Rotting Hill by Wyndham Lewis

the outside. Now you feel you want it every day. You never went to Cockridge unless you could help it. Now you are always thinking of things in Cockridge or in Storby that you must have this minute.” He turned to me. “Because there is a ration, a limit, people imagine they are short of something they never had so much of before, or perhaps never heard of before. To hear them talk you would think that formerly they covered hundreds of miles every day in their car, ate enormous porterhouse steaks daily, chain-smoked from the time they got out of bed to the time they got into it again, bought a box of chocolates every morning after breakfast and another just before tea.”
        “I know a number of people just like that,” Eleanor agreed. But I felt Rymer must not be allowed to get away with everything.
        “There are shortages,” I remarked.
        “Shortages,” he retorted, “yes, if you want the earth. People today have as much food as is good for them—some, more than is good for them. People are putting on fat. I am. They have as many cigarettes or as much tobacco, as much beer as is necessary.”
        “As many clothes?” I enquired.
        He stopped and eyed me blankly for a few seconds, as if holding a conference behind his poker-face.
        “Clothes,” he said slowly, “are not rationed.”
        Had he been dressed in the less formal of his two suits he would, I felt, at this point have stroked his black patch.
        His wife was intelligent as well as beautiful, and addressed herself to the consumption of her piece of offal. (Why should the butcher, or, rather, the Food Office, employ this ghastly word?) She was accustomed, it was obvious, to being halted, turned back, and admonished upon the threshold of certain topics. Rymer would allow no one to grumble. No criticism of conditions under socialism passed unchallenged. He did not demand the quality of the bacon to be extolled (just eat it, would be the idea, and think of something else, such as how happy our grandchildren would be in a world from which all capital—small as well as great, had been banished): he did not require ecstasies at the mention of the Purchase Tax (some day there won’t be much left to purchase, so there won’t be any tax )—no, all Rymer exacted was silence about conditions under socialism. The Government are at war with Capital, it is total war: war conditions naturally prevail. Therefore, silence! Shut that great gap! Enemy ears are listening! All criticism aids capitalism.
        Even Rymer would deny the existence of any obstacles in the path of socialism-in-our-time: his view of the socialist government’s prospects are blindingly sunny. When he is foretelling an unprecedented export-boom, if (in the interests of sanity) one should mention the fact that the United States can supply itself with everything it requires, which it manufactures far more efficiently than any other country is capable of doing ( vide Mr. Lippmann), Rymer pooh-poohs such a statement. He describes it as ridiculous. American goods, he will assert, are of very poor quality: the Americans would be jolly glad to get ours if they had a chance. We market our stuff badly over there to begin with. “But believe me once our industry is on its feet again our exports will soar, you see if they don’t.” Rymer has never been to the United States and has not the remotest idea what American goods are like, so he is not cramped in these patriotic flights by first-hand knowledge. His boundless optimism is firmly based in the most blissful ignorance. Should you speak anxiously of Great Britain’s situation, living as she does upon a massive dole from the United States, he will say that that is our fault for having anything to do with the U.S., with Wall Street. Were we to arrange to receive a dole from Russia instead—say a billion or two, marrying the pound sterling to the rouble—we should soon be out of the wood! If we