You pessimistic quietistic anarchist, you!

“Crackdown on pirate DVDs” or words to that effect, are routinely touted in the local English newspapers in China. I can assure you on the same day and any other day I can take you to my favourite DVD vendors who will sell me the latest pirated DVDs for a mere seven or eight RMB, the amount becoming slightly less the more I buy. They come with languages to choose from and some will have not even been released in the American cinemas yet. I saw The Dark Knight and savoured the antics of The Joker a week or two before US audiences were seeing it for the first time on the big screen.

My favourite vendor, the perpetually smiley-faced, tiny Mr. Zhang, a cigarette never far from his lips, gives me the best prices and refuses to sell me DVDs that he feels are suspect quality (well … who does he inflict them on?). I have been his customer for more than two years. His business has now expanded. He has moved to different premises on the tiny alleyway where his shop lurks among the small diners with the perpetual smoking dumpling steamers outside and the fruit and veg shops. Heck, I don’t even know where to buy legal DVDs; none of us does. (“Us” being anyone with buying power in China, I’d say.)

Mr. Zhang and other vendors are not bothered; they are protected. There are deeper gangster or syndicate laws that run deeper in China than the ostensible Communist Party Law. The ones who usually have to worry are the chaps with “getaway” bicycle lorries crammed with DVDs who do not belong to a syndicate. They stand nervously on side streets, ready to dash off at the sound of a siren on their creaky steeds after slamming down the roof of the huge DVD box on wheels. I once took a couple of photos of a “bicycle-based” vendor and he immediately put his hand up, shooed me away and started walking to get out of the view of my camera — drawing more suspicious attention to himself than anything else.

I have been reading, with a mix of enjoyment and growing suspicion, Bill Clinton’s autobiography, My Life. He is so wonderfully human in his writing. It glistens with all the right values, mostly Christian, a down to earth man with morals and — omigosh — such a burning need to help the pale and downtrodden. Yet this is the same Bill who is required to be completely transparent with donations to his foundation now that the missus is Secretary of State. She’s not happy with this and nor is he. We all know why.

I know certain English teachers in Shanghai. To use the expression: perhaps I should not point the forefinger as the other three fingers are pointing back. These teachers work for a variety of different companies as freelancers, in an (at best) grey area of the work permit legalities and where a fair amount of income is not declared by the agency or company. The organisation simply declares the earnings as “pre-taxed”. And we shall not question that any further, shall we?

The person may be a DVD peddler in Shanghai. He may be the unfortunate husband of one of the most powerful positions in the world. Or … he could be an English teacher who just needed to do what he needed to do in the area of freelance teaching without injuring his conscience to now be able to buy that dream home (a simple cottage) in New Zealand to take care of his missus. It is also so his 83-year-old mama in SA can be given a new hearing aid and be able to eat and have a few treats like buying You magazine to do the crosswords and catch up on the paparazzi skinner… it just inescapably seems to be how the world works.

JM Coetzee, in Diary of a Bad Year, put it brilliantly: “If I were pressed to give my brand of political thought a label, I would call it pessimistic anarchistic quietism, or anarchist quietistic pessimism, or pessimistic quietist anarchism: anarchism because experience tells me that what is wrong with politics is power itself; quietism because I have my doubts about the will to set about changing the world, a will infected with the drive to power; and pessimism because I am skeptical that, in a fundamental way, things can be changed”.

I nearly ended the blog there, but would like to comment on anarchy. Like Coetzee, I don’t think the will can change the world for the better, because the underlying motives and sheer, imperfectible humanity of the will are questionable. (Clinton recently published a book called Giving, exhorting us all to be givers, not takers, but will not readily disclose the larger sums of money his foundation receives.)

But I think anarchy, without human aid, will have its way eventually. Books like Thom Hartmann’s The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, which examines how we have utterly raped our world, was profoundly depressing. The depression I felt, depression clinically understood to be unresolved anger, lay deeper than mere ego. (Ego here is defined as Wordsworth’s “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers”, our self-centered clutching at material stuff as if stuff has any intrinsic meaning.)

The “green” of money and the “green” of mother nature are finally being publicly acknowledged as contingent on each other, the former the parasite, the latter the grieving and increasingly angry host. Oh that anger is going to be vented thoroughly, sooner or later.

We are probably in for a cataclysm of global proportions, a combination of the effects of global pollution, the financial crises and more and more war. Coetzee’s doubted “will” is not needed; it will just happen, in spite of and because of human agency. The human race left in the aftermath will hopefully have learned a valuable, humbling lesson.

Just preferably not in my lifetime! I look forward to seeing my Chookie chopping carrots for the evening meal in that little cottage in Auckland, New Zealand, while I work on the next book, talk about the children we taught that day, whose lives we hopefully will continue to contribute to for a very long time.

Shucks, Rod, when are you going to write a funny blog again?

When I can figure out how to put the following lines in a blog that makes them sound witty: “It is no longer important whether we will go out with a bang or a whimper. It is only important that there is someone left who can hear, or understand, the import of those sounds”.