A COUPLE of days after that poor postman was suspended from his job for revealing how easy it is to opt out of junk mail, the front page of the Daily Mail announced: “Great junk mail revolt — post bosses under siege as thousands swamp opt-out hotline.”
This was fighting talk from a constipatedly conservative newspaper whose default political outlook generally places revolts and revolutions (the French, the Russian, the Industrial, the Sexual, the Technological) very much in the black half of its grimly monochromatic, world-divides-into-two-types-of-thing philosophy.
But insurrections against minor bourgeois irritations are something else. Just as a couple of parking tickets for the Editor’s chauffeur will see Mail readers exhorted to take arms in “Blair’s War on the Motorist!”, so they are congratulated now for standing up doughtily to junk-mail terrorism. What’s more, I think the paper could not believe how easy it turned out to be. All these years of grumbling about pizza flyers and loan offers, and all you had to do to stop it was dial a number.
The same is true of cold-call salesmen — those sparky folk who phone on a crackly line from Delhi to ask very politely if you’ve ever thought about changing your gas and electricity supplier to the same man who delivers the fish — all of whom I silenced in one fell swoop years ago with one click on a website.
The truth is, you really can opt out of most of life’s irritants. Were I one of those columnists who sees the opportunity for Zeitgeist neologism in every news story I honour with my attention, I might even be tempted to call this evidence of “the opt-out culture”.
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Think, for example, of tipping. Flipping your waitress a couple of notes for being smiley used to be a spontaneous expression of generosity. But the industry chose gradually to exploit this human weakness for goodwill gestures and now adds the gesture to the bill itself, and allows us, very graciously, the opportunity to opt out of making it.
And, of course, whenever you buy anything that involves a contract, real or digital, you are pointed towards a tiny box, which, if you do not want your doormat ever afterwards bespaffed with brightly coloured marketing gack three times a week, you are invited to tick.
So mollycoddled, so nannied and puerilised have we become that we can no longer be trusted to do anything for ourselves, only to opt not to. We are being made a nation of Bartlebys (you remember, of course, Melville’s scrivener, Bartleby, the compulsive indigent who chooses to opt out of work, company, food, even speech, until he is nothing but a cipher declaring, more and more weakly, “I prefer not to”.)
It is the feeblest form of passive resistance. Instead of going after the gross marketeers and throttling them in their beds we are, as we tick the boxes, and phone the 0800 numbers, merely lying down in the street and hoping they won’t roll over us in tanks.
Fat people, for example, who should be encouraged to re-examine their lifestyle and eating habits from top to bottom, are instead offered opt-out facsimiles of the food that has ruined them. Diet Coke drinkers feebly opt out of sugar, just as the low-fat crisp munchers opt out of fat, the negativity of the endeavour a sad metaphor for the slug-like body shape they will never escape.
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We are being forced by the monsters of commerce to become more and more passive. And we are not doing anything about it. Obviously.
And yet, for all that, I find that the things I really want to opt out of are not being offered on any hotlines or tickable boxes.
I would like to opt, for example, out of the smell of McDonald’s — that morbid stench like a dead crow rotting in a chimney — that wafts monstrously down almost every high street in England. I’d like to opt out of Big Brother, Love Island, Pop Idol, bendy buses, the new Smarties’ tube, magazine racks full of plastic tits that make me feel embarrassed to be a man, Waterstone’s, people sucking gigantic frothing fat-free milk drinks in cardboard cups as they walk to work and pretending it’s coffee, dog poo on the pavement, José Mourinho, and “re-formed” ham.
I would like to opt out of low-cost airlines, Coke Zero, the new Dr Who, men who wee in the street, Notting Hill Gate and Kelvin McKenzie — who wrote in his Sun column last week that Channel 4 will consider you as a contestant for Big Brother only if you are “a rear-end merchant”. Yes, a rear-end merchant. In 2006. It’s enough to make a straight man want to take one for the team, just to show solidarity.
And I’d like to know what our renegade postman can do about friends and acquaintances who call my house phone and then, because I’m engaged, call my mobile.
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Show me the box I have to tick to opt out of the Israel-Palestine-Lebanon crisis; global warming; urban foxes; stacks of mini sweetcorn that have flown all the way from Thailand piled up rotting outside supermarkets because they aren’t fashionable any more; the people who have just moved in next door and spent all summer sanding every surface they can see so that my house vibrates all day like a giant sex aid; African parrots on Hampstead Heath; men in vans who honk at women with whom they would like to copulate; women who, whenever you ask them how they are, say “exhausted”; Formula One; morbidly obese toddlers wearing football strips; the fourth-plinth debate; Tesco; bouncers; horoscopes and R&B.
Isn’t there some number I can call?