The Big Problem for conservatives is that we are nowhere to be seen when it comes to establishing the cultural narrative. It is liberals and lefties that decide what story to tell about who we are and how we got there.
And anyone that has a clue about religion and history and myth knows that the chap that gets to tell the story gets to rule the nation.
So I've been watching a series of P.D. James's Adam Dalgliesh mysteries from a DVD set that I picked up on 50% off day at HalfPrice Books.
My takeaway is that James fillets 1980s Britain with almost savage determination. It's a wonder to me that she ever got the accolades and the handle she did. Many of her mysteries are set in government or quasi-government offices. And most of the offices are not exactly run with professional skill and devotion to the mission. Almost all the police officers in the series, apart from the incandescent poet Dalgliesh, are at best lazy time-servers and at worst evil and corrupt.
Put it this way. If you've run through the Dalgliesh mysteries you wouldn't be shocked to read the latest on the late Alfie Evans, that the NHS children's hospital in which Alfie died was noted for its mistakes and incompetence and that it seems likely that mistakes and incompetence played their part in the death of Alfie.
But then over the weekend I got to watch the start of Unforgotten Season 2, an ITV mystery series created by Chris Lang about cold murder cases. Here we have a crack London police investigative team led by a woman and seconded by DI Sunny Kahn. We have an earnest Muslim woman teacher of Shakespeare trying to get a school principal's job. And we have a gay couple with their darling little daughter.
In other words, the TV series is all about the ruling-class's cultural narrative, normalizing the cultural agenda of the ruling class and boosting their "little darlings."
Hey, that's the whole point of a ruling class; you get to set the stage with your favorite cardboard heroes and your chosen cartoon villains. And there ain't nothin' we deplorables can do about it.
There happens to be an actual cultural history of Britain out there. It is the Up Series, an ITV documentary series about a cohort of Brits that were seven-year-olds in 1964 when the first episode was broadcast.
The idea of the Up Series was clearly to show the triumphant success of the post-WWII welfare state and spotlight the rising working class and show them to advantage against the over-privileged toffs. So the first episode shows three delightful working-class girls in the bright-and-cheery living-room of their "council house" (public housing), while three rich boys are shown in all their insufferable snobbishness. In the middle are a bunch of middle-class kids and one boy-of-color.
Only the whole thing went wrong. The upper-class twits all hit the marks set by their helicopter moms and went on to successful lives and careers. The upper-class daughter of divorce got her act together after an angry teenage period and married a good man. But the sparkling working-class girls all ended up as single-parents living in a shabby squalor. The ordinary middle-class kids kinda faded away; the earnest boy who wanted to help the world gave up teaching South Asians at government schools in the East End of London and switched to teaching in a private school. But Tony, a fists-first working-class kid from the East End of London grows up to become a London taxi-driver and an Essex Man -- i.e. working-class that has moved out to the suburbs. The key thing about Tony was that he belonged to the good old British criminal class, and his dad was in jail when he was seven. I wonder if his dad's underworld connections gave Tony the inside track to get his foot into the London taxi cartel.
Do you see what I am getting at? Having buried the old white working class, and bollixed up the dutiful middle class, the ruling class imports a whole new population from the Caribbean and South Asia and drive their former "little darlings" to despair.
So in the BBC TV series Last Tango in Halifax, the white working class woman played by Nicola Walker (the heroine police inspector in Unforgotten), is clearly in a mess because of her own character deficiencies. Indeed the only Good Person in the Halifax series is the POC lesbian girl-friend of the white school principal.
Now, I don't really blame the TV series creators for telling the ruling-class's narrative. Apart from the fact that it would be career suicide to tell the true story, I doubt if any of the folks with the connections and the track record to put together mass-media vehicles can ever be anything other than Good Soldier Schweiks going along with the ruling-class narrative.
For an alternative to the ruling-class narrative you need a writer like P.D. James, who worked full-time through the Fifties and Sixties in the government bureaucracy, first in the NHS and then in the Home Office, supporting her disabled husband. An unknown author can create a new narrative, and if it takes off and she becomes a best-seller, then she has achieved a cultural fait-accompli.
Or you need an unfortunate accident like the Up Series, that shows up the abject failures of the ruling-class idiots, but only if you have eyes to see.
We conservatives dream of a possible world where our narrative would get the respect it deserves. But really we are whistling past the graveyard. What happens in real life is that the ruling-class goes on pushing its narrative and favoring its latest "little darlings" until one day it runs out of other peoples' money, an accident reveals its incompetence and folly and the whole project lands on the dust-heap of history.
And the one thing for certain is that the "little darlings," past, present, and future, will be hardest hit.
And anyone that has a clue about religion and history and myth knows that the chap that gets to tell the story gets to rule the nation.
So I've been watching a series of P.D. James's Adam Dalgliesh mysteries from a DVD set that I picked up on 50% off day at HalfPrice Books.
My takeaway is that James fillets 1980s Britain with almost savage determination. It's a wonder to me that she ever got the accolades and the handle she did. Many of her mysteries are set in government or quasi-government offices. And most of the offices are not exactly run with professional skill and devotion to the mission. Almost all the police officers in the series, apart from the incandescent poet Dalgliesh, are at best lazy time-servers and at worst evil and corrupt.
Put it this way. If you've run through the Dalgliesh mysteries you wouldn't be shocked to read the latest on the late Alfie Evans, that the NHS children's hospital in which Alfie died was noted for its mistakes and incompetence and that it seems likely that mistakes and incompetence played their part in the death of Alfie.
But then over the weekend I got to watch the start of Unforgotten Season 2, an ITV mystery series created by Chris Lang about cold murder cases. Here we have a crack London police investigative team led by a woman and seconded by DI Sunny Kahn. We have an earnest Muslim woman teacher of Shakespeare trying to get a school principal's job. And we have a gay couple with their darling little daughter.
In other words, the TV series is all about the ruling-class's cultural narrative, normalizing the cultural agenda of the ruling class and boosting their "little darlings."
Hey, that's the whole point of a ruling class; you get to set the stage with your favorite cardboard heroes and your chosen cartoon villains. And there ain't nothin' we deplorables can do about it.
There happens to be an actual cultural history of Britain out there. It is the Up Series, an ITV documentary series about a cohort of Brits that were seven-year-olds in 1964 when the first episode was broadcast.
The idea of the Up Series was clearly to show the triumphant success of the post-WWII welfare state and spotlight the rising working class and show them to advantage against the over-privileged toffs. So the first episode shows three delightful working-class girls in the bright-and-cheery living-room of their "council house" (public housing), while three rich boys are shown in all their insufferable snobbishness. In the middle are a bunch of middle-class kids and one boy-of-color.
Only the whole thing went wrong. The upper-class twits all hit the marks set by their helicopter moms and went on to successful lives and careers. The upper-class daughter of divorce got her act together after an angry teenage period and married a good man. But the sparkling working-class girls all ended up as single-parents living in a shabby squalor. The ordinary middle-class kids kinda faded away; the earnest boy who wanted to help the world gave up teaching South Asians at government schools in the East End of London and switched to teaching in a private school. But Tony, a fists-first working-class kid from the East End of London grows up to become a London taxi-driver and an Essex Man -- i.e. working-class that has moved out to the suburbs. The key thing about Tony was that he belonged to the good old British criminal class, and his dad was in jail when he was seven. I wonder if his dad's underworld connections gave Tony the inside track to get his foot into the London taxi cartel.
Do you see what I am getting at? Having buried the old white working class, and bollixed up the dutiful middle class, the ruling class imports a whole new population from the Caribbean and South Asia and drive their former "little darlings" to despair.
So in the BBC TV series Last Tango in Halifax, the white working class woman played by Nicola Walker (the heroine police inspector in Unforgotten), is clearly in a mess because of her own character deficiencies. Indeed the only Good Person in the Halifax series is the POC lesbian girl-friend of the white school principal.
Now, I don't really blame the TV series creators for telling the ruling-class's narrative. Apart from the fact that it would be career suicide to tell the true story, I doubt if any of the folks with the connections and the track record to put together mass-media vehicles can ever be anything other than Good Soldier Schweiks going along with the ruling-class narrative.
For an alternative to the ruling-class narrative you need a writer like P.D. James, who worked full-time through the Fifties and Sixties in the government bureaucracy, first in the NHS and then in the Home Office, supporting her disabled husband. An unknown author can create a new narrative, and if it takes off and she becomes a best-seller, then she has achieved a cultural fait-accompli.
Or you need an unfortunate accident like the Up Series, that shows up the abject failures of the ruling-class idiots, but only if you have eyes to see.
We conservatives dream of a possible world where our narrative would get the respect it deserves. But really we are whistling past the graveyard. What happens in real life is that the ruling-class goes on pushing its narrative and favoring its latest "little darlings" until one day it runs out of other peoples' money, an accident reveals its incompetence and folly and the whole project lands on the dust-heap of history.
And the one thing for certain is that the "little darlings," past, present, and future, will be hardest hit.
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