Ski on folks, this recession may be just virtual reality

I am rather growing to enjoy this recession. Things are getting cheaper, restaurants have empty tables and there are even gaps in the traffic along Sheikh Zayed Road. It helps, of course, to have a job. But even if you are unemployed, there is a feeling that it's not your fault and for once, there's a good reason why you are not as rich and successful as your friends. This, I imagine, must have been the feeling that millions of Russians and central Europeans must have had during communism. If only it weren't for the Politburo, we would all have fast cars, large houses and thoroughly attractive wives, they must have mused. Instead they grew beards, listened to jazz and wore leather trousers 20 years after they went out of fashion.

I met an old lady on a train in the Polish countryside in the mid-1990s. Her slow train had broken down, so our express was brought to a halt so we could take her and her fellow passengers back to Warsaw. They had spent the time blackberry picking, so we swapped blackberries for sips of vodka. I was with a Polish friend, so I asked him to translate this question: "Of all the amazing things that have happened since the fall of the Berlin Wall, democracy, privatisation, freedom to march, home ownership, which has been the most amazing?"

The old lady munched on her mouthful of blackberries, then replied. "None. Nothing. Life is worse now. Electricity, housing and water are all much more expensive. The new people in power are all crooks." This taught me a valuable lesson. From my perspective, all the developments appeared a positive thing. For the old lady, who cared little for democracy and believed in it even less, the new people in power were crooks and thieves, the old nomenklatura in pinstriped suits. History has probably proved her right. Some people have got very rich in the past 20 years in central Europe. The food has got better, jazz has been replaced by hip-hop, and few men with beards wear leather trousers today. But for the average old person, life has not improved markedly.

One man who took advantage of the fall of communism was Slavoj ?i?ek, a bearded Marxist Slovenian professor who managed to go from four years of unemployment, then a job as a recording clerk at the Slovenian Marxist Center, to international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a follower of Jacques Lacan, the quixotic French philosopher and psychoanalyst.

Mr ?i?ek enjoys baiting the media, and one of his best observations was to suggest that the Iraq War was a virtual reality. I don't recall the precise philosophical reasons for this, and I'm sure that if you were shot in Basra or beaten up in Baghdad the war was very real, but for those of us who watched it on television it did have a rather surreal quality. This recession, it occurs to me, may also not exist. We have only the word of the bankers to believe, and who trusts them these days? What if the show trials of greedy bankers were just a charade? The losses were just on paper after all. Politicians around the world have been persuaded to crank out the money printing presses. Speculators, it's true, may have made some losses, but thanks to changes in the accounting rules, US banks are suddenly good things to own again. Colin Powell, the former US secretary of state, held a doctrine of warfare that was based on fighting without deaths, although that did not last long. This recession seems eminently painless, although perhaps it is only like that seen from the perspective of Abu Dhabi.

However, I hear that the streets of London are flowing with blood. Job cuts are hurting, and it is the middle classes who are bleeding. But when I phoned to wish a few of my pals a Happy Easter, I was regaled with tales of their recent skiing trip. There had been 42 of them in total, including children, nannies and assorted hangers-on. Every day there was a large lunch up the mountain. I thought the collapse of sterling would have made it impossible to buy lunch in Europe, but apparently somebody managed to stump up the cash. On the last day, a group of the best skiers went heli-skiing. And I thought the only people who could afford to run helicopters lived in the UAE.

This recession, like Colin Powell's ideal war, is without too many casualties. OK, some people are losing their jobs. But its effects need to be felt more strongly for us to know it's real. We need to know people other than car makers in Detroit, journalists in Texas and Bernie Madoff and his pals feel its pain. Stock markets around the world no longer believe in the recession, with the Dow Jones Average having recently enjoyed the steepest 23-day rally since 1933. (Even the dimmest of us can chuckle at the irony of that.)

When the ski slopes of France are no longer filled with braying Brits, then we will know that this recession is really hurting. Until that happens, we can only assume, as Mr ?i?ek warned in the London Review of Books last year, that "the main task of the ruling ideology in the present crisis is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown on the global capitalist system as such, but on its deviations - lax regulation, the corruption of big financial institutions, et cetera".

In other words, the financial meltdown was just the work of a few rogue elements. The party will go on, once the music has been changed. It is only when old Marxists such as Mr ?i?ek are sent back to Slovenia, forced back into their leather trousers and made to listen to jazz every night that we will know that the world has really changed. [e-mail]