Moranifesto

by Caitlin Moran

  Really, as a city on an island which is perpetually zenithing, Manhattan should be something discovered on the other side of the universe, on a particularly good episode of Doctor Who. It can’t be real. Nothing can be constantly having “The Moment.” It’s an emotional impossibility. And yet—Manhattan. An impossible heart.

  On this visit, however, I don’t feel any of that. This time around—still melancholy for the Black Mountains of Wales—it’s New York’s physical implausibility that hits me. I want mountains—and I am surrounded by them: built ones. Granite, steel, glass ones—raised up by man, in a century of tearing muscles and sheer, bull-like effort. As Guy Garvey sings in Elbow’s “New York Morning”—a song I listen to a thousand times while walking down the streets, slightly tearful—“Me, I see a city and I hear a million voices / Planning, drilling, welding, carrying their fingers to the nub.”

  It takes a working-class, northern band to look at a city and calculate, automatically, how long it would have taken their fathers, and their grandfathers, to build it: each hod of bricks, each slam of the sledgehammer; “Every bone of rivet steel, each corner-stone an anchor.” To coolly assess each blueprint, welding spark, and crushed limb, and still love New York. In fact, to love it even more—because you don’t see it as a glittery miracle anymore. You see it, instead, as the sweating, determined euphoria of people working so hard that it looks like a miracle, in the end. The effort behind a never-ending, rolling moment.

  When you see how much backbreaking work real magic is, you fall in love with magic even more.

  And that was when I stopped feeling so melancholic about there being no birds in my garden—when I felt my long-rumbling anxiety about the slow, dull death of the natural world dim down—even as I stood upon an electricity-gorging glass-and-steel blade, the neon impossibility of dirty, hot, fucked-up New York.

  Because: humankind is incredible. We built Manhattan, simply because we wanted it. We wanted it like we want hot fatty carbohydrates, and sex, and disco music, and silver heels, and driving fast. So we made it.

  So if we can build Manhattan from simple, joyous want—a present to ourselves, a treat—in just two hundred short years—raising the Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Broadway when our women were still in corsets, and African-Americans still using separate doors—imagine what we’ll be able to build when we really need something. When the floods start, and the graphs spike red, and we panic. When the last tiger dies, followed by the last polar bear, and the last song thrush, and we are alone—feeling the terrible melancholy, and dishonor, of being the only species left on the planet.

  Then—when the apocalypse arrives, finally, on our doorstep—we will galvanize, and raise forests, and refreeze the poles, and hatch and release a billion songbirds into the air, because, because—because if we can make New York, we can make anything.

  Syria: A Man on a Roof

  In the summer of 2015, the migrant crisis in Europe became the big, rolling, ever-escalating story—boats full of terrified people, children washed up on beaches, humanity trying to save humanity on the shores of Greece.

  The burning out of Syria, and the rise of ISIS in its blackened, abandoned socket, drove so much of this misery. The first piece I wrote about it was before the migration crisis began—back in early 2013, when the United Nations was still debating whether or not to bomb the country, to bring about peace.

  There are a great many people who have stared into the abyss of Syria and seen—miraculously—an answer. Well, one of four answers—the only four formulated, in years of debate. They are:

  Bombing, in the expectation it either (1) will or (2) won’t actually improve things—but it is symbolically vital to intervene. Or:

  Not bombing, in the expectation it either (3) will or (4) won’t improve things—but it’s symbolically vital not to intervene.

  And that’s it: four answers, all centered around the subject of military intervention and inevitable civilian death. The only four answers on the table.

  By way of contrast, I don’t believe in any of the four answers. All I have is questions, instead.

  1. Why has so much of the coverage been not about Syria but about us, instead?

  Like a bad boyfriend’s excuse—but with war? The last weeks have been dominated by the questions of who betrayed who in the Commons; whose career is now fucked by the lost vote; and who is now closest to the United States—Britain or France?

  The Syrian crisis has been depicted as a crisis in Western politics and media—where if we finally worked out what our tactic was, and the right people triumphed, then the problem in Syria would be over in a matter of months.

  But all the way through this, I have felt increasingly discombobulated by the lack of Syrian opinion. Syria has a 94 percent literacy rate and over two million refugees in neighboring countries. Where are the Syrian politicians, and opinion writers, and academics? Why was the debate not being largely shaped by what these people there thought, feared, and believed? How come I knew what Piers Morgan thought about Syria—but not Syrians themselves? It’s 2013—these people are not “other.” It’s a four-hour flight away. It’s far closer than New York—and we would know what New York thought about being bombed by the US Army.

  2. Are we sure we really know how this crisis started?

  When countries collapse, their implosion often resembles a human suffering a psychotic breakdown. At the point where the neighbors, and emergency services, get involved, they just see someone who had an argument with someone in a shop, and is now threatening to jump off the roof. All the attention is on what the person in the shop said, and how to get the person off the roof.

  But of course, psychotic breakdowns begin years before someone gets on the roof. Assad—he’s just the argument in the shop. His murderous crushing of protest is what has summoned the emergency services. But according to a brilliant, long-view piece by foreign policy consultant William R. Polk, Syria’s nervous breakdown started with a catastrophic, climate-change-driven drought from 2006 to 2011, with up to 75 percent crop failure and 85 percent livestock death. Hundreds of thousands of farmers and their families fled to the cities—where they then had to fight for dwindling resources with a preexisting 250,000 Palestinian refugees, and 100,000 from Iraq.

  In 2008, the United Nations termed Syria “the perfect storm for societal destruction,” described a country for which the fallout from drought was “beyond [their] capacity as a country to deal with,” and requested aid. The request was rejected—and here, four years later, we are.

  Syria is a crisis sprung from mass migration and climate change and the effects of neighboring countries’ wars—not just Assad’s viciousness. Assad’s a nasty, desperate man dealing with something that would overwhelm almost any government. Put into that context, the conversation about whether to bomb Damascus or not seems surreally disjointed. Syria’s root problem is in the deserted hillside farms full of cattle bones and neighbors’ wars—not in whatever chair Assad is currently sitting in.

  3. What if aid agencies were among the most powerful forces on earth?

  What if the misconception revealed by that recent, sobering poll—which indicated the British public believes the government spends over 20 percent of its budget on foreign aid, rather than the real figure: 1.1 percent—were true? And aid agencies suddenly had as much political and financial leverage as arms dealers and chemical weapons manufacturers?

  I know this seems like costly whimsy—but then, in the most awful sense, a single US soldier fighting a disorganized war in Afghanistan, and costing $1.2 million a year in upkeep, is, ultimately, quite a costly whimsy, too. I know these questions seem more and more absurd, but when you look at Syria—a country now so broken, and so far from stability and peace—is there anything other than aid that can stop the next generation being utterly screwed? What if aid agencies were powerful enough to accelerate what the refugee process already, inexorably does, and could essentially . . . evacuate the country?
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  What if, one day, there was a war, and instead of being trapped, and gassed, and bombed, everyone could . . . run away?

  What would it be like to wield a brutal, oppressive regime, and to wake up one day, and find your country . . . empty?

  The Refugees Are Saving Us All

  And of course, what I wrote did become, awfully, true—Syria did empty out. Not in an orderly way—helped by the United Nations, and aid forces—but ad hoc, ramshackle and desperate, as whole families, villages, and towns started the long walk out of a country that was falling to pieces around their ears. This column came six months after the last, as the first waves of this unhappy tide started to break.

  It’s funny how tiny we think the problem of migration is, really. There are currently fifty million people displaced by war. Fifty million—the most people in transit since the Second World War. Fifty million means an entire country—more than the population of South Africa, Australia, Venezuela, or Spain—has no actual country. Fifty million people have left behind their streets, their schools, the graves of their dead. Syrians, Somalians, Afghans, and Iraqis fleeing extremist Islamic groups; Rohingya Muslims fleeing Burma; and the perpetual, bloody churn on the borders between Mexico and the United States. Fifty million.

  And yet—the unhappiness of British holidaymakers in Kos.

  Six thousand refugees have arrived in Greece so far this year—and this has, unfortunately, clashed with the British holiday season. For the last two weeks, the press has been full of pictures of British holidaymakers on Kos, looking disgruntled that the definition of “a holiday” does not include “complete inoculation and isolation from immense geopolitical events.” One imagines similar annoyance on the faces of previous British holidaymakers on encountering earthquakes and tsunamis.

  “The holidaymakers feel uncomfortable,” the Mail explained, showing well-fed, safe people on holiday claiming the word “uncomfortable” over people who were lying, with their children, in a doorway, as their hometowns burned.

  “Fully clothed migrants walk past sunbathing tourists in bikinis,” it tutted—which at least had the novelty of someone being fully dressed in a T-shirt and shorts recast as a threat.

  As one might expect, the comments section below was not creamy with the milk of human kindness. “Only one solution: send a gunship and sink sink sink.” “Most of them are cockroaches.” “#shootthemonarrival.”

  From the Daily Mail’s point of view, it was a perfect storm. They were able to be furious with both “incompetent Greeks” for not “dealing” with the problem, and also the immigrants: both groups of which—with their catastrophic economic crises and war-torn homelands—were conspiring to spoil the vacations of people from the seventh most powerful country on earth.

  As an optimist, I was compelled to try and find the positive in this unhappy situation—and, after six solid hours of pondering, I actually found one. And it is that this story contains the greatest number of ironies ever witnessed within a simple situation. A new record has been set! Alert The Guinness Book of Records!

  We’ll start with the biggest, which is this: What is a refugee doing when they leave a country that is, in the case of Afghanistan and Syria, being overrun by ISIS—the people we currently regard as being the biggest threat to global democracy and progress? To us?

  Well, obviously, in the first instance, they are saving their own lives, and that of their families: they are acting with the understandable and universal desire to not die horribly, or live miserably.

  But that isn’t all. For they are also preventing themselves from being weaponized in the future. How many of those who cannot leave Syria, or Afghanistan, will be coerced into joining ISIS—merely to survive? And how many of their children will embrace extremist Islamic doctrine? How many millions of trapped people will end up making ISIS more powerful—fueling its armies, serving its businesses?

  The world would be a much more merciful and sane place if we saw refugees for who they are—people who refuse to stay around, and be bitten by zombies or vampires, and be turned into zombies and vampires themselves.

  Humanity should have a special place in its heart for people who run away from wars. Who remove themselves, and their children, from any situation where they must pick up a gun, or strap explosives to themselves, and maybe come to wage war against the very disgruntled holidaymakers who wish them to stay under Western-hating regimes. These refugees are inadvertently saving your arses, and your ability to go on holidays, and your ability to whine in the Daily Mail. The dignified response would be to at least nod your head, in thankfulness, on your way to eat meze.

  Then there is the presumed economic superiority of British holidaymakers in Kos—who clearly classify the refugees in the same bracket as the homeless and beggars.

  However, as the current rate for being trafficked into Kos is between £500 and £2,000 per person, this ironically trumps Ryanair’s £79.99 return from Liverpool with an almost blingy manner. Perhaps the refugees could help out the British holidaymakers with a penny, here and there.

  The last is the irony of this all happening in Greece. I’m married to a Greek man, and I know how many Greeks refer to British holidaymakers—drunken, arse-flashing, shouting “Oi! Stavros! EGG AND CHIPS POR FAVOR!” It looks a bit like the comments section of the Daily Mail.

  A refugee from a war, or a refugee from bad British weather . . . everyone can look down on someone, somewhere. Meanwhile, a whole country still roams the earth, earthless.

  We Are All Migrants

  Three weeks later, and the situation had become more appalling. It became increasingly clear that the “plan” was to do nothing—that, in fact, the absence of a plan might even be the plan—for, if enough people died crossing the Mediterranean, maybe it would discourage others. And I wondered—what will that do to us, those of us just watching this? Were we not condemning our own souls, along with theirs?

  When I consider the last few weeks, I realize I’m not concerned about the child migrants who are dead at the bottom of the Mediterranean. There is no point in being concerned about them—for they are dead. They think and feel nothing anymore—not after that last, terrible panic. After the waves came through the hatch, which was locked, and their mothers and fathers died next to them, trying to punch through the side of the boat, to escape.

  There have been thousands of them before, and there will be thousands—thousands upon thousands—more. They died, or will die. My thoughts are not with them.

  Do you know who I’m concerned about? Us. Those children—floating underwater, off the coast of Rhodes—they do not play out well for us.

  Put aside how it makes us look to the rest of the world—our columnists calling them “cockroaches”; our government withdrawing funding for the rescue ship, a cold, unspinnable decision that could only have ever had one result: people dying.

  Put aside, also, our reputation as a nation, for we still have enough friends—friends who agree with our policy; well, Australia, at least—to brush that off.

  No—I worry about us. Every individual in this country. I’m worried about us being part of a nation that goes along with this being the plan. I’m worried about our mental health. I do not underestimate anxiety, and guilt, anymore—how they can torque up inside us, as we get older. How things we thought we could ignore—things that would pass—can get lodged in your heart, burning you for twenty bad years, before the world turns sour, and you collapse.

  How much energy are we using to not think about those children? Would funding those rescue boats cost us more, as a country, than it will cost our souls and minds to think of those children in the sea? The Mediterranean—previously for holidays, and Cannes—is now to be fashioned into a siege trench, in which thousands and thousands of people will die. Is this what we do now? We protect the economy of Europe by letting the beaches of Greece and Italy fill with the corpses of families? How do we feel about that?

  I know how we’re supposed to feel: like it must happe
n. That we are a small country, in a world full of misery, and we must protect ourselves. We are supposed to feel grateful we are being protected from these waves of migrants coming at us from the north, east, and south. There is a place for everyone on this earth, and everyone must stay where they are. Or, at least, not come here. Politicians have made hard decisions to keep our country safe for us. The birds may migrate, but we must not.

  Except we do. Humans are migrant. The world is only full of towers and minarets and gardens and pathways because we spread across the world, in flocks: murmurations of humanity that came in waves. Almost all our history is simply about movement: trade routes, new lands, exchanging silk for flints; founding empires, America, mountain conquering, traveling to Disneyland or the moon.

  Perhaps it’s because I am the grandchild of migrants, married to the child of migrants, but I am hyperaware of the plasticity of a “homeland.” I am aware of how much people move, and why. I note how the ones who migrate—away from trouble, away from war, or repression—are the ones obsessed with peace, stability, educating their children, fitting in, and getting on: the kind of supercitizens who recharge cities. I obsessively catalogue all the reasons why migration is argued to “not work,” when clearly it is working, because it has, all through history. It is history. I note how migration to Britain in particular is deemed inappropriate, because we are small, and crowded—despite only 2.27 percent of Britain being built upon, and our economic system being dependent on constantly expanding consumer demand.