EVERY cause throws up its kitsch. The most apparently benevolent but benignly evil ideologies excel at it. Consider Stalin's images of happy workers swinging their scythes, singing to the sky.
Anyone who thinks kitsch is no more than Burns Night and shortbread tins has yet to learn the totalitarian impulse behind such images. Kitsch, as Czech author Milan Kundera pointed out, crosses many ideologies but always includes the same image: that
of children smiling in the sunshine, singing of some perfect future.
Kitsch moves some universal sentimental need in us and that is why it is so dangerous. Those smiling kids in their cornfield have propped up ideologies as diverse as communism, fascism, Christian Science and the Moonies.
I recall, with horror, one of my attempts to escape from the modern world, at the new age community in Findhorn, looking up from our sharing workshop to see the image on the wall of children of many races smiling in that same damn sunlit cornfield.
Maybe the reason I hate kitsch so much is that my childhood was full of it. Endless photographs of me, aged four, running wild through fields while Joni Mitchell sang "We are stardust, we are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden". The hippie dream was a lie and years later I learned that similar projected utopias led to the gulag and Auschwitz. Behind the image of the smiling child was a desire to overthrow the known world and start again. Pol Pot and the hippies had much in common. I came to fear the singing children.
Imagine my horror, then, on hearing my children sing to me a song they had been taught at school: "You and me, we can save the world."
It was an eco-song, to be sung at assembly, all 300 of the little innocents chanting along.
"Lets recycle our bags and tins and clothes and things and you and me, we can save the world."
"That's very nice," I said to my kids, who wanted some appreciation for at least their singing capabilities, if not their grasp of ideology. The lecture on the evils of kitsch and the YouTube images of diggers shovelling corpses I thought could wait another five years or so. But as I packed the kids back off to their mother's, I was haunted.
It was children under the regimes of Stalin and Pol Pot who were taught to spy on their parents and report them to the authorities for breaches of correct behaviour. These children were then orphaned for the information they gave. From now on would my kids be taking note of whether I put the empty tuna tin in the metals recycling bin? Would they think me evil and hellbent on the destruction of the planet if I put the weekend colour supplement in the trash? Would there be some study at school in which my kids would tick boxes on my recycling habits?
My children are not mature enough to understand my doubts about the whole eco-politics project, which I am coming to see as yet another apocalyptic inverted utopianism; of how there is no real crisis, only the ongoing march of our mass desire to reduce politics to something so plainly good and evil that a seven-year-old could grasp it and enforce that childish ideal on adults.
I am now in fear of my eco-children.
The full article contains 589 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
