The System is LeakingListen
There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza
There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole
So fix it dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry
So fix it dear Henry, dear Henry, fix it
— Traditional nursery rhyme
Something is broken and the only way to mend the broken thing is with the broken thing itself, a dilemma that the song doesn't resolve, leaving us instead with a deadlock. Henry needs a bucket to carry water to wet the stone to sharpen the knife to cut the straw to mend the hole in the bucket. But the bucket has a hole.
Traditionally Henry is portrayed as a simpleton, Liza as the smart, practical one, but in the rendition recorded by Harry Belafonte and Odetta in 1960* you can hear more nuance. Liza, like many a modern day manager, knows exactly what must be done to address the immediate problem, yet is unable to view the bigger picture, and understand the impact of her locally-optimised decisions. Henry seems unconvinced by the path she is taking, responding with uncertainty, but also with an edge of wry humour. Belafonte's Henry has an air of the wise fool about him, letting Liza's ideas run their course, but only so the innate absurdity may reveal itself.
Something is broken and the only way to mend the broken thing is with the broken thing itself. There's a hole in the system dear governments, dear governments; there's a hole in the system dear rulers, a hole. The capitalist patriarchy† is leaking money, and confidence, and the only tool we have to fix it is... the capitalist patriarchy. Here's a couple of examples of how this is being applied.
1. War: the war metaphor is deeply ingrained in our psyche. We hear talk of "fighting" the virus, "battling" it, not letting it "win". We hear talk of science and medicine as "weapons", even worse, compliance to lockdown, to doing as we're told is considered our "best weapon" to win this "war". Redemptive violence is the patriarchy's answer to anything that doesn't comply with the patriarchy. More recently, not satisfied with conquering nations and killing or imprisoning dissidents we have wars on such vague nominalisations as Drugs and Terrorism, and now on some floating strands of RNA, as if our agression will bash the virus into compliance. War, our default response, creating the illusion that we are doing something.
2. Appropriation: capitalism has a long history of propping itself up through the blatant appropriation of land and chattels from the peasant classes. In our times such state-supported theft is more subtle. In addition to our less-than-equitable income tax system, cash is extracted from the proletariat through such means as the national lottery, interest on loans (including mortgages), the gambling industry, tobacco tax, VAT, Christmas, disaster funds and other charity appeals. It is this last method of extraction that is being especially utilised at the moment, a cynical tugging at our heartstrings some are referring to as the "spirit of Dunkirk" tax. People of the UK are being tricked into thinking that "our wonderful NHS" is a charity, and thus easily rallied into parting with their money to support it. But the NHS is not a charity. It is a national institution intended to be fully funded by our tax money‡. NHS funding has been slowly eroded over the past decade, and The Duke of Westminster's generous (sic) NHS donation of £12.5 million becomes a mockery when we realise it represents just 0.1% of his inherited wealth. A fairer tax system would have deprived the duke of something closer to £3 billion.
Our broken system cannot fix our broken system. Capitalism is leaking money, which means there's no money to fix capitalism. But worse than that, the hole in the capitalist patriarchy is leaking confidence, hope, security, autonomy, agency, peace of mind, and mental health. Maybe we can patch the money hole through the kinds of taxation mentioned above—the Liza solution. Fixing our deeper emotional needs won't be so easy. Lockdown may save our physical beings, but it is slowly eroding our spirits. We need to watch for that.
* A Hole in the bucket by Harry Belafonte and Odetta. You may also enjoy
There's a hole in my budget a political satire recorded in 1974 by Flanders and Swann
† I use this term as shorthand for "neo-colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy", a cuttingly astute phrase coined by bell hooks, which first appeared in her book We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, 2003.
‡ Giving is good, but we should never forget that the NHS is not a charity by David Ainsworth, 22/04/2020
27 April 2020