Why my economic posts aren’t boring, even not boring enough to make a good story
I’m pleased to point out, as some of you might have noticed, that over the last couple of weeks, my blogging has covered a fair few different topics, including the realms of various political issues, even a book review and to my surprise, a rare writing update. It seems the political and literary minds have allied once again in my head and it’s sure to strengthen both sides.
But the trend as of late in the political sides of things is to blog about all of the shit going on in the economy. I mean, it seems the most central political issue at the moment and we haven’t even seen the worst of it. Now, I’m sure a lot of my readers skip the political stuff in general, or don’t find it that interesting, but I think it’s fair to say the political posts that have been dealing with the economy have received more of this treatment.
It’s true, economics can be fucking boring. One only has to watch the nightly news to want to fall asleep at the sound of some boring middle-aged economist talking about falls in markets that seem so far from reality, and some how we’re meant to care or understand. But I think, part of it is that so much economic news is full of jargon and high-flying concepts that it leaves us all feeling like dip shits. We could never possibly understand economics so just leave it to the boring experts, who coincidently, think the system is fine and dandy because it works for them.
But of course, this shit does matter and these boring economists aren’t going to tell you that part. The media only scratch at the surface because one little drop in their little game of Monopoly means a few thousand people lose their homes, a few hundred lose their jobs or have their wages slashed. To them it’s just a game where if they lose, they walk away with a few million in prize money. To us, it’s life or death, survival or poverty. It really hits home for the author of this blog, when his father loses his job after their factory shut down and he walks away with a pathetic redundancy package.
And fiction hits the reader the hardest when it affects reality. I’ve always said that. I try to relate the monsters in my stories to the real monsters in the world. The Presidents, CEOs, Generals and right-wing nuts. This whole shit with the economy whilst seemingly boring with numbers and jargon, really does have some gripping and emotionally engaging stuff under the surface. So I might just pump some angry metal music through my iPod and with my creative and political minds, dig under the surface and find myself a story.
