In a broken dream.

There were several options for a theme for this post. Kate Bush’s ‘The Dreaming’ or ‘Suspended in Gaffa’, Jethro Tull’s ‘Thick as a Brick’ or the Levellers’ ‘Dog Train’ and many others. Even Supertramp’s ‘Dreamer’ or REM’s barely decipherable ‘Losing My Religion’. In the end I opted for the dulcet tones of Rod Stewart, the man who sings while gargling gravel, fronting for Python Lee Jackson.

Most people live in a dream. I used to, you used to, some who pass by here still do. This is the part the dreamers prefer to avoid: the place where you’re naked in public or falling through the air, where you find you’re in bed with the Brown Gorgon or where Nick Clegg steals all your tobacco and smokes it, laughing, while you are immobile. This is the wake up screaming place.

It’s certainly not the only one. They are all over the internet now. That blogroll is not an exhaustive list by any means. It leads to other wake up screaming places, and every one of them leads to a whole lot more.

Over at Captain Ranty’s there is a long post which is largely written by Harbinger. All of it is worth reading, but I’m just going to steal this little bit:

Of late, I have to admit that I wish, above all that I could be pig, bloody ignorant and never have woken up. I do feel like the guy in the Matrix, who ends up selling his friends out in order to be ‘plugged’ back in. When I think about how much better life was when I knew nothing.

A quick quote from the Levellers:

And if you’ve heard this before
Yeah I’m going to say it again
But life was easy when
I didn’t have a clue.

Remember the old days? Go to work, come home, watch a bit of television, have tea at a set time, go to bed, maybe read a little fiction, go to work the next day and pick up your pay at the end of the month. It was easy, wasn’t it? You could tut-tut at the news but it was really not your problem. It wasn’t even real, just some images on the bright box in the corner. Soon forgotten. Someone else can deal with it.

You might be old enough to remember the grumbles about the expense of having to fit front seat belts to your car but as my father said at the time; ‘I have to have them but I don’t have to use the bloody things’.

Then, one day, we all had to use them. It seemed like such a trivial incursion and nobody really minded because the expense of fitting them was in the past. All new cars already had them. Might as well use them, you’ve paid for them.

In Italy, sales boomed of white T-shirts with a diagonal black stripe. In the UK, we just clunk-clicked every trip like that nice Mr. Savile on the telly said. Nobody thought of it as an incursion into our liberties.

Nobody was at all surprised when rear seat belts became compulsory. Nobody batted an eyelid when they were fitted to buses because ‘we have to have them but we don’t have to use the bloody things’. We will. Once they are on all the buses, using them will be compulsory. Loss of freedoms? Don’t be silly, it’s for your safety. Experts Have Said so it must be true.

Those little turns of the ratchet are no more likely to disturb the sleepers than the ticks of their bedside clocks.

The thing about bedside clocks though, is that after a certain number of ticks, the alarm goes off.

The tick that set mine off, like many others reading here and on that blogroll, was the smoking ban. That was when the well-oiled ratchet squeaked, and that was when I really first noticed it.

There had been hints before then. I taught at a college for thirteen years. During that time, ridiculous things happened. We were told we could no longer write ‘fail’ on student papers. We had to write ‘not achieved’ and no, we could not add ‘and not likely to’. Student intelligence remained constant over the period, but the ones at the start of my employment could actually write. By the end, I dreaded exam time. All assignments came in typed but the exams were hand-written, some apparently by a blindfolded gibbon well dosed with amphetamine, who had the pen in his teeth.

Marks deducted for illegibility? No longer allowed. Ignore and give no marks for asides and irrelevancies? No longer allowed. The exam marker’s job went from testing how well someone had actually learned the subject to a quest for something, anything, you can give a positive mark for.

The students were just as intelligent as they had always been. The change was in the attitudes – not of those teaching them but in those who were in charge of those teaching them. At the time I thought it was normal management idiocy, that they had found a ‘Dilbert’ book and thought it was a manual. We were told how it reflected well on an educational establishment if the pass rate was high, and that target became the principal goal. Get them through, send them out.

It didn’t seem to be deliberate. Policies that idiotic just couldn’t be deliberate. It must be, could only be, the action of some moron in management somewhere. The ratchet slipped one more tooth and the bedside clock ticked softly and I just got on with the job.

In those days, the New World Order, the Bilderbergers, Common Purpose, the Fabians, secret societies, those were just the ramblings of loonies like David Icke and Alex Jones. Stories to frighten the children. Tales for the gullible. Nobody seriously believed that stuff. It didn’t even come up in pub conversations when we were all having a beer and a smoke. If it did we’d all laugh.

I’m not laughing now. Since that smoking ban alarm went off, I’ve learned a lot of things. How many nuclear explosions have there been on this planet? Ask me twenty years ago and I’d have said ‘three’ and would have been proud to have remembered the test in the American desert as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

How many really? Really, it’s over two thousand and still counting. More than two thousand deliberate nuclear bombs have been set off on this planet and it hasn’t even been a century yet. Cancer rates boomed along with those mushroom clouds and what did we all blame? Smoking, drinking, fatty foods, salt, sugar, bacon and even (and I am not kidding) hot showers. Anything to avoid looking at the mushroom cloud in the room.

I wasn’t worried about nuclear bombs. They were so far away, in another country. The idea that the atmosphere could be spreading all those new radioactive particles all over the planet simply didn’t occur in my dream. It wasn’t until I woke up and looked around that I realised things were not as they seemed.

Smoke caused lung cancer. That was certain. It’s not quite so certain now. Doctors could be trusted implicitly. Not any more. Now they tell lies so astounding that nobody could accept them other than as part of a dream. Would you believe that it is healthier to run your car exhaust into the car than it is to have a smoke in there? Some doctors do. All the drones do. I say, let them try.

The smoking ban wasn’t really a smoking ban. It applied to places that had already banned smoking. It applied to places where nobody had ever smoked. They didn’t mind because hey, they were no smoking places anyway. The ban made no difference.

Oh, it did. The dreamers won’t see it but it did. It made a massive difference.

Before the ban, places that did not allow smoking were smoke-free by choice. Now they are smoke-free by law. Still, no difference? Can’t see why it matters?

The State, with that smoking ban, took control over what happens on private property. You can no longer say that you do not allow smoking because you do not have the option. The State tells you what you can and cannot allow on your own property. The precedent is set and your home is no longer your castle. You do not own your own business. The State owns it now. You let them dictate one policy and they will eventually dictate them all.

You think you can deny people a room in your hotel because you don’t agree with their lifestyle? No. You can’t. It’s not your hotel. It belongs to the State and you will give those rooms to who you are told to give them to. Unless they smoke, in which case you can throw them onto the street – indeed, the State will fine you if you don’t.

Look where that led. Those poor young families want the big houses the old people have so the old people must be forced out of homes they’ve saved all their lives to pay for. The State owns those houses now. This does not apply to MPs who can have all the big houses they want and you pay for them. No, don’t look at the ones you paid for. Look at the ones occupied by people who paid for them themselves.

And pretend they will never look at yours.

Harbinger’s wish to return to the time before that alarm went off is understandable. I wish I had never been woken up, but as Harbinger said, there is no going back. There is no snooze button on this alarm. Once you are awake you never sleep again.

Once you wake, you see there is not just one ratchet. There are hundreds of them, slipping on well-oiled cogs, one click at a time, and you’ll wonder why nobody else can see them.

They don’t want to see them. It’s just the clock ticking. The alarm hasn’t gone off, it’s not time to wake up yet. It’s warm and comfortable and easy in this dream and nobody really wants to leave it. Reality is cold and unpleasant and full of very nasty people.

Let’s just hope the alarms start going off soon because if they don’t there’s only one other outcome.

An lot of people will wake up screaming one day. A lot more won’t ever wake up at all.