Before I get into this post I should probably mention that I'm in a pretty foul mood already today, not least thanks to the trippy nightmare I bolted awake from about an hour ago. It’s not particularly relevant but I feel like venting it so here goes:

So I’m walking along the so very familiar roads just outside, approaching my cosy little home when, turning onto my street, I suddenly become aware of a struggle about half way down the road. Two policemen, unmistakeable despite their uniforms being more gaudy and their hats much bigger than usual, are struggling with a scruffy young man.

He’s screaming and writhing, clearly terrified for his life, as the two leering enforcers attempt to bundle him into the boot of a battered old blue Ford. My instinctive reaction is to reach for the notebook and pen in my coat. Crossing to the opposite side of the street as I approach the convulsing know of bodies, I scribble the date, time and location while trying to get a glimpse of the reg plate and the officers numbers.

Then, in a heartbeat, the guy’s in the boot and they’re looking at me, still leering, and I’m running back up the street. Round the corner, past the shop and before I know it I’m clattering down some stairs. Turns out, wherever or whenever this is supposed to be, that ethnic minorities have been driven into underground ghettoes and it’s among a subterranean community of black people where I’m now desperately looking for friends and sanctuary.

As long as the people down here keep to themselves the authorities above leave them alone but I know harbouring a wanted man such as myself will not be tolerated. For some reason the entrance to the ghetto bares a striking resemblance to my grandparents house, noble wood panelling, open fireplaces and beautiful old furniture despite being an underground hovel.

I crash through a room that doesn’t belong in my grandparent’s house, where people are queuing for food. My heart’s in my mouth and I can hear the coppers barging their way through just a few rooms behind me. I have to find my friend, the leader of this community, I need time.

I realise at this point that there is no chance of evading the uniforms but that escape is not what I’m looking for. I need time. Bursting into a tiny cube of a room, obviously carved deep into the living rock, I find a small wooden table and my friend. He knows what I need.

I sit at the table, scribbling a detailed statement of what I have seen. I can hear my friend stalling them just beyond the door, my script becomes a wild series of desperate loops and my hand begins to complain as I record every last detail of injustice I have seen. Every fibre of my being is screaming at me that my only chance of survival is through these notes.

Then, in a flash, everything changes. The same room, the same situation, but suddenly I’m watching myself be dragged away, out through a second door that leads back to the surface, by the thick armed fancy dress thugs.

My own face, twisted in terror, mouthing something, is frozen amid a few seconds of absolute confusion. Then the face is gone and I realise what’s happening. I am now the leader of the underground community, the man who stalled the pigs at the door so that my friend could record the vital truth.

Reaching below the table, I feel for the sheet of paper and retrieve it. My eyes dart over the jumbled characters, and then I’m on my knees. There is more than just an account of scruffy young man being put in the boot of a car in these notes, much more. From somewhere an image has entered my mind, an image I know to be true.

My wife, her rich dark skin perfect and beautiful despite the subhuman conditions in which we are forced to live, holds me while I am racked with sobs. When they drove us down here, at the start when we tried to resist, many people disappeared, just like the lad in the car. We never knew just what happened, but now I do. There were camps, huge processing plants, wherein our people, and all the others no longer desired, were systematically exterminated.

The grief I feel is overwhelming but, as I let it run through me, I know there is something else. Running much deeper is a streak of anger that tells me once I get off my knees today I will never kneel again. Finally, even beyond this, in the fuzzy out reaches of my mind, there is an echo of something else.

I am not the man with the notebook in the street, I am not the leader of the underground ghetto, they are but vessels. I am the knowledge, the idea, the feeling. They can torture and kill body after body but they cannot destroy me.

So there you go, intense huh? I guess I could waste a whole lot of time wondering what this dream tells me about me, but I’d much rather focus on the infinitely more interesting inspirations behind it. Reading yesterday’s paper this post, which I still haven’t quite started, began to form in my mind and I’m pretty sure that that seed flourished more graphically last night than I could ever manage here.

Still, let’s try anyway shall we? Front page of The Guardian yesterday carried a story about claims that record labels have been keeping the price of downloaded music artificially high. The photo on the same cover recounted the fact that Selfridges in London is among several stores soon to house police cells on site for shop lifters and credit card fraudsters.

Now I’ve had arguments with people in the past about just how ethical it is to download music for free, or ‘steal’ it as some would describe the process. My own position starts from a belief that material wealth is meaningless, so i find it hard to get outraged about such ‘theft’.

On a more practical level however, I’ve always said that the record companies cause piracy in the first place by charging far more than their products are worth, thereby excluding large numbers of people. ‘Investment in future music,’ the suits squeal, but this is clearly bullshit. How much has the average price of a CD gone up over the last few years?

Does anyone actually believe that the sound engineers, session musicians and even the title artists have received a corresponding increase in income? Do me a favour, the money these guys makes goes to their shareholders, anything else is an afterthought and while this is the case these huge companies don’t have a leg to stand on.

I just take this story about the fixing of download prices as proof of my theory. They’re just inherently greedy in all circumstances and, to be fair, what else can they be? They are a product of a system, the capitalist system, which is driven by profit alone. That is the game to which our society is geared so perhaps we can’t blame them too much for being players.

Another concern about this system comes from the idea of large stores having police cells. Sure it’s billed as being a measure to help the police right now, but I see a high potential for trouble with this ahead. How about this: Stores can already detain people they catch shoplifting while the police arrive, they usually keep them in an office or designated room.

Now what with lower numbers of police and an increase in ‘bigger’ crime concerns, such as terrorism, we’ve already seen the start of outsourcing lower level crime. PCSOs were invented mainly to deal with anti-social behaviour and other such small scale local crime that the police simply don’t have the resources to tackle.

Is it really that much of a leap to think that, in the interests of the police maximising the potential of what resources they have, stores will eventually be able to use these cells themselves. At first it may still be just until the police can arrive to actually arrest the ‘criminal’. How long, however, before we see the introduction of ‘fixed penalty’ sentencing. Just like the idea that coppers can march people to cash machines to take out standardised fines, why shouldn’t the high street monopolies be able to imprison someone for a predetermined amount of time if they are caught shoplifting?

Finally there’re the supermarkets. A very good friend of mine pointed something out that scared the shit out of me and I think I’ve written about it before. Supermarkets have long since started gaining the monopoly on food supply in some areas, driving small independent retailers out of business with by using ‘loss leaders’(1).

Visit any supermarket today and you’ll notice that they’re not content to stop at food. Books, newspapers and magazines for example are one area into which these behemoths are now moving. Now if a retailer decides it is not happy with a particularly controversial magazine cover for example, they can decide not to sell it, fair enough. If that retailer however, holds a local monopoly over magazine distribution then it is actually, in effect, censoring the free press in that area.

The most worrying aspect about these last two points is what appears to be a common trend, namely a persistent move away from mass self governance and towards systems over which the public at large has no control. It seems clear to me that politics is increasingly ineffectual as anything but a huge red herring to distract us from where there power increasingly lies.

Capitalism is simply not compatible with freedom or democracy and each one of these oh so rational and reasonable little steps takes us that little bit closer towards living in my dream. While I found that dream disturbing in the extreme, (the emotions felt utterly real and incredibly intense,) there was also a dark and bitter determination that gave cause for hope in the long run. The situation was bleak but not insurmountable.

Well that’s all well good, but wouldn’t it be better if we just avoided the situation all together?

footnote

(1) ‘loss leaders’: basically supermarkets have so much financial capital behind them that they can afford to sell their top few hundred products at a loss, thereby undercutting their competitors. They do this partly to give the illusion that they’re products are cheap, but mainly just to get people into the stores. They know full well that once you’re in there they can get you to buy plenty of other, full price things.

Overall, if you actually sit down and look at it, supermarket shopping is more expensive and the products are of lower quality, and this is what we’re selling our freedom for!