Godless in Eden. Fay Weldon

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СКАЧАТЬ the age of the Taleban. In Afghanistan women who were once engineers, teachers, writers, social workers, earners of all kinds, have been driven back indoors and shrouded in black by fanatical young men who live by principle however odd that principle may seem to us.

      

      It is not likely to happen here, I say, but nasty surprises can still occur. Supposing Tony Blair isn’t just a wicked stepmother putting her house in order, throwing out the poor relations and hangers on, supposing she’s just a man in drag after all and a woman-hater?

      

      Let no-one forget that Hitler solved Germany’s high unemployment problems at one fell swoop, by simply banning women from most of its workplaces. One wage earner per family please, and that wage earner the man. And Hitler, like Blair, spent the early populist years, just like any other politician, having his picture taken with dogs and children. Women are right to be fearful.

      

      The Blairs fall down rather on the dumb animal front, as it happens. Cherie failed to love the Downing Street cat, Humphrey, sufficiently for public taste. Indeed, it was rumoured that she’d had the poor, mangy, incontinent old thing put down. But the murmurings of the people quickly produced pictures of Humphrey safe and sound if looking surprisingly young, retired, ‘living quietly’ in a distant suburb, away from the hurly-burly of No 10. No-one quite believed it. And then Tony’s offer to ‘ban hunting’ and save the poor fox somehow seemed to hang fire – the foxes still flee, the hounds still run, the horns still sound over the green English countryside.

      

      The electorate worries about this, more than it does about the projected abolition of the House of Lords, the new government’s habit of issuing edicts and by-passing Parliament, the strange programmed zombification of hitherto lively and intelligent politicians as dull-eyed and brain-washed they spout the party line. If I were the Blairs I’d quickly get a dog – preferably not a beagle lest anyone forgets and holds it up by its ears. No, a corgi would be better: one of the palace puppies perhaps – to restore the first family’s animal-loving credentials.

      

      In ‘women’ I do not, by the way, include the category ‘mother’. Mothers remain a separate case. The feminist movement does not know what to do with them and never has. The child cries, the mother hurts and runs home and no amount of conditioning seems to cure it. The ‘problem of the working mother’ seems insoluble; ‘the problem of the working father’ is never referred to by either employers or government, though paying proper attention to it, I do believe, would pretty soon solve the technological society’s overlong, over-exhausting work schedules. Paradoxical that the more automated the society, the harder and longer everyone seems to have to work. But all that’s another story.

      

      See feminism and politics as a converging dynamic: see another one creeping up on the outside, a softly implacable, bendy-rubber force, that of Therapism, surging alongside the others into the Parisian tunnel, into that solid concrete wall, to meet the sleek, phallic Mercedes which was to make a martyr of Diana. (Ah Di, poor Di, what you are responsible for!)

      

      Therapism is the ‘therapy’ we are all familiar with entered into public life: a belief structure edging in to take the place of Christianity, Science, Marxism – all overlapping, none coinciding – as those three fade away in a miasmic cloud into the past. Therapism gives us a new idea of what people are, why we are here; one which denies God, denies morality, is ‘value-free’, which rejects the doctrine of original sin – the notion that we were born flawed but must struggle for improvement and replaces it with the certainty that we were all born happy, bright and good and would be able to stay this way if only it weren’t for harsh circumstances or faulty parenting. It is a cheerful idea espoused by the nicest and kindest of people, which is why it’s so hard to refute. It is also dangerous.

      This being the Age of Therapism we turn our attention, like Princess Diana in the famous BBC interview, to our anorexic and bulimic selves, not to the state of the nation. We see ourselves as wronged, not wronging, victims not persecutors; we ally ourselves with the underdog. We ‘felt’ our way to a Blair victory, didn’t ‘think’ it. When it comes to a decision about joining the common European currency, abandoning the Pound Sterling for the obnoxious new Euro, it’s the people’s intuition which is to decide the issue, not their judgement. A referendum’s to be held; let the people emote their way to the truth, since even the nation’s economists are defeated by the complexities of the matter.

      

      This being the Age of Therapism, my local school, which has a leaking roof and no pens or pencils for the children, recently enjoyed a visit by a team of forty counsellors. They stayed for two weeks. Talk and listen, talk and listen. Adapt the child to its circumstances: reality is only in the head.

      

      This being the Age of Therapism, the NSPCC, which knows how to wring hearts and raise funds, now focuses its ads along the lines, ‘Just £15 will provide counselling for a child.’ Forget hunger, poverty, wretchedness. Talk and listen, talk and listen. All will be cured.

      

      Therapism absolves us of personal blame. The universe is essentially good! The fat aren’t greedy, or genetically doomed: no, their unaesthetic shape is caused by abusive fathers. (All switch! In Mother Nature’s new creation the old man is the villain of the piece, as in Father God’s it was the female witch.) As in Erewhon, our criminals are mentally ill, poor things, and the ill (as in AIDS) are the criminals. They didn’t eat right. All things are mendable; the paedophile and the rapist can be cured by talk and investigation of the past; the police, unlikely to catch the robber, can put the robbed in touch with their Victims’ Support Group. All will be well, and all will be well. Once Christianity was the opium of the people: now its sleeping draught is Therapism.

      Poor suffering wretches that we remain, but now without sin, without guilt, and so without possibility of redemption, searching for a contentment which remains elusive. Though at least we cry ‘Love, Love, Love,’ not ‘Kill, Kill, Kill’. We strew flowers in St Diana’s royal parks, where’ere she trod, and try not to sew land mines.

      

      Therapism demands an emotional correctness from us – we must prefer peace to war, tranquillity to stress, express our anger so it can be mollified, share our woes, love our children (though not necessarily our parents) and sacrifice our contentment to theirs, ban guns, not smoke, give voice to our low opinion of men (if we are women), and refrain from giving voice to our low opinion of women (if we are men), and agree that at any rate we were all born happy, bright, beautiful and free, and what is more, equal. This latter makes educational policy difficult: Mr Blair, little Mother of the Nation, loves us all the same: we must all strive for academic achievement and when we grow up must all work from nine to five, or eight to six or seven; not because work pays the rent, but because work makes you free.

      

      ‘Take up thy bed and work’ as The Daily Telegraph recently subheaded a rather extraordinary article in which a bold new Social Security Secretary of State declared that the disabled must not be condemned to a life of dependence on State Benefits. This government has the opportunity and the mandate – a familiar phrase from ministerial lips since the Blair Government swept into power – to reform the Welfare State so that it provides proper help and support in order to allow those people who can work to do so, while helping those who cannot work to live independently and with dignity. Disability grants, in other words, are to be cut. And indeed, and in fairness to the government in its new stepmother СКАЧАТЬ