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Michael Moorcock in the belly of the beast (2000)

 This originally appeared in Hilary Wainwright's Red Pepper, an independent magazine of the green and radical left.

I live, as one editor said recently, in the belly of the beast. Pretty much under the X in Texas. It takes a long time to get from anywhere else to here, even if you're already in Texas. Willie Hague must have passed us on that peculiar whistle-stop tour of Republican strongholds he made a couple of months ago. Whose approval, or cash, was he looking for?

Our small town serves an agricultural county, which has a State forest and a State prison. We have a fine French-style courthouse and county jail. Some days, if 're lucky, you'll see a black cowboy swing off his Palomino, throw his reins over the hitching rail and with spurs jingling, chaps flapping, push through the doors of the Gin-U-Wine Oyster Bar to get himself a cool one with the boys.

On Fridays and Saturdays the Bar has live cowboy bands for dancing. At the Opera House along the street, they put on plays and musical shows. Texas is to music what Ireland is to poetry or Mississippi is to fiction. From Leadbelly to Janice Joplin and Hannibal Lukumbe, Buddy Holly to Willie Nelson, they just can't help producing what's best and seminal in popular music. And we have events at the local bookstore.

Our town is so naturally picturesque and mature for the region it seemed for a while that every hokey Hollywood movie was being made here (Home Fries, for instance). You couldn't enter the drug store without bumping into Denzil Washington helping Meg Ryan find the Tylenol. Or realising that it really was Robert Duval sipping a soda at the counter.

Thanks to sheer luck and a little good thinking, it's an unrestored, un-self-conscious, mostly un-buggered up characteristically Victorian Western town that's been here since before Texas was a Republic, let alone a State, and most of it never burned down, got torn up by tornadoes, razed by Comanches, economically carpet-bagged, or otherwise suffered the fates of most other towns of its size in these parts. No adobe, just white columns and wrap-around porches. More Old South than Wild West.

There are train tracks (and far too many damned lonesome whistles blowing for my peace and quiet) and poorer people live on one side while the graveyard, for obvious reasons, is slow to integrate. But it doesn't divide into simple black and white any more. Increasingly it can be seen in terms of class, which helps better identify the problem. Sometime, too, when the Christmas lights in houses on our side of town are blazing with enough power to run a small hospital and shacks on the other side of town don't even have electricity, you can't help getting depressed. This is a humane and tolerant community. Reckoned suspiciously liberal by some. But the area north of us was settled after 1848 by idealistic Germans and Czechs, Lutherans and liberal Catholics who didn't approve of slavery. In terms of race and gender our town council is about as representative as you can get. Gay couples join in regular community stuff and marriage between 'Anglo' and 'Latino' is nowadays commonplace throughout the area. There are even a few black and white marriages. Without knowing we'd done it, we elected the first Latino sheriff in the US (I found that out from The Guardian). We voted for him on his merits. Federal welfare agencies say we and one other nearby city are the two most generous, socially-progressive communities in the State. A town to be proud of. Americans at their best. Full of generous, practical, common sense.

I have great admiration and affection for the majority of my neighbours. Name a need and they'll spring to meet it. Give them a problem and they'll get together to solve it. It is a friendly, inclusive community. Nearby we have a huge, well-functioning anarchist commune, highly respected by co-operative local redneck farmers impressed by their efficient land management and self-discipline. There's also one of those militia communities out there somewhere. You see them clumping round the supermarket in camouflage suits stocking up for whatever disaster is next on the cards for the poor old white race. But they don't get any credence here and several of our most respected lawyers, doctors and public servants are black. Racism tends to be associated with elderly curmudgeons who still believe LBJ to have betrayed Texas to Boston. So, by and large, if you had to live in the beast's belly, you could be doing it in a lot worse spots.

On his recent compassion schmooze with Governor George Bush Jr, William Hague said he'd come to get ideas. He didn't come to see us or ask us for our ideas. But he did listen while George Bush made his 'nobody gets left behind' speech and was clearly impressed. This was rhetoric he could use at home.

Because Texas never had that many provisions for the poor and destitute at the best of times, we felt the effects of Clinton's celebrated welfare reforms pretty fast. The numbers of needy aren't going down. They're increasing. We're a comparatively wealthy county, but our resources are getting exhausted. More agencies are competing for the same funds. The need grows as the funds get harder to come by. Our local 'Food Pantry' – a volunteer agency with some small state funding, that gets basic foodstuffs like flour and oil to our growing numbers of destitute people (predominantly white) – was pushed beyond capacity after recent floods, so that the exemplary Family Crisis Centre (women's shelter) had to feed people from its own diminished supplies.

My doctor's totally committed to this community. She's like an AJ Cronin character, desperately trying to find ways of delivering decent healthcare and diets to the poor. Wondering how she'll get her children educated in a State whose chief religion is anti-intellectual (Bible Belt Baptist) like its political rhetoric (the aggressively philistine Phil Gramm). She steadfastly refuses to join an HMO. They keep putting her insurance up. The insurance companies own the HMOs. And an HMO delivers whatever quality of healthcare you can afford as a dear friend recently found to her cost. Our school isn't anything to be proud of. It's one of the few which took Coca Cola hand-outs in return for sticking their vending machines in the common rooms. And excluding all others. Almost all my skilled, self-employed friends can't afford medical insurance. The local supermarket sells self-sewing kits in case you cut yourself with your chainsaw. A friend of mine recently stitched himself up neatly. He proudly shows me the job. A barber-surgeon couldn't have done better . . .

Our amiable but less than eloquent Gov. Bush (whose comment on Hague was 'this guy's smart') recently did a TV commercial describing his aspirations for Texas education. Our goal must be to teach every child to read, he said. Texas has, I think, the world's twelfth largest economy, feasibly able to function as an independent state and the only one with a workable opt out clause. And it's amongst the worst educated in the union. Neighbours like Louisiana and Mississippi with equally bad records at least have the excuse of relative poverty and a dependence on gambling revenues for their school funding.

You don't need much education to get rich here. One of our boom businesses, apart from insurance and the domestic gun market, is private prisons. Inmates write to me. It's not profitable to grant parole. Without a scrap of hope, the prisoners go savagely crazy. The prison murder rate's increased. Everyone suffers. The old carrot and stick method of keeping control is now all stick. One correspondent, innocently caught up in an internal murder investigation, was made with other prisoners to kneel on corrugated tin for hours. As far as he knows this happens in all prisons. He routinely suffers similar treatment. The corrugated tin is pretty normal. So is the rape and torture of prisoners by prisoners. The guards are rarely brutes. The better people leave the underfunded service. This is modern, cruel, shameless America. The US would have to improve her record on human rights significantly if she wanted to join the European Union.

I was talking to a lady at the supermarket checkout the other day. We were comparing calluses. She didn't usually shovel horseshit for a living and I no longer got paid to play the guitar.

She was a nurse, taking a break to be with her 13-year-old and do a little riding (not a rich person's occupation in Texas where people have horses they're happy for you to exercise). She didn't nurse locally because of the pay she worked in Austin. I said how bad we thought the remaining local hospital was (we had five once). She grinned oddly. All the health professionals in this area have a pact: 'We look after one another rather than go to that hospital.'

I told the nurse how I'd taken my wife there soon after we'd arrived from England and how astonished I was at the bad standards. I said everyone in England thinks American hospitals are like ER. This time she shook her head in disgust. Not even close, she said. She couldn't watch those shows. They made her laugh. They made her despair.

I know what she means. American friends remark on the unexpected respect they get from English hospital staff. There isn't a hospital in the US I know that comes close to the standards of London's Charing Cross.

It's generally agreed that drugs are overpriced in the UK. Ordinary, familiar brands of drugs will cost you up to four times more in the USA than you'd pay privately in the UK.

Blairies (and Hague's a Blairy wannabe) are like Essex returned from Florida for three weeks going on about how much better America does things. Or like those journalists who only know the shopping malls of power. Better service. Better junk food. Better hotels. Friendlier people. More optimism. Better weather. Cheaper this. Bigger that. Here a boom, there a boom. Maybe the realities don't bear thinking about. This is now a deeply consumerist culture, a logic unable to question its own presumptions and therefore dangerously self-righteous. Our economies are so closely linked that the US and UK now have precisely the same political motivations, ambitions, shareholders and social problems.

The reality of living here without the social infrastructure they're culturally used to would probably send a Blairy into trauma. Even my Mississippi spouse was in culture shock for years.

Social institutions aside, just the low quality and high price of ordinary DIY fixtures would surprise them. Consumerism really is ingrained. Built-in-obsolescence? People expect a new $450,000 house to start falling apart after fifteen or twenty years. Lots more stuff on the supermarket shelves it seems. Only when you look closely it's just a greater choice between different brands of identical cornflakes. What's more there's fewer cornflakes in bigger packets. Runnier washing up liquid in bigger bottles for a higher price. Inedible meat. No GM or hormone labelling. A sense, coming from London, of inevitable, widespread adulteration.

And believe me dustmen throw bins about just the same, bureaucrats and jobsworths waste even more of your life, banks are less efficient, plumbers rip you off and waiting times at the crowded surgeries are already far longer than they were at my local NHS practice in working class Fulham. Assuming you can afford to pay for a visit. Or aren't turned away because you're a Medicare patient.

Lying has become endemic. Lies are a terrible distraction and waste of a citizen's time.

Since the Maggie & Ron soap began, UK politicians have developed a kind of cargo-cult mentality. They remind me of those awful early British rock and roll movies. They think if they get the poses right they'll become the King.

If Kosovo proves anything else, it's that Americans are very good at talking the talk, but tend to have two right feet when walking the walk. Self-approving autocracies behave like that.

It all made some sort of crude sense while they were trying to fill up their country, by using the fastest economic engine they could invent, but it's as inefficient and ultimately destructive as the internal combustion engine. Still, every lad these days wants a flashy motor . . . And preferably a gun.

Poor countries put up impressive-looking but badly functioning hotels and public buildings in the vague belief they'll somehow attract the infrastructure. Do Blairies think they can bring us all imagined American bounty by chanting the same slogans, naming the same magic names, worshipping the same gods, performing the same prestige? Does 'Abracadabra' mean much more to the average Briton than 'three strikes and you're out', those mantras of aggressive American sporting terms, the anti-analytical slogans of kulak capos, of Christian Coalitionists, NRA Baptists, Tobacco Democrats and Coca Cola Republicans whose methods have dramatically failed to improve the lives of ordinary Americans? Who have become grotesquely richer as children die in civil wars fought in their inner cities ? As domestic stress heightens? As life becomes only a profitable sham. The USA is now the Mr Toad of the world. Blinkered aboard an out of control motor. Toot-toot, parp, parp. Out of my way.

What a hero!

Is Tony now the Toad's toady?

Even I don't know what some of those silly quasi-authoritative words mean. Until recently, I thought Drug Czar was a Russian Mafioso character in Dick Tracey.

Which he of course could be, since so many US politicians seem to read only comics. Where else could they pick up that otiose rhetoric? Computer games? Star Trek?

The really frightening affront to our common sense is this – these policies, the sound-bites, the spins and the sophistries of US public servants, are deepening the problems. It would make some kind of sense to imitate American rituals if they were actually working in America! Instead, in America, they've demonstrably created serious social dysfunction. They have persuaded people to give authority the answers it wants in spite of the truth, by penalising those who 'fail' to solve the problem, challenge the notion or fail to achieve the set goal. Public servants, like children with guns, learn to lie. Sentimental persuasion only works in the ads.

Paternalism is deeply rooted in the political rhetoric here, most of which sounds as if it was written by Marie Corelli on Guinness. It takes much longer for a senator to say 'the great American public' than 'the public' and we, the taxpayers, are paying for all those extra words. But maybe they're best left just talking. American legislators have always had a tendency to take a simplistic sledgehammer to a patch of complex social oil. And they're always flabbergasted at the result. This country is actually run by people who think the Three Stooges had something there. Prohibition did wonders to establish organised crime. And it can only be in the interest of the public to de-criminalise but regulate the drug market.

Why on earth would British politicians deliberately seek to create a society like this? A society which devolves its social institutions, disenfranchises its citizens and calls that 'empowerment'? (Makes me suspicious of 'devolution' now). A society babbling with grandiose rhetoric but where, in reality, I have far fewer rights than in Britain? Where I sense more intrusion into my private life? With increasing, incompetent social engineering in schools and other public institutions? Lower standards of public health, education and policing?

Do we want a constantly adversarial deadlock of blame and counter-blame, which profits only lawyers? An imposed orthodoxy. The same never-ending game? An authoritarian culture which regards its elected officials more as patrons than representatives? The nonsense of competition and score averages and business systems applied to social services? A strong likelihood of being fitted up by corrupt cops or being casually blasted out of existence by someone's assault rifle? Scantily-trained, trigger-happy police and self-righteous undereducated public officials? Personality politics? No real political issues ever debated in the mass media? A distinct understanding amongst ordinary people that you get the law you can afford? That you have to lie to survive? Well, we all saw what happened to Russia under a system like that.

They're already fudging the welfare and education figures, of course. They've cut the rolls by making the ex-recipients invisible. The tricks used to disappear people off the registers are a tribute to human ingenuity. American ingenuity used to be devoted to solving practical problems. Now increasingly it's devoted to deception and abstraction. The business of America has become show business.

Actually, a large part of the business of America is also crime. It's a profitable spin-off from a domestic arms trade intrinsic to the well-being of an economy upon which far too much of the rest of the world now depends. So when will drugs and guns become as unprofitable as slavery? What happens to Italian gun-exports if the US bans handguns ?

It's an angle Blairy sophistry hasn't quite got worked out yet. But I'm sure it will. I'm fully expecting the Blairies to start 'empowering' the counties (divide and rule, make them fight for one slice of cake) and rediscovering the old British Bill of Rights (1689) which of course gives us (Protestants, anyway, until, I think, 1850, when it was extended to Catholics) the right to keep and bear arms, which is where the Americans got it from in the first place. A shot in the arm for Vickers. Buy some shares in Browning. A nice one, Mr Wesson. A rich one, Mr Smith. Let's show the Serbs how a mature democracy can beat them at their own game. Every time one ghetto-dweller guns another down, some far away white suit makes a few more dollars. And it can be applied internationally. Imperialism breeds nationalism. And nationalism needs guns.

If the Clinton 'she only inhaled' affair is emblematic of anything, it's of the profound hypocrisy which today permeates so much of American society. A culture which New Lowbrow Labour enthusiastically wishes to reproduce by dancing round the Big Chief's drum. American constitutional law is often clumsy and unfair compared with English common law or the US's holdover of bits of common law and rhetoric long since dropped by Britain. We abolished our Grand Jury in the 30s because it had become manifestly unjust. Like the health business, or the gun business, the law business proliferates, the way a business always must. At some stage markets have to be created or the business can't expand. And business has to expand to survive . . . Infinitely. To consume the infinite.

The result is a legalistic rather than a lawful society in which court-room half-truths and simplifications become the norm, where legal abstractions, rather than common experience, dominate debate; where it's more important to cut a plea bargain than to prove the truth, and where politicians and the media are constantly telling people in wretched circumstances that they live in the best of all possible worlds. It creates the very opposite of transparency. It worsens social injustice. It encourages a cynical, all destroying decadence.

That's what some of us down here in the Lone Star State think, anyway. And a fair number of us are sixth generation Yaller Dog LBJ Democrat Texans. My house was built by one of the old scoundrels in 1865. It hasn't needed any major repairs since. •

Michael Moorcock,
Texas,
2000

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