The Mooresie

The further down the hill she goes the more subdued and shadowy her mood becomes, as though Bath Street were an emotional gradient. She’s thinking about history’s celebrated victims, thinking of the holocaust, the blight of slavery, female suppression and the persecution of sexual minorities. She can recall her own Spare Rib days in the 1970s and how she’d briefly entertained the idea that a woman leader might make all the difference. This had obviously been back in the early seventies. Her point is that despite the very real continuing abuses born of anti-Semitism, born of racism and sexism and homophobia, there are MPs and leaders who are female, Jewish, black or gay. There are none who are poor. There never have been, and there never will be. Every decade since society’s inception has been witness to a holocaust of paupers, so enormous and perpetual that it has become wallpaper, unnoticed, unreported. The mass graves at Dachau and at Auschwitz are, rightly, remembered and repeatedly deplored, but what about the one in Bunhill Fields that William Blake and his beloved Catherine were shovelled into? What about the one under the car park in Chalk Lane, across the road from Doddridge Church? What of the countless generations that have lived poor and have in one way or other died of that condition, uncommemorated and anonymous? Where are their fucking monuments and special ringed dates on the calendar? Where are their Spielberg films? Part of the problem is, no doubt, that poverty lacks a dramatic arc. From rags to rags to rags to rags to dust has never been an Oscar-winning formula.

Alan Moore, Jerusalem