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One meaning of the word 'chav', as now used, is as a derogatory label for a superficial person addicted to clothes with designer labels. A way to slag someone off. A superficial label in its own right which says more about the user than the person they are slagging off. By their own definition, people who use chav in its new, malicious sense, are therefore a bit of a 'chav' themselves - not to mention being a monumental slag.
Originally a gypsy word for child or youth, chav was commonly used as a term of endearment and greeting among the working classes. As a synonym for 'mate', as in a dozen regional dialect equivalents. 'Butt' and 'wuss' and 'man', for instance. It is there in the Only Fools and Horses dvd box set - from Boycie, if I remember, and it must be somewhere in the collected scripts of Galton & Simpson, and Croft & Perry. It was a real, helpful, social word, available to all to ease the flow of conversation and make a working relationship easier to maintain. And now it has been kidnapped, subjected to a garish media makeover, and turned into an insult. Now it is a slur whose only purpose is to generate the emotions of hate and contempt. All it can ever do is cause trouble - and for what? Why do we need to sacrifice a perfectly innocent, useful word to make way for this term of abuse? It's an act of vandalism far worse than anything any chav would spraypaint on a concrete wall in Walthamstow. Why does New Grub Street need it?
'Chav' also means a person with a blinkered or ignorant frame of mind, susceptible to loud aggressive behaviour in public, and a generally instinctive, hedonistic lifestyle. (Again like the Daily Mail and The Sun) But in fact it is now a term so wide as to be meaningless, other than in terms of its one true reference point, social class. However the Hackocracy likes to spin it, chavs are the working classes on their day out. On Epsom Downs in their funny hats, singing their raucous rude songs about winkles and puddings and beer. The same sneers can be heard in every Servant - Master gag in human history. They are a reflex defence mechanism of a middle class under threat from below. In this case from a working class with more spending power than ever and the historic new ability of co-ordination and communication. It is therefore more necessary than ever to control the language as well as to convey the message that the lower orders are simply not capable of dealing with money or success or fame - that they are simply too vulgar. As the Daily Mail calls the Beckhams: "The celebrities that taste forgot." As if The Mail was an arbiter of taste.
Farcically enough, by calling them 'chavs' the Mail is patronising the working class with a word which does in fact mean 'child'. But that is no excuse for giving hate such a word to use. In this case, one which enables the user to feel innately superior to a vast sector of humanity, and also to feel horror at the prospect of any possible bond or common purpose with these 'Yahoos' - another example of a universal term of alienation. A word which reinforces the notion of inequality; that some people are simply more human than others, and therefore more deserving of the good things of life. And some people are just animals who deserve to be herded and bred and driven and eventually culled like cattle .
From being the first word a baby heard, 'chav' is now a hate word. Another way of dividing people from each other rather than bringing them closer together. That is a little linguistic tragedy, but as part of the greater ruthless swindle of Consumerism, it is as much a babykiller as the girl who oils the spring that turns the thing that winds the nob, that makes the thingumybob - that's going to win the war!
Poor old chavvy is just another victim of this need. Another Rose Cottage in the path of the motorway. It's a shame the Fabian Society still seems to think it can have the motorway and the cottage. That it can eradicate the symptoms of class conflict without removing the causes. But what else can you expect from people in straw hats who travel by punt? Why can't they just say what they mean? People who use chav as an insult are just slags.
Already, entire towns are being labelled Chav Towns. The hunger of the media for stereotypes is insatiable.
And now the hate sites have started up, inciting violence against these new sub-humans.
One particularly raving lunatic claims of Stourbridge:
But beware, anyone not drinking Stella will be immediately glassed by some footballer’s jumper wearing try-hard and then kicked around the floor via his Rockport’s for being ‘a gayer’.
Immediately.
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3/11/08 John Prescott on Class
The World Health Organisation follows UNICEF in finding that British kids are not the healthiest in the world. WHO reports that they get drunk earlier and suffer for it, UNICEF reports that they are some of the unhappiest children around.
They're unhappy, and they habitually get rat-arsed. Surprise surprise.
Of course, it's not like this on the continent, we're told. Drink there is a social grace. A sort of folk art or religion. A socially cohesive factor rather than British Jekyll'n'Hyde Juice. All the family, from olive-soaked great-grannies to bouncing bambinos, performing the healing ritual together in the laughing shade. And Britain does have a more intensively compartmentalised sense of time than hotter, more recently industrialised cultures. We didn't win two world wars with siestas. But the shiftwork we needed to win those wars, and the peactime battle for industrial market dominance, definitely left its 40 hour week mark on the culture, which remains one of the most regimented in Europe, in which flexi-time is still thought of as an impossibility, like a form of time voodoo. Thank God It's Friday is a characteristically British expression, expressed in the act of getting roaring drunk for the two days freedom called The Weekend.
The average British 15 year old, looking at the actions of his immediate superiors, must conclude that alcohol is for getting drunk. That is the point, to obliterate reality as much as possibility, possibly because, as UNICEF says, reality hurts. To expect parents to be able to counter the massive effects on the adolescent mind of advertising, peer-pressure, product-targeting, and the cultural status afforded to drunkenness is unrealistic and ultimately a cop-out. Civic responsibility must take over where parental responsibility has been repeatedly proven to be inadequate, and where 'commercial responsibility' fails to self-regulate - if it ever does.
Whatever else happens, the rediscovery of the Youth Centre must take place, if necessary, at the taxpayers expense.
In a perfect marketplace, a socially responsible, enterprising brewery chain would spot the vast gap in the market for warm dry venues where young people could meet and drink - and even be taught to drink. A tactfully supervised social environment where all the social instincts and networking destroyed in the last 30 years can be recharged by a new generation. A chain of these youth pubs might even be called Kiddispoons, who knows? The possible ways to counter British paedophobia are endless. Wetherspoons claims to be open to suggestions. Then how about it building a chain of modern youth venues - New Youth Clubs - to attempt to fill the social gap before kids can legally be sold alcohol. The objective being to heal some of the alienation of young people and teach them do socialise over drinks.
One terrible possibility is that lovely cuddly Europe will end up like us. That is their mistake to make. Meanwhile Scotland is proposing price fixing to deter excessive drinking. A 'Bevy Levy', in fact. As gross a distortion of natural market forces as was ever contemplated in the birthplace of Adam Smith, and surely immoral in some pulpits even now. The democratically elected Swedish government was taken to the European Court of Human Rights by the massed lawyers of teh advertising industry for merely protecting Swedish children from propaganda for poisonous sugar products. What can the lairds of Holyrood expect for getting on the wrong side of the booze barons?
Naturally, there is a convenient sidetrack. We can't measure or weigh happiness, so why even consider it. Be grateful when it happens and get on with your job, Cratchet. And then there is relative happiness across the generations, and the confusing effects of material prosperity on the equation. We were poor but we were happy? Really?
The truth which cannot be sidetracked is that we are living faster lives, and we sense it. And the effect of this frantic pace is to make us feel that our lives are shorter than our grandparents did. We are living in a greater sense of panic, that this is not a rehearsal, and that in addition, we are now indoctrinated that it is feckless and foolish to expect anyone to co-operate or help you unless they stand to gain substantially from the transaction. Scrooge's countinghouse without the benevolent glow.
When Tom Harris asks the question 'What IS Happiness?' he is sort of missing the point. As a Labour MP he should be told over and again, by Orwell for instance, that
" the real objective of Socialism is not happiness. Happiness hitherto has been a by-product, and for all we know it may always remain so. The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood."
Then maybe his government would begin to sound like it was telling the truth.
