Sunday 6 February 2011

A DENIAL OF PERSPECTIVE.

So here they are, the entire catalogue of those figures that played a part in the shaping of the world in time long past - the Crusader kings of Jerusalem and the Atabegs of Mosul, the corsairs of the Mediterranean and the Norse adventurers who planted temporary roots in Dublin,  the solitary saints of Wales and the powerful princes of the Roman Church, the magnates who took up arms for Stephen and for Maud, the demon earls of the Fenlands and of Chester, who made regional hells about them for a  few months or years, the abbots and obedientaries of Cluny who played host to the pilgrims crossing Europe to the most celebrated shrines of the Western world, the Knights Hospitallers who housed the pilgrims to Jerusalem, all real, all deserving of mention.

And moving to the nearer  ground before them, closer yet smaller and more shadowy, in a denial of perspective, the humble people who might have been you or me, had we been born eight centuries earlier - the shopkeepers and artisans of Shrewsbury, the small gentry of the Shropshire manors, the pedlars, the craftsmen, the humble brothers and sisters of the monastic Orders, the villeins bound to the land, the younger men who cut out assarts from the forests, the men-at-arms, the ambivalent souls with one foot in England and one in Wales, like me, like you, the continuity of humanity inhabiting these islands, and especially this shire, I may have given them their names, within the covers of my books. I may have given them a local habitation and a history, but they existed, as surely as did the kings, then and in every age since and still exist today and will continue into future centuries.  They are you and me, and the ones who come afterwards.


 ............I feel a part of a progression which is England. I hope you may feel the same, and be glad of it, as I am glad.


Ellis Peters, from her Introduction to the Cadfael Companion by Robin Whiteman.

A  progression which is England. Not the brightest of men, David Cameron.

43 comments:

Woman on a Raft said...

He thinks Vanessa Whitburn is making England up by putting The Duchesse of Boot in the Archers. (No, I'm not listening. The telly trailed it.)

The Mod Father may not be your favourite, but it is his track "England's Rose" which the IWM use in their short flm about British (yes, I know) aircraft manufacturing.

Weller doesn't sing it; a girl warbles it in a way I don't think you'd approve of either, but the installation artist gets to decide this one.

At the engineering hall at Duxford they have a relic, a scrap of the canvass from Wilbur and Orville's money-losing machine. They built a little chapel near it; you go and sit on pale wood benches and watch a large screen which links clips of the early flight and has a roll-call of the British companies while the song plays.

I've not described it very well; it is much more moving in its simplicity because the chapel's construction echoes the unearthly ingenuity of man-made flight, how it's nothing but the understanding and surfing of physics which hold a man in the sky.

It's not mawkish - perhaps a little Betjaminy - and it is worth three minutes of your life if ever you are in Duxford at the IWM.

HenryJ said...

Bah! books,bah! reading,takes up too much time,knowledge fresh from the t'internet is the thing,I have noticed as more technology comes in to "help" the more we go back in time and the less technology we have,public transport when new technology is applied we have less,bins we apply technology and now have collections fortnightly,phones technology you spend more time trying to understand what the people who you telephoned for help/infomation are saying and the computer help well less said less madder you get,oh England, oh Cymru nah rose tinted glasses and wordsmiths and dreams,Cameron a powerhungry shit weak politico still believes the earth is flat, who forgets life exsists outside his fishbowl,as said I can't be bothered with big 1000 page books of somebody else's dreams and opinions unless theres pictures or it's local history or WWII airfields of "name that shire" or railway lines now lost,optoelectronics or Creed 7b, model 444,maint manual or Constitutional History of England,due to the new technology and 13years of Liebour,I don't understand what you have written or what you mean or maybe as a wordsmith you threw all the words into the air and typed them onto your keyboard as you caught them, don't you just like technology.

PS of course not being good at words or writing I like the technology of compression it makes a bad essay even worse.

PT Barnum said...

I'm still trying to grasp CallHimDave's meaning in that speech (apart from conspicuous muslim = threat to western civilisation). As far as I can tell, he will work out what British values are and then make us live by those values. This is just about the least British thing I can think of. And the Ellis Peters' quotation is a luscious testimony to our wild, bifurcated mongrel heritage.

I also note that the core list he offered (freedom of speech etc) included equality between men and women. After a radio debate in which it transpired that not only do the public school boys on the backbenches mock MPs with disabilities (in this case, Paul Maynard) while they are addressing the House, it is also normal for them to mime the shape of huge breasts when certain women MPs rise to speak. Motes and beams, Mr C?

Woman on a Raft said...

Be fair, Mr PTB. I mime 'dickhead' every time they get up to speak, so it evens out.

Dick the Prick said...

I think Mr CallhimDave did that old ruse common of most snake oil salesmen in being equivocal on the use of the term 'liberalism' - that old chesnut that means fucking everything and nothing, liberalism to protect or enforce, to allow or condemn, to grasp or to forget. Hmm...

I'm finding the complaints a bit curious, words like patronising, opportunism and ignorance have been banded about when i'm left here thinking that the fuck didn't say anything.

Ellis peters is a good lass, my ol' dear's a huge fan so have read much of them and thoroughly enjoyed. A world away from iDave, an eon away. Am just watching t'record review and the good ol' coalition voted against loan sharks 'offering' wage day cheques at the 1 time special offer of 4200% - a few got up and expressed concern but then voted it down! WTF? There's socialism in the board room and fuck you nigger on the street. Uuuurrgghhh - cunts all.

a young anglo-irish catholic said...

'...the continuity of humanity inhabiting these islands...'

Well, this is the point. Mr PTB's 'bifurcated mongrel heritage' is just not the case.

Between 1066 and 1945 the population of these islands was incredibly stable. The biggest inbound movement was probably the Hugenot influx. But where are Hugenot ghettos today? Only the names remain.

There was huge Irish immigration - am I not one meeself, sir - but a single generation is all it takes for the Irish to become utterly local.

The immigration from rural Pakistan - and to a certain extent the Carrib - is very different. It is determined to live in its own, imported world. Importing brides and grooms from back home every generation in order to top up the difference.

Did the shit-headed Labour party not abolish the primary purpose rule as its first act in 1997 - to stop brides and grooms being forced into marriages by interviewing them at airport immigration?

The one damn way to let the brow-beaten child speak up in private.

And having delivered that did the shit-heads not also deliver postal voting, to make it easier for the local 'elders' to tick the boxes on the woman's behalf?

Did this not lead the electoral commissioner to say that bits of Birmingham's democracy would shame a banana republic?

What Cameron should have done is forget the Islam aspect and just attack large groups determined to replicate another, backward, way of life in the UK.

Bringing to the UK all the worst practises of political corruption, massive rule bending and small-time crookery.

Think back, Mr I, to the hurricane in Moseley. Ripped the roofs of lots of houses and businesses. The BBC reporters turned up appalled that virtually nobody was insured.

But the subsequent winge-fest follow-up never happened. The media had stumbled on the alternative economy that operates in East Asian areas. This was all sorted out within the 'community'.

I had Pakistani landlords in Birmingham and Middlesboro. One of them had us write our rent cheques out to the local mosque charity. Years later I realised that it was a way of avoiding tax, 'cos I was 'making' a contribution to a charity.

That's not anything particular to do with Islam. It's another world, grafted into the English body politic and the multi-culti anti-rejection medicine is not going to work for much longer.

mongoose said...

When I was little, and the first mongoose in the history of the world to be born the wrong side of the Irish Sea, I used to have to listen to twats making Paddy jokes. I went to a school which had Irish dancing sessions. (A lifetime's aversion to dancing ensued.) We went to Mass three times a week, fish on Fridays, confession on Saturday, "Holy Days of Obligation"... And so it went on. It was a little multicultural mental ghetto. With the decline of the One True Church much of this has been swept away, though you will not find me weeping about it. Time, and reading Ellis Peters, does the work, Dave, not politicians. But we should hold the line at the Rule of Law. Say what you want, think what you want, preach, even, what you want but you may not coerce any other citizen to follow your path - even your daughters. That is England, isn't it?

call me ishmael said...

The fruits of Empire, mr yaic, the cities now clogged in part with brown immigrants rose only by the exploitation of their ancestors, their native reources, their labour, their markets. Birmingham, Bradford, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, all grown boastful and smug, gilded civic halls and mercantile palaces, ostentatious and vulgar, ghastly Rotarians and bent freemasons, knowing whispers and secret handshakes; slaves, tea, coffee, spices, cotton, all fuelling industry and commerce, spawning Fred Dibnahs's steamy smoky mad genius can-do world of shuttling and pumping connectedness, onwards and upwards, walking on the face of the Gungha Din. Absorbing a few million, now, with common sense and tact and legality doesns't seem too high a price to pay, retrospectively, without interest.

a young anglo-irish catholic said...

'Absorbing a few million, now...'

Indeed. And why not. But absorbing, Mr I, is what we are failing to do.

call me ishmael said...
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call me ishmael said...

It is the hijacking and amplification, mr yaic, of Otherness, its colonisation for gain, by the likes of Darcus Gob-Howe and the wretched Yasmin Alibhai Muslem, it is the spawning of a corrosive race relations industry expertise where none was previously necessary, it is these petit bourgeois nouvelle preoccupations which blight Harmony's landscape; it is the lack of common sense and tact and legality, and the grandstanding of the Worthless, such as CallHimDave, which beggar hospitality and strangle assimilation.

I would suggest, furthermore, that while your erstwhile landlords' South Asian sharp financial practice is well-known among urbanites it is very small beer, inconsequential, compared with the efforts of the financial terrorists of Wall Street and Canary Wharf who are looting all our homes - mostly, of course, they are white and in control of the White House and downing Street, so - the story goes - it doesn't count; best turn on the wogs. Aye, and the disabled.

Perspective, that's the thing.

call me ishmael said...

I just copied the words out, mr hj, as I was taught at school. Seems that many of your interests are catered for in any of Ms Peters's Brother Cadfael 200-odd page novels, those that aren't are probably best served with Gaviscon.

a young anglo-irish catholic said...

Aye, aye and aye, Mr I.

But I come at this from the perspective of the family in the blue collar street, the family with the father who used to come home filthy, like he'd been in the mines. The man with the bizarre accent and his jeans tied up with string around the bottom.

Looked down upon by the unionised bone-idle at the local mega-factory.

And what did we do? We played the game to the the millimetre. Ultra-respectable, never a foot out of place, ever examining our behaviour and whether we could ever be criticised.

'You look' my mother used to say, the worst thing possible, 'like nobody owns you.' But the old man was robust and I spent only a few months on free school meals.

And do you know what, I expect everyone else at the bottom of the pile, outsiders, to do the same. Fit in, strive for respectability and advancement, parents willing, if scared, to let their children go forward.

No excuses.

call me ishmael said...

Lots of people have those bootstrapping histories - industrious, self-denying parents, grammar schools and so on. But what about those who don't, who can't, those whose bootstraps are too threadbare to pull them up, or who have no boots; what about them, the faultless, the deaf and blind, the mute, the mistreated, mateless mother, the crippled, the sick, must we tramp on them that the likes of Cameron have even more than they need, must we tramp on them to make ourselves feel better, feel glad that we are not among them. I am a welfareist, mr yaic, but at the same time, pissed and angry, discontented, hungry for light, I would have been among the first out of the sea, up the shores, into the caves, out on the veldt, into the cities and out to the stars. There is no dichotomy between progress and compassion, au contraire, mon ami.

call me ishmael said...

Vanessa Whitburn, mrs woar, like all at Radio Four, apart from Mark Tully, is the spawn of the Devil.

Nothing you write will deter me from my insistence that Paul Weller be exiled to Australia and denied access to mirrors.

Some wish to see Venice and die. I would like to see the Imperial War Museum, any of them.

a young anglo-irish catholic said...

Ah.....you don't get a discourse like this on CiF.

One thing, though. Maybe I have an odd view. My father grew up on a farm, where you grew and farmed your own food, drew your own water and cut your own peat.

Many years ago, he said 'they're so keen for you to have money these days, they'll actually give it to you.'

Always stuck in my mind that.

call me ishmael said...

Yes, it's a good one.

call me ishmael said...

"public school boys on the backbenches mock MPs with disabilities"

Is there a link to that, mr ptb, an iThing ?

Caratacus said...

Mr I + YAIC - you have given me much to cogitate upon between you. Much more than anything else I have read or heard the entire weekend. So if you hear of a truck full of LPG cylinders arse end up in the SW somewhere, it's your fault, OK? :)

The big D said...

I applaud your vision Mr.Ishmael. Progress and compassion would slow our downward progress.

Unfortunately, not enough people share your vision nor noticed the good intentions that smoothed the entrance to this road. Once started on this journey all attempts at changing direction have failed.

We need to stop then start again on a better path, how we achieve that from where we are now is not clear.

PT Barnum said...

Mr I., the closest I can get (apart from the paper media) is Trevor-I'm-Black-But-Proper-English-Me-Philips being emotional with the Marr monster (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12376300) yesterday. The problem being that no cameras in the chamber captured the gurning faces of faux palsey. But those who were reprimanded by the Deputy Speaker agreed it was happening, it just wasn't them.

PT Barnum said...

This discussion has taken an interesting turn overnight. I have never been a racial or national outsider or new arrival, but I recognise some of what Mr ayaic describes as a phenomenon which occurs when you move out of your class position (rural manual labouring classes) into another class (grammar school and friends who lived in the kind of houses which my relatives could be found charring in).

Accent, clothes, manners, home address, parents, assumptions all were subject for mockery and worse, and to survive it was necessary to learn to 'fake' middle-classness.

I don't know if this is a true parallel but perhaps there is a shared experience of the incomer. The insiders react with aggression or hostility until the outsider conforms. Group-think of an ugly kind.

jgm2 said...

There's a link on the BBC at the moment about the decline of 'Anglo-Indian' cooking.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12369759

The majority of Indian/Stanis will, in a generation or so probably be as Anglicised as the rest of us. The schools, grammar schools, medical school, dentist schools, legal courses of Birmingham University are packed to the rafters with Indians just as they were, in my day, with the kids of Irish immigrants.

The ghettoes of Birmingham and the UK though are still packed with the nth generation jackasses of the natives for whom the entire world still seems to owe them a living. When they said 'from the cradle to the grave' they didn't actually mean it literally you idle cunts. It was supposed to be for emergencies only - not a fucking lifestyle choice.

Cunts sitting in Birmingham and Newcastle and Hull, never worked a fucking day in their lives - never worked a fucking day in three lifetimes in many cases - all sitting on their fat arses screeching that it's the wogs and Pakis and Polish plumbers (like the Micks before them) who are taking 'their' jobs. When they're not spitting tacks about having 'their' money used to bail out the banks.

In a meritocracy the fuckers would starve or freeze to death. But they're kept just warm enough and fed on lard, sugar and salt based microwave food from Iceland (because they haven't the time to prepare a proper meal) so that they can be fussed over by legions of concerned bed-wetters from the bed-wetting middle-class 'doing something' when the kindest thing that could be done for the majority of the fuckers is absolutely nothing.

Dick the Prick said...

Fuck all this - the Huff Post has just been sold for $200 million?!?! Have the dumb fucks not read it? I love that Groucho Marx quote 'I wouldn't be a member of any club that'd have me as a member'. Ah, discrimination is such a conceit - get over it, move on. First thing to do is kill all the lawyers!!

Dick the Prick said...

To be fair Mr jgm2, I saw 3 lads in Hull use their mate's head as a battering ram and we were introducing ourselves to each other whilst his head was being used to open a toilet door to get their bud with the drugs - Temazepam! Highly comical. I think it's a little bit untoward to think of a lot of people except base, popular, infantry, soldier - there in a crisis but every other time, fucking useless.


It's no fun taking the piss out of people who can't protect themselves. I find men a poor indicator of a familial situation; always better to talk to the lass. If men want politics they can have it but i'm so old that all I care about is if the toddler's got enough toys. Global warming can come and go if we invest in decent drainage.

call me ishmael said...

Back in the '80s, mr jgm2, whilst Whisky Maggie and her spivs were gangfucking British industry, I worked in a Voluntary Projects Programme aimed at getting long-term unemployed people not back into work but into work for the first time. It was funded by the Manpower Services Commission as part of SEMAG, the Special Employment Measures Action Group and had close connections to various Community Programme Schemes which offered part and full-time work for up to a year and sometimes longer for supervisory, managerial grades. Before I could steer people to the CP, I had to source or provide basic skills training and generally a couple of days a week on voluntary community projects, some manual, some domestic, some admin. Through these simple, structured activities people learned the comradeship, the regularity and the self-esteem which accompany regular employment and I never knew one single soul who did not benefit hugely, either in the short-term or, in many cases, the long. I used to hustle money, too, from charitable trusts, particularly the Cadburys, to take these less than privileged people to see Shakespeare or the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; my office was run a bit like this blog, ongoing conversations in which some engaged and some just watched, all of an anarcho-plumbing bent, all eventually insisting that survival required at least a degree of conformity, not to govament but to one's fellows commonly agreed purposes. Work was good in and of itself, even done voluntarily, education was good, in and of itself, the arts were for everybody, not just for Kirsty Wark's opulent wankers.

There were lots of these projects, up and down the land, once I knew the stats, which proved their worth, but it's a long time ago and I forget. What I know, though, mr jgm2, and when I say know, I mean know, you know, as night follows day, beyond sophistry and rhetoric is that people are not naturally idle - we would not have survived all these centuries if that was the case - but people are often denied opportunity and then eventually shut out and called names.

I have nothing against employment programmes, sensitively and efficiently and productively run. But if they are used punitively, to bizarrely aggrandise the spiv and the financial terrorist to whom, seemingly, we owe our very fucking lives, who adjudicate on our rights to services paid for with our own money, whilst they piss champagne down each others' throats and blow cocaine up each others' arses then we deserve to lose everything they steal from us, in the name of book balancing, the fucking bastards. It is not the impotent poor whom we should thrash but the idle fucking rich.

call me ishmael said...

I did that, too, mr ptb, spoke Brummy on the street and Belfast indoors, even then, at five or six, I felt I was betraying my Mum, and felt ashamed, little knowing that all I was doing was an early example of Cameronism, poor litlle bastard.

mongoose said...

It is a grisly fucking club that we would yearn to join it, is it not? Well, I fucking don't. Bastards, thieves and fucking traitors is what they are.

That the idle are idle is just a truism - a consequence more like it of the fuckwittedness of the ruling elite. We have talked here before, often, of the simple things. There's a film out "Company Men". I seem to be the only sod in this whole town who can lay a floorboard, mix muck and change a light-fitting. Everybody used to be able to do some of these things and if push came to shove a modest living could be earned doing such things. Even now, I want to lay all this paper shite down and make sticks of furniture for a living but it cannot be. "Fuck me, yes, I will make you a Shaker-style dining table. Mind, it will take me six months." Maybe when the kids are gone, maybe when I'm dead.

But one thing is for sure and it is that the honour and nobility of labour - all labour, from rocket science to mucking out stables - is a thing of the past. There is only one badge of honour now and it is money.

jgm2 said...

As you say Mr Ishmael - idleness is not a natural human condition. Even I, as idle a fucker as you could hope to meet (or not) spend time walking the highways and bye-ways, mending my own cars, growing my own veg (a bit), shooting my own game (a bit) and even occasionally reading for pleasure.

Which is why I say that the kindest thing that could be done for many folk is to light the fucking metaphorical fire under them. We had ten years of 'boom' albeit a bogus boom perched on a pile of printed cash - we had a million, two million maybe more folk traipse in from Eastern Europe - many of them degree-educated and do all those jobs that we, the great British doletariate, are 'too good' to do - or, more accurately, doesn't pay us to do because by the time you've factored in your free housing, free council tax, free this, free that you'd be working for nothing.

Two million jobs that our indigenous 'economically inactive' (hidden from the unemployment stats by any number of mechanisms) would have benefitted from doing if only they could be made to believe there was any advantage in doing so.

I believe your story of helping the indigenous of Brum who had written themselves off. But that's my point - they should never be getting to that stage. The ones who 'made good' should be shining beacons of what is possible but instead they're characterised as class traitors.

What are you doing you wanker? Think you're too good for us? Studying hard and getting a good job and fucking off? Fucking traitor. You're 'working class' you are. Be like us.

It's fucking insane.

Anybody who tries to break through and explain that the greatest impediment to most of these people's lives is their own lack of ambition is immediately criticised (by Labour) as being some preachy class-traitor or 'out of touch public schoolboy' or any number of other pejoratives rather than facing the fucking truth.

And who benefits from the status quo? Not me. Not you. Not them. Not the fucking banks. They don't benefit from having several million 'economically inactive'.

The 'rich'? They don't benefit from having a shit-load of poor people cluttering the place up and living in shit-holes. Why would they care if everybody was naice and middle-clarse?

The only people who benefit are the fucking Labour party because several million poor people and the bed-wetting 'something-must-be-done' industry they beget provide an endless excuse for pissing away money buying votes.

Just as if, in the morning, we could suddenly run all our cars on tap-water then by the afternoon tap-water would be £1.30 a litre 'because we need the money' then so it is with 'the poor'. If we didn't have them already then Labour would fucking well create them.

a young anglo-irish catholic said...

A gem, Mr jgm2.

I've come to believe that the current Labour party - now without an historic purpose because there is little more social protection that could be invented - is controlled by people who have no other motivation than their uncontrolled, eye-rolling, hatred of middle england and conservatives.

These people are quite happy to use the blue collar as a wedge in their battle against the Tories. Hundreds of thousands will be sacked to once again paint the Tories black, while the white collar public sector management protects its own.

They couldn't give a shit. It's the as if the WW1 Generals were replaced by Fabians. Let the masses be slaughtered so the enemy might be vanquished.

Lower than vermin, Fabians.

mongoose said...

It is as you say, Mr yaic, the Luvvies really do hate the Tories. It is at the very pinnacle of their hatred that they know that the Tories don't care about them either way. No fury hath Hell like a Luvvie ignored. But we must take no comfort; they are all cunts and do not give a shit about anything or anybody. In any decent country, nobody would have voted for a single one of the thieving bastards.

In the time of Margaret the She-Wolf, there was a cartoon in the papers. A horde of flat-capped, fag-smokers were drawn outside a dole office. A bowler-hatted flunky with a clipboard was organising them into two queues "...those wedded to the work ethic and those not." That we are all sometimes idle swine is fine but I have always fed and clothed my kids. Met whatever were my responsibilities as I guess, have you, Mr jgm2. Social protection seems to have run riot and removed from some that element of self-respect which drives most of us out to toil of a winter's morning. How this self-respect and drive is to be rekindled is the question we must face, and this, I think, is the thrust of Mr I's point. I'd rather spend their benefits money on some training and a box of tools but it is the step from here to there which is proving so difficult.

a young anglo-irish catholic said...

'I'd rather spend their benefits money on some training and a box of tools but it is the step from here to there which is proving so difficult.'

Would not all of Ishmaelia not agree? That people can still be pumped out of schools not being able to do at least one thing really well is the biggest scandal of our times.

That struck me most forcefully when I left school. I couldn't do one thing really well. And deep down, people know when they are useless. And when they know they are useless the trouble starts.

PT Barnum said...

During my two decades as an academic I taught the children of titled folk and the older offspring of the urban working class.

The former were 'entitled', sneering at anyone different, just getting by with enough work or pleading for special consideration, taking skiing holidays in term time, in possession of cars, monthly allowances, daddy's bank account.

The latter? Some I count as among the most amazing people I have ever met. Men and women, written off by their schooling or family backgrounds, thrown out of work, or injured in workplace accidents, driven into the world by abusive husbands, taking a risk on reinventing themselves and remaking the lives of their families. Giving them even a little (time, help, encouragement) was met with such gratitude it was almost embarrassing. And they worked harder and better than any other student, however gifted, while caring for children, elderly parents, working part-time.

Providing the means for the 'idle' to discover that spark in themselves, for whatever it might be, could be what makes the difference. It can be ignited in many ways, but it can also be dowsed with a single word, be it scum, failure, loser.

jgm2 said...

It can be ignited in many ways, but it can also be dowsed with a single word, be it scum, failure, loser.

Colin Powell seriously toyed with running for president on the Republican ticket - indeed he may have been set up to fail by Bush when he had Powell present his risible Iraq 'evidence' to the UN. Barak Obama is black(ish) and actually did get to be US president.

The difference these black guys had compared to tens of millions of other black Americans? Both were only first generation black American so they hadn't grown up with the likes of Al Sharpton and all the rest of the cunts telling 'em they're doomed to failure from the start. So, you know, why bother?

The same way the immigrant Irish who mobbed the grammar schools in my day and the Indians of Birmingham who are mobbing them today didn't have the likes of Clare Short or John Prescott 'feeling our pain' or 'empathising with our predicament' and generally fucking well patronising us. Fuck no. We had parents who believed in education and who told us to pay attention at school and to try and make a better life.

So we did.

The biggest cause of the dearth of expectation is actually fuelled by the self-same well-meaning, bed-wetting, patronising liberal-lefty wankers who claim to give a shit. Oh, poor you, you're doomed to failure, here have some fucking money - that'll fix it.

mongoose said...

It is a shame, Mr PtB, that the young are not wiser but it is one of God's better jokes.

call me ishmael said...

Well, I must admit, you have me there, that Al Sharpton, what's he like, doing all that complaining on behalf of the niggers? Doesn't he know that as recently as in your lifetime, mr jgm2, those white folks have almost entirely stopped lynching niggers, castrating them, burning them alive and laughing, free, from good ole boy judges and juries courts. Jesus, anybody'd think they'd been mistreated. All those Ivy League boys, from good American families, grown rich on centuries of slavery, what possible advantage could they have over the negro, ain't this the land of the free?

In my lifetime all this shit was going on, segregation and the Klan, the official face of the Southern States, fuck me, it's a good job that niggers aren't Jews, or they'd a had some other people thrown out of their country and taken it over, we'd all be creeping around observing Nigger Holocaust Day, just that the Nigger Holocaust lasted centuries, not a decade or two. What was it we called this post, it's so long ago, now, Denial of Perspective?

a young Anglo-Irish catholic said...

You seemed to have attracted a lot of us boot-strappers, Mr I.

Sympathy in short supply, it seems.

call me ishmael said...

Here in Ruin, sympathy and compassion are infinite, mr yaic. The bell tolls for us all.

call me ishmael said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
call me ishmael said...

I don't depart too far from most of this. I had a boy working for me, once, about fifteen, on work experience, bright lad, lyrical and confident but he could wield neither hammer nor screwdriver. I wrote to his headmaster. Few will be poets or philosophers, I said, but everyone will need to change a fucking plug, what are you playing at? There was no reply, which, of course, was a message in itself.

Dick the Prick said...

You wrote to a headmaster saying lad's a fucking numbnuts'?

jgm2 said...

I don't think we're allowed to change a plug in Englandshire any more Mr Ishmael. Some new electrical regulations or other. Some MP's daughter got electrocuted several years ago and, well, you know how it is, something-must-be-done. And if denying 60 million people the option to legally do the simplest of tasks saves just one life and generates screeds of compliance, health and safety bullshit and unnecessary cost then surely it's worth it.

We're allowing ourselves to be rendered increasingly fucking helpless. The better for the bed-wetters to look after us. Because they care. Because they're caring people. Not like the wicked Tories who want us to all be poor all our lives and then die poor. For no good reason obviously. Because they don't care. Just because they're nasty.

Not like Labour. Who truly care. Because they say so.

call me ishmael said...

Dick the Prick said...

You wrote to a headmaster saying lad's a fucking numbnuts'?
8 February 2011 08:34

No,mr dtp, more that he was.