Martin Amis is one of the two classic ‘nepo babies’ of the English literature of the 20th Century. As everyone knows, Evelyn begat Auberon, and Kingsley begat Martin. And what was remarkable is how both the Waugh and Amis sons admired their fathers, and, to some extent, imitated them. I spent this morning looking through about twenty of Martin’s books and saw nothing so clearly as that the novels of Amis fils now remind me of those of Amis père: not in what was perhaps most characteristic of Martin: the turbo-charged and exuberant scabrousness of his whimsical version of Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism; but certainly in the sentiment, situation and relentless humour, also the attention to language, and, finally, in the occasional intrusion of weighty themes – admittedly more weighty in the case of Martin than in the case of Kingsley.
Now, in this pantheon of great literary fathers and sons I have to say that I rate Martin the lowest. Evelyn Waugh was unparalleled: there is nothing like any of his early novels; and nothing like what is possibly his best single bit of writing, the long opening musing – essentially autobiographical, despite what he said – of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Auberon rather failed as a novelist in the 1960s, being out of time: but imposed his sense of absurdity more closely on his time, especially in the famous Private Eye diaries in the 1970s, but also in his journalism, where he was a rare case of someone who was able to express serious thought in amusing terms. (Consider Heath in drag; working-class children being supposed to eat lumps of coals, fish fingers and dogdirt; politics identified as a form of displaced psycho-sexual depravity.) Kingsley, of course, made his name with Lucky Jim: which bewildered Waugh as much as Decline and Fall had bewildered G.K. Chesterton. Such was the change in the sense of humour across the generations. But Kingsley wandered closer to his characters than Waugh (or drank with them); and there was more affection, more sentiment, less spite. I think Stanley and the Women was an achievement; not, as Martin thought, a stain. But the Amises both wrote much about cock anxiety, a subject avoided by the Waughs. Martin inherited the humour of his father, the language, and the sentiment: and added to it, as I say, scabrousness and, perhaps, a European or American taste for occasional experiment.
The obituaries and recollections have been almost universally positive: by James Wood, Boyd Tonkin, Philip Hensher, Howard Jacobson and many others. But it seems worth, in the Daily Sceptic, thinking about things a bit more critically.
Let’s begin with the undeniable achievement: this is the language. The language was highly worked: highly self-conscious. It was grounded, for a start, on grammar. This is now necessary to say. But its chief characteristic was brightness of tone. Amis seems to have written mostly in the mornings, and perhaps consequently his writing is almost continually hard, bright and clear. There is no haze (except the deliberate haze of unreliable narration). His father found his style at times too bright – and so threw Money across the room. The passage I remembered most clearly from any of the novels is the following. This is from The Rachel Papers in chapter ‘Twenty To’, where a young man is consulting his notes on how to conduct himself in an interview for Oxford. Under Appearance Change Midway he reads the following:
- Enter without glasses on: put them on a) if don over 50, b) if don wearing glasses.
- Jacket unbuttoned: if old turd, do up middle one on way in.
- Hair over ears: if old turd, smooth behind ears on entry.
This seems to exhibit much of Martin’s humour: the situational worldly-wiseman attitude, having to deal with a world which is pretty much a hall of mirrors in which one can out-think the other narcissi, plus all the side characters (the cabbages, cardboard boxes, crisp packets, mobile phones and mandrake roots). There could be a thousand other examples of his very effective humorous style. Calling a chapter on Bellow’s writing “Bellow’s Lettres”, for instance. Amis did a good job of keeping Gore Vidal-style ‘bookchat’ going, much as his friend Christopher Hitchens did. This was quite something in an increasingly illiterate age.
But let us move onto the next point. Amis was aware, perhaps too aware, of death. There was a lot about life and death in his novels, almost from the beginning. But we may take this to have been a typically literary exaggeration of an awareness of time. Not only the time he could play with in Time’s Arrow, but more emphatically the awareness of time passing in one’s own life. Amis, like a popstar, became famous when he was young, about the same age the Beatles were at the time of A Hard Day’s Night. And, unlike a popstar, he was aware he had to grow up. He was aware of this because his trade – literature – required him to be aware of it. Music is, as Schopenhauer told us, a conceptless art. But if one works with a conceptful art, as literature is, then one continually finds that though words can be played as if they are music, they continually refer to life. And life changes, life passes. It turns into – strange extinction – death. Hence all those lines about life and death, of course in Experience, where his father died, and in Inside Story, where his best friend died. But also about Larkin in The Rub of Time: “The life rests in peace; the work lives on.” (Like everyone else, Amis felt obliged to separate the teller and the tale, as D.H. Lawrence had suggested, and as Larkin’s melancholic and scurrilous life seemed to require.) And also about himself, in effect, as in London Fields: “When middle age comes, you think you’re dying all the time.”
The famous line about Martin’s own awareness of this is found in Experience. He reports there that the novel Money was written to illustrate the fact that if one remained childless one would remain childish. (Money was published at the same time as his first marriage and first child.) This is obviously true: even if Niall Ferguson got in trouble for saying it, with reference to John Maynard Keynes. On the one hand, becoming an adult meant getting beyond love-for-lust’s-sake to love, perhaps. (And Kingsley may not have been the best example here. In Experience Martin records that Kingsley said that sex was intensified if one happened to be in love: as if it was a sort of fuel injection system.) But, on the other hand, it meant something else: putting something in the language. Not just humour, wit, tricks, not just tales and characters, not just ‘voice’. No stream of words could justify itself. So Martin had to grow up. And he did so, for better or worse, by dealing with themes, especially political themes. Unfortunately, and relevantly for the Daily Sceptic, this literary master of the last generation, adopted the standard themes of the bien-pensants.
Kingsley would not have done this. Martin commented that his father’s rule was épater les bien-pensants. When asked about his father (in an interview to be found in The Rub of Time) Martin said that their political histories were antithetical. “I have,” he said, “always been pallidly left-of-centre…” This is it. Relevant in the 1980s and 1990s, Martin was, in his last decade, simply incapable of grasping things that we have to hope Kingsley, Auberon and Evelyn would have grasped. But on all the recent problems, Martin was on the wrong side. He had been a feminist since a conversation with Gloria Steinem in 1984. He was admired by Simon Schama and Ian Hislop. He worried about nuclear weapons, in Einstein’s Monsters: “I am sick of nuclear weapons.” And he worried about climate change. He also had contempt for Donald Trump. He thought Brexit was a denial of British decline. I have no idea what he thought about Covid, though I can guess. In short, on everything that has come to matter in the last 40 years – and particularly the last 10 – Martin Amis was worse than hopeless.
One of the great literary critics of our time, Ian Robinson, who died a few years ago – a very late Leavisite – had an explanation for what was wrong with Martin Amis’s novels. He called the phenomenon “Henry James Misunderstood”. What this phrase denoted was cleverness-plus-moral-emptiness. Robinson thought that the moral effect of reading an Amis novel was one of moral exhaustion: exhaustion by subjection to what, in Time’s Arrow, Amis called “latrine talk”. There was a lot of “Celia shits!” in Martin’s novels, from The Rachel Papers (where it was a chapter title) onwards. On the one hand one had to deal with phrases worthy of Stephen Fry such as “pyorrhoeac toothbrush” in Success, but also, in the same novel, sentences such as, “Did you fuck her, you bastard?” As with many novels of the last few decades of the 20th Century one of the great themes was ‘did-you-fuck-her-you-bastard’ and its correlate ‘I think-she-fucked-him-the-bitch’.
What I want to add to Robinson’s criticism of “Henry James Misunderstood” is an additional one: “Insincere Hitchens Moralising.” Kingsley was the father, and Christopher was the friend: ‘The Hitch’, no less. They emerged from New Statesman as a sort of literary band of brothers, Hitchens, Amis, along with James Fenton, also Clive James, Salman Rushdie and others. Hitchens and Amis had an exemplary friendship. They racked around together. They went through the ‘did-you-shag-her-you-bastard’ phase (presumably in the erudite, bold and gaudy style of 1970s speech) and had children at about the same time: respected each other’s wives, and both ended up in America. But whenever we consider Hitchens we have to consider his remarkable, even glorious, Richard Burtonesque voice, adapted for political irony: drawling continually, with capacious insincerity, pretending to care about Cyprus, Mother Teresa, the Elgin Marbles, Iraq, etc. Christopher Hitchens was a wonderful spectacle, but a terrible example as a friend. For Christopher was wrong on everything, just as his brother Peter, by an equal and opposite reaction, has been right on everything. Peter found something to moralise about. But Christopher had to use his colossal moral style of address to coerce his audience into thinking his opponent (whether Kissinger, Clinton or Blair (on religion, though not on war) was inevitably on the wrong side.
I think Martin rather fell in love with this. Sometimes one could hear Christopher in Martin’s voice: drawling in order to win an argument, or to sound right. But Martin was not a Trotskyist, and so a bit of a coward compared to Hitchens. So Amis had to find some themes: the Jews, the Holocaust, Nuclear Weapons, Environment, and, finally, as his last card, Trump. Martin’s essay on Corbyn is formidable: an analysis of the “undereducated” “awkward squad” only redeemed by a vague desire for betterment; but his essays on Trump are abject. And – pause – Martin cited PolitiFact for support. (How can someone who could write: “Keith Talent was a bad guy. Keith Talent was a very bad guy. You might even say that he was the worst guy”, not see Trump as a possible reader of the audiobook of London Fields?) A lot of what he wrote about politics was what could be described as “Insincere Hitchens Moralising”. Even in those masterful autobiographical works Experience of 2000 and Inside Story of 2018 there was an uneasy – I thought – insincerity, even about his own life. One had the sense that Martin had to pose as ‘Martin’ and make it all up, including the feelings. So I found, though not everyone may have found this, that the interesting stories were interspersed with false notes. False notes are evident throughout his writing, but are concealed in the novels by art or “patterned artifice” as he calls it in The Rub of Time. The closer we get to the ‘real Martin Amis’ – whatever that is, but we suppose that it is clearly evident in some of the essays, in bits of Experience and Inside Story – we find the false notes become false themes.
In the end, Martin Amis may have been – as improbable as this may seem – a combination of Kingsley Amis, Irving Welsh, and George Steiner. The Amis bit was the good bit. The Irving Welsh part was the Swiftian consciousness where “Celia shits” was treated not as a shock but as a complacent observation (and observed in turbulent para-popular hyper-real language). The George Steiner part was the habit of juxtaposing life and art in mind-boggling manner. George Steiner had a habit of opening a lecture by sketching a picture of the Holocaust in relation to, say, Wagner opera (by, as I remember, referring to a train leaving for Belsen as the Tristan chord was heard in the distance). He juxtaposed high art and low death: and offered it up as a sort of modernist shock or short-cut, a simple boggle of absolute moral bewilderment. Amis was fond of the same thing, but his distinctive contribution was in adding touches about things such as, in Time’s Arrow, “the clarity and attack of our bowel movements”.
It’s an odd literature, that comes out of Kingsley’s sentimental observational comedy, the enjoyment of “Celia shits”, and the drawl (or whine, since Martin had lighter artillery) of the “Insincere Hitchens Moralising”. Even as sympathetic a figure as James Wood comments that Martin’s “obsessions were all surplus to his true literary vitality”. We may admire his desire, as he said in Einstein’s Monsters, to give “various kinds of complicated pleasure”. We certainly should admire the glory of a brilliant forger of words. But there is no reason to feel any enthusiasm for his views. It is hard to avoid supposing that he more or less made his views up to feign a solemnity he felt obliged to assume in order to earn a success that must have surprised him. While the words burnt bright, the solemnity was as dull as – forgive the cliché, Master – ditchwater.
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Russia/Ukraine Analysis, Are We on the Brink of a World War?
Phase 2 of The Great Reset: War
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2022/03/23/war-phase-2-of-the-great-reset.aspx
Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola
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A society ruined by the Blairites, people who only think of the own virtue signalling (1st to dish out jabs, 1st to offer homes to Ukrainians etc. etc…), the world stage is all that matters. Levelling up, why don’t they say it how it is, levelling down where we are ALL poorer for it.
We are controlled by criminals and occultists who hold the keys to all the media, education, everything we consume, they run it. People need to be reminded that when they see all this evil and horror in this world, they shoudl alwasy be mindful that they are doing this for the benefit of a group of evil, disgusting old men – some of whom rape kids for pleasure. Never forget that.
Of course theres never any shortage of morons who will proudly shout out their fantasies about what they would do to anyone who touches their kids…..then theyre gleefully sending them to the government-corporate-occultist indoctrination and mind control facilities where their offsrping are brainwashed and terrorised into believing they are going to die or kill their relatives based on nothing but lies, then they are guilt tripped into being repeatedly tested with carcinogenic swabs using unvalidated worthless tests that cannot diagnose a disease under any circumstances, theyre muzzled for eight hours a day which can lead to all manner of very serious health issues both physical and psychological which are intrinsically linked, then theyre whipped up into a groupthink hysteria and being injected with what leading lawyers and lifelong high achieving medical professionals describe as a genetic bioweapon. Well done to the parents of Britain, they have really shown us what they are made of, how irretrievably dumbed down and controlled and detached from God and their souls they are, and how they shouldnt be allowed to vote let alone raise children. Its these idiots and their parents and so on that keep going back to repeatedly vote for more of the same, because “it never did me any harm”. Yeah, sure it didnt.
The solution to all of this is that we the resistance become political, start voting for OURSELVES instead of these SCUMBAG TRAITORS in the CONSERVATIVE LABOUR LIBDEM AND GREEN parties, none of which can be trusted, all of which are 100percent contaminated by the kind of diseased mind that populates Satans sh*t pipe aka Westminster. We also demand an absolute overhaul of how votes are counted and all postal and electronic voting methods must be outright banned. Or are we just going to let them continue to rig the voting system as well.
Subversion of the Free World Press – Yuri Bezmenov
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQN4c3uN_tA
“We also demand an absolute overhaul of how votes are counted and all postal and electronic voting methods must be outright banned”.
This is abolutely key; if we can’t make them do this then there is no point in voting at all. In certain constituencies the outcome is known well before the count begins, because many of those running it just don’t get this democracy thing at all. The system is becoming as corrupted as the ones they left behind.
Excellent piece. As agree more, thanks
“As long as one was “safe” and able to enjoy one’s splendid isolation with one’s gin, one’s tonic, one’s Netflix, one’s Amazon Prime account and one’s lockdown puppy, what consequence was it that government debt was skyrocketing to 103.7% of GDP? What consequence was it that quantitative easing would inevitably lead to eye-watering levels of inflation? ”
None, because neither of those things are the case. Otherwise Japan would have inflation of a million percent given its ‘debt to GDP ratio’ is over 200%.
When an article starts stating these sort of beliefs that have no basis in fact, then the rest is immediately considered suspect.
What has caused prices to rise is the imposition of bureaucratic restrictions on a free market, the inevitable effects of hysteresis on productive output, plus a reduction in the broad participation rate below 67% for the first time since records began – as older people decide to retire early rather than risk the virus. In other words largely a supply slump.
Of course wages haven’t gone up by as much, so it will stabilise in time – since wages are the source of income necessary to pay the prices. Or we need to put taxes up to remove the excess furlough money that was injected into the economy via a series of badly designed schemes.
That money was saved, and it is the increase in private saving that has caused the government debt. You can’t have government debt without private savings. Savings causes the debt – just as putting £100 in a bank causes the bank to go into debt to you. Eliminate the debt and you eliminate the savings as well.
If those who hold a belief in ‘debt to GDP ratios’ were required to put their pension pots forward as the savings that are to be eliminated along with the ‘debt’ I’d have more time for their arguments.
My savings haven’t gone up, but any tax increases will affect me.
The idea that government debt increased by £400 billion, or whatever the current figure is, because people went and saved an extra £400 billion is beyond moronic.
Zimbabwe must be the richest country on the planet with all those savings.
Your economic argument only works if the UK is a ‘closed box’, it is the opposite, one of the most open economies in the world. Inflation can be caused by other than just production of ‘money’ within the borders of an open economy. Amply demonstrated by the surge in energy prices worldwide most of which happened prior to Ukraine and has little to do with Russian gas. Much more to do with self imposed restraints in Europe and the US under Biden together with economic expansion in the East.
Even just looking at money supply you ignore where those ‘savings’ occur. They have been almost entirely located in increases in asset values since 2008, over the period since then average wages have fallen behind inflation. capital has benefited at the expense of labour. In other words the 1% have enriched themselves enormously at the expense of the 99%. And during covid that was on steroids.
This article is excellent, and points to why the west is sick.
I hesitate to bring Russia into anything at the moment, its so divisive a subject. But its interesting to note that its economy is basically the opposite of the west. It runs a very low debt, a positive balance of trade, is pretty self sufficient in raw materials and food. On the rather warped logic of economic commentators this apparently makes it weak and a bit of a basket case. Perhaps Mr Burke may have disagreed.
“Of course wages haven’t gone up by as much, so it will stabilise in time – since wages are the source of income necessary to pay the prices.”
You ignore that the state itself is the biggest participant in the economy.
This means that as prices rise, the state itself will find itself able to purchase less of everything. Since the state will never allow its access to goods and services to be crimped, it will print the money – driving the next round of inflation, and prices ever higher.
The state itself, as the biggest participant in the economy, is immune (in the short run) to the feedback mechanism you describe, since the state has itself the power to create the means of purchase.
An excellent insight of the moral malaise which curses the West. Those who wish to cause trouble knew what they were doing when they decoupled mankind from God and our Christian foundations. The primary solution is obvious.
‘Nonetheless, at every level of authority fear was played up, even among children. And all for nothing. As became apparent from the experience of Sweden and states in the USA that refused to follow China’s totalitarian example, the sacrifices were futile, the doomsday scenarios false. Those who bore the heaviest cost of governments wanting to be seen to do something were the young and the very poor. Globally around one hundred million more people were made ‘poor or extremely poor’, i.e. reduced to living on less than US$3.20 per day in purchasing power parity terms (Kühn et al. 2021), while the wealth of the 400 richest Americans grew by 40%, or $1.3 trillion. The disease is a respiratory disease, and spiritually we have long been breathing unwholesome air. By means of the virus God has exposed the rottenness of civilisation, in order that he might be justified and prove blameless when he brings it to an end.’
From When the Towers Fall: A Prophecy of What Must Happen Soon
https://wipfandstock.com/9781666735772/when-the-towers-fall/
Laid bare, not laid bear!
Are you the real Annie? I thought I hadn’t seen you in a while. That is just the sort of comment she would make.
I was wondering the same thing. I had begun to notice I haven’t seen dearest Annie in a while, then ‘annieob’ pops up and is on the firm. I do hope it’s her, and if not that Annie is doing well.
Edit: Okay, annieob hasn’t just popped up, she joined in Jan. ’21.
Pardon me, annieob.
The root problem is cowardice.
Our leaders acted like cowards and took the course that was least politically costly for them.
Society acted like cowards and scurried away into their homes rather than think through the risks and the costs and face up to the risks, which, if they cared to look, they would have realised were not so big.
Our society has acted like cowards, by not standing up to self serving teachers unions, whose interests were put ahead of those of children.
And of course, they’ve taught a generation of children that when you face nay risk, small as it maybe, you don’t weight things up, you act like a frightened little mouse and scurry away and shame anyone who has the courage you don’t have.
And here comes the really politically incorrect part. This is the consequence of the relentless feminisation of our society and the devaluation of masculinity. Men are genetically programmed to be bigger risk takers and what society has needed this last couple of years was less risk aversion and more courage.
Personally, I look at the weakness and cowardice of our society, masquerading as virtue, and it disgusts me.
Agree 100%. When you distill it all, cowardice is what remains as the enabler. We needed bravery, and it turned out that all we had were scared sheep.
The root is faith and altruism, not cowardice.
Lockdown is communist, communism is the consistent translation of altruism into politics.
The same is true of fascism and socialism.
An excellent piece, well done!
Look after your children, because one day they’ll be look after you. I fear that they’ll eventually get to wreak vengeance after what we’ve done to them.
I have on a few occasions suggested that we should on a Thursday evening get the nation to bang pots and clap to say that you to the young that have suffered so much when there was no risk to the young.
But this won’t happen — it wasn’t so much that people didn’t want to do it, but that they didn’t understand why they’d want to do it.
As far as the majority are concerned the young were at tremendous risk from covid and their elders actually saved them by telling them to lockdown and getting them to take vaccines.
I’d still like to arrange the one-off ‘Thursday evening’ though — perhaps it might get through to some people that it was the young that made the sacrifice.
“Our”?
Their!
This is not a universal contradiction since there will be some overlap, but consider this:
Many on the hysterical/deranged side of the isle regarding SARS-2/COVID, who were screaming ‘Granny killer’ at those on the calmer side of the isle, and who said little to nothing about children and the effects lockdowns, etc would have on them, are the very same people who, during the ‘Brexit’ debate and after the vote, were writing off Granny and Grandad’s vote, saying they were ‘not the future’ of this nation, and saying it’s all about the children and their future.
Very good point (it’s aisle btw).
Good grief. Heaven knows what I was thinking. Thank you.
Easily done! It doesn’t detract from the essential point – that highlights the double standards at play.
You’re too forgiving, whereas I’ve ordered myself to do 50 press-ups and stay off the internet for the rest of the day!
I suppose that I was as guilty of a Panglossian view as many others. Although a lot of things have changed in every single aspect of British life since I entered the world when we had a King, and many of them I detest with a vengeance, I have always conceded that “things” do indeed change, often for the better, and could be described as “Progress”.
Before 2020, I had reasonable hopes that my descendants might continue to enjoy the fruits of this “Progress” in education, medicine, a generally benevolent State and standards of decency and behaviour, such as those I had come to expect; along with certain freedoms accompanied by responsibilities.
Those expectations have now been shattered beyond any repair, by a malevolent and incompetent State, and its equally vile apparatchiks and myrmidons. Every section, supposedly functioning for the public good (educators, the “media”, medicine, politicians, judiciary, churches, police etc.) has not just failed, but they have now become the enemy of the People. All I see is a life of servitude for the future generations, controlled digitally and electronically by power-mad “elites”. The debts foisted on the young are beyond any excuses, and are yet more fetters.
The inability, or desire not to recognise the damage caused to this and the generations to come is no hypothesis, or aberration. “They” really don’t care.
It’s “adieu, Pangloss”, and “bonjour, Manichaeism”, where the latter’s dark side is in the ascendant.
Whilst not quite old enough to have known a king (though I fear that Charlie boy will soon become one), I too have been horrified by recent events. I always used to be an optimist, but am now certain to end my days as a depressed pessimist (or maybe that should just be called a realist).
Optimism is overrated.
Extra points for ‘myrmidons’, a wonderful word.
I agree totally but now stand accused by my family of being an over the top pessimist. They don’t see a life controlled by passes for this and that as a problem. Leasing a car is a good idea, the electrical supply being controlled centrally is a good idea, being able to track someone using their phone keeps people safe, vaccines are necessary to keep people healthy etc etc. I really don’t know where this group think has come from but I want no part of it.
I agree completely and could see for myself as a teacher and parent the obviously harmful effects on children playing out in realtime. This harm was completely ignored by most adults around me, who seemed to think that it was a ‘good’ experience for children as it allowed them to experience the momentousness and camaraderie of something like a war (without the risk!) But what’s even more astonishing than the ‘moral bankruptcy’ is the ignorance and stupidity that was shown, which is even more surprising given the access to information we all have. This proved to be a very lazy society – happy to receive their marching orders from a handful of sources and terribly afraid to go against the grain. The people who frequent this site weren’t party to some secret hidden information, it was all there in plain sight, just required critical and independent thought.
But we also shouldn’t forget that this was not some organic process resulting from an overreaction. This was a well funded, well planned and powerfully implemented propaganda campaign that was about creating fear, compliance and control for reasons that are not yet completely clear. Let’s get to the bottom of the crime itself and identify the perpetrators before we dissect the moral frailties of society at large.
Hear, hear!
I’m resistant to seeing society as a victim at the hands of a ruthless establishment and media, less so a society like ours that is economically prosperous and with substantial means deployed for education.
A well educated, independently minded, free society shouldn’t allow itself to be easily manipulated.
We clearly don’t have that. We have a lazy, flaccid society that is far more preoccupied with comfort and easy consumption than with any hard work associated with being independent and free.
Worried as I am about the perverse actions of governments, global corporations, media and international institutions like the WEF, what really worries me is a population that is completely unalert, uninterested perhaps even incapable of defending itself against this sort of abuse as long as it is allowed to live in comfort. That is what really worries me.
I am also resistant to this idea, Stewart. But it’s naive to think that some form of central planning wasn’t the trigger.
Yes, lockdown happened because it had popular support, first and foremost.
That popular support came from indoctrination in doomsday cultism.
I was utterly appalled by the behaviour of people especially teachers. The children who suffered will never recover. Because they were the ones who were already struggling, with parents who were not going to help at home. I’d say “a curse on them” … but they took the jab, and that may well come true.
I’ve been utterly appalled by the behaviour (and ignorance) of many teachers ever since I became one. However, when it came to ‘lockdown’ we were much busier and more under pressure than most people realise. Lessons still had to be taught at the usual times, albeit via dystopian technologies, and this meant revising schemes of work and lesson sequencing, which is an awful lot of work. We were also kept completely in the dark about what exam board expectations would be right until the last minute which is stressful. I did witness many teachers perpetuate the sense of danger from the virus, which is unforgivably stupid, but I also saw many examples of teachers going out of their way to support children who were in danger of falling off the radar. In short, I wouldn’t single teachers out as having caused damage. They behaved largely like the rest of society did (i.e stupidly and naively, with the odd exception
)
But you’re right – they overwhelmingly took the jab, and then got really ill ‘with covid’. This was true of all but three teachers at my large comprehensive!! And I saw such a lot of vaccine virtue signalling
I don’t know about anyone else here but I feel so grateful, proud and blessed that my life experiences, brain and general disposition lead me to decline the damn vaccine.
What’s this “our” crap? The moral wretchedness was solidly on the side of government, and was engendered by the filthy foul rotten media, and filthy foul rotten NGOs. The destruction fo our society is no accident, these people have been working towards it for more than a century. The media’s role in lockdown, the environmental hysteria, BLM, now Ukraine etc, is absolutely fundamental. The media is the hypnotist that keeps the masses in line. As an illustration, Canadian surveying shows a perfect correlation between the jabbed, and those supporting intervention in Ukraine – even at the risk of nuclear war. The jabbed are utterly brainwashed, and that is not down to government, or even the WEF, it is down to the skilled and amoral vermin of the media.
Imagine being a “journalist” today, and thinking you were a decent human being
Brill.
‘Our’ is a term commonly used to denote us as a society.
I’m not in this shitty society. I just live close to some people who apparently are.
That’s a self-defeating statement.
https://images.app.goo.gl/EBrrdFR1wVd76LtD7
I was astonished by the idea of closing educational institutions on a whim, and tried to protest. My MSP proved to be one of the most happy to “keep us safe”, by closing children at home. Another politician “comforted” me that children are very resilient. That’s what my Dad used to say, quoting his orphan childhood: he was taught to be sooooo resilient, not eating whole day sometimes. Very happy memories for him. The campaign UsForThem, as amazing and wondrous as it is, proves that if you don’t have giant money supporting you, you can’t really push your agenda. Long story short, I made quite some good enemies trying to push against what was done to kids, and my kid nursery staff, and quite a few parents, hate me :)))
I have felt honoured to be unpopular among the lockdown fanatics of my own acquaintance.
What a wonderful article. Thank you. And whilst I see that so much of this was planned, funded and executed by malign groups, the defence must always be the strength of families and small communities – if those fail, we’re doomed to servitude.
I should like to point out one thing, though:
“I do not claim to know what the “best” government response to the pandemic would have been.”
There was no pandemic. Certainly not any caused by any coronavirus.
Wonderfully put. I believe Burke himself would have approved, and I believe he would have utterly loathed Johnson and his worthless ilk.
Slightly OT, but here’s a story of astonishing cruelty that will make your blood boil. Two boys are forbidden from seeing their dying father because they are unjabbed. They are then ‘permitted’ to see him once after they provide a ‘negative’ test. They plea with staff to be ‘allowed’ to see him again, stating they’ll take as many tests as the hospital would like, and are in no uncertain terms denied access to their dear father. Then their father passes away. We could go over the illogical, irrational, unscientific and arbitrary nature of the whole incident, but right now I am absolutely seething. This is what humanity has become. Whoever sanctioned this needs to be in prison. End of story.
https://youtu.be/t-IlSbbmU-E
I’m afraid that prison is unlikely – TPTB will smply shrug their collectively shoulders and opine “shame, COVID aint it”
I do not condone violence but I believe in our current flaccid society, those that implement these baseless, immoral rules with impunity, will only “get it” when they themselves have something dear to them taken away, permanently.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. It’s time we started to hand out stupid prizes.
The Dark and Wizened hand of the WEF guided the world’s leaders to Lockdown. BBB was the outcome and 85% of the sheep bleated.
It is a society shorn of loyalty to anything larger or longer-lasting than the immediate physical existence of its members; a society comprised of individuals in the truest sense, thinking only of their own health and in signalling their own virtue in purportedly “protecting others”.
I see the problem as one of ill-informed, unprincipled selfishness.
Of course, we should stand up for the rights of children – all of us, whether or not we are parents. But they have been treated abominably: used by adults for profit, or to signal virtue to other adults. Look, I’m masking my child! I’m having my child injected!
How many bothered to look for information about the effects of masking or of the injections? That would have taken time they preferred to spend on something else.
Nor were they really thinking of their own health. Thinking takes effort, and there was something else they would rather do.
I accept that there were those who were genuinely frightened and concerned for the safety of people they loved, but I saw very few of them. I saw people concerned for their own safety, and willing to sacrifice their grandchildren and great-grandchildren to medical experimentation if it might prolong their own selfish lives.
Churches closed their doors: appalling examples of pleasing Caesar rather than serving God.
No article can encompass all the reasons for the moral disgrace of the last two years; and Burke (superb orator that he was) is not the example I would have chosen for concern for the interests of the population in general.
He was, however, an excellent example of someone who stood for something other than himself. He bothered; and he believed that he had responsibilities where others were concerned – even nameless others he had never met and would never meet.
We have been encouraged to become self-absorbed, atomised individuals who care only about how we appear to the most visible and powerful of others.
On the contrary, the problem is altruism, the morality of sacrifice and death.
The British public was told specifically to sacrifice for the NHS, the whole disaster flowed from the rejection of reason and the explicit adoption of altruism.
Bruce
Not in my name. Not now, not then, not ever!
Who is this ‘our’ bozo?
I rejected lockdown long ago for numerous reasons.
Everything that has happened since the outcome of the Covid Fear has demonstrate and continues to demonstrate our moral bankruptcy.
He should have credited the philosopher Georgio Agamben for the concept of ‘Bare Life’ especially as Agamben was writing highly sceptical pieces early on in this charade and got called a crackpot for doing so.
And we are still being encouraged to vaccinate 5-16 year olds against Covid to protect adults when these kids are under practically zero risk of suffering from Covid and nobody knows the potential long term effects of the vaccine. What we are beginning to know is that the big pharma companies who are making billions selling them while protected from legal claims for the impact of side effects, is that they are making every effort to conceal those side effects, some of which in some cases have caused heart problems and death.
Didn’t Nietzsche have something to say about the death of God?
I’m not a believer however I have been thoroughly educated by Jordan Petersons efforts to understand the immense value of a moral framework such as that our civilisation was based upon.
We really are living in the ruins of a great civilisation aren’t we.
The buildings we used to build versus the ugly stuff vomited up now is a staggering contrast.
Beauty, honour, truth etc …. so out of favour.
I’m really worried for my Son … I know I’ll cope because I just do …. but he’s white, straight, male and only 19 …. he was really shaken up by the prolonged lockdowns and now he re-enters a world of CRT, debt and cretinous institutions ….