Backward ho!
As a hack journalist of long standing, I know the news isn’t news until it touches you in some way. That is why, along with my fellow hacks, I have spent so much time “making it touch.” To understand post-modern mass media, one must understand this contrived necessity. “Chastity” in news reporting is a thing of the past, like every other thing of value in our civilization. Newspapers & other media that report only what is considered important, without adding that urgent breathless tabloid quality, no longer exist. Even The Times & The Wall Street Journal resort constantly to catcalling the reader: “This is about You.”
Granted, the news should be relevant to somebody. But as a backward person, I long for return to the days when the pretence was, “This is Important,” in & of itself; & the only background necessary was to briefly explain (should the topic be rather arcane) why it is important — to the community at large. For the rest it was assumed readers had seen yesterday’s newspaper, & would not need reminding of what had already been reported. If they’d missed something, they could check back: it was customary to keep newspapers for several days. The enforcement of the alternative assumption — that readers are extremely stupid, that they know nothing at all about anything, & need to be not only catcalled but constantly flattered in language once reserved for eight-year-olds — is among the signal accomplishments of Progress. That, & the related metastasization of pornography.
Contempt for the reader is implicit in each of these developments. The cynicism of the news media is built on this contempt. Or so I have come to believe: that contempt makes people behave contemptibly. And deprives them of their native human joyfulness.
That said, let me add, I’m a sucker for a good storyline, that gets me where I live. In this case, gets me where I used to live, in Vauxhall, inner London. The streets there were never very pretty, & have grown uglier over time as the amount of disposable income has increased all round. (I blame Thatcher.) But there is something about helicopters falling out of the sky, into the Wandsworth Road, that makes the thought of those streets even more disagreeable. How often one finds oneself dodging cars. Helicopter crashes seem over the top, if puns are being forgiven today.
Years, years ago, when I was but a wee thing, I’d examine my father’s copies of Popular Science magazine. From those I learnt of The Future in which everyone would commute in their own flying cars, & communicate with each other through portable “videophone” devices. Even helicopters were The Future in my papa’s childhood. I think it was around the age of ten I first began to realize that The Future wasn’t going to be very pleasant, & too, that there would be no hiding from it. Not all the projected devices have yet arrived. Some have been invented already, but are not yet out on the mass market, at a price affordable to Mass Man. But the engineers are working on it.
More recently, being driven along an Ontario highway, westward from the Greater Parkdale Area, I noticed a road sign. It announced, “London 175” — referring to London, Ont., & stating the distance in something called “kilometres” (an invention of the French regicides). But some witty vandal had crudely painted “Wrong way!” across it. (There are moments when I can appreciate a witty vandal.)
Surely we have enough information now to establish that we have made a terrible mistake: that in our befogged modernist post-humanism we have chosen the opposite of the right direction.
Let us go about diligently by night, painting “Wrong way!” over all the signposts to The Future.
Can’t resist this one but about 20 years ago I noticed a bill board stating simply “Question everything.” Beneath that some enlightened vandal had spray canned the single word, “Why?”
Modernism: the critique of our supernatural knowledge according to the false postulates of contemporary philosophy. I am not a modernist.
Predictions about the future have almost never been accurate. Does anybody remember Y2K?
But there is one prediction that I can make with certainty. Sixty years from now someone will be complaining about how society has declined and that things were much better at the beginning of the century.
Acartia: and they will probably be right.
Excellent — we know the signs are pointing in the wrong direction. Aside from changing the signs to point towards the nearest tabernacle with a burning candle, any suggestions on the right way? Seems just spraying “wrong way” and adding nothing else would only add to the confusion. But I’ll admit it’s a start.
Acartia, in a past life I was a computer programmer and systems analyst. The reason that the Y2K didn’t blow up in the world’s face was the fact that so many people made such a fuss about it before it came to be. If that fuss had not been made, and complacency ruled the day, a very big mess would likely have ensued.
A little hysteria can be a good thing as long as it doesn’t become a religion or a permanent government department.
Lord Beast, I think just spray such messages about gratuitously to create confusion. This will give us time to figure out what to do next.
Bravo, Lord Dochart, though I suspect that hysteria rarely crosses your hallowed and peaceful domains up there on the river.
Otio, I don’t have a better plan. But I don’t think we have much time to figure out what to do next. The bioengineering and transhumanism crowds are abolishing what is left of man after the rise of the modern bureaucratic state, faster than the various nihilist factions can manage to destroy the state or man. These people all seem to know where they’re going without any signs. Think faster, please.
Good point, Lord Beast. We will order all Departments in the High Doganate to think faster, & our Political Department to think very quickly indeed.
Thank you. Very reassuring. Our White House down here seems to be thinking and acting very quickly itself, so it will be close.
The assignment of blame to Mrs. Thatcher for the squalor of Vauxhall seems a curious attitude. While I am sure some of her policies were wrong (I believe she did, at least, acquiesce in the swallowing of Great Britain by the Leviathan EU), I can hardly believe that she single-handedly destroyed a nation (or even a neighborhood).
My observation (admittedly distorted by my belief that the “War Against Poverty,” as it is called in the US, has in fact been the biggest cause of not only poverty, but crime, ignorance and human/societal degradation in the history of mankind) is that government always does more harm than good, no matter what project they undertake. Certainly, Mrs. Thatcher was the leader of a government and therefore suspect, but that she, by herself, was able to do that much damage seems rooted more in a personal prejudice than in fact.
The only large organization ever created that is more dangerous than the government is the worker’s union that has as its sole purpose the fleecing of workers while encouraging them to avoid work.
Perhaps, my perception that Mrs. Thatcher’s efforts to break the power of unions in Great Britain was a great social good is incorrect. However, to lay at her feet the destruction of a nation, a town, or even a neighborhood that, in my opinion, more properly can be assigned to the effects of 80 years of creeping socialism appears to this distant observer a little unfair.
Perhaps Mr Orwell missed an irony here; I was being facetious. The worst I could say is that Mrs Thatcher (as she then was) created the conditions for an explosion of wealth, with crass manifestations unmitigated by Mediaeval sumptuary laws. So an appliqué of fake went over everything.
It was all brought home to me once in a pub in Cornwall, where a sublime & genuine 17th-century horizontally wood-panelled interior was ripped out by the new franchise landlord & replaced by a cheap plastic imitation of the same thing — one of four or five “Olde England” standard interiors from that brewery chain. I could not devise a punishment adequate to the horror inflicted.
But the worst physical damage done to Vauxhall was by the Labour (socialist) Lambeth borough council, through the 1970s. In the midst of a government-created & nurtured “housing crisis” they expropriated hundreds of acres of gorgeous early 19th-century owner-occupied workmens’ cottages; then, after recovering from bankruptcy, smooshed & replaced these with unbelievably hideous concrete “tower blocks” of subsidized public housing. They also regulated the street markets into non-existence. With Thatcher, the supermarkets arrived to replace them, & any surviving housing stock became gentrified, accentuating the contrast between the social classes.
And I could go on & on & on. …
What really bugs me is that I failed to buy, for lack of 16K pounds in the mid-’seventies, a house that could have been unloaded for half-a-million only 20 years later.
Actually, squads of demons infected the world in the mid-sixties (at the time of Vatican II) that destroyed not only almost all sanctuaries, but also many of the hearts and minds of the general public. This catastrophe was reflected in the spread of strip malls and suburbs of plastic bandage-coloured aluminum boxes alleged to be houses.
There were a few rays of sunshine in the darkness, however. One magnificent rural Ontario Catholic church I know of was about to have its beautiful statues and murals spray-painted Vatican II white by its hootenanny pastor, when an old farmer told the young twit that such an atrocity would be done over his dead body. (The farmer meant it and the pastor knew he meant it.) That church was saved, although the pulpit was later pulled down so the ornate base could be used for the Cranmer-style teak altar board that now sits profane and ridiculous in front of the old and magnificent marble altar.
As the church buildings were being assaulted all over the globe, the general use of drugs, the infection of pornography, and the move towards the acceptance of sodomy and the slaughter of the unborn in their mothers’ wombs, gained considerable steam.
Whenever there is massive, organized destruction of what is sane and/or beautiful, it has always been preceded by heresy or apostasy of some kind.
Governments sometimes make decisions that increase private sector jobs. A simple little tax passed in the late 1600s resulted in a lot of work for bricklayers, to say nothing of fundamentally changing the architecture of England. All because of windows.
On a completely different topic, I think that there is a market for the licensing of fonts for sarcasm, irony, etc.
Acartia, I have to ask myself how many other jobs were either lost, or never created, because of this simple little tax you extoll. The usual ratio is about 8:1.