Now, given that the so-called ‘noughties’ saw the ironic rise of promise rings, mormon-inspired chastity vampires, generational prudity, the retreat of men behind the cheeky carry-on net curtains of the lads mag, the sexual incompetence of a celebrity culture based largely on comedy tits, The Jonas Brothers, paedo-geddon and everybody being an infantile square who’d rather watch a boxset than fuck – then we can only assume that the ‘one-ders’, with a name evoking wonder – the wide-eyed optimistic march into a glistening future of progress and respect for the awesome, humbling stature of the world we’ve been born into – will fucking suck too.
We should call them the shitty-tens, that might at least inspire us to do better out of spite.
The thing about the noughties that really sucked was the general sense that progress had been expected but that it had not been made. This was, after all, the Twenty-First century, the blackjack of centuries, the century when all the busts and unwelcome face cards of the twentieth century’s unceasing quests to double down and gamble were supposed to be paid off by a series of glorious, jetpack-fuelled tricks.
Why can’t I buy a delicious roast dinner in pill form? Why can I only plan a holiday in space if I’m willing to pay Richard Branson $200,000 for a half hour excursion? Why are people still working in supermarkets? In the sixties, people used to say that ‘millions now living may never die’ – in the noughties they just repeat some half-baked platitude about not wanting to live forever that they heard a c-list comedian say in the big brother jacuzzi because that is, literally, the full extent of their intellectual and philosophical ambition. In Britain especially, we’ve given up on the future because the future arrived and it was fucking orange.
Compounding the sense of dignity crushing futility is the fact that – when we sit down and take a long look at ourselves, our society and our place in the world – we have to acknowledge that all three are still, after all this time, still firmly underneath some onion-faced old lady who got to where she was by being born there.
The monarchy, the god damned fucking monarchy.
Of course this doesn’t feel like the future we were promised – you can’t live in a future with a queen unless that queen is wearing a silver bikini and is half wasp.
Issue 1, 2000 AD
When the first issue of 2000 AD rolled off the seventies presses and the young of the discontented winters paused to daydream of a Utopian and impossibly distant century, they might not have explicitly erased the monarchy from the picture – but it was a necessary assumption. A monarchy would be as out of place in the brave new world as burnt rock cakes or nicotine-stained net curtains. Its Abolition was a prerequisite for any kind of progress.
Perhaps because it was always so obvious that it would be gotten rid of at some point, no one ever actually got around to getting rid of it.
Instead, mind blowingly stupid arguments – “she does a good job though, dun’t she, the queen?” and “it’s good for tourism…” (as if the lack of actual torture victims and inmates had dented the profits of the Tower of London) – were allowed to waft fart-like and uncontradicted until they condensed into an intellectual shit-hive that was more than capable of resisting any advocate of change.
This has left us with a horrible paradox in received opinion: everybody knows that the hereditary principle is ridiculous but everybody also knows that there’s no need to abolish the monarchy. It is stupid and embarrassing. And it is retarding us as a nation as we languish, constrained by our chintzy head-of-state and left prostrate, quite unable to strive or let our wings take dream.
If there was a turning point in the noughties – a moment that we can point to as the decade’s fulcrum – the gravitational mass weighing on the rubber sheet of goodness pulling it all down into the y axis of shit – then it has to be the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004.
Not because I especially hated George Bush – I hated him a normal amount – and not because of any ridiculous anti-americanism that paints George Bush as a worse leader than the tyrants and terrorists: The problem with George Bush’s unequivocal, uncontested trouncing of John Kerry was the way it just left everything feeling hopeless. Scared beat clever. Swiftboating beat arguing. Religion beat, well… pretend religion. It was almost as if The West Wing wasn’t an accurate reflection of reality – a notion I refuse to entertain.
There was nothing to cling to. No hanging chads or false consciousness – just the truth: that everybody in the world was pissed off with everybody else and that nobody cared too much to hide it.
And, just to make it worse, was the horrible realisation that lots of us had gone along with Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and were now tainted with the same shit as the winners and consequently were unable even to enjoy the moral highground once everything started to fall apart.
We’d ignored the mawkish sentimentality, logical contortions and crude demagoguery. We’d plugged it, discussed it, even paid money to see it. We’d sat back and taken it while Michael Moore argued that it was awful that black people were being sent to die in a war while simultaneously arguing that more troops needed to be sent to die in a war. We’d lapped up the carefully worded innuendos about the ‘white house’ arranging for members of the Bin Laden family to be flown out of the US after 9/11, even though Richard Clarke had taken sole responsibility for the 9/20 flight before the film went on general release.
We’d watched this bit, where, without captions to tell you who we’re actually looking at and with only the most cursory, barely connected nod to ‘human rights’ at the end – we are shown an extended pop video of White house staff and Bush family members standing next to people who look foreign and scary.
Are we supposed to recognise all these carry on up the khyber-style Arabs? Which ones are the ones that gave the money? Which ones did the human rights abuses? It doesn’t make a blind bit of difference – this is just an appeal to racism that can barely even be bothered to dress itself up as anything else – and we all lay back and took it.
We nodded along with slackjawed approval as he intruded on people’s grief, presented pre-war Iraq as a happy land of swingsets and hobbits, used every tabloid trick imaginable to manipulate us… and it didn’t even fucking work.
If it had done what it was supposed to – if it had reached a large enough audience of middle ground voters to swing the election – then it would still have been a horrible, greetings card mockery of an argument but at least it wouldn’t have mattered. As it was, Bush got re-elected anyway, and the Limbaughs and Hannitys and Coulters could walk around with a new air of smugness, happy in the knowledge that, however much you lower the bar, there will always be some fat fucker willing to limbo under it.
The noughties saw us forget that our enemy’s enemies are not necessarily our friends. It’s a lesson we should try to remember.
In the UK, there has developed a kind of sickening underclass in the last decade.
Economically valueless, they work – when they work at all – in industries that have been rendered more or less obsolete by the march of progress. They are perennially drunk and have loud screechy voices drawing unwarranted attention to their tasteless outfits and rough, bitterness-chiseled faces.
Motivated only by spite, rage and an animalistic lust for undeserved monetary reward, they lazily gorge themselves on a diet of celebrity gossip, fads and irrational fear. They prefer the rule of the mob to that of law. They are criminally ignorant. They breed nasty, unvaccinated, disease ridden children. They lie around at home – producing nothing of value – and dragging the whole intellectual life of our nation into a scuzzy, ugly, acquisitive quagmire with their vile, toxic presence.
They are, of course, Columnists; and to have to read them picking on the working class because some unpaid work-experience girl showed them urbandictionary.com and gave them tenuous permission has been one of this shit decade’s true horrors.
What kind of generation listens to Lily Allen when Lady Sovereign exists? A shit one, that’s what. A bullied generation. A gang of needy, whining victims floating in a sea of their own equally valid opinions.
It’s no good. If you’re among the chattering classes, you’re supposed to feel embarrassed about your background. You’re supposed to know, deep down, that those potent, erect, bastards who intimidated you at the bus stop were right to humiliate and damage your fragile little ego – it is the only justice achievable in an imperfect world. You’re supposed to get over it, realise your limitations and acknowledge that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in St. Cuthbert’s reformed academy of Philosophy. You are not supposed to seize on a bit of playground slang and use it as a means of segmenting and distancing yourself from people you’re scared of. You’re not supposed to be comfortable.
The noughties saw the end of middle class shame, but we needed that shame. It was the only thing that stopped us being insufferable little prigs.
Here, watch Lady Sovereign’s fucking brilliant Hoodie video while punching yourself:
The Pormanteau word was defined in the 1870s by Lewis Carroll as a corollary to his nonsense masterwork ‘Jabberwocky’.
In Alice Through the Looking Glass, Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty explains that:
“…, “slithy” means “lithe and slimy”. “Lithe” is the same as “active”. You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word.”
With a near mathematical attention to detail, the celebrated author exploits the concept to spine-chilling effect, creating verse that is outwardly meaningless, yet somehow imbued with an inherent comprehensibility that seems to transcend the higher authorities of codified language and appeal directly to the pre-lexical language instinct. By blending words together, Carroll neuters their profligate cultural associations and instead returns them to pure onomatopoeia. You need no broader education to find the meaning in Jabberwocky – a truth evidenced by the myriad translations of the poem, all of which find suitable – and meaningful – equivalents to the apparent nonsense words employed. It is this that marks Jabberwocky among the canon of great literary achievements, and guarantees the Portmanteau word a place in any respectable linguistic survey.
In 1964 the portmanteau scaled new heights of geo-political relevance when the people of African country, Tanganyika and Zanzibar decided that the blended name ‘Tanzania’ would be a fitting name for their new republic; George Orwell drew attention to the authoritarian mania for portmanteaux in 1984 making them the foundations of his ‘newspeak’ with its ‘miniluv’ and ’sexcrime’ – a tendency that persisted long into the twentieth century under communism with blended word like ‘Stasi’ (from Staats Sicherheit or ’state security’) and ‘Comintern’ becoming a common feature of cold war discourse; They were a key linguistic element in Finnegan’s Wake; and, in all manner of areas, portmanteaux like ’spork’ and ‘genome’ and ‘internet’ did great work filling in the gaps of our language through which new concepts and inventions might otherwise have fallen.
All of which makes it even more annoying than it already is when you hear some vacuous, pampered, self-stupefying noughties bollock using something as braindead and servile as ‘Bennifer’ or ‘Brange-fucking-lina’.
You were the generation who inherited paradise and spent the whole time peering about to see who had the best cloud. Dicks.
