You shouldn't think I don't have things to say, things to think. I just find it hard - as I have for as long as I can meaningfully remember - to get them down
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Well, that has always been the case with me (although it's only now that I can actually admit it). The very nature of Asperger's Syndrome has left me unable to grasp the curious, non-ideological way most people's minds work and rendered me only able to think of people as ideological tools, as objects whose every thought and action can be analysed in terms of pure logic and instant certainties. In other words, it makes people's understanding of other people, whether they want it to be or not, as inflexible as ultra-Marxists and neo-Nazis both, for their own reasons, *choose* to be (it is not a coincidence that people with AS often lean towards political extremes because they promise to simplify and make sense of the world as more evolved political theories are responsible enough not to do - I myself flirted both the far-right and far-left in my teens. I think people with AS will tend to disapprove of The Sun and all it stands for because of its extreme *aggressive normality*, but it is surprisingly tempting for them to become conservatives of a Daily Telegraph ilk - I was like that at 14, as I confessed on an earlier blog - because that's a world of cosy certainties, even though the maintenance of those certainties involved, and indeed could not have happened without, the ghettoisation of those with AS and similar conditions in dehumanising long-stay mental hospitals).
So I wrote countless splenetic rants in which everything could be reduced to pure ideology, every single action had an ideological construct, without realising the illogical and emotive reactions that most people make. I still distrust the idea that such reactions should never be questioned (because that is government by Murdoch, effectively, at least in this country - we are already far closer to that than we should be) and I still loathe what Keane represent for pop, not least because I genuinely believe that what they were in 2004 was a substantial influence on what the Cameronistas were by 2005. But I think I now understand that you cannot make such instant associations (although I do still think that Blair's adulation of the USA was in part inspired by Luxy-under-the-bedclothes memories of fighting the old guard at Fettes - he loved the illusion of being a rebel, and a crucial part of NuLab rhetoric was to greatly exaggerate the power of Americosceptic fogeys because otherwise they'd have had to admit that they *were* the establishment. NuLab promoted their pop-savviness as heavily as they did because it was the only real factor by then distinguishing them from the Tories, whereas even under John Smith there had been real differences in terms of economic policy etc. NuLab began to die as soon as the Tories presented themselves as equally pop-savvy, because that removed the only factor distinguishing the parties post-1994).
The most interesting thing about Scruton is something I don't think I knew then - the fact that his father, who was (I think) a Mancunian who had worked his way up and got himself a cosy place in Buckinghamshire, nonetheless distrusted everything that Scruton now laments in such misty-eyed language. Michael Wharton aka 'Peter Simple' was another of that ilk, his father being a Jewish Bradford businessman who I think was of East European descent, i.e. everything Wharton - who used his mother's maiden name: his father's surname was Nathan - affected to despise. Fascinates me, that, the way certain people are attracted by ideas of "purity" *precisely because* they feel they lack them themselves and they envy those who do - I think a higher percentage of far-right supporters over the years than some would think are in this category. If you have a more clearly-defined culture you are, in my view, less likely to feel the *need* for the far-right, something which is clearly shown by the relative popularity of the BNP in England and in Scotland/Wales.
At about the same time that Scruton was at the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe, Ian Dury won a boarding scholarship there (and despised it), and I would *love* to know if they ever exchanged choice words. Later on, Howard Jones also went there, and I don't even want to think about the possible implications of *that*.
Yes, I'm aware of your Asperger's. I of course don't judge you on a personal level for something you have no control over, but insofar as it impacts on writing you put out to the public, I think it's fair to offer criticisms.
I'd complement the Keane comment by saying that, when it comes to many of the artists you exalt - be it Pet Shop Boys, Kanye West or whoever - it is just as possible for fans of such people to be utterly apathetic politically. You go on about being more selective in what pop music you listen to and turning it into an ideology, as if that were itself inherently noble, and somehow contributed to the amelioration of people's lives. Your politics are presumably the product of compassion and altruism, but when you get bogged down in this navel gazing you lose sight of reality. Someone sitting in their bedroom listening to Kanye West is doing no more good for humanity than said person listening to James Blunt, they are both merely engaging in recreation.
Incidentally, I noticed you contributing a few comments on Peter Hitchens' blog recently. I for one would pay money to see the reactions of the regulars there to one of your pop culture tirades.
Oh yes, it's perfectly fair to offer criticisms - I ought to have been more honest about my condition, and explaining why it affected my view of things. For many, some of my writing must have seemed quite emotionally foreign, which is a justifiable reaction.
Your second paragraph is perfectly accurate, I'm sure - and I'm well aware that just because people like black or black-influenced music that doesn't mean they won't be racist (it never has - many of the white Notting Hill rioters liked rock'n'roll) and that just because people like Pet Shop Boys that doesn't necessarily mean they won't be homophobic. I've got this wrong in the past, assuming that people into music which I see as politically positive must therefore be *personally* positive - I've greatly underestimated the extent to which many pop consumers do not think at all about any deeper meanings in the music they listen to (as is implicit in the very use of the word "consumer"). And Kanye seems increasingly egotistical-consumerist now anyway.
My favourite comment about Scruton was by Craig Brown - who is a terribly limp satirical fogey these days but was once a decent TV critic for the Sunday Times, hard though that is to believe (especially considering that the unspeakable A.A. Gill replaced him). Reviewing a programme Scruton did for the 'Think of England' series in 1991, Brown commented thus: "There were times ... when I felt Scruton must surely be a German spy parachuted into England with snow still on his boots, dutifully mouting patriotic catchphrases swiftly acquired from some outdated primer. Roaring around on a motorbike, his anger buttoned up, Scruton spoke stridently ... about how 'we English' are so very gentle, unasservtive and averse to extremes. 'Our weather has made us patient, phlegmatic and gentle ... Our landscape is like us - varied and individual but unassertive ... In its subdued pageantry, its uniforms and its phlegmatic togetherness, the brass band represents something typically English.' It was as if Scruton had learnt all he knew of the English countryside from a close reading of the early works of Godfrey Winn. If only an aeroplane had suddenly appeared through the typically English clouds, I felt sure he would have been flushed out, and we would have caught him screaming 'Schweinhund! Donner und Blitzen!', shaking his fists to the sky ... Alas, nothing appeared to interrupt his recitations of such nonsense as 'We English expect a show of dignity when it comes to Evensong' ..."
re. Hitchens, this was merely the latest (very brief - I couldn't hack it for more than a few days) instalment in a long line of involvements by me with the far-right. These have now definitively ceased - I know how they work and I don't want to waste my time with them anymore - but I developed quite dangerous addictions first to the political Usenet groups and then to one particular forum (I left both mainly because I felt I was almost becoming like the people I was debating with). I don't think Hitchens convincingly responded to my claim that, at the end of 'Abolition of Britain' back at the turn of the century, he greatly exaggerated the extent of the NuLab elite's desire to get Britain into the euro. It is certainly true that there was a Blair/Clinton/Schroeder quasi-consensus that could never have survived Florida 2000, but even at the time it was clear to anyone not riddled with paranoia about "Europe" that there were many forces stacked against the euro that NuLab had no real intention of fighting.
Hitchens is probably the only right-wing British columnist I have any respect for, because there are some issues (the celebification of politics and the demonisation of Gordon Brown for not fitting in with it rather than for legitimate reasons, rail vs road, opposition to neoconservatism, Labour and Tory having effectively merged) where we can find common ground. Of course I disagree vociferously with him about *where* the big two have merged (he thinks the Tories have gone socialist, I think Labour have gone neoliberal) and with his view that European "Statist" ideas, which did have some say here in the 60s/70s, are still powerful and influential in Britain. But at least he can write, unlike the green-inkers who post to his blog ...
Yes, PH's non-apocalyptic attitude to the "war on terror" is refreshing coming from someone of his political bent. Of course, his unrelenting prudishness does get wearying, but I prefer my right-wingers to be angry and pious rather than smug and creepy. You're right about the ppl in the comment box - worthless sycophants who, often probably without realising, quote verbatim things he says. They're like Jess Harvell to Hitchens' Simon Reynolds. Might Peter Oborne not be another right-winger you respect, given his unexpected recent stand against anti-Muslim bigotry?
I'd be more ambivalent about A.A. Gill than yourself. He can be very narrowmindedly sardonic about anyone he thinks doesn't fit in with a certain perceived normality or "commonsense" - his dismissal of John Peel as a sad anorak, and indeed his calling Peter Hitchens bonkers - but he can be a good and funny writer. I liked his comment about the Democratic convention being "so cloyingly sentimental it would give cynicism diabetes".
I've got time for Oborne, for the reasons you suggest (never has a certain kind of Arabist British conservatism seemed more valid as an ally of convenience than today) and because one particular Usenet contributor in 2004 said that Oborne was only anti-Bush because Bush didn't go to an English public school. The contributor I have in mind was an extreme inverted snob whose attitudes - basically that only "public school pooftahs" (his *exact words*) were anti-war, that Britain had a sort of responsibility, a duty, owed to the US to join in as a result of its pop-cultural links, etc. - did more than practically anything else I've experienced on the internet to cause me to revise my thinking. He was the reason why I stopped thinking that anyone who was steeped in pop/rock must *automatically* be more socially progressive than anyone who wasn't. He had mutated from a pro-pop leftist who I could relate to and get on with into someone who embodied the dangers of what pop's old utopianism can mutate into in the wrong hands - he, above all others, was the inspiration for my phrase "rock'n'roll at gunpoint".
Oborne was at the same public school as Chris Martin, and I have infinitely more respect for Oborne than I have for *that* spineless, pseudo-consensual fraud (although I'd be hard pressed to name someone I *don't* respect more than Chris Martin).
Where Hitchens is concerned, I remember reading 'The Abolition of Britain' not long after it came out, mainly because I believed the comments of (pre-BBC) Marr, (post-BBC) Toynbee etc. that it was genuinely politically important, and I wanted to get to the heart of this movement, whatever it may have been. My abiding impression was a combination of frustration (on the very last page, Hitchens was still defining his ideal nation by what it wasn't, i.e. "what made it different *from the Continent*", his emphasis not mine) and an unexpected respect for the quality of the writing, much of which I found I could admire in a purely aesthetic sense, as part of my general admiration for eloquent rhetoric as a vocation in itself (unless it is actually neo-Nazi etc.), if I detached myself from his actual conclusions. I knew that he could not be dismissed as easily as I'd wanted to (although this was pre-War on Terror and so before the final shattering of the old left/right certainties, which culminated in *that* Question Time appearance with his brother). His worst writings are his actual MoS columns, which are too brief to be fully-realised and are basically just playing to the gallery (I'm sure encouraged in this by those above him at the paper). His blog-only pieces and longer essays (sometimes for the staunchly anti-war American Conservative magazine, which has at least one contributor who is still broadly on the traditional British Left) are far better.
I must admit I've been a fanboy of various journalists (Reynolds included) but I hope it was only when I was young and inexperienced enough not to know better. I certainly wouldn't regard myself as *anyone*'s fanboy now.
I don't know who you are, and I don't know if I fully agree with you, but 'engaging in recreation' is an important thing for all of us to consider. What's the value of hate and analysis, really, when we could be doing something for ourselves?
I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me and elaborating or, alternatively, claiming I'm belittling recreation. If the latter, I can tell you I'm not; I was merely questioning ye olde carmody's conflation of musical taste with politics.
Well, that has always been the case with me (although it's only now that I can actually admit it). The very nature of Asperger's Syndrome has left me unable to grasp the curious, non-ideological way most people's minds work and rendered me only able to think of people as ideological tools, as objects whose every thought and action can be analysed in terms of pure logic and instant certainties. In other words, it makes people's understanding of other people, whether they want it to be or not, as inflexible as ultra-Marxists and neo-Nazis both, for their own reasons, *choose* to be (it is not a coincidence that people with AS often lean towards political extremes because they promise to simplify and make sense of the world as more evolved political theories are responsible enough not to do - I myself flirted both the far-right and far-left in my teens. I think people with AS will tend to disapprove of The Sun and all it stands for because of its extreme *aggressive normality*, but it is surprisingly tempting for them to become conservatives of a Daily Telegraph ilk - I was like that at 14, as I confessed on an earlier blog - because that's a world of cosy certainties, even though the maintenance of those certainties involved, and indeed could not have happened without, the ghettoisation of those with AS and similar conditions in dehumanising long-stay mental hospitals).
So I wrote countless splenetic rants in which everything could be reduced to pure ideology, every single action had an ideological construct, without realising the illogical and emotive reactions that most people make. I still distrust the idea that such reactions should never be questioned (because that is government by Murdoch, effectively, at least in this country - we are already far closer to that than we should be) and I still loathe what Keane represent for pop, not least because I genuinely believe that what they were in 2004 was a substantial influence on what the Cameronistas were by 2005. But I think I now understand that you cannot make such instant associations (although I do still think that Blair's adulation of the USA was in part inspired by Luxy-under-the-bedclothes memories of fighting the old guard at Fettes - he loved the illusion of being a rebel, and a crucial part of NuLab rhetoric was to greatly exaggerate the power of Americosceptic fogeys because otherwise they'd have had to admit that they *were* the establishment. NuLab promoted their pop-savviness as heavily as they did because it was the only real factor by then distinguishing them from the Tories, whereas even under John Smith there had been real differences in terms of economic policy etc. NuLab began to die as soon as the Tories presented themselves as equally pop-savvy, because that removed the only factor distinguishing the parties post-1994).
The most interesting thing about Scruton is something I don't think I knew then - the fact that his father, who was (I think) a Mancunian who had worked his way up and got himself a cosy place in Buckinghamshire, nonetheless distrusted everything that Scruton now laments in such misty-eyed language. Michael Wharton aka 'Peter Simple' was another of that ilk, his father being a Jewish Bradford businessman who I think was of East European descent, i.e. everything Wharton - who used his mother's maiden name: his father's surname was Nathan - affected to despise. Fascinates me, that, the way certain people are attracted by ideas of "purity" *precisely because* they feel they lack them themselves and they envy those who do - I think a higher percentage of far-right supporters over the years than some would think are in this category. If you have a more clearly-defined culture you are, in my view, less likely to feel the *need* for the far-right, something which is clearly shown by the relative popularity of the BNP in England and in Scotland/Wales.
At about the same time that Scruton was at the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe, Ian Dury won a boarding scholarship there (and despised it), and I would *love* to know if they ever exchanged choice words. Later on, Howard Jones also went there, and I don't even want to think about the possible implications of *that*.
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I'd complement the Keane comment by saying that, when it comes to many of the artists you exalt - be it Pet Shop Boys, Kanye West or whoever - it is just as possible for fans of such people to be utterly apathetic politically. You go on about being more selective in what pop music you listen to and turning it into an ideology, as if that were itself inherently noble, and somehow contributed to the amelioration of people's lives. Your politics are presumably the product of compassion and altruism, but when you get bogged down in this navel gazing you lose sight of reality. Someone sitting in their bedroom listening to Kanye West is doing no more good for humanity than said person listening to James Blunt, they are both merely engaging in recreation.
As for Scruton, I just find him amusing in his astonishing effeteness - e.g. who else on earth would call their autobiography "Gentle Regrets"? Almost always when I read his articles I expect him to start talking about picking strawberries with his grandmother. A more recent blast of his archetypal tweeness can be found at this URL: http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/615311/we-need-the-english-music-that-the-arts-council-hates.thtml.
Incidentally, I noticed you contributing a few comments on Peter Hitchens' blog recently. I for one would pay money to see the reactions of the regulars there to one of your pop culture tirades.
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Your second paragraph is perfectly accurate, I'm sure - and I'm well aware that just because people like black or black-influenced music that doesn't mean they won't be racist (it never has - many of the white Notting Hill rioters liked rock'n'roll) and that just because people like Pet Shop Boys that doesn't necessarily mean they won't be homophobic. I've got this wrong in the past, assuming that people into music which I see as politically positive must therefore be *personally* positive - I've greatly underestimated the extent to which many pop consumers do not think at all about any deeper meanings in the music they listen to (as is implicit in the very use of the word "consumer"). And Kanye seems increasingly egotistical-consumerist now anyway.
My favourite comment about Scruton was by Craig Brown - who is a terribly limp satirical fogey these days but was once a decent TV critic for the Sunday Times, hard though that is to believe (especially considering that the unspeakable A.A. Gill replaced him). Reviewing a programme Scruton did for the 'Think of England' series in 1991, Brown commented thus: "There were times ... when I felt Scruton must surely be a German spy parachuted into England with snow still on his boots, dutifully mouting patriotic catchphrases swiftly acquired from some outdated primer. Roaring around on a motorbike, his anger buttoned up, Scruton spoke stridently ... about how 'we English' are so very gentle, unasservtive and averse to extremes. 'Our weather has made us patient, phlegmatic and gentle ... Our landscape is like us - varied and individual but unassertive ... In its subdued pageantry, its uniforms and its phlegmatic togetherness, the brass band represents something typically English.' It was as if Scruton had learnt all he knew of the English countryside from a close reading of the early works of Godfrey Winn. If only an aeroplane had suddenly appeared through the typically English clouds, I felt sure he would have been flushed out, and we would have caught him screaming 'Schweinhund! Donner und Blitzen!', shaking his fists to the sky ... Alas, nothing appeared to interrupt his recitations of such nonsense as 'We English expect a show of dignity when it comes to Evensong' ..."
re. Hitchens, this was merely the latest (very brief - I couldn't hack it for more than a few days) instalment in a long line of involvements by me with the far-right. These have now definitively ceased - I know how they work and I don't want to waste my time with them anymore - but I developed quite dangerous addictions first to the political Usenet groups and then to one particular forum (I left both mainly because I felt I was almost becoming like the people I was debating with). I don't think Hitchens convincingly responded to my claim that, at the end of 'Abolition of Britain' back at the turn of the century, he greatly exaggerated the extent of the NuLab elite's desire to get Britain into the euro. It is certainly true that there was a Blair/Clinton/Schroeder quasi-consensus that could never have survived Florida 2000, but even at the time it was clear to anyone not riddled with paranoia about "Europe" that there were many forces stacked against the euro that NuLab had no real intention of fighting.
Hitchens is probably the only right-wing British columnist I have any respect for, because there are some issues (the celebification of politics and the demonisation of Gordon Brown for not fitting in with it rather than for legitimate reasons, rail vs road, opposition to neoconservatism, Labour and Tory having effectively merged) where we can find common ground. Of course I disagree vociferously with him about *where* the big two have merged (he thinks the Tories have gone socialist, I think Labour have gone neoliberal) and with his view that European "Statist" ideas, which did have some say here in the 60s/70s, are still powerful and influential in Britain. But at least he can write, unlike the green-inkers who post to his blog ...
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I'd be more ambivalent about A.A. Gill than yourself. He can be very narrowmindedly sardonic about anyone he thinks doesn't fit in with a certain perceived normality or "commonsense" - his dismissal of John Peel as a sad anorak, and indeed his calling Peter Hitchens bonkers - but he can be a good and funny writer. I liked his comment about the Democratic convention being "so cloyingly sentimental it would give cynicism diabetes".
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Oborne was at the same public school as Chris Martin, and I have infinitely more respect for Oborne than I have for *that* spineless, pseudo-consensual fraud (although I'd be hard pressed to name someone I *don't* respect more than Chris Martin).
Where Hitchens is concerned, I remember reading 'The Abolition of Britain' not long after it came out, mainly because I believed the comments of (pre-BBC) Marr, (post-BBC) Toynbee etc. that it was genuinely politically important, and I wanted to get to the heart of this movement, whatever it may have been. My abiding impression was a combination of frustration (on the very last page, Hitchens was still defining his ideal nation by what it wasn't, i.e. "what made it different *from the Continent*", his emphasis not mine) and an unexpected respect for the quality of the writing, much of which I found I could admire in a purely aesthetic sense, as part of my general admiration for eloquent rhetoric as a vocation in itself (unless it is actually neo-Nazi etc.), if I detached myself from his actual conclusions. I knew that he could not be dismissed as easily as I'd wanted to (although this was pre-War on Terror and so before the final shattering of the old left/right certainties, which culminated in *that* Question Time appearance with his brother). His worst writings are his actual MoS columns, which are too brief to be fully-realised and are basically just playing to the gallery (I'm sure encouraged in this by those above him at the paper). His blog-only pieces and longer essays (sometimes for the staunchly anti-war American Conservative magazine, which has at least one contributor who is still broadly on the traditional British Left) are far better.
I must admit I've been a fanboy of various journalists (Reynolds included) but I hope it was only when I was young and inexperienced enough not to know better. I certainly wouldn't regard myself as *anyone*'s fanboy now.
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