Showing posts with label dickens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dickens. Show all posts

Sunday, 6 January 2019

Traditional values

I am firmly of the opinion that tradition stifles creativity and progression. Tradition is for those who are moribund of thought and can’t or won’t cope with progression. Unfortunately there are far too many people in England who seem to want to return politically to a mythical bygone era. A perceived golden age. Such thinking is dangerous. The reactionary is a person to be feared and challenged. Reactionary politics is destroying the entire economic fabric of the country; we have high levels of poverty, poor health, homelessness, illiteracy, stupidity and crime. But hey ho we mustn’t complain as we’ll be getting blue passports soon. Hip fucking hooray!

I suppose it could be argued that using the word reactionary now is reactionary in itself. It’s not a word that is bandied about much these days. A bit of a blast from the past. But I can’t actually think of a better word to describe those sort of people that hold political beliefs based on nostalgia rather than reality. The sort that only see things in black and white, concrete thinkers who are incapable of abstract or critical thought and tend not to be particularly creative. Concrete thinkers and other narrow-minded sorts tend to fear change. They don’t adapt easily to new or different ways of doing things

If you’re a Tory, a Brexiteer or a Neoliberal then you’re a reactionary. Perhaps for a brief period the Tories were modern enough to just try and maintain the status quo, but that sort of Tory ‘thinking’ has long been despatched to the dustbin of history. Reactionaries fear progression. They yearn for the ‘good old days’, which of course weren’t good at all. They’re the sort of person that thinks in a very rigid way. If they’d been around when the wheel was invented they’d have been dead against it; no good would come of such a revolutionary idea (excuse the pun). That is why there is no deep and meaningful philosophy behind conservatism and why those that voted brexit couldn’t actually explain in sound philosophical or practical terms how it would actually benefit the average person in the street. Right wing politics is all about maintaining the position and wealth of the elite. Its about obscurantism, oppression, coercion and indoctrination of the majority using propaganda and the age old tactic of divide and rule. It's never about improvement or equality. Those concepts are totally alien to the reactionary Tory.

The reactionary elite are kept in office by the chimerical middle-class; an example of artifice in the extreme. There is no middle-class. Start thinking people. The greatest resource you possess is your mind. Please start using it.


Thursday, 12 January 2012

What the dickens?

The recent Dickens season on the BBC has caused me a certain amount of unease. I have a distinct dislike of period costume dramas, particularly those based around Regency and Victorian times. In fact I will often go out of my way to avoid them. In many ways that’s a shame as no doubt some of them will be very well written. The trouble is that they make me want to vomit. The only exception to the rule is A Christmas Carol which I never tire of and which invariably leads to a modicum of tear-duct leakage. I’m sure that somewhere in this land some very good ‘alternate’ productions of his work are being performed, but I would so much prefer it if by default Dickens could be treated in a similar vein to Shakespeare. I know that there is a whole world of difference between the novels of Charles Dickens and the plays of William Shakespeare but I do feel that the approach could be equally as exciting by relying solely on the prose of Dickens and its dramatic interpretation. Does it really need to be reduced to lack-lustre entertainment gift wrapped in frilly dresses, starched collars and sideburns? I‘d like to see Dickens interpreted with some stripped down gritty realism.

Sadly much of the subject matter in the works of Dickens is still very relevant. Presenting his work cosseted in a cloak of mawkish sterility detracts from its power. Charlie boy highlighted the horrors of poverty which sadly are still all too real today; you would have thought that over the last 142 years* it would not have been beyond the capacity of the peoples of Great Britain and their successive governments to have eradicated it by now. But clearly to date it has beaten us. Poverty is very much alive and thriving. So far we have failed. When will we make poverty history? Until that day we are nothing!


“Dear mother it’s a bugger...”

*Dickens died in 1870