Citizen sane: observations of an angry older man

Tuesday February 26, 2008

I don’t want to be ruled by nannies, prigs and bullies, says Joe Jackson. Life is certain to be less fun.

As I write this, I’m busy promoting my new album Rain; sitting in hotel rooms or record company offices all day doing interviews and answering the same questions over and over again. It can be interesting, though, when it forces me to examine my own motivations in ways I never did while I was actually writing the songs. It’s as though the journalists hold up a mirror, and what I see in that mirror can be surprising. For one thing, you’re supposed to be an ‘angry young man’ at 20 and ‘mellow’ at 50, but I’m more angry and rebellious than ever. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t walk around with a black cloud over my head. I enjoy my life. But age and experience have provided me with more and more things to be angry about.

Take, for instance, the regular emails I get from a friend in New Orleans. It’s not so much the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina that boggles the mind, but the human incompetence, cynicism and corruption surrounding it. And of course the total breakdown of law and order, as a result of which a close friend of my friend was murdered in her own home. This last piece of news reached me as I was preparing for a show in Minneapolis. I went out for a walk, and saw a curious sight.

A major advertising campaign had been launched on bus shelters, promoting an imminent smoking ban. Real, three-dimensional radiation suits had been attached to the billboards, with captions to the effect that this was the only suitable attire for areas of high radioactivity … and smoky bars. When I got back to my dressing room, I remember punching the wall in sheer rage and frustration at the obscene amounts of money being thrown at campaigns of politically-correct fearmongering, and the obscene lack of response to genuine catastrophe.

Unquestioning

I didn’t write a song about this. I don’t think songs work very well as a political statements – or vice versa. On the other hand, my lyrics do reflect my view of the world, and doing interviews often forces me to explain them. A case in point is a song called Citizen Sane. This song says, more or less, that we’re all yearning for some kind of authority to tell us how to be sane citizens in a confusing world; but that the authorities all turn out to be corrupt or dishonest or incompetent. What puzzles some of my interviewers is that I target not just politicians and preachers but doctors, who currently enjoy the kind of unquestioning faith which in other times was commanded by kings, popes, or the KGB.

I should perhaps back up here a bit and explain that for the last five years, I’ve been researching the issue of smoking. Less important, perhaps, than what’s happening in New Orleans, or Iraq, but it’s what I speak out about (rather than write songs about) because it’s what I know most about. I’m convinced that the potential dangers of tobacco are currently greatly exagerrated, and in the case of ETS (environmental tobacco smoke) pretty much non-existent; and that the reasons for this have more to do with politics and profit than health.

If you really look at how the studies are done, what the statistics really mean, the conflicting factors and biases that are not taken into account, and so on, it’s simply impossible to conclude that ETS is anything to be concerned about. There is still not one proven, documented case of death; just computer projections based on dubious cherry-picked statistics. Plenty of people know all this, including antismokers. But the fearmongering continues because it works so well, and because there are too few people willing to challenge it. Health activists and lobbyists are like boxers who keep punching below the belt because the referee is always looking the other way.

Corrupt

This is a bigger issue than many people realise, because it’s part of a larger pattern. Public Health is becoming as corrupt as any authority becomes when it has tons of money and is not subject to scrutiny. And it increasingly has powers above and beyond the democratic process, to get legislation passed without any real debate. There are many issues raised, for instance, by smoking bans. Quite apart from the transparent phoneyness of ETS, there is the social impact, the economic impact, freedom of choice, property rights, tolerance, tradition, and the appropriate limits of government intervention in the social habits of adult citizens. Many people are affected, from publicans to, lest we forget, smokers, who comprise around a quarter of the population and whose completely legal pleasure contributes over £10 billion a year in taxes.

The government’s election manifesto promised to ban smoking only in places serving food, and 68% of Britons, according to the government’s own Office for National Statistics, were opposed to a total ban. But every one of these considerations was swept aside, and we got a ban anyway, because it was what health authorities wanted. Unelected, unaccountable bodies like the World Health Organisation are now dictating policy to governments across the globe. Yes, I know ‘World Health’ sounds like something no-one should be ‘against’. But this is an organisation which spends 76% of its budget on paying its employees and renting fancy offices in places like Geneva.

It’s not ‘anti-health’ to ask why, when millions of Third World children die every year simply because of lack of clean water, the WHO devotes so much of the remaining 24% to, say, road safety campaigns in African countries where hardly anyone has a car, or bullying French politicians into banning smoking in cafes – even though their own 10-year study failed to prove that ETS hurts anyone. And it’s not ‘anti-health’ to point out that ‘tobacco control’ soared to the top of the WHO’s agenda precisely after a major part of its funding was taken over by three of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies – companies which have already donated hundreds of millions of dollars to antismoking campaigns, and which have a clear vested interest in selling their own nicotine products to the world’s 1.2 billion smokers.

Social engineering

If you don’t care about tobacco, consider that there is absolutely no reason why, in the wake of their ‘success’ in fighting it, public health authorities – or any zealous windbag acting in the name of ‘health’ or ‘safety’ – should not go on to dictate and regulate every aspect of our lives. Already we’re being told that not only smokers, but people deemed to be overweight, or to drink too much, or to not exercise enough, will be denied medical treatment. Who’s next? People with AIDS? People who have rock-climbing accidents? Public health seems to have abdicated its true purpose – healing the sick – in favour of social engineering for everyone else.

This is a new and very worrying development, and it’s worrying, too, that it doesn’t provoke more outrage. Maybe an analogy will help: imagine that, through whatever shifts in the political and corporate climate, car mechanics become enormously powerful. They then decide that you should not be allowed to drive without a mechanic in the back seat nagging you at every turn. When you balk at that, they bombard you with horror stories and exagggerated statistics about car accidents (which wouldn’t, in fact, have to be anywhere near as exagerrated as those about ETS). Finally, the clincher: if you have an accident, no one will be there to help you.

Mean-spirited

This is the kind of thing that’s making me an Angry Older Man. Sure, I don’t like Bush either, but he’s an easy target. What I’ll keep saying, at least until more voices join in, is that I don’t want to live under a ‘medicocracy’ – a dictatorship of doctors – any more than a dictatorship of mechanics or plumbers. I want them to give me advice if I ask for it, and help me out if I get into trouble, not force me to live in a prescribed way.

I certainly don’t want to be ruled by the kind of nannies, prigs and bullies who abound in the antismoking movement. Even with the best of intentions, the health and safety brigade are often wrong, and only look at life from one angle – an angle which is increasingly mean-spirited, promoting paranoia, intolerance, and illusory concepts like ‘zero risk’. This is not the road to sane citizenship. It’s not even certain that life in a medicocracy will be healthier. But it’s certain to be less free and less fun.

Joe Jackson is a member of Forest’s Supporters Council. He is best known as a musician and writer with songs such as ‘Is She Really Going Out With Him?’, ‘It’s Different For Girls’ and ‘Jumpin’ Jive’. His new album Rain was released on January 29. He begins a world tour in Cardiff on Wednesday February 27.

Full tour dates:
www.joejackson.com