Past My Sell-by Date ??!!

I am now well past my ‘sell by’ date and rapidly approaching the age at which the average male in the UK is dead. I am, therefore, at that period in my life when the population at large is ever increasingly out of step with what I regard as reasonable and even normal and I take a pretty jaundiced view of society in return.  There is nothing unusual in this state of affairs; the young care nothing for the opinions or values of the old. They can, and undoubtedly will, just like us, go to perdition in their own sweet way. Every civilisation that this planet has yet thrown up has eventually either destroyed itself or allowed itself to be destroyed and there is no law, enforceable or otherwise,  that decrees that the, so called, ‘western’ civilisation, that exists today, should be an exception to the general rule. As George Bernard Shaw so rightly said - the only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history! As far as I can tell, the current younger generation is not actually learning any history at all – certainly not in any coherent form that could subsequently be useful. After all learning requires effort and even though it has six letters rather than four ‘effort’ has become a dirty word.

I read recently in an article in Physics World – which for the uninitiated is the House Magazine of the Institute of Physics – written by physicist Jim Sherlock that today’s top careers on the wish list of the young are pop star, footballer, D.J.,T.V. presenter and model. The students of today apparently have four main requirements of life: glamour, visibility, status and a big pay packet.  Allowing that 99.99999’% of them are going to be bitterly disappointed then on the assumption that he is right, and I have a nasty sinking feeling that he could be, this civilisation is probably heading straight for the buffers. A cursory look around at some of what is happening in this corner of our modern civilised world does not actually inspire much hope to the contrary.

As I sit writing this, in the aftermath of the bombings on the London transport system, I am aware of politicians and their various acolytes, hangers on and wannabees rushing around like demented hens, utterly useless draught legislation in hand and, as usual, completely missing the point. It is an interesting thought that our statute books are full of useless legislation. Much of it is obsolete and left where it is due to the idleness, stupidity and endless quest for immortality of those whose business it should be to get it repealed. 90 % of the remainder is totally ignored, mostly quite successfully, by 90 % of the population at large. Most of it is written in some foreign language known, I believe, as Gobbledegook and is, therefore beyond the comprehension of most mortals – including most of those responsible for legislating it in the first place.

New legislation does not even begin to be the answer to such terrorism, but it is a symptom of the root cause. This mania and I use the word deliberately and expressly, for interfering in, for poking their noses into and for creating the necessary pseudo legal framework for controlling the lives of everybody else is one of the characteristic hallmarks of most politicians. It is a truly international trait – whatever the race colour or creed - they all do it. But it is in the way, and to what degree, that they exercise these characteristics of interference, nosiness and lust for control that determines whether or not their country will, or will not, suffer at the hands of terrorists. You may well have noted, but then you may well have not, that it is only a very limited number of countries that suffer from this ‘world wide’ terrorist attention. You may very well not have considered it worthwhile to ask why – or more pertinently why us ?

The answer is not hard to find. In the majority of countries politicians exercise their many very dubious characteristics – far more than the three that I have so far cited, but we will return to those later – within the borders of their own country. They may not like what is going on outside but, publicly at any rate, they mind their own business. They don’t instigate revolutions, they don’t start wars, they don’t strut about on the world stage trying to convince everyone just how important they are – they mind their own bloody business and we get left alone. And before you start, that is not cowardice, it is plain practical commonsense. No one, not even you, likes outsiders poking their noses in and commonly accepts that any such interference probably deserves a bloody nose on principle. The problem is that scaled up to country level the whole thing gets out of hand and becomes unacceptable. However, we consider terrorism in some detail elsewhere. There are other topics which we need to consider first in order to gain a better perspective of all of the happenings about us.

I was brought up to respect the law and the national and international institutions that create and, to some extent, implement it. We were, I was brought up to believe, all equal before the law. The law, I was told, was just, reasonable and fair.
Our legislature, I was led to believe, was the oldest and best in the world peopled by servants of the state who were themselves the most upright of persons of high moral and intellectual calibre whose primary desire was to serve their country to the best of their quite outstanding abilities. (I can already hear you laughing!). This cradle of democracy was, without a doubt I was told, the finest and most advanced country in the world. With the possible exception, and I will put it no more strongly than that, of the bit about this being the finest country in the world if only for the reason that it is marginally less appalling than all of the others, what a load of crap that all was.

Ever and again we just accept what we are told because we are too stupid or just too plain bone idle to exercise our brains and question it. After all, to actually face up to reality and complain and criticise to the point of getting something changed is somehow un-British and to be frowned upon. Let’s begin at the beginning, always, as Oscar Hammerstein observed, a very good place to start. We do NOT, as I have repeatedly and untiringly said, live in a democracy !!  I discuss the concept of  Democracy at some length elsewhere on this site and there is no need to repeat it all here but it would be of interest to pause for a moment and contemplate just what it is that we actually do have.

What we actually have here, in the U.K., is an Oligarchy. What the ********** is an Oligarchy I hear you cry. Put in its simplest form it is ‘government by a small group of people’. It is supremely irrelevant whether that small group is replaced from time to time, by whatever means, as it is in this country, or not, as in some others. What it isn’t, in any way shape or form is government by the people. In this country the small group – the Cabinet, by and large, does exactly as it damned well pleases and to hell with you and me, for as long as it can constitutionally get away with it. What the people might think or want is quite beside the point except at election time. The funny thing is that at election time people have already made up their minds without any consideration of manifestos. When they have put up with one lot for long enough then they vote the other lot in in the forlorn hope that they might have improved since they were voted out last time. To cap it all, this small group with the aid of its lobby fodder – most of it with one eye on its mortgage and the other on its grossly inflated pension – ‘supported’ by around 35% only of the population then claims to have a “mandate” to do exactly as it pleases. If you didn’t laugh you’d cry. Only human beings could possibly be this crooked on the one hand and this stupid on the other.

Of course, I am going to be accused of hair splitting and of playing with words. Democracy, Oligarchy, what does it matter ? Semantics, along with spelling and grammar, seems, of recent years, to have become a dirty word - since they stopped teaching English in schools in fact. I’m not going to dwell on semantics here, either, as, once again, I consider it in some detail under its own heading elsewhere on the site. I will merely reaffirm here that the two words Democracy and Oligarchy are different, they mean different things, they are two completely different forms of government and to represent them as essentially one and the same thing is a crudely cynical, but nevertheless highly successful, deception.

At my age, when I am at a party or gathering where the majority of those present are around a generation, let’s say 20 years, younger than me things can get quite interesting. I, and I am not unique as I know from discussions with others of my age, become invisible. Conversations go on over my head, around me and even through me! If I am engaged in a conversation with a ‘youngster’ it will be interrupted without any ‘by your leave’ by another just as if I do not exist. It is not just a question of manners – in their minds I am genuinely not really present. The elderly, today, are of little consequence - age no longer engenders the respect it has earned. They are largely unemployable – in spite of their wealth of experience. Their vast reservoir of experience is regarded as a liability rather than an asset. They are a relic of a bygone age. They are frequently in the way. I could go on but I must hasten to make the point that I am not complaining – only stating the way it is. In our society only 100 years or so ago, and in more primitive societies still today, the converse would have been true. What has changed ?

Society has changed. As we have become richer we have become more selfish. As life has become easier we have become more self centred. We live longer and accomplish less. The more ‘civilised’ we become – the worse it gets.
Our society has become an ill mannered, ill tempered, ill disciplined and largely illiterate travesty of what it could have become; an uncaring concentration of humanity driven only by greed and frustration. Human beings are intensely tribal –which is another topic that we discuss elsewhere - and this has been a very useful tool for survival over time. But now, instead of being a collection of discrete individuals coming together to form a large tribe (which we call a state) for their mutual benefit, we have a situation where the state has become a monolith, controlled by the oligarchy mentioned above, taking unto itself all of the power without any responsibility and leaving the individual largely powerless and rudderless.

It all starts at the beginning when mothers are coerced, however nicely, to give birth in hospital because it is more convenient. Convenient for who you ask – for the State of course in the form of the N.H.S.  It is certainly not for the mother unless there are clinical reasons to take into consideration - which for most second and subsequent births there are not. Babies are being daily dumped in nurseries from as young as four days old because of the pressure to get back to work. Once the child is at school if it becomes too much of a handful you will be expected to collect it and sort it out because legislation has now rendered the school staff totally impotent in the circumstances. However, the same and similar legislation renders the parent pretty well equally impotent if they are to keep within the law. And now the same Head Teacher who cannot control your child without your help will have to give YOU permission (if you are dead lucky) to take YOUR child on holiday during term time.

If you are unlucky enough to have a daughter, and in spite of the fact that under age sex is illegal, she can be prescribed contraceptives by her doctor without your knowledge. Whose children are they for God’s sake ? Who is actually responsible for the child, the parents or the cretins who cobbled that lot together. Oddly enough it’s the parents. What it amounts to is that the state has the power without the responsibility and the parents have the responsibility without the power. Is it any wonder that our society is going to the dogs.

I think, on balance, that I’m glad to have had my life when I did but I do have another nasty sinking feeling that tells me that every generation when it reaches my age reaches, albeit perhaps for different reasons, largely the same conclusion. We just don’t fit any more – we’ve got out of step. Nevertheless, even making such an allowance, I still find myself asking the question that was ever on the lips of Victor Meldrew ……………..“Is it me” ??