Some phrases have stayed imbedded in the deepest recesses of my mind. In the cerebral treacle through which all my thoughts poodle, one phrase repeatedly summons me. "Got to find a way to keep on keeping on". Along with "my shutters are down, if at first you don’t succeed lower your standards", the survivalist instinct of the trucking cliche has become something of a mantra for me. At times of stress, despondency and fatalistic gloom, repeated mumbling swells the ego and spirits.

Sifting through my scattered memories I think I can trace its first usage to Margaret Thatcher’s reign of despotic terror. Having been sculpted, battered and poorly educated, under the milk snatchers strangulation of Britannia, my entire consciousness was often consumed with the wish to see her termination (political or organic, I cared not). I was intent to stand over her grave and make sure she was dead, although I can’t help feeling there would have been a queue. After all I wasn’t alone in sharing such contempt. Feelings of disgust, bile and naked hostility to the coiffeured monarch of cruel Britannia was the very force which guaranteed bitter communality. Today it’s perverse to think of people being brought together almost solely by hate. Although perhaps not as perverse as finding yourself nostalgically lamenting the loss of these good old days, when it was easy to locate your personal demon.

Whatever. When it wasn’t hate and revulsion, it was indefatigable stoicism. Like athletes on the final lap when the engines gone, or football players in the last minute of extra time, anyone and everyone with a will and hope for something better, probably found themselves mumbling the mantra "got to keep on keeping on" . If I can just keep going till the iron lady rusts and crumbles, everything will be all right. When feeling sufficiently stoic, resolved and angry, this meant seeing it out on home turf. But more often than not it meant entertaining thoughts of escape, or tactical retreat (brave men run in my family).

Living under the apocalyptic cloud of Thatcherism (not to mention Ronnie Raygun) it was often difficult not to entertain thoughts of escapist release. It’s a fairly terribly indictment of being reared on this lop sided isle, that I didn’t know anybody who was resolutely committed to staying here. In fact an admission of enjoying living in Britain often came across as proof of imbecility or a suspiciously ripe bank account. I suspect applications for emigration reached an all time high during this period. Certainly that epoch witnessed one of the biggest ever mass exodus from this country of what we kindly refer to as our intellectual community.

Then, damp eyed she disappeared, and we entered the winding down period. The Major years filled everyone with inertia. Back to basics came over more as buggered for ideas. Living under the Major, was somewhat akin to what Tom Nairn described as living inside a cadaver . I think it was around this time in the early 90’s that the new widespread sensation of the political system, and by implication the social order, drifting away from the traditional systems of control, began to take seed. As I said before in the 80’s it was easy to identify the enemy. It was relatively easy to locate the source of the sickness. But as time trundled onwards, such clarity became clouded. Finding the enemy became more difficult. The enemy went underground, and with it the apparent ability to mobilize opposition. Political nihilism became the new credo.

Of course when Blair was elected, some deluded optimists pinned their hopes of a new dawn on the equally ridiculous coiffeured boy wonder. Proudly proclaiming that his presidency would "have a thousand days to prepare for a thousand years", the cream curdled as fast as his hair wilted. Fairly quickly it became apparent that the difference between Labour and the Conservatives was an inch, and contrary to pragmatist spin-doctors, this inch wasn’t worth having. The boulder of apathy and disillusionment that had started to roll under the previous regimes gathered more and more momentum. As the scourge of this upstart monarch’s court Nick Cohn remarked, voters and citizens of our supposed corporate isle of cool, actually found themselves having as much "freedom as a shopaholic in an Albanian supermarket" .

As a consequence previously unmatched levels of skepticism and cynicism, confusion and bitter resentment have opened up a massive void at the heart of western democracy. Voter apathy across Europe and the States has rocketed. Today what are routinely regarded as legitimate doubts about the operations of government, would have, as little as twenty years ago been regarded as extreme instances of anarchy.
In America, Eisenhower’s 1960’s prophetic speech about the threat of the military-industrial complex (with the intelligence agencies in cahoots) running amok outside of democratic control, has for many come true. The cumulative effect of sequential, regular revelations about the secrecy and corruption at the heart of the American dream has resulted in a perception that rather than government being the servant of the people for the people it is in actuality involved in a conspiracy against its citizens. The litany of reasons for this distrust is apparently endless. Firstly the known and not so well known assassinations. The Kennedy’s brothers, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, many of the black panthers leadership, the shooting of Governor George Wallace in the 1968 presidential campaign when he looked set to defeat Trick Dicky Nixon… Then the equally damaging revelations of Watergate, the Iran Contra debacle, not to mention America and Britains arming of Sadam Hussein, and their ruthless betrayal of the Kurds. As I said the list is endless (American foreign policy is worthy of a thousand essays). The material for feeding the sense of power outside of democratic control is immense. For example over four hundred books exist on the Kennedy assassination.

The void created by the disillusionment with the authority of the state has been filled with conspiracy theories and theories of conspiracy. Differentiating between the two articulations of distrust is important. Conspiracy theories are often more extreme, fanciful and exotic in their search for logic and explanations. For example in the states Lyndon LaRouch has offered the entertaining mega conspiracy explanation that America’s slide into social apocalypse is the result of continued British control of America (apparently the war of independence was a ruse), with supreme power still being exercised by our dear old queen. According to LaRouch, misery guts runs the worlds drug trafficking and was directly responsible for the Kennedy assassination (on reflection….). This variant of paranoia is of course patently rubbish, and it’s easy to dismiss such absurd remarks as typically American (don’t forget about David Icke and the lizard conspiracy mind). However the ridiculous notion of the queen as the uber drugs baron of an international crack corporation shouldn’t be allowed to rubbish the more credible theories of conspiracy. For while mega conspiracy theories reduce the complexity of political and social life to a single line, theories of conspiracy actually offer infinitely more complex versions of why we are in the state we’re in. It’s also worth considering that the extreme mega conspiracies might themselves be the work of black propagandists! Oh dear, in such a hall of mirrors, with truth an apparently malleable commodity, is it any wonder it’s so difficult to keep on keepin’ on?

In Britain talk of theories of conspiracy is routinely wavered away by the dominant political class as crackpot nonsense. However as numerous authors have shown Britain’s secrets are no less disturbing than those of America. Special Branch’s operations in Northern Ireland, specifically the revelations of their involvement in aiding Loyalist gunmen in the political assassination of prominent republicans, and MI5’s staggering role in the states destruction of the trade union movement , specifically during the miners strike, are just two of the more well known examples.
Until fairly recently it was common to view the impact of all these theories of conspiracy has having little effect other than raising basic core levels of suspicion and cynicism. In the states such antipathy to the institutions of power has prompted largely reactionary right wing movements. Perverse amalgamations of religious fervor and social isolationism have spread. For example the various incarnations of preacher militia at war with the machine of state; Waco being most extreme example of this particularly phenomena.

However more and more the routine acceptance of the corruption and failure of democratic systems has found people searching for new means of organisation and resistance, which avoid the extremeness of these movements, while retaining the anger and desire for change. Although the levels and nature of resistance to the McDonaldisation of contemporary life have perhaps been overblown, they are indicative of a burgeoning desire for transformation. A search for alternative means of socio-political organisation While the form of these movements is as diverse as the opinions voiced, the one unifying feature is the search for strategies which satisfy the need to "keep on keepin’ on".

J0hn Beagles 2002.