Dublin Opinion

In the depths of an excellent review of Gordon Burn’s Born Yesterday: The News As A Novel Mark of K-punk, having already suggested how the political existence of Gordon Brown and modern political life have been anticipated by Philip K. Dick, supplies this quote from John Newsinger’s Brown’s Journey from Reformism to Neoliberalism:

Brown told the Confederation of British Industry conference that “business is in my blood”. His mother had been a company director and “I was brought up in an atmosphere where I knew exactly what was happening as far as business was concerned”. He was, indeed he had always been, one of them. The only problem is that it was not true. As his mother subsequently admitted, she would never have called herself “a business woman”: she had only ever done some “light administrative duties” for “a small family firm” and had given up the job when she married, three years before young Gordon was even born. While there have been Labour politicians who have tried to invent working class backgrounds for themselves before, Brown is the first to try and invent a capitalist background.

Ha! We will remember your formative years for you wholesale, Mr. Brown.

I’ve been a fan of Dick ever since I read Conor’s copy of Valis, but I’ve only ever read four or five of his books. Typically, Mark makes the connection between the political bubble that is Gordon Brown’s world and a Dick novel I’ve yet to read, The Simulacra.

Gordon Brown’s appearance on American Idol a couple of weeks ago brings us ever closer to the situation described in Philip K Dick’s The Simulacra, in which advancement into the elite is achieved through talent shows held in the White House. It increasingly seems as if Dick did not so much predict the future as dream it in advance. The world of The Simulacra - in which politics has merged with talent competitions, in which drugs are the mandatory treatment for mental illness (the novel begins with the outlawing of psychoanalysis), and in which affective-telepathic aliens called papula are put in the service of salesmen of every type to directly manipulate the emotions of customers – looks eerily like our world, subjected to oneiric distortion, displacement and condensation.

Burns apparently makes a passing reference to Philip K Dick while discussing how Kate McCann’s demeanor implicated her in the disappearance of her daughter. Because she appeared so cool and controlled, and kept herself neat and tidy it was imagined that she lacked empathy, that quality that makes us human. As any reader of Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep knows, androids don’t do empathy. Kate was well turned out at every press conference (rather than being a miserable, sobbing heap) therefore she’s a robot.

I didn’t hear Nuala O’Faolain’s interview with Marian Finucane but reading the Susan McKay account in the latest edition of Village magazine it seems shocking how she was told she had cancer.

According to McKay she went to the New York hospital alone, not expecting bad news. Sitting in the waiting area a doctor breezed by her and said she had two brain tumours. A little while later he passed by again, mentioning that she had two in her lungs as well. I guess he was a robot too.

In the case of Gordon Brown however, it is not that he lacks empathy, so much as he seems incapable of eliciting any. The general public simply can’t warm to him, with some going as far as suggesting that he’s autistic.

This concentration on political personalities is a bit sickening really, and the thinking underlying Born Yesterday is old news anyway:

Dick’s fleeting appearance in Born Yesterday belies a deeper affinity between Burn’s methodology and Dick’s preoccupations. Born Yesterday had been framed in advance by Guardianistas as a commentary on the replacement of news with entertainment; very old news indeed to a reader of Dick or Baudrillard.

Great, another book I don’t have to bother reading.