Lucy Mangan was on Radio 4 when I was driving home today. She writes things for the Guardian, usually accompanied like every serious writer these days by a picture of her in case the reader needs to know what she looks like. Like you do.
She was talking, somewhat tetchily I thought given she’d been given what used to be called the oxygen of publicity, indirectly about the collapse of the net book agreement some time ago, and the effect this had on big discounters like Amazon.com, bookshops and the High Street.
Long long ago before the internet was even a tiny electron in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye, booksellers all had an agreement. Books would cost the same whoever sold them. After a time, generally if they were crap, they’d be sold off cheap or find their way to the discount book shops, where you could buy those massive picture books called things like 100 Fighting Ducks Of The World.
Then in 1997, in one of those sterling Last Days In The Bunker acts of Conservative government or folly depending on your point of view, a court decided that the agreement that books should cost the same whoever sold them was against the public interest. And astonishingly, over 500 small booksellers went out of business while the biggest and deepest-pocketed sellers, the supermarkets and later the online traders did very nicely out of it thank-you very much, as nobody at all could have predicted.
So far so nothing to do with food. Enter Lucy Mangan. She didn’t mention the fact that Jordan’s books, the ones even she doesn’t claim to have read let alone written, might perhaps not have been elevated to the status of literature if anyone had been forced to go into a bookshop to buy them instead of dumping them into a supermarket trolley with their loo rolls. Hindered by not having her picture available on the radio Lucy chuntered off accurately enough about how people went into small shops to have a look in the book then if they liked it pissed off home to order it as cheap as they could find it and why wouldn’t they?
Leaving aside the obvious, that if they did that too often they wouldn’t be able to go and have a look in the bookshop because not even the supermarkets stay open by not selling things, Ms Mangan stretched the analogy. Times are hard, she said. It’s like farmers markets and that. We all know we should buy free-range organic chickens, but the other stuff’s cheaper. So sod them if five of them have to live in the same shoe-box. We’ve all got a right to two chickens for a fiver and if they don’t like it they should have evolved bigger and more vicious.
Actually, Lucy Mangan didn’t really say the last bit. But what she was doing was even more stupid, which isn’t something she obviously is unless Cambridge University has changed its admissions policy dramatically. Essentially the argument ran: A book is a book, if it’s got the same title and the same words in it then you might as well buy it from the person selling it cheapest.
Which is fairly obviously true if you’re just talking about buying it and not looking at whether you can actually leaf through the pages first when Amazon even let’s you do that a bit with some books on its website. Where that argument is so retarded it shouldn’t be let out on its own is when it’s stretched to food.
The two chickens for a fiver deal in the supermarket is not the same as two chickens at the farmer’s market. The supermarket ones won’t taste of much because they never developed any muscle tone because they never went outside. They might be bright yellow, but its more likely because they’ve been dyed than because they ate lots and lots of corn. And they will have lived in hell for the few weeks they shared the planet.
Still, it’s all the same, isn’t it? They’re only chickens. Just another commodity, the same as books or Coke-Cola or identical cars in different garages. Sorry, online car sales websites. Get it as cheap as you can. If the High Street is just a line of boarded-up windows and charity shops, it’s market forces, know what I mean? The recession and that. As Bruce Springsteen said, it’s on account of the economy. Nothing you can do about it. You worry too much, me old mate.
I’m probably getting old, but I remember when people writing in The Guardian didn’t have quite the same attitude. But that was back when Posy Simmonds’s Silent Three was cutting social commentary and this is a brave new commoditised world, where anything that stands in the way of consumption for its own end is just a tedious and old-fashioned irrelevance.
We’ve all been told this over and again for the past thirty years. Because it works. As Aldous Huxley said in Chapter One of the original Brave New World: ”At last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too – all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides – made-up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions. Suggestions from the State.”
Welcome. As Lorriane Chase, another 1980′s survivor currently up the Ant & Dec jungle used to say, nice ‘ere, innit?
