The Fifth Estate

It has meanings - I discovered by doing a search - that are not what I mean.

Not even in the same frame of reference.

For example: “The Fifth Estate is a socio-cultural reference to groupings of outlier viewpoints in contemporary society, and is most associated with bloggers”.

But that’s not me.

I have been to France: about two years cumulatively over the last twenty.

The French are way more interesting than “The Fifth Estate is a socio-cultural reference to groupings of outlier viewpoints in contemporary society, and is most associated with bloggers”.

So what are the other four?

Estates.

The Clergy.

The nobles.

The commoners.

The Press.

From my personal observation of, mostly Paris, the Fifth Estate is The Street.

Witness le Mouvement des gilets jaunes.

But there is Fifth Estate leakage elsewhere: witness a million women in pink-eared pussy hats in America in 2017 going into the streets to protest the election of a rapist.

And later, protesting the rapist’s appointment of a rapist to the nation’s supreme court.

When you get all those pink ears out there, that’s when  a whole nation believes in the power of THE STREET.

There will be more: until the words of Richard II who once told Wat Tyler “thou art a villein and a villein thou remains” become the genuine detritus of history, we are stuck with race and class and whatever other artifice that rich people can concoct to keep them in power as levers to keep the ancient regime in place.

Unfortunately, though, ol’ Richard was right then in 1381, and he’s right now.

And that’s the hell of it.

Nothing seems to change.

It’s still the same now as in the times of Wat (“only little people pay taxes”).

Therefore, the need for the Fifth Estate is at least as important as it would have been in Wat Tyler’s time, if he had ever had the chance of a snowball in hell and if, at that time –1381 -  there had been a street.

To deploy pink ears into.

Light hearted as all this must seem to the casual reader, we – most of us, are in a state of imminent non-dead doom: as serfdom looms for more and more of us – all the wealth in the hands of almost nobody, so the rest of us can only revert to feudal relationships - I suggest that the cities of America rip up the black top streets they currently have and replace them with cobbles.

That way we can go down fighting – at least – as members of the Fifth Estate.