|
Easter reminds us of one who was contemptuous of the power hierarchy of his day, and valued the nobodies, the nonentities, who heard him gladly. You and I are inconspicuous, if you are like me. But don't we rate a public voice, once a year? This medium features the views of the known, the Somebodies, the ones who've got somewhere, the established rebels, the authorised versions of heresy. Why can't people like me dissent in print! People who qualify, not by what they've done, or written for, but by their unknownness, like the anonymous warrior who in his tomb represents more of his fellows than do any of the named and famed in Westminster Abbey? In euphoric moments the generality of us kid ourselves this is the age of the common man. But we wake up now and then to notice that it isn't the common man who causes office blocks to rise in more than height before they serve interests of comunities. We note how the advocates of healthy competition plot and pressure, wine and lobby to establish near-monopolies -- if somebody's yelp prevents a complete |
monopoly. We fill in our coupons shrewdly or pin-fully in our far hope of riches not actually worked for, but we know that the wide boys, exchanging quips about fair stocks and shares across the rims of their champagne glasses in white yachts on blue waters, have the neater answer. We're not bitter. Most of us don't brood over the inequities fostered and maintained by those who are prepared to tread diligently on enough faces to get there. Because most of us unknowns have no conviction that the view from the top or that the aroma of expensive cigars really hides the smell. There are millions on nobodies who don't want to be Somebody. Partly because the Somebodies don't give themselves a good Press, but there's a deeper reason. The unknowns have a certain kind of freedom. If everybody who is Somebody doesn't know you, you can do a lot of the things you want to do without criticism, without interference, without being hunted by reporters and shot by television crews. It may only be keeping rabbits or doing |
your own double glazing - but doing it privately, making your own mistakes in your own way, hitting your own thumb with your own hammer in your own time and nobody to weigh your comment in terms of repercussions in informed circles - this is a kind of sovereignty. I would go further. It is easy to fall into the defeatist belief that unknown people exist as material for manipulation, or at least as envious audiences out beyond the spotlights on the celebrities. From this I dissent profoundly. The people at the top clown for me and my sort. Some do it in dignified gear, Rolls and silk hat; nonetheless they are our entertainers. Don't we see them climb with earnest faces up precarious ladders, the buckets of whitewash perched above their ascending heads? One of these days some nobody will leak the truth. Startled public figures will learn with dismay that the prime secret of being relatively free in an enslaved world is to be obscure, a backroom do-it-yourselfer working at the mysterious craft of happiness. Watch the race then for nonentity! |