Chav Chic

"Do you wear your marginality like a coat, ready to be shed when the room gets too hot?"

A while ago I wrote this on a card and hung it on my washing line of things to make, write and do. Been thinking about it a lot over time, attaching it to different situations and moments, and find it weaving through my mind more and more often these days. Been thinking about marginalities and the ways in which they can shift, interlock and overlap. Thinking about the differences between chosen and imposed marginality - are there differences? What do they look like, feel like, taste like? I've still not answered these questions, but tumble them round in my head, watching the view change.

Also, against all better judgement I have actually read a few newspapers this week. For anyone who's abstaining, please either look away now, or sup modestly from my thimble summary:

• The horsemen of the financial apocalypse continue to loom, laughing in loud scary tones as their horses - Hedge Jumper and Offshore Haven and IMF Iggy (praise be to subtle metaphors) - score the ground with their razor sharp hooves and flick their mighty tails at the gathering clouds of flies
• The US and Rest Of World hold breaths and wait to see if tomorrow's election will be an exercise in democracy or another case of 'the dog ate my - and a million other Floridian neighbours - ballot card'
• British press attempt to make a news item of the fact that two overpaid comics said something rude and poorly thought out on the radio. At least five people are quite cross. Many more are grateful for the diversion. Hurrah! Frothing rants are issued across the land, providing temporary distraction from worrying that this winter might just be the one that we need to sign up for selling our eggs.
• As Iceland's economy is now eating itself, the same holiday package principles that have long applied to places like Eastern Europe and South East Asia are finally hitting Northern Europe: crumbling economy = major bonus for globetrotting Brits - woooo! Get your hands on some krona and GET IN THERE!
• John Prescott, former Deputy Prime Minister, is on the telly/in the papers declaring, incase anyone's forgotten, that he is working class and by jove hasn't it been holding him back. Now, John, what's that you're hiding behind your back? Is that an Oxbridge education I can see in your hands?

So. With that skewed little current events summary out on the table, I'd like to take a closer look at our last item. John and his poopy face.

Apparently, all of the journalists covering his recent foray into repetition and hyperbole have been sitting in on the same writing workshop: Imagine that you are reviewing a TV show. Write a review that compresses the most frequently repeated opinions on the subject, incorporating the words 'John Prescott, working class, surly, chav, chip on shoulder, longest serving Deputy Prime Minister in history'.

So here we have a man in one of the most powerful positions in the UK. A man with access to the kind of things that most of us can only hope to throw an egg at as the motorcade passes grandly by. He's been accused of overstating the hardship of his background because he actually lived in an end of terrace don't you know, rather than wandering the streets, shoeless, asking for change like a plucky little Victorian urchin. He's been accused of wringing out his working class background like a dry sponge, twisting out one more drop of pathos and evidence. He's been accused of banging on.

It is annoying. Sure. I grew up in Alberta. For anyone who needs more info on what this might have to do with the current topic, go to google and type in 'Ralph Klein, man of the people'.

But the thing that's really been getting me about all this coverage is the structure of assumptions that need to be in place for this picture to hang right. Assumptions I've yet to see addressed in the press, other than as descriptors of Mr Prescott and his behaviour.

Say, have you heard the one about the working class man who is such an emotional neanderthal that he can't articulate any feeling other than anger?

What about the one about the blue collar family whose only books are the rent book and the benefit book?

The one about the guy who lives in the shitty area and communicates in a limited pallet of sub-lingual grunts because he doesn't understand anything beyond the basics of survival - of food, sex and shelter - and so has no opinion on the world that is not from the first-person viewpoint of either his stomach, his cock, or his fist?

Yeah, I love those gags. I love it when they get repeated by journalists in an almost invisible passively implied clever clever kind of way - never stated outright, but there hovering in the background like a waft of Brut and the flash of an ironic sovvie ring.

I love them even more when someone who has clearly managed to forge some kind of social and economic sucess from their other myriad privileges - their gender, their skin colour, their luck and their friends for example - then takes up the flag of stereotype based loosely on one aspect of their experience and waves it so high that it can almost obscure the view of reality, of context, of complication, especially for themselves.

I'm not questioning whether John Prescott's childhood experiences were 'authentic' enough - whether he was more or less working class than someone else, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. I'm not questioning that his early life - like all of ours - had an impact on him that still plays out.

But goddam I am getting sick the repetition of gross stereotype and snobbery. Sick of hearing it from people who look down from on high, and also from people - well-heeled, powerful, privileged people - who want to outright ignore and deny any advantages they may have had in their social climb. People who want to play the martyr, the exception, the gallant romantic role - who in their quest for authenticity pick up the most blunt edged, patronising stereotypes of what they think 'marginality' looks like and then shimmy into them as an outfit of evidence to back their claims to outsider status.

Here's a little tip: no ones life is lived in one dimension, cut out of cardboard and replicated in factory form, and, contrary to what we might have been led to believe, insulting stereotypes don't look any cuter when they're repeated and perpetuated by the very people who are or were their target. True.

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Sometime soon, if the momentum carries me this far: ranting about how much I hate the word chav, plus sprinklings of bitterness and scorn about cosmetic 'downward mobility' and poverty kitch.....woo woo!