15.04.2020

A cottage industry based on the serial killer known as Jack The Ripper has flourished over the last few years, especially in and around Whitechapel. There seems to be a point when atrocities go from being beyond humour, unmentionable taboo, still too fresh and painful, through a phase of being risqué before transforming into kitsch jokes and attractions for credulous tourists. Jack the Ripper seems to be entering the last phase.

I took this photo out of the window of a van I was driving for work at the end of last year, it’s shocking to see all the people in the photo now! I don’t think we’re ready to rehabilitate Jack into the roguish Robin Hood-esque folk hero he seems to be turning into. I wonder if part of the reason is the moniker he’s been given, it rings with Jack the lad, which has connotations of boys will be boys, and an almost admirable banterishness. The name maybe tells us of attitudes towards him, his victims (who are falsely believed to all be prostitutes to this day, as if that means they somehow deserved it) and women in general at the time.

I think he’s been through the unacceptable phase. In the 70s, the Ten Bells pub, over the road from Hawksmoor’s Christ Church in Spitalfields we saw yesterday, changed its name to The Jack The Ripper, because according to legend he would take his victims there before he killed them. I’m not sure if there’s much evidence for that, but at least two of them did frequent the place. It wasn’t long however before boycotts, public outcry, and vandalism forced the pub to change its name back. That was only about 90 years after the killings, too soon.

Then around eight to ten years ago the Jack The Ripper museum on Cable Street opened, down the road from the mortuary where some of his victims were examined post mortem, and a short walk from some of the scenes of his crimes. In order for the museum to get permission, it claimed it was a museum of women’s history in the East End. One way to put it I suppose. I would often see it with paint splattered across it and broken windows, so obviously people objected.

But much more recently, Jack The Chipper opened and no one seems to have batted an eyelid. Jack the fucking chipper. A chip shop punning on the name of a notorious murderer, glamorising him less than 100 yards from where his first victim was found. Seems like Jack has been rehabilitated.

Ripper walks have been going on for years. I’ve actually been on one. A friend’s mother was over from India and she was fascinated by the story so we went. I’m very interested in local history, ghost stories and legends, so it didn’t seem too ghoulish, it’s important to know this stuff, but people taking photos of piss stained alley ways, in an area that’s still rough, where killings go on all the time, because a murder victim was found there did seem a little distasteful.

Jack the Ripper might be an odd one, but what about Café Nero? Nero was seen as the literal antichrist by early Christians, he killed his mother, step brother, wife and countless Christians as well as allegedly starting the Great Fire of Rome. His name is synonymous with evil. It’s like opening the Mussolini spaghetti house in Leicester Square. Or recently when a restaurant opened up somewhere in Shoreditch whose menu was based on the last meals of convicts on death row.

As killings and horror drift off into the distant past, they lose their visceral,  crunch of split cartilage, stench of shit and blood, and so become easier to make light of.  How many years do you think till it becomes acceptable to open a beer hall putsch themed German bier halle, with big tankards of beer, plates of schweinshaxe and bretzeln and portraits of Hitler and his lieutenants adorning the walls? Or a Myra Hindley greasy spoon. I actually own a bong in the form of Osama Bin Laden.  

And how long after the last plague victim died did this become acceptable?

And worst of all this... 

The last big plague outbreaks started in China in the mid 19th century and killed 10 million people in India alone, over a thousand were killed in Sydney in the first part of the 20th century and more recently a drug resistant form of the bacteria has emerged in Madagascar where it killed 170 in 2017. Who can say?

It’s not just distance through time, but physical distance too. It’s already acceptable, in fact common place to open Hitler themed bars in places like Thailand, because the horror of what he did is so far off, and probably misunderstood. Only last year the K pop band BTS got into trouble for dressing up in SS style uniforms, carrying red flags with fascist style insignia. In fact this process may already be beginning here, there was an article in the Times the other day with the headline, "Can Hitler ever be described as a 'great' man?' 

So I was wondering, if the fact John Prine’s death effected me more than the hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world, and at least 12,000 deaths in the UK was due to a similar effect. Maybe emotional distance also has a similar perspective issue. Numbers of dead are very difficult to comprehend, maybe that’s why so many atrocities are allowed to go on.

It seems like Donald Trump is somewhere along a reverse process. He’s going from a brand, more a crass piece of marketing than a human being, into a despot, potentially a criminal against humanity. His press conferences have been getting more and more chaotic. A day or two ago he was ranting about how he had absolute power. It was  the kind of thing you’re used to seeing with subtitles, with one of the vicious dictators the CIA installed, like Pinochet in Chile or Menem in Argentia, or some other autocrat, maybe Deng Xiaoping during the Tiananmen Square massacre or Boris Yeltsin while he was storming the Russian parliament building behind the podium. It is genuinely the kind of thing you see before civil wars break out. Imagine the A-level exams in 30 years time with questions like, ‘was there anything in Donald Trump’s address of 12 April 2020 that could have helped us predict the coming civil war?’ There is already talk of two groups of states on either coast acting co-operatively against the will of the federal government.

With that as a backdrop, he’s just stripped the World Health Organisation of its US funding. Presumably to try and shift the blame for his incompetence on to them.

On top of that they’re talking about a 35% drop in GDP in the UK by June. My general feeling about the coming recession is it will obviously be horrendous, but I hope it’s bad enough to completely break the current system. The IMF reportedly have no idea how to deal with a such a sudden and large crisis. A few weeks ago I read about them pressurising smaller countries to redress their spending if they want a bail out.

The reason I hope it’s too bad for the IMF to bail out is that their bail outs are totally incompatible with democracy. The fact is, the IMF is run by free market extremists, all trained by Milton Freedman, and in return for their help, countries have to implement their policies of deregulation, cuts and privatisation, which in the short term cause a lot of pain, but theoretically lead to recovery but, there’s no going back. Once central banks are independent (the neoliberal argument is economics is a science, and has nothing to do with politics and therefore should be separate) governments lose control of monetary policy, and control of the currency is no longer democratically accountable, once production has been privatised and tax set at rates favourable to business, and economies have been financialized to the extent the UK has, they are completely exposed. If a government introduces policy capital doesn’t like, but might be good for the people, business will threaten, or actually implement capital flight, divestment, capital strikes, move jobs and money offshore, dump shares to depress asset prices and crash the economy. These tactics are how Donald Trump secured massive tax breaks for his real estate business in the 70s. So democratically accountable governments are only permitted to operate in a way unaccountable business approves of. This is exactly what happened to Greece following it’s debt crisis ten years ago, it happened to Iraq following the 2003 war (the country was asset stripped and a 15% flat rate tax was imposed), it happened to South Africa after the fall of Apartheid, which is why there’s such abhorrent inequality there, worse than before the country was freed. It’s a pattern that is repeated over and over again.

We are more or less already there in the UK, which explains the treatment of Jeremy Corbyn to some extent, but my worry is this crisis could lead to permanent corporate dictatorships across the world. It would be much better in my opinion if things were allowed to fail and we build a new model.

Back on the ground here in East London, things are looking rough. I walked to the big Sainsbury’s again to drop my CV off, see if I can get some work. The first manager I found told me to drop it off at customer services, but I knew that was a fob off, so I found another one. He said they're not hiring at the moment but will keep hold of my CV in case anything comes up. 

I noticed work has carried on on that big development by the Royal London Hospital. I suppose they have to finish the work contracted, but I wonder if any apartments will sell.

A lot of the shelves are still bare, which was a bit scary. Especially short on staple items like rice, pasta, tinned tomatoes. Lots of Easter Eggs left over though.

Flour rationing. 

The graffiti seems to be getting angrier too. This Fuck The Law piece was probably done by some kid trying to be edgy.

But these fuck the CPS (I assume the Crown Prosecution Service) have a real desperation about them. They look like a genuine expression of despair. I don’t know, seems like there’s trouble out there.

The homeless still look like they’re having a hard time. I was asked by a few people in this one spot in a very short period for money. 

People queue round the block for the bank, this photo doesn't even show half of it. 

My dog hurt her foot, so I washed it in salty water. I've been very worried about her because she has a lump on her side and I've struggled to get hold of a vet. I'm very grateful to this little doggo at the moment, things would be very hard without her. 

Keep the faith.