UnReality TV

Dear Stan,

Another brilliant piece by Peter Hitchens. It underlines the sinister effect of TV on so many people - if you see it "with your own eyes" it must be real and true. The most unreal of all are of course "reality TV" shows like Big Brother or, the mother of them all, "The Family" which depicted the "real life" of a Reading family in 1974 and which I described in an earlier post. As proof that you cannot keep a bad idea down, a 2008 version of "The Family" has just been aired, showing the dreary life of a family in Canterbury, 40 miles south-east of London. Needless to say, that city's peerless cathedral and Christian heritage were not much in evidence.

I particularly loved Peter's observation on men wearing makeup. A few years ago Reading Crown Court was under media siege because of the trial of a woman accused of murdering three of her children. As I walked past the court building and the satellite trucks, a young man was powdering his face and studying the results in a small mirror. It was a particulary creepy and unsettling moment; I assume he was a reporter for one of the numerous channels I do not watch, as I did not recognise him. Even a purely "factual" report evidently could not be delivered straight without the reporter adjusting his own image.

The young mother was acquitted of all three counts and all the channels displayed her joy at being "proved" innocent. But, in the best whodunnit tradition, it was revealed afterwards that she had been investigated separately for the attempted murder of a fourth child.....

Peter's comments on our two biggest icons, Tony B. Liar and Princess Diana, are particularly revealing. Both were plainly utterly unworthy of the status and public influence they were given; Tony's catastrophic appointments to Government positions alone show how completely unfit he was for public office. But somehow on TV they were highly convincing performers. Princess Diana must have been the most "recognisable" person in history; yet Peter did not recognise her at first meeting.

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........the perniciousness of TV would be just as bad even if it were used to promote causes I like. I can say this quite safely since I know that it won't do so, but it also happens to be true. TV influences the human mind in ways which defy and avoid reason and ignore facts. It is also seduced by appearances, and extraordinarily bad at picking up the subtle negative signs that humans give off when you meet them personally. I have often pointed out that TV is good at making bad people look good, and also at making good people look bad.

Two striking examples of this are Princess Diana and Anthony Blair ( and of course now Barack Obama). I am not suggesting that any of these were or are personally wicked. But I am suggesting that their effects on our society have generally been bad, and that without TV they could not have achieved those things. Diana's televisual glamour was astonishing, and made people ignore her many episodes of bad behaviour, most notably her erratic private life (surely unwise in the mother of young boys) and her incredibly destructive BBC interview with Martin Bashir. Compare the response to Prince Charles's equally destructive TV interview with Jonathan Dimbleby, which rightly rebounded hard on him and has done him damage ever since.

In the case of Mr Blair and Mr Obama, I have never seen Mr Obama in the flesh so I can only comment on his record, but he seems to me to be a rather ordinary and undistinguished politician who once made one good speech but generally contents himself with imitations of Martin Luther King. Those who have the 'I have a dream' speech imprinted on their brains, as many of my generation do, must have noticed how similar Mr Obama's voice, cadences and inflections are to those of Dr King. As I scurried through various US airports during the election campaign, Mr Obama's speeches were often relayed on TVs in the concourses, and more than once I thought I was actually hearing Dr King. But how can this be? Dr King's voice and vocabulary were the product of a specifically Southern and deeply Christian upbringing and background, especially an intimate knowledge of the Authorised (King James) version of the Bible.

Mr Obama has never lived anywhere in the American South, he did not have a Christian upbringing and his acquaintance with the Bible only began when he signed up to Trinity Church. If he sounds like Dr King ( and he does) it must be because he - consciously or unconsciously - seeks to do so. You think this unlikely? You're welcome to do so. But politicians are very concerned about how they sound. We learned on Sunday from my colleague Simon Walters that the teenage Tory Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, has used a voice coach, apparently in a (not wholly successful) effort to make himself sound less posh.

In the flesh I expect Mr Obama is a fairly ordinary person, who I suspect smells quite strongly and unglamorously of cigarettes if you can get close enough to him. Princess Diana, likewise, was so beloved by the camera that the reality was deeply disappointing. The first time I saw her in person, from about ten feet away, it took me 30 seconds to realise that this was the face that launched a thousand headlines. This angular, awkward figure was the monarch of glamour? Surely not. Yet it was so.

As for Mr Blair, my own experience and that of many others who have dealt with him directly has been that he is a person who knows very little about the world, rarely reads, and is of rather limited intelligence. Yet TV has managed to make him look like a world statesman.

That is one of TV's faults, its creation of wholly false images. But because it enters the mind unmediated, a word whose significance Mr Lewis seems to have missed, it bypasses all kinds of important filters. A child dealing with an adult, be it a parent and teacher, gets its impression of that adult not just from a screen persona which may or may not be true, but from a complete experience. the child will see that person when in a hurry, on the mornings when that person has overslept or missed the bus or had a puncture, or left a label standing up at the back of a shirt. The child will have seen that person in good and bad moods, tired, irritable, distracted. In short, it will be much better able to judge what that person says. TV persons are too good. They never make mistakes or have spots. They are always on their best behaviour, always combed and properly dressed, always carefully lit to their advantage, always anxious to show their good sides and conceal their bad ones. Even the men wear make-up, and (I speak as a person who has appeared a few times on TV) the relaxation of tension when the cameras finally turn away and the microphones are off is considerable, as is the difference between the behaviour and language of TV people off and on screen. People on TV are consciously not being fully themselves.

Then there is the difference between books and TV. A child who reads books forms his own pictures of the characters, sometimes aided by verbal description but undoubtedly his own. He imagines their voices and mannerisms. So does the author. But each experience is individual. This is why, for those of us who were brought up before TV was the overwhelming master of our culture, the filming of beloved classic books is always a disappointment. We know the characters did not speak or look like that . Similarly, once TV or movies have taken over a classic, there is only one image. Sherlock Holmes will now always look more or less like Basil Rathbone (actors who play him until the end of time have to pass this test) Inspector Morse, who didn't look in the least like John Thaw in Colin Dexter's early books, came in the later books to be identical to Mr Thaw, and acquired a red Jaguar too. Even 'Brideshead Revisited' was so taken over by the Jeremy Irons version that the miserable movie remake often copies the TV series in visual imaging (the casting of the minor character Hooper is particularly striking. The film actor is obviously based on the TV actor). As for 'Pride and Prejudice' , this is now rapidly ceasing to be the property of Jane Austen. In the end, Andrew Davies will have remodelled most of English literature.

St. Barack Worship

Stan,

Thought you might enjoy Peter Hitchen's comments on the Obama media mania.

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St Barack’s Expensive Schools and Sneaky Cigarettes.

Still the Obama-worship continues. Scores of Americans denounced me for suggesting last week that Mr. Obama was not divine. How do these people cope with the fact that the President-elect, following a fine old Left-wing tradition on both sides of the Atlantic, is seeking to send his daughters to terrifyingly expensive private schools in Washington DC?

Surely, in between curing cancer and mending the hole in the ozone layer, Mr. Obama can fix the US capital’s atrocious state schools?

And have any of you ever seen a picture of Mr Obama, a heavy smoker, with a cigarette in his mouth? No, nor have I. Why is that?

Remembance Sunday

Sunday 9th November was Remembrance Sunday and our parish newsletter had the following poem on the front, which I am sure you would like to share:
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If I should never see the moon again
Rising red gold across the harvest field,
Or feel the stinging of soft April rain,
As the brown earth her hidden treasures yield.

If I should never taste the salt sea spray
As the ship beats her course against the breeze,
Or smell the dog-rose and the new mown hay,
Or moss and primroses beneath the tree.

If I should never hear the thrushes wake
Long before sunrise in the glimmering dawn,
Or watch the huge Atlantic rollers break
Against the rugged cliffs in baffling scorn.

If I have said goodbye to stream and wood,
To the wide ocean and the green clad hill,
I know that He who made this world so good
Has somewhere made a heaven better still.

This I bear witness with my latest breath
Knowing the love of God, I fear not death.

(Lines found in the Bible of Major Malcom Boyle,
killed in action after the landing on D-Day, June 1944)

The night we waved goodbye to America... our last best hope on Earth

Dear Stan,

Here is Peter Hitchen's ever razor sharp dissection of the Obama hysteria. He is perhaps unfair in comparing it to the frenzy on the demise of Princess Diana. Having had the misfortune to be in England in 1997 for that tsunami of garbage, hypocrisy and falsification, I don't think even the torrent of drivel written so far on Obama by the British media quite approaches their week long abandonment of sanity that September. It was particularly good to see Peter reminding the British public of the inglorious cesspit of corruption and cronyism behind the Democratic machine in Chicago.

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The night we waved goodbye to America... our last best hope on Earth

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.
I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.

It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which recorded Obama’s victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn’t yet a children’s picture version of his story, there soon will be.

Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find.

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn’t believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he’d promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.

He needn’t worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America’s Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton’s stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used to.

Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did talk about a ‘new dawn’, and a ‘timeless creed’ (which was ‘yes, we can’). He proclaimed that ‘change has come’. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn’t know what ‘enormity’ means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr. Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don’t try this at home).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.

And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring audience by repeated – but rather hesitant – invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will – ‘Yes, we can’. They were supposed to thunder ‘Yes, we can!’ back at him, but they just wouldn’t join in. No wonder. Yes we can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He’d have been better off bursting into ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’ which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.

Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in America. They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a state-subsidised slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on fraud and corruption charges.

They also know the US is just as segregated as it was before Martin Luther King – in schools, streets, neighbourhoods, holidays, even in its TV-watching habits and its choice of fast-food joint. The difference is that it is now done by unspoken agreement rather than by law.

If Mr Obama’s election had threatened any of that, his feel-good white supporters would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain, or practically anyone. But it doesn’t. Mr Obama, thanks mainly to the now-departed grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and denounced as a racial bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive private education. He did not have to grow up in the badlands of useless schools, shattered families and gangs which are the lot of so many young black men of his generation.

If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then every positive discrimination programme aimed at helping black people into jobs they otherwise wouldn’t get should be abandoned forthwith. Nothing of the kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably be more of them.

And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn’t vote for him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is obviously untrue.

I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America’s beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street – which runs due north from the White House – the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

AMERICA BUYS ALL THAT CHANGE BULLSHIT

Dear Stan,
 
Excerpt from the ever-acidic "Daily Mash" on the election result, which came through at about 5am London time (I was listening with one ear to the bedside radio). I should explain that "Lord Dimbleby" is David Dimbleby, one of the BBC's long time presenters. The fact that he and his younger brother Jonathan are always on our screens has, of course, nothing to do with the fact that their late father Richard was for decades the British equivalent of Walter Kronkite. Keep the family business in the family, I say.
 
 
AMERICA BUYS ALL THAT CHANGE BULLSHIT

"Change... yeah... of course"

BARAK Obama swept to victory last night as millions of Americans lapped up all that bullshit about change.

The Illinois senator made history as the first black American to become President and the 44th man to win the office with a lot of vague platitudes and an army of creepy spin doctors.

He told a crowd of 250,000 supporters in his home city of Chicago: "Remember, change is something that happens in the middle of the night when we're all fast asleep and very often the next morning no-one can tell that anything has actually changed.

"I promised you change you can believe in, I did not promise you change you can actually see."
He added: "You believe in Jesus don't you? Right, but have you ever seen Jesus? Exactly. Just making sure we're all on the same page."

Mr Obama said he would bring about change by working closely with the vast and terrifying multi-national corporations that had funded his campaign and pledged to end the war in Iraq in order to create a much bigger war in Afghanistan.

"But instead of some middle-aged white guy doing it, it'll be me and I'm half-Kenyan. What's that about?"

Bill McKay, a college student from Denver, said: "I can't believe I now live in a country where an African American can be elected to the presidency after spending just $600 million on advertising."

He added: "Give me a hug!"

Meanwhile, in the UK, thousands of people talked about staying up all night to watch the drama unfold, but then didn't.

Martin Bishop, from Oxford, said: "I was going to follow the coverage and have the significance of every result explained to me by Lord Dimbleby but then, at the last minute, I decided to go to bed because I don't care."

Denys Hatton, from Guildford, added: "If your life is such that you're placing all your hopes in one politician, then may I humbly suggest you get yourself a crate of superlager and a cardboard box and stop wasting everyone's time."