FOR reasons I’ve never entirely understood, Christmas has long been associated with ghost stories. I suppose it has something to do with its proximity to the new year, traditionally a time for both reflection on the past and hope for the future, a seasonal mood which then mutated into spooky stories about the past coming back to haunt the present and, by implication, the future. It could just be that there’s something overpoweringly alluring about being tucked up nice and cosy in front of a roaring fire on a cold, dark night, and being scared out of your wits.
Either way, the Christmas ghost, particularly in its Dickensian avatar, is a wonderful thing – and a useful one, too, particularly if you’re a cartoonist like me and trade in clichés. Having any politician of your choice haunted by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come always makes for a nice cartoon, and this year I’ve been churning out the standard template yet again, with Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling being spooked by Marx and Keynes, filling the roles of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come.
However, it’s another kind of ghost that’s really been on my mind this particularly bleak midwinter, and that’s the zeitgeist – literally: the “Time Ghost”.
Like most spooks, the zeitgeist is an insubstantial manifestation and, in common with other spectres, you often don’t realise you’ve seen it until after it’s dematerialises. It seems that everyone (outside the Tory Party, that is) now both recognises and accepts that the defining zeitgeist of the past three decades was a truly monstrous apparition, however much they snuggled up to it hitherto. It was greedy, rapacious, cruel, callous and, as befits something supernatural, riddled with internal contradictions. Its enforced exorcism, although harrowing in the short term, should come as a great relief to us all. And however ethereal it may have been at the time, in retrospect the zeitgeist of what we might as well call Thatcherism retains a hideous palpability. A couple of bars of a Duran Duran song or even a memory of the haircuts of the group’s line-up can conjure up the whole feel of the 1980s: their shallowness, complacency, acquisitiveness and vanity. But also – and here we get back to Christmas – their breathtaking insincerity.
Insincerity is as much a part of Christmas as ghost stories. We all wallow in it at this time of year, especially in our efforts trying to spread a thin veneer of comfort, joy and goodwill towards members of our families. But pretending to be pleased with the socks given to you by a particularly vile and smelly old relative pales beside the insincerity of Thatcherism.
If you can bear to remember, Thatcherism pretended to be about a puritanical fiscal rectitude, financial responsibility and not living beyond your means. And so, with a terrible inevitability, Margaret Thatcher’s hard school of harder knocks initiated the longest, most destructive and most completely self-indulgent binge in history, encouraging an entirely new kind of consumerist sybaritism fuelled almost exclusively by personal indebtedness. And in its ever-so-slightly modified “new” Labour version, when the congenital irresponsibility and insincerity of Thatcherism was ameliorated in the public sphere with a certain earnest bossiness about good behaviour, and consideration for others, the fearful risk aversion which stopped children going on school trips was mirrored, in the engine rooms of the economy, by an insanely cavalier disregard of the risks they were taking with our money. You never know, but it’s possible that a couple of financial health and safety officers in some of our leading banks might just have pointed out how dangerously inflated the bubble was getting, and how much it was going to hurt when it exploded in our faces.
But there’s also the nauseating insincerity of the response to the collapse of Woolworths. Quite apart from the irony of their best day’s trading ever coming on the first day of their closing down sale, there’s the mawkish nostalgia Woolies’ demise has inspired among the commentariat, none of whom, I suspect, would be seen dead in the place, stocked with tat and managed by asset-stripping idiots. I suspect that those insincere tears arose from the memory of a different zeitgeist, of wooden-floored Woolworthses selling rubber bands and reeking of the retrospectively happy austerity of our childhoods, rather than the reality of ticky-tacky emporia stinking of the vacuous zeitgeist of retail Thatcherism.
Oh well. It’s probably still too early to be able to pin down the current zeitgeist, and we’ll have to wait and see if it’ll be marked with a new sincerity or an older kind of cynicism. Meanwhile, may I take this opportunity to wish all Tribune readers a very merry Christmas and as Happy a New Year as is currently feasible. And I mean that most sincerely.
