What Does This Do?

While I've not been well, I've been thinking about what I want to do with this blog, which 'direction' I want it to go in when I get back to it*.

Instead, I'm going to let Howard Jacobson tell you.



*Next week, if I feel up to it.

Stuck In The Mud

This is a comment on The Tory party is the main obstacle to a Cameron win

Thatcher won because of the spectacular failure of 'old' Labour. Not only has 'New' Labour failed just as spectacularly, as Nick Cohen almost says, the entire 'left' project, that we all used to believe in so much, has collapsed too, with the solutions we thought would solve most of society's problems not only creating more problems, but actually making the original problems themselves even worse.
So, the Tories should be not only shooting at an open goal, they should be the only team left on the pitch. Therefore, why Cameron even refuses to go into the, now deserted, opponent's half is a bit of a mystery. That is until you realise that the very solutions offered by 'New' Labour are demonstrably failures of what would have been post-Thatcher Tory solutions. Such things as consultants, managerialism, PFI, unsuitable privatisation and so on, and on.
That is why Cameron's players are all stuck in the mud around the centre circle passing the ball back and forwards between them, all dimly aware that if they do shoot all they can ever score is only an own goal.

Human Kind Cannot Bear Too Much Reality TV

[I know I said I wasn’t going to do anything here until February, but this current kerfuffle about the TV programme on C4 – ‘Celebrity’ Big Brother touches on one of the things that I would like to make a main theme of this blog – namely the failure of popular culture]

[Here and many other places too]

This bit below started out as a comment on Power Games at The Guardian’s CiF site.

Actually - in a way - I'm rather pleased by all this. For I hope that this will show - at least a few more - people just how nasty Popular Culture has become as it goes through its death throes. How it has destroyed itself.
A decade or three ago Popular Culture was so full of promise. It seemed that TV, film, pop music and so on could all take - for the first time - a mass audience to those places only a high culture had taken an 'elite' minority to before. But now all that (naive?) optimism is long gone in the ever-intensifying all-out rush for more sensation, more thrills, more of all the things its dumbed-down, stultified audience thinks it wants and needs, while its producers grow ever richer from providing less and less.
None of this would really matter - not even to the Guardianistas and all others that like to feel they 'really care' about the underclass - if it was just a matter of the proles and the prolefeed that keeps them mollified. But another failing of the great post-war liberal experiment has been how instead of raising up the working class to be more like the middle-class, it has - instead - led to the middle-class 'dumbing-down' to merge into the lower orders, developing a taste for the fare that gets dumped into the prolefeed trough (no matter how 'ironically').

What I have decided to call ‘The Great Liberal Experiment’ destroyed aspiration – or rather non-material aspiration - see, for example how the destruction of Grammar schools reduced social mobility etc - rather than increasing it, as the policy-makers hoped. The desire to ‘better oneself’ was then replaced with this self-satisfied moronic complacency so typified by folk such as this Jade person.

I wish I had more time to go into this now, but I haven’t. However, I’m sure I will – in the coming months – be returning to gnaw on this particular bone again.

Back In Feburary

If anyone is still reading this thing.

I'm a bit busy at the moment, what with still sorting out the Little Frigging archive, and some other stuff too.

So, I've decided to - as those rather silly marketing folk are wont to call it - relaunch* this blog in February, when things should be a little less hectic.


See you then.


* Strange, isn't it. When you think of 'launch' you think of rockets or ships, which, if they fail to launch, tend to either explode or sink, thus making the notion of a 'relaunch' rather problematical.

Hiatus

There will be a break from blogging here while I assist my good friend, Norbert Trouser-Quandary to recreate the Trouser Quandary Resolution blog (now deleted) archive at his new blog,
Little Frigging in the Wold.

Back soon(ish).

Outlaw Blues

As Guessedworker says in the comments on Notes and Comments No. 10, I didn’t do a very good job of explaining my thinking behind this:

The romance of the outlaw: Robin Hood, Jesse James, and so on. Now Delano Brown and Donnel Carty? I suppose the existence of those earlier figures does show that the fascination with the outlaw figure and ‘lifestyle’ has a long history. Since the invention of the ‘rebellious’ teenager in the 50s and the social liberalisation of the post-60s there is a feeling that something more fundamental has changed in this sort of attitude.

At the time I was rather under the weather with a quite bad cold, so what was originally intended as a note to myself for a longer piece became the entire comment above.

Here I hope to make a little clearer what I first intended.

There has always been a fascination with outlaws, criminals, in stories myths and legends. With some, like Robin Hood, they have become a sort of folk hero. However, these stories have somewhat ‘glamourised’ what is often a sordid and nasty business, undertaken by often deeply unpleasant people for not very endearing motives.

Romanticism created the notion of the romantic outsider, ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’ – like Byron. Sometime later the morally-ambiguous anti-hero appeared.

Later on, rock ‘n’ roll mythologized the romantic outsider as the teenage rebel, on the outside of society and its rules. These days this is especially true of the over-stylised sub-genres like rap, heavy metal and so on which become almost pantomime-like in their immersion into the romanticised mythologies of the rock culture*.

While, at the same time, film and TV too have made much of the ‘good’ villain as somehow more ‘honest’ than a corrupt and flawed society.

I am not saying any of this is wrong per se. in many ways a certain moral ambiguity is a good thing, much better than a bland acceptance of the status quo, for example. Nothing should be beyond question.

Since rock and its romanticised mores have moved into the mainstream, the pseudo-romantic hero of the rock star outsider has - to a large extent - moved from being an outlaw stance to a near conventional mainstream attitude.

For example, the drugs, excess drink, sexual experimentation and general ‘bad boy’ behaviour of the archetypal rock star are no longer at the very margins but right in the mainstream.

This is especially true in the way that drug taking has moved from the outside of society into the centre, where for a lot of young – and now not quite so young – people, it is an almost normal fact of life. However, because the illegal nature of the drugs and the way drug scene intersects with the criminal world, it again puts them on the outlaw side of the fence.

I would, therefore, ague that this cultural climate of romanticising the outlaw does play a major part in what seems to be an increase in certain forms of criminal activity. This goes someway towards the current seemingly ambivalent attitude to crime, especially, among the young.

The recent survey referred to in Deborah Orr’s article says that many of those currently engaged in crime do it for the kicks, rather than from economic necessity.

In interviews with 120 offenders serving sentences for violent offences in prisons and young offenders institutions in England and Wales, it was found that many committed their crimes simply because they enjoyed them. "It weren't even for money. I had money. It was more like the buzz you get from doing things," one robber said. "I was more addicted to robbing than I was to drugs. Just get a funny feeling when I go out robbing."

As I said in the original comment, I felt as though something has changed. Before this post-romantic sea-change, the good man made bad by a corrupt world was taken to apply only in a very limited number of cases, e.g. the Robin Hood tale. However, these days, in a sort of sub-Rousseau-like way, it seems every criminal is seen as made bad by this inherently corrupt world. So much so, that being an outlaw is taken as just as valid a career choice as being a good guy. This is – I believe – different from the derided ‘society is to blame’ attitude of not so long ago.

The current attitude believes society nowadays is not forcing people into crime because they have no choice, rather society is, through its seeming ambivalence towards, if not secret love of, the outlaw outsider, offering this equally valid lifestyle choice. It seems therefore that the tragic untimely and unnecessary death of Tom ap Rhys Price was a result of this form of relativism.

* I am – of course - using ‘rock’ here as a kind of shorthand for a whole host of things including fashion, attitude, ‘philosophy’ and so on as a way of conveniently describing a major part of contemporary popular culture. It is a simplification, for example many of these same attitudes can be found in pre-rock ‘lifestyles’ like in Jazz, blues. ‘spiv’ culture and so on.

Notes and Comments: No. 10

The romance of the outlaw: Robin Hood, Jesse James, and so on. Now Delano Brown and Donnel Carty? I suppose the existence of those earlier figures does show that the fascination with the outlaw figure and ‘lifestyle’ has a long history. Since the invention of the ‘rebellious’ teenager in the 50s and the social liberalisation of the post-60s there is a feeling that something more fundamental has changed in this sort of attitude.

Another day, another comment:

It is just that the Christians were the latest to appropriate the ancient mid-winter festival to their own ends. Now that their influence is - at long last - on the wane, the older and far more important psychological needs for a mid-winter fillip are re-emerging some in the old ways like feasting, drinking and lights, some in new ways like a little chocolate now and then.

*

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Or, perhaps not.

And, nothing will come of nothing.