Death by Clickbait (extract)
Extract from an essay about the crumbling glory of the UK. Death by Clickbait is part of an upcoming collection of essays examining why young people are turning to the far right.
The Queen dies and the economy collapses (unrelated). The Queen dies, no one knows why (just old?). The Queen dies and all the world leaders and royalty show up for the funeral. Biden is seated in the 14th row, behind the Prince of Luxemburg and all the other minor royals of the entire world. Macron releases a statement that “she was not just the Queen she was everyone’s Queen” – the man representing a country that sent their royalty to the guillotine and didn’t look back at the heads that rolled. Putin was snubbed from the invite list, which he found “profoundly immoral.” The Queen dies and my mother calls me crying, informing me it is the day of the funeral, so I pull up the pictures, click-baited by Huffington Post “the most emotional moments of the funeral are of the animals” and that was my entry into a hole where I was admiring black net fascinators, surprised but not surprised by those who lined up for 24 hours to see the coffin. Disgusted that the paedo, crooked old Andrew, was given attention by the cameras as he kneeled down with a well-arranged bouquet of tears. Feeling sorry for the teary-eyed woman in a crumpled anorak photographed holding up a picture of the Queen in her prime with “my Queen” written in running red marker pen.
The Queen died and out of respect, the met office stopped reporting the weather, rationing the nation to once per day. The startup my friend works at initiated a minute's silence, and his boss made it a “well-being issue”, offering people his ear if they needed someone to talk to. The Queen died and out of respect, an opportunity was spotted. Pretty much every company had a flash sale – 50% off laser hair removal, to honour our Queen. What a legacy. The day of the funeral was made a public holiday. Oncology operations were cancelled, sexual health clinics closed. Who knows what other people’s lives were terribly affected due not to the death of the Queen, not because she was gone, but by how the country handled it.
I saw many republicans set off by the Queen’s death. It was their queue to rant on Instagram stories about how awful the royal family are, how racist, colonialist, every “ist” that’s them. A problematic bunch of fuckwits, still sitting on the thrown. This shows how little the death of the Queen actually changes, it reveals not who the country is run by, but what it runs on, and how those opposed to it put their opinions in Instagram stories so their friends can ‘heart’ them and make them feel noble and smart and, well, just, like, so right.
I was a little disturbed by the whole thing. The last 6 years have been like watching the deterioration of a family member I am inextricably tied to, a deterioration into full-blown mental collapse. Does anyone know the waiting list time for Bethlem Asylum? How does a whole country access the care it needs? The mental breakdown has been brewing like a tepid cuppa re-heated in the microwave over and over. “Ping.” Here it is, time to explode. The unhinging, born out of the collapse of the UK’s self-image, the picture of prestige and glory on a billboard, covered over by an ad for Iceland’s frozen meals, ad on top of ad, plastered and weathered by daily drizzle, graffitied with “cunts” – teenage boys tag their testosterone, and so the nation must swallow their pride and glory – for it’s already shat out.
My international friends were perplexed as to why the UK are so glum about the death of the Queen, and not the imminent threat of nuclear war. Because it’s easier to channel fear and anxiety into a gold-shrowded funeral you are not on the invite list for, to reach your hand out of the window and feel a few drops of rain on your fingers, rather than go out into the storm and soak yourself in calculations of how little you will be left with at the end of the month. How you will make choices, not between school trips and going out with your mates on Friday nights, but turning the heating on and filling the tank.
But it’s not just a matter of not wanting to face it. It’s also about the view granted to us, depending on which window we choose to peak out of.
What is going on out there? My bubble tells me nothing new, so I check the tabloids. I’m shocked to discover that the Daily Mail doesn’t even try to hide its incredibility – this national newspaper is laid out like a mad blog dug out of the 2010s bin with skitting out videos and a childish font.
I check the Daily Mail the week the pound has fallen to its historically lowest level against the US dollar. It didn’t bow down out of respect for the Queen this time, but because the newly in-office unelected Tory prime minister Liz Truss has implemented the tried, tested and failed theory of trickle-down economics – cutting taxes of the rich so much that even the rich freaked out. The markets destabilized, and any of the stragglers in suits still on their knees in the dusty, deserted pews of the UK Capitalist Church, quickly made a run for it just after slipping a fiver from the collection being passed around, but before having to repent for it with a series of muffled Hail Margarets.
What’s the Daily Mail got to say about it? Did it pap the geezers fleeing the pews? Scream “you wankers! We’re gonna suffer for this! You criminals! How will I feed my kids?” No. The crisis was merely alluded to in a price comparison article – the cost of Tesco value Spaghetti in September 2021 compared to its cost in September 2022. No context, just the penny differences. Where were the judgements, the anger, the blame? Not there. All the emotional energy was concentrated in the top left-hand story – the one the eye naturally catches first. Not the economy, not the Queen. A story about a “beautiful 21-year-old woman crushed to death by a hotel wardrobe after she woke up in the middle of the night and mistook it for the toilet door”. My eye is distracted by a fast-flashing ad for Amazon’s Alexa in the bottom right corner. Before it induces a seizure, I click away and back to my safe space, the Guardian and its less intensive, yet still flashing, red blog contained in solid blue and white lines.
The front page of the Guardian depicts Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, the masterminds/ scapegoats tied to the mast of the sinking blue yacht. They have their heads bowed. Their step, posture, and loose grip on the papers and briefcase, all of it shakes with that fumbling around energy, all of it shakes with a despairing sigh. In this identity-obsessed moment of our time, what have my eyes been primed to notice? That a woman and a black man are at the helm. It’s a real shame or a deliberate tactic that they arrived there in such a moment, plopped into the middle of the mess, shown fumbling around as if they lost their glasses on the steps of number 10… but the camera is angled in such a way that we do not see the ropes that tie them there.