The grounds of friendliness

Pat Kane, New Integrity

I hadn’t watched Celebrity Big Brother as religiously as others, but I couldn’t help being completely struck by George Galloway’s final orations in the house. There he stood, in his “UK” overalls, delivering a jeremiad against the imperialist horror of the United States, while the massed ranks of his celebrity housemates looked on with a symphony of indifference and annoyance.

What was so tragic for me, as George prefaced his tub-thumping (most of which I politically agree with, it has to be said) with ‘brothers, sisters, comrades’, was the sense of the end of a certain brand of political rhetoric. His exaggeratedly precise language (“down the with be-heh-moth!”), his booming, arm-chopping delivery, was perfectly tailored for the striking crowd outside the factory games – a strong working-class voice to restore strength to the fragile and beleaguered. (I've witnessed him doing this on many political campaigns in Scotland, and others like him - Jim Sillars of the SNP was another classic exponent).

But for the watching, post-class millions, and certainly for the botoxed, hair-extended and deeply therapised celebritariat directly in front of him, this must have seemed like some cabaret act – perhaps one of Micheal Barrymore’s cheesier Saturday night routines.

Galloway's sojourn into reality tv has to be one of the greatest media miscalculations that any modern politician has ever made – precisely for the way that it unravels an older form of political “integrity”, in the face of the “new” integrity demanded by our omniscient media spectacles.

Preston, the pop star, put it best when he said (roughly) that “I looked up to him at the start, I really admired him… but I think he’s just two-faced now”. Galloway’s evident gravitas at the start of the show encouraged his housemates to entrust him with funds and responsibility – he became their ‘representative’, in a way that doubtless Galloway found very comfortable: The politician able to project an image of trustworthiness, which turns into actual power.

Yet that old political integrity works to the extent that politicians can maintain a consistent profile in their theatre of choice – the political interview in the appropriate, the council chamber or parliament floor. Big Brother represents the general shift towards a much more transparent, accountable, traceable, observable society – or, at least, a simulation of that (we’ll never know what was left on the cutting room floor by Endemol’s editors). The way the BB cameras discovered Galloway’s breaking of the rules for discussion nomination, or beamed his harsh judgement of erstwhile ‘comrades’ from the confession booth, exactly parallels our deeply communicational lives. An environment in which it’s presumed that every aspect of our lives (or as integral theory would say, every quadrant – individual, collective, internal, external) has to relate, and be seen to relate.

The cameras pitilessly showed the misfit between Galloway’s external sense of his self and agency – a stentorian but coherent leader of the oppressed and afflicted – and the internal spectacle of his chicanery, his cold interpersonal strategising, his standard-issue Machievellianism. And this is surely much more damaging to Galloway - the politician who founded a political party, called Respect, in order to restore faith in politics’ transformatory power – than any wrist-lapping cat impressions or Dracula outfits.

One line kept ringing through my head, from the Bertholt Brecht poem, To Those Born Later:

And yet we know;
Hatred, even of meanness,
Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.

A wise poem for struggling times. But in the big brother-and-sisterhood of our hyper-mediated, mutually-observed world, it seems that friendliness, and the ground for friendliness, need to be much less misaligned, in order for a truly 21st century politics to have any effect on its audience.

Enter Blair, then Cameron, then the next ‘pretty straight [sic] guy’…

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