Accidental contributors were James at Nourishing Obscurity and John Duff at Duff and Nonsense. And on an almost daily basis, andin the spirit of the thing if not formally, Cherry Pie dispenses poetry and photgraphs and wisdom. And that’s the last time I volunteer to run a theme for a while.
Sorry if I missed you from this or any other round-up. I'm prepared to stand corrected, link with apologies, and cite my utter incompetence as my only defence.
I had thought we’d grow the positive news idea into saying something good about the civilisation in which we live and which our rulers are doing so much to destroy.
And we did all that and in spades, and it has enriched me personally to the extent several newly-discovered poets and quite a lot of music and architecture that I’d never heard of and also reminding me of buckets of culture that I’d just plain forgotten. It’s also impoverished me by the internet purchase of second-hand DVDs and books with a street value of £20, or half the Ministry of Defence’s research and development budget for the personal protection of serviceman for 2008-9.
And if we didn’t always agree on what is good, and why, and if we now go our separate ways to blog and persuade and propagandise that A is beautiful, and even that A is B, well that’s the beauty of the Internet and one of the deep and abiding strengths of western civilisation. Freedom.
Now watch some joker spoil civilisation even more.
Another glory of our civilisation if not as, ahem, diverse in its choice of guests as it once was, is Desert Island Discs.
Some of the tunes involved may very well get me kicked off the Cultural Conservatives’ Club top table at the International Theodore Dalrymple Awards for Western Culture, but as I’m certainly the only blogger who always posts with his hair Brylcreemed into the gun-metal dome of a scarab’s carapace and in full evening dress, I’ll still be able to feel intensely and silently superior to those above the salt as the port passed.
I still haven’t worked how to post video that’s not already posted onto someone else’s blog yet, so it’s links and waffle only for now.
Oh, and if you like anything and want a copy, I hope you bloody well buy the music and pay its proprietors for the privilege.
Notorious for biting with varying degrees of savagery the commercial hand that fed them (such as in ‘Mudmen’ and ‘Have a Cigar’ as well as the dreadful ‘The Wall’ with which they tried to demoralize us as we were setting about winning and ending the Cold war), Pink Floyd were capable of great rock music and this famous track with its long, eerie opening chord always has me on the edge of my musical seat in anticipation. And when that deep first deep guitar chord arrives I’m prepared to forgive much. Glorious stuff.
Disappointingly little of Tubular Bellsby Mike Oldfield features in the film of The Exorcist, but here it is in all its highly dated glory with its “Grand piano; reed and pipe organ; glockenspiel; bass guitar; double speed guitar; two slightly distorted guitars; mandolin! Spanish guitar, and introducing acoustic guitar, plus...tubular bells”.
A relic: but still highly representative of the majestic, overdone, distinctive and pompous sort of thing that grew to maturity in the 1970s.
Um…
Christianity has its Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar …and The Messiah now that I think of it, and Judaism or at least Jewish history has Nabucco and Prince of Egypt (a great musical film), but what about poor old heathenry, huh? What about all us tax-paying yet freaky devotees of Odin and Thor, Frey and Freya: don’t we get a musical of our own?
Well, there was this one piece…but a bad man liked it, and even when impeccably liberal Hollywood used it, it still somehow managed to tick the Left off. And if you’re all worried that Wagner don’t surf, here’s the fluffy bunny version for all you Angora Wiccans out there…
Stay calm. There was once upon at time a very funny radio series about aliens and Surrey (despite HG Wells having done it first), and having recently listened to the BBC version of Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy when then this came on I Iaughed my socks off at the silliness of the Eagles’ Journey to the Sorcerer– as overblown a bit of fluff I’d ever heard, and still fun today. Not sure of this is the Eagles and it’s surely not the album version, but it gives an idea how the Beeb in its late prime managed to put the musical cherry on the top of the funny, first ever broadcast of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
You want punkabilly?
I can’t hear you! Do you want punkabilly? DO YOU WANT PUNKABILLY?
Thank you, CastleCity!
I’ll swear that this started off as a joke back in the 1980s (I know that I did), but I’m told that Tenpole Tudor says good things about our troops at his various reunion tour gigs. I’ve danced to this song at weddings and birthdays and Goth nights and rock nights, and they do say that on a moonlit night whenever two or more unashamed Englishmen are gathered together in the presence of premium-strength pints of anything and a weak-willed DJ, then the shirts come off and they play Swords of a Thousand Men in that fine old utterly anachronistic crusading spirit we all know and love.
Some songs are the voice of a generation.
The era of punk and the New Wave came in just as Old Labour’s last government was dying and making way for the purifying fire that Mrs.Thatcher and I would bring to scour the corruption from the land and rededicate Britain to its ancient destiny of making a quid or two. In that freelancing spirit of let’s make lots of cash by getting a novelty record cut and then scarper when the sales fall, Jilted John in 1978 came out with his eponymous song.If you’re familiar with the track you’ll know what’s coming, but if you’re not then wait until 120 – 125 seconds of its lovely melody and haunting lyrics have gone by to realise as we all did only last autumn that this is the song, not of my generation, but of my daughter’s generation. And her children’s generation. And theirs…
I’d refer my right honourable and honourable friends to a post I’ve already made this week, but why schlep? Here, in all its high, angelic beauty is Lux Aeterna; complete with a picture show that’s strongly reminiscent of fermented milk, but Elgar’s music itself is still in my opinion the Carlsberg of church music.
‘Do you think the Welsh can do better than that, Owen?’
‘At one hundred yards, volley fire by ranks present. Present. Aim. FIRE!’
Beats Delilah, doesn’t it boyo?
And if it came down to taking one record only, it’d have to be Lux Aeterna.
Aargh!Julia’s doing Culture again today, and another jewel it is too.
Of that, more when my beard and the day are both older. I think tomorrow I’ll do my own desert Island Discs to make Culture Wars: The Culture a round seven days. And then I shall rest…
So no fiction today, but surely culture and the fountain-head (!) these last thousand years pretty much exclusively in these islands - of our shared and publicly-held ideas of right and wrong.
We’ve spent a millennium trying to live up to the following in England, and longer still in the Celtic Fringe (though surely in this context I should call it the Celtic Crown given how nasty human sacrifice was.)
Christians and Jews please note that I’m not asserting that the works below are fiction in the sense of ‘made up stories that never happened’.
Atheists and agnostics, please bear in mind that these are the foundations of official and private ideology of most of western civilisation and they were and are roughly the lines (shorn of the historical-context mysticism) by which people of goodwill still try to reach the good life in this world and to…hell? with the next.
My fellow pagans: like it or loathe it the Christians won their culture war, stuffed our predecessors up a treat, and eventually abolished slavery after practicing it themselves for centuries. They also beat numerous continental head-cases in endless wars and created science based in part on the notion of an orderly universe governed by a single and self-consistent god. There’s nothing inherently evangelical in our own tiny fringe cult, but as I have had it explained to me there’s nothing wrong either with helping a kinsman rediscover a lost heirloom, so if you want to look there’s quite a lot of sensible advice on how to live the good life over here – even before it gets all mystic. I particularly endorse the passages on alcohol and friendship.
There’s even a verse about the stupendous importance of towels so don’t panic.
But though our culture has always had its faults and anyone can find an excuse to break their own moral laws when it suits them (I know that I have) and our monotheistic ancestors were no exception, ideas count.
Ideas matter. Words count for something. Repeat words endlessly Saturday after Saturday or Sunday after Sunday generation after generation and sooner or later folk are going to take them seriously. You can see the seeds of Abolitionism in these words: of law and individual human rights; of the idea that girls aren’t merely toys for the boys and that property might be respected with divine endorsement, and so on.
Maybe people will simply love and follow someone with a beard of one sort or another: I know I do.
Both texts have different versions and paradoxical names (the Ten Commandments aren’t merely ten and they aren’t all commandments), but you can still see the shape there of how perhaps it came to be that we feel badly (or a least many of us in the dextrosphere feel badly) about casual murder and bad manners and dishonesty and theft and hurting the weak and the defenceless.
I’ve chosen an example of each text at random or by predetermination or genetic disposition or Fate or Wyrd or at the bidding of the Secret Masters or by what I had for breakfast – I don’t know which, but I do know it’s not because of any particular favourite of mine or any knowledge that I have concerning superior authenticity.
Beliefs count. Ideas count. The words we use and hear used every day over long periods of time can make a huge difference to the way we live our lives and on the quality of those lives, and if you don’t believe me then just you ask any nigger if I’m wrong.
2 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;
3 Do not have any other gods before me.
4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me,
6 but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
7 You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.
8 Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
9 For six days you shall labour and do all your work.
10 But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.
11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.
12 Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
13 You shall not murder.
14 You shall not commit adultery.
15 You shall not steal.
16 You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
17 You shall not covet your neighbour's house; you shall not covet your neighbour's wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.
If 1984 wasn’t intended as an instruction manual, then the following should not be treated by our rulers as a motivational speech.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.
I may be a little late with that one…
All the Culture Wars contributors seem to have their eyes on the skies today.
Firstly, Julia on the common falcon by an uncommon poet who believed in something good and great about our civilisation and who followed his beliefs at some personal cost.
Via Julia, John Duff is perhaps an inadvertent participant and I’m grateful because he’s also looking to the skies through the words of and a hero of our country of whom I’d never heard before, and who in turn inspired one of my American heroes.
Speaking of heroes, Pavlov’s Cat makes two superb culture posts, and from his choice of heroes which I share almost to the last byte I’m tempted to paraphrase Rooster Cogburn…My god, he reminds me of me.
Starship Troopers asserts the heretical idea that the use of political power can cause people harm. Harm is bad and perhaps, therefore, the use of political power should be made better.
Political power might be made better: less tyrannical or short-sighted or spendthrift or miserly or bellicose or arbitrary if those who wielded it had been obliged to prove by some test in advance of governing that they possess some level of social and personal responsibility.
If the volunteers show themselves to be prepared to take personal risks – including death or injury – to preserve the body politic, then we might justly consider they are potentially more responsible than others who don’t do so.
Volunteering for military service can indicate some level of social and personal responsibility and some level of risk.
Therefore, perhaps the decision to undertake voluntary military service should be used as the chief test to qualify to vote or for standing for office.
In Starship Troopers’ future Earth and its space colonies, only discharged veterans of a minimum of two years’ military service [or honourably invalided out] can vote or stand for office.
Above all it’s an exciting military science fiction novel – one of Heinlein’s so-called ‘juveniles’ – and it still stands up both as science fiction and as a war story today – decades after its publication.
But Heinlein is triumphantly right-headed in it, and his characters discuss, explain, and exemplify, amongst other things, the out-dated and unegalitarian concept of virtue:a sense of political involvement and competence which is legitimate becasue of cost at which that involvement has been bought.
Government is force – ‘ the rods and the axes’, and for all the limits on it; the conventions and limitations and however closely it might try to parallel public morality, when it comes down to it the difference between doing what the government tells you to do and doing what you want or feel duty-bound to do is that the government can justly use force against you if you disobey. So to use the power of that coercion – you must balance the power with responsibility.
Heinlein wrote all kinds of true and un-Leftie things, and though I now disagree that all co-operation with the State is through fear and compulsion, he makes a strong case for a democratic republic whose enfranchised citizens have earned their power. The Left in most of its forms spits feathers to this day at the book. The very notion that society and government aren't or shouldn't be: a costless give-away game show with the State as compère starting up the conveyor belt with its set of winesglasses, cuddly toy, towel; or a shopping channel with an infinite credit limit on your card is blasphemous to most. And of course they responded with fair-minded logical disagreement and closely-argued refutations...Ah, you spotted my deliberate mistake, huh? Okay, I confess: they defamed Heinlein personally from the start and continue to misrepresent his arguments even now.
And he throws some magnificent grenades at the Left-liberal wishful thinking - and all in his familiar relaxed, easy prose style.
Oh, and naked force and the threat of force has solved more major international problems in history than any other factor.
Oh, and an executed murderer can never, ever repeat his crime.
Oh, and irresponsible government always leads to disaster.
Oh, and the labour theory of value is worthless.
Oh, and human beings aren’t suited to communism.
Oh, and if ‘women and children first’ isn’t the overriding motive of a system of government, then that government will fail when its population fails.
Oh, and if you don’t have any force to use; if you lay down your arms, then somebody else or something else will move in as soon as it can and displace you and the universe won’t even notice you’ve gone away.
IF I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
That’s what he wrote, and what he did. Let’s let it be.
Almost apocalyptic tonight with (apart from my exceedingly good offering now well in the past) four horsemen bringing us stuff of culture… or that about which much of Western culture revolves.
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place. Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn: But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind, So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace, Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place; But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch, They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch; They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings; So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease. But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life (Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife) Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four— And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man— There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:— That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will bum, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Day Three of Culture Wars; The Culture, and I’ve missed so much.
Starting with works about love and by women. Above is one of Mrs. Northwester’s favourites; we keep a copy over the fireplace.
Pavlov’s Cat points out that I have already missed three excellent posts on Blognor Regis. I am ashamed.
So here’s high culture from John Barleycorn; Rock – with a capital um…wiggly letter like a melted giraffe, forget me own name like as not…And Sport – which is like culture but with fewer rules and more balls. Sorry Longrider. ‘course, if he’da got with the programme and used #culturewarstheculture as a tag as I suggested then I’d have found him first – before THEY did…
Counting cats introduces me (if not you) to a poetic Australian. Yeah, as if all that humiliating stuff with balls on the grass wasn’t enough to do the homeland down.
Julia’s right on the money as per, with an Atlanticist and freedom-loving film that preaches as well as anything that ‘our’ culture is now a worldwide culture, and that for all our faults, the West has stood for so long for freedom.
Pavlov’s Cat has his own sweet vision too – a shield day, a spear day, now that the appeaser’s exposed and run off to his paymaster and the men of the West are free to fight…
Oh, and cop the glorious song amongst the photies. Another stumble-upon montage from James. Use the tag, James; use The Tag.
The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis remain a delightful and illuminating read: full of nice short chapters for quick, hurried reads in a busy life on the road to Damnation, or it can be a heavenly bog-book for those little sessions where you’re obliged to sit still and think about politicians and the state of your own body and soul.
Mostly it’s fun.
Mostly...
Because it's really about us.
It’s also a handy little Devil’s Own Guide to fouling up life and preparing us all for a highly calorific afterlife, and takes the form of letters from an experienced demon - Screwtape - to an inexperienced new field agent - Wormwood - whose assignment it is to tempt his particular victim (the ‘patient’) away from any chance of Heaven and into Hell where his soul will be devoured by the demons as a delicacy. Wormwood’s mission - and there’s little doubt that he had no choice but to accept it - is frustrated by the fact that the patient has recently become a Christian. Screwtape offers advice to the hapless rookie in the each chapter (or each week as it was originally published in The Guardian!) to help him overcome the obstacles that God -‘The Enemy’ – puts between Wormwood and success. Thus Screwtape tells us something illuminating about virtue and vice in each chapter which are often real and particular and permanent features of our lives on earth and how we do live it, how we mess it up, and how we might do better by ourselves and our fellows here and now.
Each chapter is funny and enlightening in some particular way. Lewis was making points about Christian morality and theology and therefore not every part of each will be to all tastes, but it’s still got a lot to say in short, easy to digest ways about the human condition and how we live today and might live tomorrow. Mostly each chapter's funny because, as Lewis remarked himself about readers' comments, they usually remind readers of themselves.
Both of the regular readers of this blog will know that I’m no Christian of any sort: though this week newcomers probably couldn’t tell it, but England was until very recently solidly Christian for nearly a thousand years and most of the rest of Britain still is, if anything. So our common morality was [until the relativists and the Marxists and others got their paws on it] likewise mostly influenced by the Judeo-hellenic world-view of personal responsibility and the need to consider others as rational beings and the children of God and hence to treat them as we would wish to be treated ourselves.Notice how well this isn’t doing now that world-view is being forced out and replaced with empty and damning nostrums of the Left and hyper-individualism. Most people in and of these islands will recognise what Screwtape is getting at when he advises Wormwood how to subvert the patient’s faith via his manners, his family affections, his friendships and companionship with fellow-parishioners – and especially through sexual love.
Yey! Sex at last.
Though not with anyone like CS Lewis, obviously.
Screwtape’s advice about how to make the patient feel secretly superior to his nicer new Christian acquaintances show us how snobbery (pride!) might jeopardize his new-found love for a girlfriend who would otherwise support him and help make him a better and happier person. He shows us how to destroy a marriage or other loving relationship by persuading us to believe that each act of generosity is some kind of ‘sacrifice’ to be repaid in full (and in blood by implication) rather than a gift; freely given and asking nothing in return. [I wouldn’t imagine Lewis to be a fan of Ayn Rand]…and by showing us this, he also shows how to keep such relationships alive and happy.
He’s also very witty on the gluttony of ‘moderate’ or slimming diets, and he beautifully accounts for the tooth-clenching anger that people who only want ‘a little’, or who want something simple ‘done properly’ can inspire in generous hosts and friends who put the boat out. Or serve meat. Oops.
He was also bang up-to-date on the glib, empty intellectuals who would one day come to rule Britain; full of moral relativism and itching to tear down the familiar and the good, (here we are then) and an extra ‘chapter’ which was written later than the original wartime letters is as good a commentary on and condemnation of communism and the weakness and absurdities all-too available in consumerism - and a prediction of the bland conformity of our very own bureaucratic age. I’d say it’s a must for all conservatives, Christian or otherwise, and indeed for anyone who doesn’t want to sub-contract their conscience and personal happiness to the jokers who pull the strings in government today.
This book works because it’s funny; especially in the old tempter’s inversions and lies - fair is foul and foul is fair and all that. Screwtape is unconsciously ironic. His glibness about how pointless the virtues and even simple kindness are shows his words up as the lies they are. His libels of morality strike like accidental blessings at the reader’s conscience and they give us hope about the goodness at the heart of our own way of life and encouragement to live it well.
So we laugh at his increasing fury - and hunger - as Wormwood blunders ever further away from the patients’ damnation. Most of all it works and we smile - because the patient's faults are our own; and often easy enough to remedy in ourselves..
