Leftists Talk About Bread-and-Butter Issues for Public Consumption...

...but, when it comes down to it, what they really seem to care about is identity politics and political correctness.

This fact was borne upon me for the thousandth time recently when I got an election flyer for a left-wing candidate. Everything in the flyer was about local amenities, public transport, and the like. Not a single mention of the liberal social agenda, globalism, or anything like that.

It always seems to be what they lead with in ordinary, everyday debates as well. I'm constantly asked, by my leftist friends and colleagues, why the rich should dominate society like they do-- or some such question. I rarely have the courage (or the appetite) to reply: "But this doesn't really seem to be what you care about, or the threat I think you represent. What you really seem to care about is changing all the immemorial traditions of mankind."

More of the Same

The BBC posting another highly newsworthy and socially relevant story-- some women (enough to make a news feature, apparently) are wearing "divorce rings" to celebrate the destruction of their marriages.

For a long time now, the media and entertainment industries seem to have gone full blast to sow hatred and resentment between men and women.

Every time I see a couple walking hand-in-hand or arm-in-arm along the street-- especially an old couple-- it feels like a little victory against this agenda of hatred and separation.

The Protestant Champion

I never talk to myself, and until I heard other people doing it, I believed that talking to oneself was a merely literary of dramatic convention-- that people didn't really do it. But I do have a habit which seems even more eccentric-- that is, suddenly laughing at something I've remembered at random. I don't see why one shouldn't do this, but I don't notice other people doing it.

Today I was laughing at the memory of a passage from GK Chesterton's autobiography, which I think might be his best book. I'm sure I've posted this passage before, in some form or other, but here it is again. I think it's very funny.

For scene-setting, all you have to know is that Chesterton's grandfather and father were estate agents. The family were Unitarian, but not particularly religious.

I cannot help having a dim suspicion that dignity has something to do with style; but anyhow the gestures, like the songs, of my grandfather's time and type had a good deal to do with dignity. But, used as he was to ceremonial manners, he must have been a good deal mystified by a strange gentleman who entered the office and, having conferred with my father briefly on business, asked in a hushed voice if he might have the high privilege of being presented to the more ancient or ancestral head of the firm. He then approached my grandfather as if the old gentleman had been a sort of shrine, with profound bows and reverential apostrophes.

"You are a Monument," said the strange gentleman, "Sir, you are a Landmark."

My grandfather, slightly flattered, murmured politely that they had certainly been in Kensington for some little time.

"You are an Historical Character," said the admiring stranger. "You have changed the whole destiny of Church and State."

My grandfather still assumed airily that this might be a poetical manner of describing a successful house-agency. But a light began to break on my father, who had thought his way through all the High Church and Broad Church movements and was well-read in such things. He suddenly remembered the case of "Westerton versus Liddell" in which a Protestant churchwarden prosecuted a parson for one of the darker crimes of Popery, possibly wearing a surplice.

"And I only hope," went on the stranger firmly, still addressing the Protestant Champion, "that the services at the Parish Church are now conducted in a manner of which you approve."

My grandfather observed in a genial manner that he didn't care how they were conducted. These remarkable words of the Protestant Champion caused his worshipper to gaze upon him with a new dawn of wonder, when my father intervened and explained the error pointing out the fine shade that divides Westerton and Chesterton. I may add that my grandfather, when the story was told, always used to insist that he had added to the phrase "I don't care how they are conducted," the qualifying words (repeated with a grave motion of the hand) "provided it is with reverence and sincerity." But I grieve to say that sceptics in the younger generation believed this to have been an afterthought.

Honestly, This Sort of Thing Makes Me Sick

I idly wondered if CNN would actually summon some patriotism for America's 250th birthday. But their top story, at the time I accessed their website, had this headline: The World Cup's unexpected gift to America: A game the rest of the world knows as football is teaching America something about itself on its 250th birthday. (If you click on the article itself, the headline changes to: "America held a big birthday party — and a soccer extravaganza broke out.")

Here's a passage from the story: "The game the rest of the world knows as football is teaching America something about itself on its 250th birthday and reminding international visitors that the nation is far more welcoming and complex than its bitter political caricature. The World Cup’s gift of joy is a unifying distraction after tough years marked by ideological divides and a pandemic’s economic fallout. And its blend of European and South American superstars and rising African and Asian teams is also holding up a mirror to the country’s own diversity and its enduring political experiment, enriched by immigration."

Seriously, can they get off the hobby-horse for even one day?

But it's more than that. This sort of rhetoric seems so self-defeating to me.

Liberalism wants to celebrate America for its diversity. It also wants to celebrate Ireland, America, Spain, etc. etc. for their diversity. Everything is diversity, all the time. But if everything is diversity, doesn't diversity itself become...monotony?

And what is diversity composed of? What are the ingredients of diversity? Well, they are national and ethnic and religious traditions, that's what. Diversity is like artificial intelligence-- it can't create anything. (Although immigrant ethnic communities do create their own traditions, like the Italian-American Feast of the Twelve Fishes. But that's still national and ethnic and religious cultures, even if they happen to be displaced.)

As for "tough years marked by ideological divides"-- why is ideological diversity a bad thing, while cultural and ethnic diversity is seen as a good thing?

It's all so tiresome.

Happy 250th Birthday, America!

I won't be online tomorrow so I'm taking this opportunity to turn red, white and blue in honour of America's 250th birthday!

I firmly believe that 1776 was a turning point in world history, and I'm increasingly of the opinion that the principles of the American Revolution should be exported worldwide-- and that this would protect, rather than harm, the unique and organic traditions of each people and nation.

And I love America, aside from politics. True, I haven't spent more'n a few weeks there-- but people who have lived their entire lives in the USA have drastically differing views of it, just as people who grew up in Dev's Ireland had (and have) drastically differing views of it. So, I'll boldly insist that I love America.

God bless the USA!

The Twinkly Nineties Aesthetic

Sometimes it's hard to tell if something is a feature of the world or just a feature of your own mind.

About this time last year, I wrote a post about the different aesthetic associations that, in my mind, come along with different "currents" of Catholicism.

But there are "aesthetics"-- in my own mind-- associated with so many things. Sometimes they're so specific, I wonder if they can be real.

I was sitting in a café in the Ilac Centre the other week, talking to a fellow poet. I was specifically talking about my frustrated efforts to write a poem about the Ilac Centre. Specifically, the poem was about the Ilac Centre in the nineteen-eighties. I said: "Well, it had a very specific atmosphere back then. There was a fountain in the middle, and a big balloon rising up and down above the fountain, and there were windowed lifts that went up to the top of the centre, and there was a mezzanine café, and there was a mosaic of street traders there, and..." All of this came together in a definite aesthetic for me, but as I tried to describe it, it seemed evanescent to say the least.

Anyway, recently I've been thinking of a very specific aesthetic which I called the "twinkly nineties aesthetic". I think it can best be exemplified by this scene from Groundhog Day. (The bit where the music begins.)

This aesthetic had a few elements which I'll try to identify:

1) It was unabashedly sentimental and upbeat.

2) It tended to use nature imagery, either literally or metaphorically.

3) This is harder to articulate, but it seemed to assume an equilibrium of social forces. For instance, liberalism and conservatism, religion and science, masculinity and femininity, tradition and progress-- there was a certain sense of stability.

4) I somehow associate it with blue jeans, hazy blue mountains in the distance, running brooks, stepping stones, and...that kind of thing.

3) Twinkly keyboard music.

4) A spring atmosphere-- sunshine, green fields, light sparkling on rippling water, etc.

I particularly associate this atmosphere with religion class in my school in the nineties. The religious education was terrible and was mostly watching "inspirational" films, or films about moral issues. They weren't all from the nineties, but the ones that were (or close to it) tended to have this atmosphere, at least in parts. For instance: Regarding Henry (1991), Shadowlands (1993), Scrooged (1988), Alive (1993) On Golden Pond (1981). In fact, although it's the earliest (and a long way from the nineties), On Golden Pond might be the prime example.

We'd also have retreats which involved a lot of lying around (literally lying around) listening to twinkly keyboard music like the music in the Groundhog Day video. At least, that's how I remember it.

A still from The Stand (1994)

I also associate this aesthetic with The Stand (1994), which I watched on my thirtieth birthday. Despite its post-apocalyptic theme, it still had this sort of atmosphere-- partly because the survivors of the devastating virus are returning to nature, out of necessity. Cocoon (1985) also has this sort of atmosphere. So does The Bucket List (2007) and The Twilight Saga: New Man (2009) which shows that it's not necessarily confined to the nineties.

If anyone reading this video thinks I'm just talking about "hippie-ness", I'll have failed to express what I mean. It's something much more specific. Yes, it is hippie-ish, sort of. But a specific kind of hippie-ish, a long long way from gentle people wearing flowers in their hair in San Francisco.

Whether it exists outside my mind is quite another matter. I'd be interested to know if anybody else know what I'm talking about.

Spooky