My refusal to engage was motivated by far stronger emotions
AL Kennedy Wednesday June 13, 2001 The Guardian
I'm confused. During the past few weeks I've been getting these intense feelings, and I once thought there might be words for them, definitions, but now suddenly, I'm not sure.
I mean, when a neighbour used to let her yippy, colitis-riddled mutt crap itself hollow across my garden and I would discover the evidence (slightly too late) whenever I cut the grass, then I would get this wave of precise emotion which I thought was something like infuriated disgust or sociopathic revulsion, but, apparently, I was wrong.
When I consider my suppurating private life: my greying hair, my body's abandonment of anything resembling skin tone, I'd have thought I was wracked with, say, inoperable despair, but it isn't so. When I ponder my decomposing professional life: the late payment, underpayment, nonpayment and general all-round personal and intellectual violation it inevitably involves, surely my knuckles cramp with cruel and unusual bewilderment or homicidal tetchiness?
Well, no, perhaps not. Because these feelings have been my constant companions throughout most of May and into June and I am reliably informed by every possible source that each one of these emotions is simply a form of apathy.
This is the apathy that seeps round your gums when you watch a tosser in a nice suit that you've paid for, lying to you on national television. The same apathy that pinks the borders of your vision when similar tossers accost you in the street/attempt to approach you employing snazzy helicopters/clutter your post with puerile leaflets claiming they have your best interests at heart.
The type of apathy which wraps around your spine when you imagine standing (regulation, stubby pencil in hand) staring at that slip of paper in your little prefab booth on June 7, wishing there were boxes you could cross beside options such as: "I wish to leave the country", or "I wish all current electoral candidates to leave the country", or "Please provide me with a grassy knoll and a loaded firearm immediately", or "Come back when you can do better than this - even just a little better - God knows, I'm not hard to please, ask anyone".
Which is why so few of us actually got our hands on the stubby pencil of destiny. Yes, we've been a very naughty electorate, haven't we, endangering the whole electoral process and democracy itself, we should be ashamed. It's not the pisspoor politicians' fault that we didn't want to vote for them. Just because we've had to live with the ghastly consequences of their fatuous, self-interested actions for the whole of our adult lives, that doesn't mean we're qualified to judge them.
For goodness' sake, we can't even tell the difference between disappointed loathing and apathy - when any reasonable person knows there is no difference - they're one and the same thing and should both be ignored. Although I should point out that my writing this is proof that I am prey to cynicism. This is much worse than apathy: a sort of emotional CJD. It means that, rather than welcoming the next wave of costly and inefficient public-private partnerships, I will expect them to perform the same wasteful con tricks at my expense which their predecessors did.
Similarly, spoilsport that I am, I can't help thinking that shunting the elderly from home to home in the knowledge that a small percentage of them will die of delayed shock is a criminal way to make savings.
I'm past curing, I know it. When I look at political advertising, my weakness makes me notice that voters are now portrayed as being capable of only one significant action - casting votes, handing over power.
And then I recall that Britain's population hasn't really been allowed a more positive presentation since the end of the second world war. "Here are Nipper and Ginger: two cheery conscripts from Up North. Give them a wave, Grandma! And there's Mrs Nipper, starching her Anderson shelter - good for you, Mrs Nipper, Rommel won't know what's hit him!"
It was patronising and designed to give citizens enough self-esteem to die, or be crippled, to lose their homes and those they loved, for the sake of their country, or something quite like it. Showing Ginger and Mrs Nipper on sleazy CCTV, locked in with eight others, grassing each other up for money until only one was left wouldn't have cut it.
The generation who grew up surrounded by acknowledgements that they had dignity, bravery and the capacity for greatness were, unsurprisingly, nifty voters - the first chance they got, they elected a government which promised to reward their sacrifices with a welfare state.
Maybe it's my cynicism talking, but I don't believe there are too many politicians in Britain today who'd risk reminding the electorate of its capacity to bring about similar change.
And as for caring about the decency (BNP supporters aside) and potential of individual voters, or genuinely acting to preserve and encourage their humanity. No, sorry, I can feel that apathy kicking in again: that real, killer apathy.