Friday 9 October 2009

Why I don't say the obvious, now

One of my ghosts speculates - in the forum where I learnt and unlearnt almost everything, the one I could not leave alone, however much I knew - that I might post about the parallels between the slow death of New Labour and the final end of Oasis. I considered that, briefly, in August. But I didn't because I've - to use a phrase which will never really fit my writing style but I'll use it anyway - been there, done that. Carmodism cannot be renewed forever, at least not if I want to keep renewing myself. I could easily also be posting here about how every tragic mistake made in the late 1970s has been repeating itself, from the failure to jump at the chance of an autumn election (which, more crucially now than then, could not have had a virtual year-long campaign before it as in the US) to workers in a vulnerable national industry going on strike just at the time when it could be most politically fatal for the very survival of that industry. But I don't, on the whole. Futile escapism, perhaps. But others can write about pure politics better than me. When I do post here, and I hope I will more often, I prefer to create a sense of a parallel universe. When we go, we can at least all go together. Also, Oasis - unlike the band whose reputation they distorted and damaged so much by association, as the BNP do to any national idea, however vague - are simply too depressing musically to want to write anything about them whatsoever, whichever angle it comes from. They heralded an epic lie and fraud. Now we're on the brink of an even greater one. What's new?

5 comments:

  1. I hope you continue with your blog Robin. Curiously, a couple of my friends of my own age have been asking similar questions about politics and popular culture, wondering where they are going and how they have become what they now are.

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  2. Don't worry, I will continue. I adopt the same policy here as I do to posting on forums - I write when I feel like it. There are so many cringemaking pieces of shit out there in my name - posting for the sake of posting, and worse - that reaching that realisation was, for me, *the* point of maturity.

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  3. (oh, and I just had to re-edit so as to make my original point clearer ... though it is also true that others can do futile escapism better than me, but I absolutely never want to have anything in common with *those* people)

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  4. Given that you're interested in things related to the late-1970s and after, I wondered if you've seen any of Adam Curtis's documentaries? Most of them are available through youtube or googlevideo.

    The Trap is especially good at explaining a lot of things about the narrowed view of freedom that we now have.

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  5. I really should have seen more of them than I have. I know he has a vision and scope well beyond most people in current television (or television in any era) - back in 1995, when he was nowhere near as well-known as he is now, his documentary in the 'Living Dead' series about the way Churchill, Neave and Thatcher had in their different ways manipulated the past for ideological reasons had an immense effect on me, and almost single-handedly led me away from the sort of non-committal, yearning right-wing nostalgia I was going through at the time.

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