Revenge of the nightclub-queue slaves

Observe, writes Dalrymple, a queue of people waiting to get into a nightclub,

how meekly they allow themselves to be searched by the thuggish-looking bouncer-greeters (who incidentally have a very high rate of violence towards women). How the bouncer-greeters lord it over them! What power, moral and physical, they wield!

The bouncers have a star-like quality:

I have seen a greeter-bouncer drive by (in a pastel-shaded BMW), and have heard the admiring comments of those he and his type have humiliated a hundred times.

The people in the queue,

supposedly so rebellious and anti-authority, are willing to endure almost any humiliation so long as they gain entry into one of the circles of hell, where the noise is so great that they enter a trance-like state almost at once. Slaves could hardly be more abject.

It is an illusion that everyone wants to be free,

but everyone wants to assert himself, and no one likes to be humiliated.

How do the abject slaves of the nightclub queues revenge themselves for their humiliation at the hands of the greeter-bouncers?

By being insolent towards those in authority who nevertheless have an infinite duty of care towards them, such as doctors, who cannot answer back. A young man who grovels to a greeter-bouncer in a night club queue will have no hesitation in cheeking a doctor and letting him know who is boss.

The doctor

cannot refuse to cure a patient merely because the patient shows him scant respect, and for the first time the patient knows it. Thus we see the dialectic of dependence and resentment in a population that is no longer expected to regulate itself, but expects always to be protected from the consequences of its own tastes and conduct.

 

Any of you fuckers out there got any fucking drugs?

This is what one of the Gallagher brothers (of the band Oasis) asked the audience halfway through a concert attended by Dalrymple, who was serving at the time as ‘vulgarity correspondent’ of a British newspaper. Dalrymple reported:

Gallagher’s attitude of untouchable snarling insolence was not lost on his audience, of course; and neither will have been its effective endorsement by [then prime minister Tony Blair’s] invitation. What is the point of restraint and circumspection if such stream-of-consciousness vulgarity can win not merely wealth and fame but complete social acceptance?

Petite touche anthropologique: two fashions that may be of carceral origin

Styles of attire which, like rap music, are associated with the jails and black ghettos of the US

The baseball cap worn backwards

The conjecture, writes Dalrymple, is that this

was first employed by visitors to prison, who wanted to get nearer to the prisoner whom they were visiting, and the peak of whose cap prevented this so that the cap had to be reversed.

Trousers worn at half-mast, known as ‘sagging’

This is supposed to be

in imitation of prisoners who were allowed no belts in case they were used for suicide or hanging others, and whose nether garments therefore hung low.

Those who intuit in the low-slung-trousers fashion

an insolent defiance, a deliberate rejection of what would once have been called respectability, are right to do so. The same is true of those who obey the fashion; they are fully aware of the effect it is likely to have on those whom they wish to offend. Such is its purpose.

The fashion

is a symbol of an attempted creation of a mirror-image moral universe, in which what is held to be good by one part of society is held in contempt by the other, and vice versa.

Some leaders of fashion, such as Chris Bryant, the onetime priest who is the UK Labour Party’s ‘shadow minister for the arts’, go further, and dispense with trousers altogether.

Chris Bryant unfrocked

Notes from underground

On an escalator on the Metro, Dalrymple witnessed this scene:

A young man in international slum-costume and face as malign as the late Mark Duggan’s…used a spray gun to scrawl his initials in bright red on the handrail. Scores of people saw him do it….He returned the other way to repeat his action on another handrail.

Dalrymple was saddened.

The ease with which the stupid and criminal insolence of one young man was able to defeat the civilised conduct of the vast majority of citizens present was…dispiriting.

Duggan: malign

And just because the young man was cretinous

doesn’t mean he wasn’t cunning, or wouldn’t be able to draw the correct lesson that he could act with…impunity.

Dalrymple dared not do anything to stop the French Duggan. Nor did anyone else. Why? Dalrymple points to these factors:

• He and others were ‘busy with their own lives’
• He and others were afraid of the French Duggan, ‘that he might carry a knife or a gun’
• He and others were ‘by no means confident that if they had intervened…it would be the young man and not they who would be charged with an offence’
• Certain witnesses — admittedly a very few, the silliest among them — might have ‘so read, marked and inwardly digested the exculpatory sociology of our time that they saw in his graffito not an act of moral depravity but a cry for help’