Just One Fine Day

Okay, so the passage below is a fairly famous quote by Banksy. Reading it should create all kinds of feelings of impotent rage. Rage at the system, rage at the treatment of humanity by evil corporations and rage at the cowering government letting them get away with it. Well  thats what I went through my mind anyway. Go on, read it. Feel some righteous indignation.

“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”

Felt good didn’t it, felt like you were right. Yeah! Fuck the corporations! YEAH!
Sadly as important things seldom are;  it’s not that simple. Here is an article written by a very funny man, although he is not being very funny this time. He is being down right miserable, and its kind of depressing.

Let’s admit it. Hypocrisy oils the wheels

The gist of it is that we are all bastards who really need to just kill ourselves. Although it is a little more nuanced than that I have to say. Normally David Mitchell is laughed at by a nation for pretending to be a twat on prime time television. He has done the uncomfortable thing of pointing out that most people are just pretending not to be a twat in real life, and instead of laughing at them he has just sort of shaken his head in a disappointed fatherly way making us feel guilty and a little bit dirty.

“Oil, trade, employment and money are important to us – and, by us, I mean we the people, not just they the politicians or business interests. What are the issues over which we citizens of a great liberal democracy have become really, seriously, exercised in the last decade? The environment? Zimbabwe? North Korea? No, the price of petrol, the recession, the money in our pockets, our jobs. That’s what we care about and the politicians know it. When there’s a controversial war, some nice, middle-class people go on an organised weekend stroll. When petrol is too expensive, lorry drivers blockade the major roads and the country grinds to a halt. Our leaders would have to be fools to take the former more seriously than the latter.”

I would love to call him a middle class twerp who doesn’t understand the real world. But  maybe I should look at myself a little more carefully before being suspiciously defensive. The case seems to be made that people want the car, the nice house and the flat screen television. Blaming it on the governments and corporations is just a way we can feel a little better about it.