But none of that really matters—not now. The thing that matters is this: people will not stop migrating out of fucked-up countries. There are currently more humans in transit—fleeing wars and repression in Syria, Eritrea, Libya, and Iraq—than at any point since the Second World War. Fifty million, according to the International Organization for Migration.
And if even a quarter of the predictions about climate change are true, they will be joined, within a generation, by millions more fleeing drought, flood, or countries that have been inundated by the sea. Most of this migration will be from the south to the north. The boats will not stop coming, because there is nowhere else for these people, with their children, to go.
And so my question is this: Won’t we, as a country, go mad if our sole and only plan, for the next fifty—the next hundred—years is to sit here and keep watching children drown? Isn’t that—just a little—like turning the unstoppability of migration into murder?
Swarms
And then, finally, the crisis seemed to peak in one awful moment: David Cameron, the prime minister of Britain, referring to the migrants as “a swarm.” And this made me wonder, what is it, in the language we use to describe others, that gives away so much about ourselves?
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams sketches, with loving detail, one of the minor characters, Mr. Prosser, a council worker charged with knocking down Arthur Dent’s house.
Although Mr. Prosser is a classic jobsworth—“fat, forty and shabby”—with a clipboard, the unusual thing about him is his ancestry. He is a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, king of the Mongols.
As a consequence, whenever stressed, Mr. Prosser—an otherwise unremarkable man—is apt to have visions of people’s houses being consumed by fire, and his enemies “running screaming from the blazing ruins, with at least three hefty spears in [their] back.” Mr. Prosser, Adams tells us, “was often bothered by visions like these, and they made him feel very nervous.”
I’ve been thinking about Mr. Prosser a lot, recently, as the migrant crisis rolls on, and we see the language that’s being used around it. Over the years, one of the most useful rules of thumb I’ve found is that, when people talk about other people, they reveal an enormous amount about themselves.
This is particularly pertinent when talking about people we dislike, or fear—when we discuss their presumed motives. When the language gets heated, we talk a little quicker, and the words tend to come not from our minds—measured things, latterly learned; the correct things; the formal things—but from our bones, instead. From centuries down.
And, so, to migrants. The language used around the crises at Calais, and in the Mediterranean, has been telling: “Swarms.” “Floods.” “Invasions.” “Economic migrants.” “Endangering our national identity.”
The people using these terms are, fairly consistently, white British—that is to say, of Anglo-Saxon or Norman descent. Perhaps it’s because I am of Celtic descent, but the language they use to describe migrants aren’t terms I would ever use. Partly because my grandparents were migrants here—from County Mayo to Liverpool, at the turn of the century—so, you know, I’m migrant-friendly, along with—as a general rule of thumb—all my other migrant-descending friends, i.e., Jews, Greeks, Sikhs, and, in one case, a proud possibly-too-embedded-in-Ancestry.com Huguenot.
But it’s also partly because, as a Celt—and I don’t want to make all you Anglo-Saxons and Normans feel bad here—we were here first. The Celts were the ones who lived in England before the swarms of Anglo-Saxons and Normans came over—some invading, some as economic migrants—and disrupted our way of life, flooding our towns and endangering our national identity, to the point where we only lived on in areas so wet and remote (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall) the Anglo-Saxons and Normans couldn’t be bothered to deal with the travel, and the mildew, and left us alone to be pale and ginger.
Yes, this all happened centuries ago. But I do wonder if, like Mr. Prosser, these things are embedded somewhere, deep in the psyches of Anglo-Saxon and Norman Britons.
When I drive through tiny, classic British villages in Suffolk and Surrey—householders tending their rose bushes before strolling off to the pub, for a pint—I wonder if, underneath all of this, there is a deeply buried tribal memory of their ancestors coming to claim Surrey and Suffolk. The battles, and invasions—the conquering, and the taking of a whole country.
It would be weird if there weren’t. We are, after all, taught our history. We all have a sense, somewhere inside us, of how we got to where we are today. And here it comes out in our language, when we see others, across the sea, staring at our country—although these people, ironically, do not wish to invade, or subsume, us. They want to be part of our culture. They want to open a corner shop, or be heart surgeons. They are coming here not to kill us but so they themselves don’t die.
And yet, in our language, we ascribe to them the behaviors of our forefathers. Well, yours. Mine were busy heading west, in order to get rained on, then be oppressed.
“Swarms.” That was the biggest one, for me. Our prime minister, David Cameron, referring to the migrants as “swarms.” Of course, it’s just one word, and he might later have regretted it. But to see someone from a background of immense privilege, talking about these terrified, traumatized families as “swarming” seemed like both a brutal, and inadvertently revealing, word.
For I could talk about white public schoolboys “swarming”—cherry-picking jobs in the media, the City, Parliament, and business, at the expenses of women and the working classes. The figures are there, every week: 48 percent of Tory MPs privately educated, against 7 percent of the population; Britain coming fifty-sixth in the world rankings for its proportion of female MPs—just below Kyrgyzstan. Etc., etc. You know the figures by now.
But I would not use the word “swarm” because then I would be revealing something—that I am a chippy, Celtic, working-class woman—about myself.
That’s the thing about talking about other people. You end up talking, really, about your darkest self. You are the migrant. You are the swarm.
We Need a New News
When you are watching something like the migration crisis unfolding on the news—when turning on the TV at six p.m., or seven p.m., or ten p.m., becomes a nightly event that leaves you crushed, dispirited, blank, and despairing—you are apt to think, after a while: Maybe the news—the actual program—needs to change. Maybe we need a new news. Maybe that is part of the problem.
I love Yoko Ono. I remember reading an interview with her—possibly in Smash Hits—where she did that thing of pointing out something, with a very tiny question, that demands a big answer.
Why, she mused, is the news like it is? Twenty-five minutes of news—awful, visceral news of war, and fear—rounded off with five minutes of sport.
Why sport? Why does our most “important” television program of the day include updates on, quite randomly, sport? What makes sport worthy of being included in the daily news about our world—when, say, art, or fashion, isn’t?
Yes, sport is a massive business—£20 billion in the UK—with millions of passionate fans. But that is exactly the same description you could use for art (an industry worth, without being on the news every day, £71 billion) and fashion (likewise, £26 billion).
Could it be, Ono suggested, that it’s because fashion and pop are seen as for girls—and sport is for men?
In the twenty years since I’ve read it, I haven’t decided if it is sexism—but it’s a thought I keep coming back to. How do we decide what “The News” is—and, subsequently, how does that decision affect us? In that half hour, what are we telling ourselves about ourselves?
Would we be a different culture if, instead of rounding off our bulletins of death and war with sport, we had arts news, instead? After all, sport is an odd echo to the preceding news: another male-dominated world of physical power, centered only on winners and losers.
Imagine if we ended
news bulletins by entering the intellectual and emotional world, instead: a dazzling paragraph on love from Donna Tartt’s latest book, a new poem on grief, the huge new pop single that makes people dance when they hear it. No winners, no losers. Just a joyous celebration of revelation, insights, skill, genius. Would that change us? If we changed the news to a new news? Why did we ever choose sport, anyway?
It needn’t be art, of course: tech news would be just as different—what’s been invented, what’s spectacularly failing, what’s coming over the horizon. Or we could have ecology news: the latest panda born, the bleaching corals, the comeback of the bees. Really, those five minutes could be anything we wanted. With no winners or losers at all.
And, of course, once you question the last five minutes of the news, you start to question the first twenty-five minutes, too.
I had always thought, until recently, that those twenty-five minutes show you everything that’s going on in the world.
And they don’t, of course. They’re just showing you everything that’s going on in the world that has reached a crisis point.
And that’s a different thing—being shown what has basically gone beyond the ability of any agency to resolve it. Wars, famines, terrorism. Continents of melting ice, archipelagos of plastic. The collapse of markets, of economies, of industries. The collapse of—in so many awful valleys, or on mountaintops, or in burning cities—humanity itself.
Of course, the news can’t help being the news—it can’t help showing you every black, smoking hole that has become some unstoppable hell on earth. It can’t stop showing you the end of hope. But, in turn, it is becoming, I think, the end of hope itself. Because the news is, essentially, screwing us up. Crushing us.
The remorseless delivery of each new crisis by twenty-four-hour news channels, and social media, leaves us exhausted, and bleak—battered and out of love with our own species. We have no perspective on how lucky we are—how things are improving, how things might be prevented.
Twenty-first-century technology allows us to sit in this panopticon, and the pounding bleakness of what we see has made us fall back into an almost medieval analysis of what is going on. We are as resigned to our inevitable climate crisis as we were to God’s inevitable apocalypse; our world leaders use the word “evil” to describe their enemies—as if evil were something that roamed the world in a miasma, rather than grew out of a dully predictable and age-old recipe: famines, corrupt leaders, prejudice, poverty, instability, disputed borders, fear.
That’s why I want a sister program to the news—that might be thought of, if not called, “The Perspective.” Every study states we are living in the period of greatest stability, illumination, tolerance, longevity, and progress mankind has ever seen. So let some kind of news show that.
We need a new kind of news program to show us the news five years before it becomes “The News”: when it’s still a manageable, budding problem that can be solved with technology, aid, diplomacy. Where someone watching the news could, feasibly, be the very person to solve it. When there is still some kind of hope that love, insight, skill, or genius could provide—rather than just another dispiriting, numbing reporting of the winners and losers.
First on the battlefields, and then, mysteriously, in all that sport.
Je Suis Charlie
Because, of course, how we report on ourselves—what we deem “news”; the stories we tell ourselves; what we, in essence, publicize about our species—has knock-on effects.
This was never more apparent than in the spring of 2015, when gunmen burst into the offices of the satirical Parisian magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed twelve cartoonists, journalists, and other employees.
And so terrorism reaches the media, with the murder of twelve journalists, cartoonists, and satirists in Paris. A precise and deliberate move—to silence those commentators’ voices, and opinions, forever.
Speaking coldly and unemotionally as a journalist, it’s a fantastic, dark PR job. Headlines around the world, instant heat, endless traction. For one hour’s work. For one big stunt.
It seems, looking back now, inevitable that there would be a terrorist attack on a media organization—because terror has always, in the end, been about PR. Look—you can’t kill everyone who disagrees with you. Islamic fundamentalists know this—for all their Twitter savvy and caches of weapons, they’re still a tiny minority, opportunistically picking off the easiest of targets: Journalists at their desks. Aid workers. A school. They know they can’t personally slaughter everyone in the Western world who disagrees with them. Extremists don’t have the numbers. They can’t end Western democracy—it’s already won. It’s huge. It might be ragged, and often wrong, and still in the very early days of working out how to be halfway fairer and more inclusive—but it’s just going to carry on: a multiplicity of voices and ideas, all vying for space: Different. Together. All just . . . talking, and creating.
For the Western ideals the extremists fight against aren’t just embodied in a couple of politicians, or a couple of pieces of legislation, or twelve cartoonists in Paris—they’re in millions of books, movies, stories, songs; the clothes you have in your wardrobe; the food you eat; the parks you walk through; the libraries you use; gay marriage; women’s careers; the free-ranging, illuminating conversations people all over the world have on Facebook, and Twitter. However awful, and terrifying, the shootings in Paris are, there are no guns that can stop all of this, now. A billion lives will roll on. Like the catastrophic, foolhardy, damaging “War on Terror” it inspired, extremist Islamic terrorism is also a war that can’t be won. Two unwinnable wars, at war with each other, while the real war goes on, regardless.
Because the real war is PR. That’s why it’s awful and inevitable the terrorists finally struck against the media—against an organization, Charlie Hebdo, that deals in perception. For the awful truth is this: there will always be a certain number of young men—and it is almost always, sadly, young men—who are miserable, and damaged, who want to kill people. And those young men will look for a reason for their unhappiness, a target for their anger, and an action they believe will bring “justice.”
Young white boys in America take guns into school and kill their peers—one shooting every five weeks, on average; 486 killed since 2000. The story they tell—in interviews and suicide notes—is that they feel rejected by society, sneered at, belittled, and that violence is their only recourse. But we do not weave them into a story of young white American men at war with their generations, or schools, or their society.
Young Islamic men—no less miserable and damaged—have a different narrative they latch on to—that they are avenging their Prophet—but their ultimate recourse is just the same. But because of Islamic extremism’s dark, effective PR job, they are “inspired by,” and we place their acts within, the narrative of a grand, global problem—that things, and people, are getting worse; that we never had these problems before; that this is an oncoming storm.
And this is feeding into our very worst instincts, as a planet. The rise in right-wing xenophobia, fear, and racism across Europe is rooted in a belief that things were somehow better, and calmer, and more peaceful at one point—when cultures didn’t mix. That everything was fine until we started traveling, mixing, blending. That before multiculturalism, Europe was peaceful.
But it never was, of course. Even a hundred years ago, Europe was far more repressive, bloody, bigoted, and fearful than it is now. Homosexuality illegal, women denied power, paupers in workhouses, Catholic repression, fascism rising. For this will never end, you know. This battle for freedom. The mistake of the right is to believe in a prelapsarian Europe—but there is no point where civilization is complete. Ever. The past was never perfect, and we never reach the future. It is always ahead of us, being built. The story of mankind is that every achievement we have ever made was built while running. We never rest. We do not pause. We are always in motion. We are countering as much “terror” now as we ever have. There have always
been unhappy people who want to destroy, and kill. There always will be.
And this is why we must not let an inhuman PR act dictate our course of action. We don’t dignify it and magnify it by calling it a “war.” We don’t give in to fear, or hatred, or become more insular—because that is the ultimate aim of the terrorists’ PR job. Division. We must never let it become as solid and powerful as that. We just counter it with bigger, better, more glorious ideas. That’s how you win a PR war. You make a better alternative.
Paths
News used to travel more slowly—physically, visibly. This was something I realized while thunderously, inappropriately dressed on the side of a mountain in Cumbria.
Busk Pike, Lingmoor Fell, November, 2:30 p.m.
We’ve been lost for a while, now. However often I turn the map, it does not look like the bit of Cumbria that is in front of me.
I want to look down on a lush valley that contains a footpath that leads to a waterfall, and then a pub. That’s what the map has promised me. That’s why I left the nice hotel.
Instead, all I can see is a very blasted hillside, a series of disused quarries, and a wall of rain moving towards us, like a sheet of blindness. The rain looks very nonnegotiable.
Of course, I know there’s no such thing as “bad weather”—only “inappropriate clothing.” Although not an exhaustive list, I feel I’m probably wearing a good percentage of the world’s most inappropriate clothing for this fell-walking expedition: a Topshop duffel coat, Doc Marten boots inexplicably spreckled with pink paint since last year’s Gay Pride, and a Ghostbusters T-shirt. Because this is a weekend away with my husband, underneath my jeans, I’m also wearing sexy lingerie, “for later.”
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