The Future Lies With The Proles

The Grauniad’s Cif again:

'The future lies with the proles'* - but Winston didn't realise that it would be in the opposite way to what he thought. Prolefeed has taken over popular culture almost completely now.

The thing is though that a big part of the blame must lie with 'the left' itself. For it was the anti-elitism of the left which led to this flattening of culture that makes even otherwise intelligent people (men and women) settle for this vacuous tripe, rather than make a bit of effort to find that which is deeper and - ultimately - far more satisfying.

It is very sad when a person will find that, for example, owning a complete DVD box set of some obscure 60s cult TV show carries more cultural cache than owning the complete works of Shakespeare (A book? How quaint.) And, if this is the most that the 'intelligent' (and I still include the Guardian in this - if now only for reasons of nostalgia) can aspire to, is it little wonder that the prolefeed itself aspires to even lower horizons?

*From Orwell's 1984, of course.

Chaos, Not Music

The Grauniad’s CiF once again:

A new rebellion by David Wilson.

'We're into chaos, not music!' John Lydon (nee Rotten) said at the time - if you can't remember that, you weren't there.
Punk lasted between anything from 6 months to a year at the most before the adverts for pre-ripped t-shirts began appearing in the back of the NME and it died of an overdose of self parody (just as 'Sid Vicious' did - oh, the irony).
The one great pity is the way it revived rock music just when it was beginning to die. An important lesson that the industry (or, rather, the youth industries)learnt so well. So, the real lasting legacy of punk was the way that it brought about the constant recycling of teenage fads we still get nowadays - the this, that and the other 'revivals' we get on slow newsdays.
I'm just glad I hate nostalgia*, or I'd be wallowing in it too.

*In particular, the nostalgia sub-industry that seems to have a sort of symbiotic relationship with the media these days.

No Box Left Unticked

The Grauniad’s Cif again, where:

'Mixed-race' is the fastest growing category of identity in the UK. This raises questions of how our understanding of ethnicity affects policy.

There's the rub though, folks.

Trying to impose rigid categories on what is a continuum is always going to leave you looking a bit silly.

Race (in as far as it exists) is such a continuum. So, unless you build high brick walls around the edges of the continents, there is always going to be a bit of... er... leakage and analysis of genetic history will show you it has been gong on for centuries.

The same applies to sexuality - another continuum. Just because some American politician, for example, fancies a same sex encounter once in a while that doesn't mean he's a liar or hypocrite.

Just like one person's bit of office banter is another's outrageous sexism, or someone's honest criticism is another's heinous blasphemy, it shows that rigid lines cannot be drawn where all is flux and reveals just why the leftish notion of achieving utopia through legislation-based social engineering is doomed to failure.