D'gin
London in the mid 1700s presented a scene of the unhappy marriage of cheap booze and poverty. It was the London of Hogarth’s Gin Lane. The humanity of the masses of the poor and working class was submerged in an ocean of stupefying gin, made almost universally available from cheap distillation. As the aristocracy, the intelligentsia, the clerical hierarchy, and of course the newly emerged capitalist bourgeoisie laughed at, or scorned, or simply ignored the permanently intoxicated mobs of the hysterical, the violent, the superstitious, the debased, the despairing people, the power of the British imperial state was ascendant. Babbling alcohol-made imbeciles and the occasional flash mob or riots of ragged, glazed eyed and wild thugs were taken as just an unpleasant, and somewhat entertaining domestic side-effect of the burgeoning of a global empire ‘of mercy’.
The maintenance of a permanent underclass of underdeveloped human beings was nothing new in Europe. From the slave owners of classical and medieval times to the paupers and ‘blessed’ poor fetishized by the Roman or otherwise established Christian churches, it was always taken to be in the interests of ruling powers to keep (and keep visible) a part of the population manifesting the worst, most detestable, most pitiable, state of human being. Either as a way to highlight their own ‘enlightened’, and hence, justified authority, or as a threat with which to dissuade any over enthusiastic reformers, or simply as a cheap pool of blood from which to draw soldiery, servitude, or easy sexual satiation, the elite robbed generations of our great human family of their birthright as intrinsically precious apparitions and actors in and of Being. The ocean of gin was a flood of degradation and uncounted tears. The majesty and mystery of Being’s unfolding through human being was left to rant and rot in thousands down the back alleys and in hovels of the dazed and drunk poor.
But lest we assume much has changed apart from the substance and subtlety of the devices for the domination of a very few over the many, and the strangulation of the inborn goodness, desire for and access to fulfilment of the many, let us look at what has come through the domination of social media by the plutocrats of our day. Gin Lane is now online.
