Dissent

It was remarkable how quickly the ripples of dissent over last weeks election result abated. Within one day, one of my Facebook friends was commenting that the 'dust had settled', several others were clearly exasperated by my continual re-posting of provocative posts and were in the mood to get on with 'business as usual'. I found myself getting physically sick. I've noticed this before; it is clearly my psychological defence mechanism, and I have only just recovered from this latest bout to sit here and face the music.
Social media has been careful to build in dissent as an impossibility, but aren't grumpiness and dissent necessarily to be accommodated, even enjoyed? The alternative is to live in some kind of Disneyland, which, strangely, is what my local, lovingly previously referred to in this blog as The Trench of Despair turned in to this weekend. It was unfortunate the election coincided with the VE day celebrations; the place was suddenly playing forties tunes and festooned with bunting. The management even wanted staff to wear fancy dress. The ensemble looked like a UKIP after party. Nigel Farage might as well have been booked for lunch. This, within one of our more spectacular representations of 'defurbishment', ultrashabby chic, or junk shop austerity (why people like this look I have no idea, to my mind it's rather an import from Eastern Europe post 1989, when the cool bars in the old east were old fruit and vegetable shops, until the tactic caught on in Shoreditch).
Talking of the Soviet era, I heard nothing of allied rather then British victory; saw no red flags, heard no Red Army Choir, no recognition that victory over the Nazis was originally an overwhelmingly Soviet affair.
Perhaps we have become witless too, as well as Tory, but it all fits, since the reason swathes of people voted conservative at the last minute was fear, fear of jobs, mortgages and debt. It represented the crudest survival of the fittest mechanism; save yourselves! So expect more of Disneyland, for it represents an architecture of re-assurance; it's cause and effect.