful. I'd like these leaders to come out of the conference with concrete ideas, something immediately translatable to reality. Do I have any ideas? Would I be working in my day job if I did?

And I'd like the media to stop it's sensationalism, although I guess that'll happen when the monkeys fly.

-H.

PS - is anyone doing the book club? I'm giving up on The Brothers Karamazov. I can't be doing with the statement "I'll tell you more about that later" at least twice per page. I am, however, picking up The Secret Scripture tonight (even though I have Christopher Moore's new one Fool calling my name). So if you're still in, I'm heading for The Secret Scripture tonight.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 09:15 AM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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