Amazon has a very high opinion of me. This morning they sent me some recommendations for the sort of things they thought I might like to buy. Click on the image to see it larger.
Lacan, Marx, cast-iron dumbbells. Amazon thinks of me as a sort of soviet athlete. A specimen of physical and ideological perfection.
This is not the consumer profile of an ordinary man. These recommendations reflect the purchasing habits of a communist superman.
Not just any old communist superman, though: a communist superman with a keen interest in the life of the human psyche (Lacan) and a pop-culture-informed vision of the perils of totalitarianism (V for Vendetta).
I have an idea for a news item: Manservant or Master? We start with footage from Jeeves and Wooster, showing how in the olden days it was easy to tell in an instant who wore the spats. Then we explain how these days it can often be hard to tell, gentlemen being apt to conduct their business in flip flops, a vest, jogging bottoms and with a pastiche of the proletarian accent while their valets might go about double-breasted and hatless.
We take two young men – one a gentleman dressed in a yellow H&M cardigan and black and white kiffiyeh, the other his personal gentleman's gentleman decked out in Jack Wills stripey blue shirt and brown shoes – on to the street and ask the public: Manservant of Master?
They all get it wrong! We ask them why they think they it got it wrong. They respond that these days the old markers of dress and accent have broken down. We live now in a world now where it is hard to distinguish between the nobility and the servant class. Most agree that while this can be embarrassing sometimes – when you tip a duke or shake hands with the stable boy – overall, this is a good thing and demonstrates how much fairer we are as a society.
We conclude that this is indeed a brave new world, a new Britain thinly lacquered with equality. The Empire has certainly come along way since the fifties; what will the next fifty years have in store?
