Evan Davis was shocked to hear,
during a Today feature on the perils of the current heatwave, that care homes for the elderly don’t have air conditioning. He must have led
a sheltered life. Or rather, an air-conditioned
life, a life programmed and mediated by career journalism, acted out in
conference rooms, studios, airport lounges and hospitality suites, the
frictionless non-places of global capitalism. Obviously this sticky issue never came up in those Oxford PPE seminars (although hothousing humans for profit must have been on the
curriculum in some form, surely). But he didn’t let the revelation put him off
his stride, and anyway the schedule had already moved on to some other
pressing topic, such as the royal carcass or the Olympic legacy.
Later, reflecting on this exchange in the seething oven of a warehouse
where we, the elderly-in-waiting, carried on our monotonous manual work while
upstairs the air-con irrigated the cool and spacious offices of the
mouse-clicking bosses (not so much a Dragon’s Den as a Vampire’s Attic), I
realised this summed up my impression of the interchangeable cast of
politicians, media professionals and business leaders who preside over our
overheated lives: an air-conditioned existence. They are cushioned by a mental, physical and financial zephyr which is taken
for granted even as it is denied both to those who most need it, and those
whose labour funds the refined atmosphere to which they have become accustomed.
The heat at the core of the economic
meltdown is purely symbolic; unlike the markets, the actual
temperature is carefully regulated. I couldn’t imagine the CEO of RBS
sweltering and glugging warm tap water as he fixed the figures for his
company’s privatisation dossier, any more than I could picture the Today
team propping open a fire exit as they got to grips with the latest episode in
the Euro debt saga. The so-called crisis has now reached such a plateau of
air-conditioned normality that every default or bailout seems only to constitute
an administrative adjustment which ensures that the presenters,
politicians and business leaders can carry on living in high-level comfort, while those
below them search ever more
desperately for rest and shade. Unless those media professionals work for a
Greek state broadcaster, that is, in which case the ideological
air-conditioning unit is broken beyond repair.
But
such tensions seem far away from the smoothly ventilated discourse of the BBC
media-industrial complex, even when it touches on those locations where its
correspondents might conceivably feel the heat. I recently watched an edition of Davis's business show The Bottom Line on the BBC
News channel [radio version available here], in which he hosted a breezy round table discussion
with a group of travel and tourism executives. The recorded show was overlaid
with a live news ticker at the foot of the screen which looped updates from
sites of geopolitical upheaval - Syria, Turkey, Egypt - while above the scrollbar these people
traded club-class corporate clichés, as if their entire shared worldview was
air-conditioned, mediated to the point of virtual reality.
The participants in these shows, however, are aware that in order to justify their indulgences they must as least appear to take account of those
economic factors which affect the rest of us. Whether dehydrating in a residential home
or taking on fluids in Costa Coffee, the ‘bottom line’ is no longer just a
matter for entrepreneurs but the Plimsoll line of the cruise liner Big Society on
which we are all supposedly sailing together. “People are re-prioritising their
discretionary spend”, one of the show’s guests euphemistically observed; but
the annual package holiday was not deemed to be under threat. On the contrary, the consensus in the studio was that even for those facing insecurity or redundancy, it was as inevitable and affordable as television or toothpaste. Another guest was a director of a Greek holiday
resort, and while he admitted that his domestic business had taken a hit, his
sales pitch betrayed not the slightest ripple of anxiety. Indeed, he painted
Greece as a popular destination offering exceptional value for money due to the
very crisis from which, he insisted, it was now recovering.
The
real and virtual occasionally overlapped: the execs acknowledged that
travel operators had to watch out for episodes of national unrest, as if
protests or coups were unexpected weather events, matters for insurance and
contingency planning. Whether it’s the Arab Spring or the ash cloud, the panel
agreed, people want peace of mind. They weren’t alluding to the minds of those
occupying Tahrir Square, although no doubt this has already been written into
the brochures as a tourist spectacle. The same cities whose mass protests
and violent suppressions bruised the news feeds were viewed here purely as products to be sold. An easyJet executive reported, “We were barely
affected by what’s going on.” UK travellers apparently keep on flying
regardless of political turbulence, protected by the sunscreen of capital.
These passing references between the lines of upbeat PR were uncanny, as if some background
disturbance had become momentarily audible before the mechanism corrected itself and
the glitch was forgotten again. As the credits rolled, guests and host stood up
and left the air-conditioned studio together, no doubt adjourning to an
air-conditioned bar where they would congratulate each other on their
performances, before each returned to their air-conditioned apartments for a night of
guilt-free, air-conditioned dreams.
