Authors: Matthew Formby
The attitude of women struck Luke as quite peculiarly hypocritical. He would notice most ladies seeing him drink on the street would look at him like a bug they would like to crush; but most of them would be binge drinking in large groups at the weekends and on hen parties. In a world that was becoming increasingly reliant on social skills, a lot of men were left behind and felt powerless. In the services industry, which was the only sector of the economy that was growing in the country, women were generally better at the job since they were natural communicators. They therefore had plenty of work. But with the decline of manufacturing, trade work and agriculture, Luke was just one of many men who seemed to have lost their place in society.
Luke could remember a time he had been waiting at a bus stop when a wheelchair user was too. She was a young woman and Luke noticed how she made very little eye contact with anybody and appeared very wary. Her alertness was not conceited or vain - by any keen observer's eyes she was an honest and good woman who no doubt had faced an undue amount of harassment and prejudice. Luke wished to speak to her but did not trust his social skills, he would probably not come across well. It left Luke feeling hollow that he could come across someone who he might have had a scintillating conversation with, if not for the constraints of his Asperger's syndrome. Madness must be when people resigned themselves to having those never experienced conversations. Unable to cope with the lack of what they had, an imaginary version was created in their head. In a way, it made sense. Life itself was barely credible. Why were people capable of so much, yet so often achieved so little?
"What could I talk about with her?" said Luke to himself quietly. Whenever he considered approaching someone, he prepared a conversation. He could mention the accessibility of buildings. When he was part of a drama group of young disabled people for a year he learned a lot about access issues. He had found out things he never would have imagined - mainly that disability was a social construct. In layman's terms, that meant people were more disabled by society's attitude to their impairment than the impairment itself. When staff refused to make buildings accessible or would not provide menus or information in large print, their unhelpful attitude was what was disabling people. At length, Luke resolved not to talk to the young woman. She did not seem to want anyone to anyway; he continued to mull over thoughts about disability in his head.
Why were there were so many architects nowadays that designed all manner of flashy and creative buildings while neglecting accessibility? True, many modern buildings were better than older ones - but even now builders were constructing houses and workplaces that had steps and no ramp. There were homes being constructed that had bathrooms with no windows - an absolute necessity for clearing out the odour of excrement. Architecture could affect people beyond accessibility. Something that Luke firmly believed was that it was worthwhile for buildings to be aesthetically pleasing, as well as functional. In the Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian eras that had been taken into consideration more. The large and tall sliding sash windows of those periods allowed a lot of light into rooms and was both attractive and useful.
Luke did not think all buildings should be built like that: that would be stagnant and conformist. He did, however, take issue with buildings that were being built with small windows and in unique but ultimately unsightly shapes. Sometimes even the materials used were hideous, never mind the design. A final pet peeve of Luke's was there was not enough sound insulation in a lot of buildings. It was useful to be able to hear your neighbours to know they existed - and if the occasion ever arose, to be able to hear their cries for help - yet in his own apartment, he could hear his neighbour Pete coughing or even murmuring to his girlfriend sometimes. Luke had for a while been very interested in architecture, even tweeting an occasional message to a couple of high profile architects who were on programmes on the television. They never replied, though, and as no one else seemed interested in his opinions Luke lost interest too.
XLVI
There was another reason Luke drank - to feel more boisterous and fun around people having a good time. Whether one lives in a hamlet or a metropolis people always like entertainment. Nobody is keen on a spoilsport or a misery guts, so they say, and Luke did not want to let other people down. He felt it was unfair how people could judge him as self-centred for drinking. At times he did it only with other people's interests in mind. For few people like a damp squib. Especially in Woecaster, that was true: there were so many activities going on - parades, fairgrounds setting up their stalls, magicians, street dancers and busking musicians.
Luke was unable to stand in front of a performer for long. He sometimes wanted to watch but unless there were about fifteen other people already in the audience he was too shy. But was it because he was self-conscious? Or because social skills among young people in general were in decline? With so many hours of their childhoods now spent on computers, in front of TVs and with personal music players, it was understandable they had never learned the art of conversation. Furthermore, there were more people living alone now than at any point in history. A further difficulty arose in the variety of tastes people had. There were hundreds of musical genres and no one could be expected to know or appreciate all of them. It had all been so much simpler back in Tess D'urberville's day. A classical guitarist here; a harpist, church organist or village choir there. People knew where they stood.
It was upsetting that so many talented people went unnoticed and received so few donations but then in this age of excess, people did not always have the time for strangers. Luke's former social worker, Barbuckle, had often shared that pearl of wisdom with him.
Fears of breaking his police warning haunted Luke. Now that he had been dealt with like a criminal, he felt his life had utterly changed. Once the police had someone on their radar, they kept tabs on them. Luke could not contact Jolly and he had been told not to write anything about her on Twitter, Facebook and other websites - nor even to allude to her. Additionally because of previous instances of public drunkenness in which he had upset people with swearing or shouting, he was not to do anything that would cause feelings of harassment, alarm or offence to anyone. All of this was written down in an acceptable behaviour contract. If a person broke the terms of an acceptable behaviour contract, the police could take them to court and apply for an anti-social behaviour order. If an order was granted and then broken, a prison sentence could be given.
Bearing this in mind, Luke felt sick with worry. He fretted about what he could and could not do terribly and he felt soon he could get in trouble for anything, even merely thinking something. Would there soon be thought crimes just as George Orwell had predicted? With recent advances in computer generated images - as are evident in the string of successful films using them lately - Luke could imagine a time when a person could be made to appear to have done something they had not. Computer whiz kids could potentially create a scene that looked like a surveillance camera recording of someone committing a crime - and Luke had even read some hackers now were able to break into surveillance camera recorders and switch the video footage they recorded.
Surveillance had grown over the years and was now being carried out on millions of people by government agencies through their internet and phones. It would not be difficult to frame someone by hacking their computer - and planting false evidence on it, even child pornography. Recent news articles revealed some hackers could allegedly intercept emails after they were sent; and before the email would reach its target it could be altered to plant something incriminating and sinister in it. Manipulating a person's recorded calls with technology might be another option. But supposing such options were not possible or unlikely, it was still easy to get dirt on anyone; nobody was an angel, except the occasional freak of nature. Governments and large technology corporations were both liable to abuse their wealth and power: and each had a frightening amount of information, more than anyone ever before, to make use of. It could be beyond totalitarian madness - far further than George Orwell's 1984 or what had happened in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. It was already known that on occasions police had framed innocent people. Sometimes people's sentences were overthrown on appeal after years of harsh imprisonment, of being stigmatised as guilty.
Now that the internet and computers were integral to people's lives, the potential for miscarriages of injustice was far greater. One had to wonder if bugs in operating systems were not sometimes developed on purpose. They could be there to allow security services and corrupt corporations to easily hack into a person's computer. That the bugs were found was a testament to how many virtuous hackers out there were determined to take on the mighty, po-faced Goliaths. But the sad thing was so many people swallowed lies made about suspects without a second thought. Many people were obsessed with crime. There was an endless amount of TV shows about it - Law and Order, CSI, Without a Trace and Wallander. Reality TV shows that featured police always portrayed them in a flattering light; they were shown as the brave officers bringing reckless drivers, prostitutes and drug dealers to justice. Much was made of the weapon stashes found in the suspects' properties. But of course the shows never featured any of the at hundreds, even thousands, of recorded videos of police brutality. They never showed officers arresting the wrong people or turning up half an hour late, which as anybody knew was more common than acts of heroism.
On reflection it had occurred to Luke, the police would find it easiest among any organisation in the world to deal drugs. They were privileged to have private spaces and confidentiality protecting knowledge of what was in them - police commissioned weapons; but weapons retrieved and kept from criminals too, not to mention the drug booty confiscated. Since police were legally allowed to carry weapons and it could be expected they would have drugs on their person - for they often arrested drug dealers, did they not? - it would be hard to prove any dealt drugs. Seeing as how it was the police themselves who investigated any alleged crimes, if someone reported a corrupt officer dealing drugs, supposing the entire police force was corrupt - which is not unreasonable, given what has recently come out about how police collectively behaved following the Hillsborough tragedy - then any evidence that would indict an officer could easily be destroyed.
Secret societies like the CIA, NSA, FBI, MI6 and MI5 had even more opportunity - their actions were almost completely hidden due to their peculiar legal status of existing almost outside the law. Many people had evidence that suggested secret societies had dealt drugs for years to raise funds for their other activities. From that point of view, it seemed to Luke that all this surveillance that was ongoing and the attempt to make the public obsessed with terrorism and petty criminals was in fact a front to protect the most powerful people in the world. So long as people believed organisations like the CIA, FBI and NSA were needed, people could be killed by them - and that left the secret organisations in the position of power, which was probably what they wanted.
Politicians and businesspeople could come and go in the ebb and flow of fortune - it meant nothing to them, as long as they were the puppetmasters and called the shots. Yet even when they were found out and investigated it still may not deter them; many of the big players inside secret agencies would go on to other places. They could wield just as much power in a large private corporation; it did not matter to them as long as they retained their power. A shadow government existed within the United States government that wielded influence over the whole world. Who it consisted of was a mystery yet it was obviously people that were wealthy. In simple terms it was nothing less than the capitalist inevitability of capital accumulating in fewer hands as time progressed. Rather than producing the best world possible it had produced a cynical, divided one but denial was the rule of the day. Every organisation - tax agencies, schools, churches, spying agencies, multi-national corporations, prisons, charities, hospitals, police - when accused of wrongdoing conducted investigations and found no evidence of them; to deny everything was the answer of the powerful.
Laws were drafted by governments that were too complicated and long for citizens to scrutinize; among the measures inside were provisions to secretly try people with little to no evidence. Secret courts were used. And as soon as this began authoritarian tyranny had began its rise. To succeed it required only that people fought the system within its own boundaries - for no matter how hard they would try, they could never win should they play by the rules. The rules had been set up to cheat ordinary citizens by deception, hiding the truth and denying everything, while rampant corruption was supported by intrusive surveillance watching anyone who dared challenge the terrorizing state. The government agencies and the large corporations that were in league with them were building a large database of information about people - every phone call they made, every credit card transaction - and this was creating a power base. It reminded Luke of something he had read by the philosopher Michel Foucault They were taking the concept of his panopticon of power to a whole new level: within their system all information about everyone was accessible to them but to everyone outside information it was just business as usual, as though all that advancement in knowledge did not exist. It ensured the gulf between the haves and have nots could only grow larger. Where did this fit in with the supposed foundation of capitalist societies? The idea of free competition?
Many of the secret agencies were located in fortified military bases away from public scrutiny and it was probably the case that the military themselves were involved in espionage - certainly there was the DIA, the defence intelligence agency, but Luke would not have been surprised if it extended beyond them; one of the first casualties of the use of military force was the truth. When a person was shot by police it often received little investigation; for it would usually be assumed the deaths had been deserved. A death of someone who came into contact with a secret service agent was even less open to scrutiny. The argument people swallowed was that since very few people were followed by the secret societies, they must be likely to be guilty of a serious crime - and surely someone on the inside would blow the whistle if the organisations were behaving unethically. Luke did not feel confident they could be trusted so much. Even whistle-blowers in hospitals and small businesses had false charges placed on them and often lost their jobs and reputations. To expect people in such well paid and shadowy organisations to be any different was stupid.