Human Stock Crisis; Depleted

 "And the opposite of socialist is not capitalist. Our party is older than capitalism, and wider than any class. It grew up in the first place out of concern for liberties, traditions and morals. It has evolved a good deal in the past three centuries yet it has retained its essential character; its area of concern is the whole of public life and all matters which should be of public interest down to the treatment of every man, woman and child."

...

"Such words as good and evil, such stress on self-discipline and on standards have been out of favour since the war with the new establishment. They have preferred the permissive society, and, at the same time, the collectivised society. At first sight this paradox might seem inexplicable. Why should people who believe in strict state control over economic life, who disfavour private enterprise, independent education, private pension schemes, private medicine, so strongly favour what they call permissiveness in social life? How is it that those who claim to oppose the exploitation of man by man and what they call commercialism should favour the commercial exploitation of indecency, the commercial exploitation of woman by man?"

...


"The decline is spreading. We know that some universities have been constrained to lower their standards for entrants from comprehensives, discriminating against more the talented [sic] because they come from grammar or independent schools. We see how the demand for absolute equality turns into the new inequality.

In the universities, which should be sanctuaries for the pursuit of truth, the bully-boys of the left have bean giving us a foretaste of what leftwing dictatorship would endeavour to achieve, actively cheered on by the casuistry of some members of the university staffs, cuckoos in our democratic nest, and by the pusillanimity of others, by the apathy of many and, I must add, by moral cowardice in public life.

...


"It was the radical Socialist writer and patriot, the late George Orwell , who described the left-wing intellectuals as men motivated primarily by hatred of their own country. Socialists who spoke most about brotherhood of man [sic] could not bear their fellow-Englishmen, he complained. Their well-orchestrated sneers from their strongpoint in the educational system and media have weakened the national will to transmit to future generations those values, standards and aspirations which made England admired the world over.

It is just because their message is that self-discipline is out of date and that the poor cannot be expected to help themselves, that they want the state to do more. That is why they believe in state ownership and control of economic life, education, health. Their wish to end parental choice in where and how their children shall be educated, in spending their money on better education and health for their children instead of on a new car, leisure, pleasure, is all part of the attempt to diminish self and self-discipline and real freedoms in favour of the state, ruled by socialists, the new class, as one disillusioned communist leader called them."

...

"It was Freud who argued that repression of instincts is the price we pay for civilisation. He considered the price well-paid. So can we, now. But we must see the dilemmas, we must argue it out among ourselves, to find a way through these moral dilemmas, while we fight for our ideals in wider fora through words and deeds. But you may ask what can fallible politicians in short-lived governments do in the face of all these tidal forces? Most of what needs to be done, I have stressed, is for individuals as themselves and as members of all manner of bodies. But some tasks are for government, and to these I will return on a future occasion.

This could be a watershed in our national existence. Are we to move towards moral decline reflected and intensified by economic decline, by the corrosive effects of inflation? Or can we remoralise our national life, of which the economy is an integral part? It is up to us, to people like you and me."

Keef lays it out in 1974; the eugenics arguments near the end of the speech possibly cost  him leadership of the Party, but did provide the example for Thatcher to cloak 'moral responsibility Toryisms' in euphemism and wordplay. The conception of the left as some pervasive conspiracy is staggering, as is the thought that Joseph was at the helm of Thatcher's policy decisions. As I recall from Peter Henessy's The Secret State, he was also one of the politicians assigned to the government's Cotswolds bunker in the event of nuclear war. Enoch Powell too. Brr.

Dis-possessed

"When I first saw [The Exorcist] I was pissed off because I saw it as a return to the ancient views about the Devil and the Catholic Church: part of the nostalgic disease of the 1970s, and a reactionary one at that. When I saw it a second time it was with a San Francisco clinical psychologist...who immediately saw the movie as an allegory. And that enlightened me. People flock to the movie because it is a therapeutic experience. We are all possessed -- by our addictions, our loves, our attachments, our habits, our unconscious, our guilts, our needs, our possessions, our social roles -- and they talk through us. We vomit out our bullshit. We all want to be exorcised."

-- Jerry Rubin, "I am Regan, you are Regan,"

Village Voice, May 2, 1974

"...We weren't so much the Lords of Darkness as the Lords of Chickenshit when it came to that kind of thing. I remember when we went to see The Exorcist that Christmas in Philadelphia: we were so freaked out, we had to go watch The Sting afterwards to take our minds off it. Even then, we all ended up sleeping in the same hotel room, because we were scared out of our minds. It's funny, because years later Linda Blair -- who played the satanic kid in that movie -- ended up dating my mate Glenn Hughes from Deep Purple. She definitely liked musicians, it turned out. She even went out with Ted Nugent once. But she wouldn't go near me.
Not a fucking chance."

-- Ozzy Osbourne, I Am Ozzy

"They just wouldn't fuck off, those satanists. I'd walk out of my hotel room in the morning, and they'd be right outside my door, sitting in a circle on the carpet, all dressed in black hooded capes, surrounded by candles. Eventually I couldn't take it anymore. So one morning, instead of brushing past them as I usually did, I went up to them, sat down, took a deep breath, blew out their candles, and sang 'Happy Birthday.'
They weren't too fucking happy about that, believe me."

-- Ibid.

Warning! Polarity Reversing

How precarious life in Britain was in the 1970’s. Without really knowing it, we were under attack from all angles, a relentless barrage of aggression that made the Blitz look like a disagreement over bric a brac at a jumble sale. As most of us went about our business (buying paraffin, listening to Slade records, going on strike, wearing massive trousers, smoking) our sceptered isle was a secret war zone, our lives and way of life threatened from under the sea, under the ground, from the future, from the distant past and from the farthest, coldest, darkest recesses of intergalactic space.

As a child, I would lay awake and wonder what would become of us if it wasn’t for Dr. Who. Exiled to Earth, he was the one thing that stopped us time and again from invasion, subjugation, annihilation - and he didn’t even really want to be here. Imagine the UK without the Doctor, and in short time we’d have been over-run by animated inanimate objects, held to ransom by aliens, taken over by an ancient race of reptiles, then ravaged by a savage war of conquest between those self-same reptiles and their ruthless aquatic cousins, mankind reduced to hapless observers, slaves, forgotten, impotent witnesses to the end of civilisation as we knew it.

Not surprisingly, I hero-worshipped the 900 year old alien responsible for keeping me alive and sought to pay him tribute by watching his struggles of a Saturday tea time, buying his chocolate and keeping the wrappers, eating his cereal, wearing his badges and, most of all, obsessively reading his annual reports which were published each year in time for Christmas.

There is no-one that has ever had as big an influence on me as the Third Doctor, including family members, which is not so much a reflection on them as an indicator of the sort of person I would grow up to be: fickle, and more interested in the imaginary and ephemeral than the here and now, the there and then, the mundane nuts, boring bolts and less than riveting rivets of real life. It’s desperately sad, of course, I know that but the pitiful nature of that revelation doesn’t negate its truth.

Dr. Who taught me that life is tentative, random, fragile: one minute you’re riding your bike to work, the next you’re being blown away by a dapper shop dummy. It also taught me that, as a species, we’re nowhere, not ancient, not adaptable, technologically backward, fatally vulnerable, helpless.

In a time when plastic flowers and sofas could, and did, kill, we needed a much older, far wiser head to watch our backs. I miss that. Precarious life might have been back then, but I felt safe, reassured. Now, I’m permanently on edge, and life is revealed as a game of cards on an oil rig, soon to be interrupted by a heat ray wielding terrapin with a wet vest and murder in mind.

Unmann-Wittering.