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The Hidden Abode

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On The Boy (2016).  Spoilers, and CW for references to psychological and physical abuse.

 

The Boy, a film from 2016, written by Stacey Menear and directed by William Brent Bell, has been largely-forgotten, but deserves better.  It tries to be to patriarchy what Get Out, released the following year, would be to racism.

The film was marketed as a specimen of the creepy haunted doll subgenre of supernatural Horror, which enjoyed a rather half-hearted renaissance in the wake of the massive success of The Conjuring in 2012, and its breakout star (and best actor) Annabelle.  The Boy spends a good part of its first two acts pretending to be just such a creepy haunted doll movie… though precisely how hard its pretending is open to question, as we will see.

It’s a surprise to me that I like this film as much as I do.  Firstly, the director, William Brent Bell, is generally a purveyor of crap.  Misogynistic crap, in one marked instance.  Secondly, The Boy does things which I generally – and ideologically – dislike.  It has a ‘twist’ ending which…

If you’re reading on, I’m assuming you have either seen the movie or don’t care

…which supposedly recontextualizes the entire film, and makes it clear that, while you may have thought you were watching a story about a creepy haunted doll, you were actually watching a story with no supernatural elements whatever, beyond the usual implausibilities built into most movies via the aesthetic ideology of ‘realism’.

I do not like ‘twist’ endings.  I especially do not like ‘twist’ endings which also function as ‘narrative substitution’.  Like fourth wall breaking, I generally find narrative substitution to be a cheap trick which can give the appearance of cleverness while actually saying very little, and generally unravelling the text’s coherence of theme and character development.

I do not like stories which appear to be supernatural but which turn out to have a ‘natural’ explanation.  I do not even particularly like stories which maintain an ambiguity as to whether or not the events of the story are supernatural.  Firstly, such stories tend to cheat.  The ambiguity tends to be a pretence.  In order to manufacture the supposed ambiguity the story must impose an overpowering natural reading, even if it pretends not to.

More importantly, for me, by undermining or eschewing the supernatural, a supernaturally-inflected film cheats itself of the vast and fertile potentialities of polysemy that is the uncanny, the symbolic, and the truly irrational, confining itself instead to the banal personal irrational of the individual disordered psyche.  The great strength of uncanny storytelling is that it deals with the generalised irrational.  Irrationality as society, as history, as life.  It depicts characters experiencing a world that is irrational – and hopelessly so – all around them, and deep in its structure.  I am convinced that this hits closer to a true and visceral expression of the experience of living in modernity.

The Boy does all the stuff I dislike.  Its twist recontextualises the film, substitutes one narrative for another, and removes the supernatural from the story, substituting one disordered psyche for what looked like an irrational universe.  …

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The Trump Trap

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The GOP, MAGA, the past, and the future…

Trump might leave the US as a three party system.  America would have three parties - a centrist liberal party, a far-right party, and a fascist party. 

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The classic pattern of a fascist takeover of government goes something like this…

The fascist party grows to the point where it is big enough to be a kind of kingmaker in a deadlocked representative democratic system, and the conservative elites of that system, threatened by chaos and/or growing left political feeling and workers’ struggle, adopt the fascists as the (to them) lesser evil, and help them into power.  The conservative elites expect to be able to control the fascists and use them as a bulwark, discarding them when they have outlived their usefulness, only to find that the fascist party out-manoeuvres them and assimilates or ejects them.  This has not yet happened in the United States, but it seems to have happened – on a micro level, as it were – within the Republican Party.  

The MAGA conquest of the Republican Party may not be absolutely complete, however.  MAGA might still split away.  

A lot depends on whether Trump once again secures the Republican nomination.

Front-runners don’t necessarily get nominations.  Many people now considered political jokes have, at one time or another, been front-runners.  Donald Trump isn’t even always the front-runner in the polls these days.  Even so, the likelihood is that, all else being equal, he will get the Republican nomination again.  

The movers-and-shakers within the GOP want rid of him.  So do most of the mid-level people.  They talk openly about how he was great but it’s not 2016 anymore, we need someone new, etc.  They are hoping to nudge the feeling in the party.  But the feeling in the party stays with Trump.  The insiders are reduced, as some of them have recently confessed, to waiting for Trump to die.

We all know the paradox.  We saw it played out in instance after instance in the midterms.  Republican hopefuls can’t be candidates without Trump’s approval; Republican candidates can’t get elected by the public with Trump’s approval.  This paradox runs right the way through the Republican Party, from top to bottom.  It is soon to be enacted on the national stage in the 2024 presidential election.

This is the trap the present-day Republican Party is in.  A trap entirely of its own creation and long in the making. 

I’ll have to go back a bit.

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Neoliberalism, ‘Creeping Fascism’, and The Cosby Show

In the late twentieth century, the post-war ‘long boom’ crumbled as a result of the secular tendency towards decline in the profit rate, which is – as Marx showed – innate to capitalism.  By the 1970s, even the vast and ongoing government stimulus of Cold War arms spending was failing to pump up the burst tyre.  The neoliberal strategy was an attempt by capitalism – unsuccessful in overall, real terms – to restore the profit rate, and the GOP was at the forefront of it with Reaganism, as were the British Tories with Thatcherism.  

The neoliberal revolution was not just economic.  It was also – in an almost too on-the-nose demonstration of Marx’s ‘base and superstructure’ model – political and cultural. …

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Of The Rings of Power and Amazon Being Fucking Evil

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Pausing Nowhere and Back Again this week for some words on this Amazon thing. We’ll be back with Lake-town next week.

Well, that was inevitable, even if knowing what to call a show is apparently a spoiler these days. It’s a less Tolkienesque title than Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age, but it scans, even if the existence of a series title with a subtitle is a moral atrocity. 

As The Rings of Power is a prequel show, the title indicates a focus on the Three, Seven, and Nine rings. Showrunners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay (let’s hope they won’t be the next Benioff and Weiss) give the impression The Rings of Power will cover the Second Age, from “the forging of the rings, the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron, the epic tale of Númenor, and the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.” Akallabêth stans rejoice, I suppose.

The period Payne and McKay describes lasts anywhere from 1941 to 2231 to 3409 years, depending on where The Rings of Power starts. That could be the founding of Númenor, Sauron’s time in Eregion, or the Rings of Power’s creation. It seems unlikely  that the series would depict any events that happen after the siege of Barad-dûr or Isildur’s death.

The Rings of Power apparently sticks to Tolkien’s overarching story and filling in the blanks, per the Tolkien Estate’s guidelines. It has unprecedented licensing to adapt portions of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, so the Tolkien Estate is clearly pleased with the series. This raises some concerns, as it may mean The Rings of Power is more traditionalist than its predecessors, Peter Jackson’s double-trilogy. At the same time, adapting Tolkien’s conservative mythology in the tedious Marvel Cinematic Universe era should be an interestingly strange sight.

I’m almost wholly unfamiliar with the show’s creative team, so I can’t predict their approach to Middle-earth. The job they’ve inherited, however, is fascinating. They have to work with Tolkien’s plots (outlines, really), which span millennia and contain scarce details. This will give the team ample room to concoct new stories within Tolkien’s framework. I wonder if each season will cover a particular era. Certainly there will have to be an almost anthology-like approach to it: characters will inevitably die between seasons. Maybe we’ll get The Lord of the Rings as True Detective. There are worse ideas than “Nic Pizzolatto writes elves.”

If the tone of this piece can accurately be called “cold,” there are a couple reasons for that. The rampant spoilerphobia of contemporary pop culture is a killer on enthusiasm. Before I watch a series or a movie, I like to know something of its story. As of now, we know basically nothing about The Rings of Power‘s creative approach. I’m not going to go ga-ga over this stuff unless Amazon lets its creators show they have an interesting story to tell.

There’s also Amazon’s involvement. If you’re reading Eruditorum Press, or if you’ve paid any attention to the world these past few years, you know Amazon is one of the most evil and destructive organizations in the world.…

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Real Gone

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Sections of this piece are drawn from conversations with Niki Haringsma, whose forthcoming Black Archive on ‘Love & Monsters’ is really good.  Don’t blame her for this though, for god’s sake.

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The style/substance dichotomy is, of course, false.  Most dichotomies are, when you dig deeply enough. The thing is: dichotomies are also real.  Even false dichotomies are real. Our world – bourgeois society, the capitalist epoch – is made of ‘real false dichotomies’.  The most fundamental dichotomies in our society – capitalist and worker; use value and exchange value – are both real, in the sense of having real material effects, and also unreal, insane, hallucinatory.  Capitalism is the rule of abstraction. It is concrete human existence tyrannised by the slippery, the spectral, the notional.

For Marx, when things are produced as commodities they are no longer just ‘use values’ but now have the divided nature of also being ‘exchange values’.  Use values are useful, sensual, material, human. Exchange value is abstract, useless outside the profit system, and has no use beyond the self-expansion of value. That’s capitalism.  That’s the root of ‘profit for profit’s sake’. Marx sees labour, and thus production, as fundamental to human life and society (our conscious, constructive, creative, social activity is what marks us out among animals).  So production that is geared towards exchange value is inhuman. Self-expansion of value (capitalism) thus perverts human creative and social powers into perpetuating an alien system, which expands by feeding on those powers.  This is alienation.

This is actually at the root of Marx’s critique of capitalism: that it subjects real and sensuous human life to the domination of phantasmic things like exchange value, the force that renders all actual human effort nothing more than abstract and homogeneous labour.  Exchange value – loosely, price – is determined by ‘socially necessary labour time’, i.e. the average amount of time it takes to make things, or perform services, etc, given the average level of productivity in society. This is because capitalism organises production for profit, and labour that falls outside ‘socially necessary labour time’ is unprofitable – because it costs money but does not make money.  This is because the worker whose low productivity meant that their work fell outside the ‘socially necessary labour time’ would – by definition – be being paid for time above the average amount of time necessary, and hence the price of her labour is raised, and hence the profits when her work is sold are reduced. This is why no ordinary worker is allowed to get away with such things. This is why the supervisor times your bathroom breaks.  In capitalism, labour that is ‘particular’ or ‘specific’ has no value in itself, because it produces only use-values (i.e. useful things), and they are not profitable in themselves – not to capitalism anyway. A table is useless to capitalism unless it is a profitable table. (This is why capitalism doesn’t make things that are not directly profitable except when forced to, or when it realises that it is in its longer term interest so to do – in which case it generally gets the state, i.e.…

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Fascism, Imperialism, and Trumpism

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Fascism, of course, always had a lot more in common with classical liberalism than most people realise.  Fascism was built around the defence of private capitalism.  Far from being the ideologically ultra-statist economic nightmare of right-wing mythology, fascist economics was complex and opportunistic.  It sometimes used nationalisation as well as privatisation.  Indeed, as Germa Bel has shown, the Nazis did so extensively, to the point where one could call them forerunners of neoliberalism.  But there’s no denying that statism was a part of the Nazi economic strategy… but then so did liberalism always use the state as a way to protect and extend capitalist interests.  Indeed, fascism – being a product of twentieth century capitalist imperialism – is the product of an era when the interests of the state fuse, to a large extent, with the interests of blocs of domestic capital, thus making state-run imperialism essentially a form of public-financed ‘primitive accumulation’ on behalf of national capitalists.  Many big capitalists – generally from heavy industry, for material reasons, as Daniel Guerin pointed out – understood this and sympathised with and/or subsidised fascist movements.  But more generally, fascism emerges from the liberal capitalist epoch, and shows the family resemblances.

In this connection, a reader recently reminded me of the work of Ishay Landa.  I need to re-read, but I seem to recall that Landa makes a strong case, in The Apprentice’s Sorcerer (2012), that fascism emerges from the Western liberal – i.e. capitalist – tradition and is in continuity with it, at least as much as rupture. 

This is a good review of Landa’s book which brings out the main points.  As the reviewer says

Landa begins by identifying as a historical precondition for fascism “the inherent tension between the political dimension of the liberal order and its economic one” (21). That is, the European bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century demanded representative governments in order to free the markets from feudal protectionism, but they were followed later by the lower classes who, in turn, demanded access to the franchise themselves in order to protect their own interests, pitting the original economic liberalism against emerging political liberalism. Where John Locke defended democracy as shoring up capitalism, Vilfredo Pareto, whose works inspired Benito Mussolini, lashed out at democracy “entirely on the premises of economic liberalism,” such as “its restriction of the ‘free movement of capital,’ and its encroachment on private property via progressive taxation” (53).” Similar strains of thought were current among German thinkers of the interwar period, most notably Oswald Spengler, and Adolf Hitler’s animus against German democracy was based upon the belief that “the [Weimar] Republic signifie[d] the unlawful and pernicious political interference in the economy”…

An interesting irony that Locke, who provides the basis for Rothbard’s ethics and metaphysics of property, is in favour of democracy (broadly), instead of resolutely opposed to it like the Austrians.  And it’s also telling that Hitler’s fundamental objections to Weimar democracy were couched in terms that would be congenial to Hayek et al (via Carl Schmitt, etc).…

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Summing Up, Part 3

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Last time in ‘Summing Up’, we talked about how the right-libertarian “views the horror of socially-arranged altruism as worse than the horror of letting people die for want of medical care” because “libertarianism is against individual freedom for all because it depends upon collective liberation”.  This, of course, raises another issue.  Where does one draw the line?  If socialised medicine is totalitarianism for doctors, why is the tacit threat of destitution which lies behind the wage labour system not considered equally bad?  The answer to this question is the same brute and vulgar answer we gave already.  It comes down to which side you’re on… which, most of the time, in an instance of capitalism creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of the selfish and cynical actor of its own ideological account of human nature, comes down to which class you’re in, or which class your interests are aligned with.  

Let’s pause again to notice all those ‘vons’ in the names of the great Austrians.  And let’s also pause to again notice that, in applying such cynicism about human nature, such distrust of democracy, such a strategic splitting of the concept of freedom, and such naked class interests, the libertarians are, indeed, the heirs of the Founding Fathers – not just of the United States but also, as we’ve seen, of Ireton and Cromwell and the equivalent bourgeois revolutionaries in England.  They carry many of the most fundamental imperatives of the founders of the bourgeois state into the present era.

The libertarians’ philosophical rationale for this partiality to the rights and privileges of the ruling class, and the attendant indifference to those of the working class, is that private property is the basis of liberty (to the extent that some have taken to rechristening them, far from unjustly, ‘propertarians’).  But this philosophical rationale manages the impressive feat of being both a tautology and a contradiction.  It’s a tautology because it assumes the point under question.  It’s a contradiction because if private property, while conferring liberty on its possessors, also structurally curtails the liberty of the propertyless, then whither the concept of liberty… except as a luxury to be enjoyed by a few?  From here the libertarian is inescapably pushed towards somehow justifying the inequity, towards explaining why yes, liberty is a luxury to be enjoyed by a few – and quite right too!  And hence we get the various distinct but similar ways in which the different strands of this tradition of bourgeois thinking (libertarianism, classical liberalism, etc) have imported justifications in from outside, from conservatism.  The justifications are easy to find.  You need only look at the many and drastic specific inequities generated by capitalist society, generalise from them, and amputate history and context so that they appear to have no cause.  That’s how you end up with libertarians and liberals enthusing over The Bell Curve, etc. 

(The necessary amputation of context is actually especially striking in the case of the libertarians, because a whole host of the inequities they seize upon to justify hierarchy are based on the imperialism – or at least war – they profess to be against.…

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Summing Up, Part 2

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In an article entitled ‘Democracy Isn’t Freedom’, Ron Paul wrote:

Americans have been conditioned to accept the word “democracy” as a synonym for freedom, and thus to believe that democracy is unquestionably good.

The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this, as evidenced not only by our republican constitutional system, but also by their writings in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere. James Madison cautioned that under a democratic government, “There is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” John Adams argued that democracies merely grant revocable rights to citizens depending on the whims of the masses, while a republic exists to secure and protect pre-existing rights. Yet how many Americans know that the word “democracy” is found neither in the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence, our very founding documents?

Now, an important thing to note here is that Paul is absolutely right.  Most of the Founding Fathers did not envisage their new republic as a democracy.  Indeed, Madison (as Chomsky is fond of reminding us) explicitly saw the task of designing the new government as one of designing a system which would protect “the minority of the opulent against the majority”.  Chomsky also likes to quote John Jay as saying “The people who own the country ought to govern it”. As he writes in The Common Good,

Madison feared that a growing part of the population, suffering from the serious inequities of the society, would “secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of [life’s] blessings.” If they had democratic power, there’d be a danger they’d do something more than sigh. He discussed this quite explicitly at the Constitutional Convention, expressing his concern that the poor majority would use its power to bring about what we would now call land reform.

So he designed a system that made sure democracy couldn’t function. He placed power in the hands of the “more capable set of men,” those who hold “the wealth of the nation.” Other citizens were to be marginalized and factionalized in various ways, which have taken a variety of forms over the years: fractured political constituencies, barriers against unified working-class action and cooperation, exploitation of ethnic and racial conflicts, etc.

This is nothing surprising.  We can go back to the dawn of bourgeois democracy in England, the Putney Debates, and see the bafflement which enveloped Ireton and the other Parliament Men when Rainsborough and the Levellers demanded that every man should have a say in the government that ruled over him, even if he lacked a “permanent interest” (i.e. property).  Ireton and his fellow propertied gentlemen not only didn’t agree with such a concept – they couldn’t even comprehend it.  It was utterly alien to them.  The very radical ideas thrown up by the revolution they had led were now confronting them, shouted from the mouths of the common men they’d relied on as their muscle, and they might as well have been speaking a foreign language.…

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A Birthday Crawl

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This post will be somewhat disjointed.  This is partly because I am not well at the moment.  It’s also partly because I didn’t start on it early enough and never quite worked out what I wanted it to be.  To be honest, I forgot the anniversary. I am notorious for my bad memory and often forget dates. It’s only Twitter – with its automatic mechanisms for pricking the unpaid contributor to fill it with content, even to the point of scavenging almanacs – which has made me as date-conscious as I am now.

Marx liked his drunken London pub crawls.  Think of this as a semi-lucid crawl around the inns (and outs) of my brain on 5th May 2018.

 

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Today is Marx’s 200th birthday.  A piece of information to which many would respond “So what?”  And I’m actually sympathetic to this view.

Someone recently asked me when I was going to go and see the Marx exhibition currently at the British Library.  They just assumed I would go. But I’m interested in Marx for the ideas.

It’s not that his life is of no interest.  Nor is it that you can divide his ideas and work from his life.  This is barely true of any thinker, but is perhaps especially untrue of revolutionary thinkers.  One of the myths about Marx is that he spent all his time hunched over books, disdaining the fray, withdrawn into a world of ideas.  Marx was an activist all his life, passionately involved in almost all the great liberatory struggles of his time – from Chartism to the fight against slavery – even when his personal circumstances, or a downturn in the pace of events, forced him to be involved from afar.

No, I’m just not remotely interested in going to gaze at samples of his handwriting.  To the extent that the exhibition would relate facts, they’ll probably be facts I already know (not to sound immodest but Marx is one of a very few things I know quite a lot about) or don’t care about.  I’m certainly not interested in hearing the kinds of interpretations of Marx – his ideas or his life – that the British Library is likely to offer. I remember being surprised by the surprise some people showed at the gloss on events offered by the Royal Academy at their exhibition of Russian Revolutionary art last year.  Really, what do people expect?

Anniversaries and commemorations tend to be odd affairs, especially when they involve the commemoration of revolutionaries by the mainstream.  There’s a rash of this all over the media right now, for obvious reasons. Most of it utter drivel… though it does have certain side benefits, such as annoying certain people (see the image above).

In 1991 the great Marxist journalist Paul Foot wrote about “the old English disease” of “revolutionary necrophilia – the love and worship of revolutionaries long after they are safely dead”.  It often involves cringeworthy misunderstanding and/or misappropriation of those revolutionaries. The example we are perhaps most familiar with nowadays is Martin Luther King.…

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Spare Kochs at an Orgy

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As some of you will be aware, especially those of you who’ve been following my whining about it on Twitter, I’ve recently been finishing up something I’ve been writing about the Austrian School of economics (y’know, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, right-libertarianism, etc).  It’s my side of a collaboration with Phil for his next book.  It’s taken a long time (my fault) but I just finished.  One of the reasons it took so long was because I kept falling down rabbit holes, so to speak.  The good thing about that is that it has left me with excess material I can write up.  And here’s the first bit. 

By the way, people who give me as little as $1 per month on Patreon saw this days ago.

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The Koch Brothers.  Billionaire reactionaries whose dad co-founded the John Birch Society, and who now act as money-pits and eminences grise for huge sectors of the US Right.  Greasers of the wheels of the Tea Party.  Suffice to say, they – along with others of their kind including the DeVos family – have also funded organisations like CPAC, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute (co-founded by Murray Rothbard, by the way).  They’ve helped bankroll – directly or indirectly, via organisations they fund – climate change denier Willie Soon, and speaking engagements by people like Bell Curve author Charles Murray, Ann Coulter, arch-Islamophobe David Horowitz, and erstwhile alt-Right darling and Breitbart star Milo Yiannopoulos.  Relatedly, think tanks they fund and control are responsible for creating a model ‘campus free speech’ bill, complete with draconian punishments for students who protest guest speakers, which several state legislators are eying approvingly.  They have spent incomprehensible amounts of money on direct support for politicians and political candidates.  Though critical of ‘establishment’ candidates in the 2016 US Presidential race, they did not back Trump… but they didn’t exactly back out of politics.  As Salon.com notes, in 2016

the Center for Media and Democracy uncovered 58 Koch-funded candidates for state legislative seats in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. The actual number could be much larger, for the bulk of the network’s donations go through “dark money” channels that hide the names of donors and recipients.

Though some people suggest the Kochs feel distaste for Trump, the likelihood is that they’re starting to think, as InsidePhilanthropy.com put it, that

investing in libertarian ideas through think tanks and universities offers more bang for the buck [than political donations]. And they’ve recently indicated that such philanthropic giving is likely to take priority over political giving in coming years.

To see why they might think that, I want to look at some of this sort of ‘philanthropy’. 

There is much to say about the Kochs.  Google their names.  It’ll keep you busy.  Here I will follow one tiny trail.  It leads to no massive revelations, as far as I can see.  But it’s a trail I haven’t seen followed elsewhere.  It follows Koch money and influence into Austrian-inspired, right-wing, libertarian academia.…

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Margaret on the Radio

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This is post is kindasorta both a Tricky Dicky and a Psychic Landscape entry. It doesn’t quite fit into either series, but should – hopefully – be read in the context of them.

 

When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, so many people downloaded the song ‘Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead’ from iTunes that the BBC were seemingly forced into the position of having to play it on Radio 1, in line with their usual practice of giving airtime to songs that are currently in the charts.  (In the end they copped out and played a clip – of a song that’s under a minute long anyway – with an explanation.  I didn’t hear it but I’d stake internal organs on it involving use of the word ‘divisive’.)  This awkward situation for the BBC, very much not of their choosing, created what is called a ‘row’, or a ‘controversy’, or a ‘scandal’.  This is when the right-wing media, rather than report the facts with headlines like ‘Thousands Celebrate Baroness Thatcher’s Death by Downloading…’, instead publish stories with headlines like ‘Outrage as BBC plans to Celebrate Baroness Thatcher’s Death by Playing…’.  The ‘outrage’ the paper is supposedly reporting is always illustrated with a few hysterical quotes from people the paper contacted to supply them with hysterical quotes.  For instance, the Telegraph contacted Cecil Parkinson, one of Thatcher’s erstwhile cabinet minions and staunchest loyalists.  Lord Parkinson proved a disappointingly philosophical commentator however, telling them – bizarrely – that Thatcher wouldn’t have cared because she’d have been too busy watching Songs of Praise.

For those of you who don’t know, Songs of Praise is the longest running television show in history.  It has been aired more-or-less weekly on Sunday afternoons on BBC1 since 1961, and features recordings of Sunday church services – from a different church each week – complete with lots of hymn singing, helpfully subtitled so the viewer can join in at home.   The show is notorious for depicting anomalously large congregations which fail to accurately reflect the reality of Christian worship attendance figures in the United Kingdom.  As such, it is also one of the most subversive television shows in history, albeit unwittingly, being a weekly demonstration of both the psychologically deranging effects of the spectacle, and an infallible index of some of the quintessential sins of the British middle classes: pride, vanity, hypocrisy, etc.

Lord Parkinson’s idea in saying what he supposedly did was, presumably, to emphasize both Mrs Thatcher’s admirable contempt for the opinions of the people of Britain, but also her Christian piety.  He didn’t bother to explain why watching a particular television programme would mean Mrs Thatcher wouldn’t find time to care about an unconnected issue.  As I recall, Mrs Thatcher was quite an efficient multi-tasker.  Also, based on the occasional instance of seeing Songs of Praise in my youth, I’d say that the show was singularly conducive to making the viewer think about other things… and in my day it was presented by ex-Goon Harry Seacombe, so there always seemed a muted possibility that the cloying air of respectable tweeness might at any moment be discarded in favour of an atavistic reversion to random gibbering and screeching. …

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