Bourgeois Revolutionaries

In J. G. Ballard's novel, Millennium People, a psychologist named David Markham and his wife Sally wait for a taxi to take them to Heathrow Airport so that they may attend a conference for industrial psychologists at Celebration, the planned community in Florida built by the Disney Corporation. Markham frets to his wife about having to shake hands with amusement park workers dressed in costumes as cartoon characters, to which his wife replies, “Don't be mean. They remind them of their childhoods.” “Childhoods they didn't have,” the husband counters, “What about the rest of us— why do we have to be reminded of American childhoods?” Counters Sally, “That's the modern world in a nutshell” (Ballard 2004, 15– 16). The brief exchange in which cultivated British professionals pay grudging tribute to the enduring and inescapable influence of American culture is, fittingly enough, followed by the report on the television of a terrorist bombing at the airport that takes the lives of several travelers returning from abroad.

The overt juxtaposition of an icon of American popular entertainment with a lethal terrorist attack might come across as somewhat glib against the contemporary realities of religious violence and the debt crisis in the West, but the explosion, which takes the life of Markham's ex- wife, draws the psychologist into the strange but bustling subculture of weekend activism in London as he sets out to find the culprit who planted the bomb. Markham encounters politically engaged members of the middle class taking to the streets to prohibit a bewildering assortment of activities, from laboratory experimentation on animals to tourism in Third World countries, or abolishing Britain's venerable traditions, such as fox hunting and the Henley Regatta. The frivolous and trifling nature of most of these protests does not diminish but, in fact, heightens the stridency and vehemence with which the demonstrators denounce what in their eyes can only be heartless injustices and barbaric iniquities.