the house by the sea pt. 9: whose fault is it?

Blame flowed like breaking waves along the shoreline, and become a national responsibility, a prerequisite to the survival of our patriotic spirit. It was the one thing as British we felt qualified for, and long-held prejudices barely contained beneath superficially progressive politics quickly swelled to the surface in public displays of symbolic otherness. They blamed the scientists, whose calculated and arrogant meddling was inevitably bound to great pain and loss when the progress of knowledge and intellect had reached their limits, for it is congenitally beyond all species to really understand themselves; this new prayer of the dumb and the afraid, this idiot prayer: please protect us from this wider contextual understanding and awareness and the proven benefits of the scientific method and please let the safety of ignorance prevail. They blamed the vocal atheists, whose spiritual void, they said, went hand-in-hand with cannibalism and bodily decomposition, and the private atheists for the same. They blamed the Catholics, whose most sacred beliefs seemed weirdly to mirror the facts of the problem: their fetishisation of the flesh, of consuming the flesh, bodies obscenely corporeal and yet supernatural, the ransacked temple, the decaying waste products of a soul’s altogether brighter journey. The response of organised religion to the problem was confused, distraught. Eternal life had became a real threat and not a vague hope, and the fact of its physicality called for the kind of urgent reappraisal with which no religious scripture is prepared to deal. Christian tears fell silent among the stammered news reports as millennia of guilt overwhelmed their faith. They prayed for it, here it was. They blamed promiscuity and the deteriorating morals of a corrupt society; they blamed sexual deviance, alcohol consumption, television, fast food. They blamed career women, unmarried women, childless women, women who drank on Friday nights or wore short skirts out or admitted to expecting more out of life than their mother’s before them. They blamed open homosexuality as being at the very heart of the rotten core of modernity which if practised at all should always be both secret and aggressive and fuelled by self-loathing. They blamed the elderly for refusing to give up. They blamed socialists, whose very notion of utopia they believed in stupidity to be synonymous with the relentless mass-mindedness of the problem. They blamed children for the pointlessness of their youth, for their lack of contribution, for their weakness, their dependence, and they blamed students for the kind of constant whimpering dissatisfaction that they assumed would make something like the problem happen. They blamed immigrants for not this alone but for all the big viruses, for bringing them here, for the primitive acts that mutated them into being. They blanket-blamed the arts – worthless though they thought them to be – that wrote these zombies into our popular consciousness, blamed the crumbling boundaries between our cinema screens and our city streets, said this would never have happened without artistic precedent. They blamed tirelessly. Everyone a cunt and everyone to blame. The British way. Trust absolutely nobody. Doubt any and all difference. Pockets of violence erupted among the uninfected, all taut with distrust and prejudice and media endorsed – expected – xenophobia. Paranoia ground out rationality. They were easily provoked into hatred and urged to stamp out diversity, a necessary evil to contain the problem. Not government sanctioned but the authorities turned a blind eye. The lynched swung rhythmic in the twilight like shared memories. The living left death in their wake like the problem they killed for. The problem grew with the dead, hatred and fracture opened the doors to it. Within hours they turned on each other. Everything endlessly lost.