Two Baby Boomer Photographs, One Baby Boomer Quote

"He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy."

Can the over 60s please take their historical narrative home with them? It's blocking aisle 2.

Oddie Priorities

That Bill Oddie was on TV again last night getting angry about people's misconceptions regarding sparrow-hawks and ranting about the public's prejudice against seagulls. The US may be about to attack Iran, and Russia is buzzing our coastline with bombers. Priorities Bill, priorites!

Oddie: Wrong priorities.

Generational Helots

Helots (wikipedia).

Hmm, interesting.

(via Freeman).

The Evil (Nearly) Dead, Abroad.

I have recently returned from a very pleasant sojourn to the Adriatic Coast of Italy where myself and Missus Buckminster sampled and thoroughly enjoyed the delightful pace of life there and the generally more relaxed and polite attitude of every single person.

Apart from one group.

Now normally one would rant and rave at this point about the “chav”, the “hooligan” and the “binge drinker” and their holiday antics. One would normally tut in a disparaging manner before commenting on the likelihood of their poor education or family background. One would observe fun being perpetrated in a raucous and all-inclusive manner and mutter that “it shouldn’t be allowed”. After all, fun? On holiday? Honestly.

But this group of malcontents left me with serious dental problems from molar grinding. Their complete indifference to the beautiful culture in which we were immersed. Their pompous and ridiculous belief in their own importance. Their refusal to learn even a few basic words of the local language. Oh my god, the arrogance of it all. Their ingrained belief that if you speak slowly and loudly then the poor victim of their ignorance will comprehend their ridiculous demands. And finally, their firm belief in their right to complain. Loudly, tediously and at great length on such subjects as (and I kid you not, these are all genuine quotes I heard in one week):

Why is it so far to Venice, they should organise it better!
Why can’t they get ‘proper’ milk here?
Why are all the menus in Italian?
I need more legroom ‘cause I might get a DTV (I’m guessing a deep vein thrombosis but honestly, who knows?)
It’s too hot. (In Italy, in summer. Who’d a thunk it?)
It’s not hot enough (From a man upon who’s stomach a boiled lobster could cheerfully have hidden).

And finally, my all time ‘favourite’….

Why don’t they speak proper English?

Aaaaaaaaaaargh.

Immigration controls? We should have controls to stop people getting OUT of the country. It’s so embarrassing I could cry. How difficult is it to just learn a few phrases in the local language for Pete’s sake?

In case you haven’t guessed I am of course talking about the middle class, middle aged and upwards ambassadors of ignorance and rudeness. Sorry, England. I always get those two mixed up.

So pay attention, if anyone reading this is over 40, and try to remember that everyone can hear you, no-one cares what you think and most of all the reason that it’s different to England is mainly because ITS NOT FUCKING ENGLAND YOU POSOINOUS OLD TOAD!!!!!!!

And relax.

The Music Came Drifting Over The Barricades, and The Soldiers Fell Back.

"Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy
cause summers here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy" - Street Fighting Man, The Rolling Stones

"Hippies. They're everywhere. They wanna save the earth, but all they do is smoke pot and smell bad." - Eric Cartman, Die Hippie, Die

In Praise of The Scorpions and The Hoff

Spring 1967- Autumn 1968 — the demographic boom following WWII has led to a youth generation of unprecedented influence, bringing forth a year to rival 1848. Their new music is blaring from every loudspeaker in The West, Break On Through by the Doors, White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane and the distorted noise of Hendrix are sheer, raw, statements of intent. Youth is taking to the streets... By mid-June the student rebellions taking place in Washington and Paris begin to spread into other cities, Sergeant Pepper is played in London as an enormous smiling face is hung over the entrance to a squat on Carnaby Street. Before August the governments of De Gaulle in France and Wilson in Britain have fallen, and the Labour party in Britain is in turmoil, the pressure for change is external, and the Labour party isn't able to give it what it wants. Increasingly it becomes clear that the British political system cannot respond to this pressure with business as usual...

Oh, wait a second, this never happened.

The Baby Boom generation has, through dint of sheer cultural firepower, established some sort of claim to molding the 20th century, akin to The French Revolution or the pan-European events of 1848. As far as I can tell, their case rests almost entirely on the back of a couple of really good tunes. Paint It Black by The Stones, The End by The Doors and It's All Right Ma, I'm Only Bleeding by Dylan are certainly rousing anthems when you've got a petrol bomb in your hand, but shouldn't a revolution, well... Change something? Looking at it in political events per year, the biggest year of revolutions in the post-war world was 1989 (with it's sequel in '91, Post-Communist Revolutions 2: The Soviets). However hard I try, I don't remember Bob Dylan or short hemlines having anything to do with it. Unfortunately for the Eastern Europeans, they just didn't pick the right soundtrack, and they don't have the influence on the global media of the anglophone baby boomer left. Where the world could treat 1989 as year zero of modernity, much of the media prefers to slip back to 1967 and recycle trite truisms about it's importance to feminism, homosexual rights, and the pill. It all comes down to those kickass theme-songs...

In the western media's narrative, the Wende is irrevocably associated with two tunes - Looking For Freedom by David Hasselhoff and Wind Of Change by The Scorpions. Between the two of them they typify the end of communism and for this they deserve our praise. So, in the spirit of casting down the oppressors, I'm going to briefly go over their stories.

With an original line-up forming in 1969, The Scorpions wouldn't be the most obvious choice as the voice of youth 20 years later. A long suffering slogger of a German hard rock band, they had been ploughing a long furrow of "successful in Japan" records until their first big breakthrough: 1984's single Rock You Like A Hurricane. Wind Of Change would be their high water mark, but would also be one of the last great big hair anthems before Alternative Rock changed the game. The song was explicitly and theatrically branded as the ballad to end the Cold War, and used a montage of Cold War history as the backdrop for the video. They were so successful in this in my mind (and the mind of Wikipedia) that, despite this song's release in 1990 when Berlin was reunified but Germany was still two states, I cant visualise that man wielding a sledgehammer atop The Wall without hearing a whistling solo and thinking of power ballads and mullets.

Hasselhoff on the other hand was downright lucky, he'd been trying to break into pop music since 1984 (with most success in Austria), and his television career was kicking off again with Baywatch that year. 1989 comes and his second album Looking For Freedom was creeping up the West German charts when Erich Honecker resigned. His single of the same name (fantastic video, lots of shots of Kit from Knightrider along with The Hoff, as he prefers to be called, and females in various states of dress) hit the top of the charts in West Germany as The Wall was preparing to fall and then stayed the duration. With it's rousing but empty declarations on Freedom this song was close enough to a symbol that Hasselhoff was invited to belt this soft rock anthem out atop the Berlin Wall (dressed up in leather, scarf and pixie lights in front of The Brandenberg Gate, watch here) at New Year celebrations, barely a month after The Wall had fallen. The full story of Hasselhoff's delusions of political/historical importance is documented by the BBC. God Save The Hoff!

Some Quotes:

"I've done everything, and I talk about what I've learnt through all those journeys: how I tried to save the world and I forgot to save myself." - David discusses his Autobiography

"I wanted to play around with the format, really tear it to pieces and shake it up. For example, if Mitch saves someone from drowning, and that person then goes out and releases a virus that kills a million people. Imagine the moral implications of that. " - David discusses Baywatch.

1989 did have some genuinely revolutionary (in both senses of the word) music, it was the year of N.W.A's Straight Out Of Compton and Public Enemy put out the single Fight The Power (see below). Hip-Hop was genuinely trying to smash down some social walls at the time, with KRS-One also at the top of his game, this was the era when Hip-Hop was closest to its Black Panthers roots. But Black American rappers weren't closely associated with the Soviet public consciousness, and I have trouble making links between the two however much I love watching Flavour Flav aggressively wield a clock in front of their incredibly threatening (camp) militaristic danceless troupe, The S1W.

Public Enemy's Fight The Power, released on the soundtrack of Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing.

It's a sad shame, and probably more of a refection of my Anglocentric world than reality, that '89 is treated as a geopolitical phenomenon, rather than having the social implications of other youth movements. In a year which saw Tiananmen Square and Ceaucescu's execution there is very little spoken of changes to society. In the 21st century we will have to think harder how to brand our revolutions, you need to have the right soundtrack!

In memory of Boris Yeltsin, when he wasn't being an asshole, and of the Greek resistance against The Junta, who seized power 40 years ago this week.
-

William spent a long night awake, waiting for the telephone call inviting him to perform Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds at Woodstock.

Will The Baby Boomers Live Forever?

Are We Having Fun Yet? on BBC 4 hints at the possibility of the Baby Boomer generation living longer and perhaps getting access to anti-geriatric drugs to extend their lifetimes. It didn't mention the next logical link in this chain of reasoning: that if they live long enough to extend their lifespans, they may live long enough to still be around when some genius invents retro-geriatric drugs to make them young again.

Just think: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair…Bill Oddie…all on final salary pensions for eternity at our expense.

Oddie: Immortal?

A Leisurely Constitutional - Political Action With Geriatrics

Warning: this blogpost is subjective, and opinionated, with the author's prejudices in full display

Saturday morning and early afternoon found me here, joining in the festivities of the latest in the long series of Stop The War/CND organised demonstrations. This may surprise those of you who have read this website regularly (my opinions jump across the left-right divide often), but at the present time I feel sufficiently strongly to take to the streets on both the main issues the demonstration was organised to oppose: replacing Trident and drawing the troops back from Iraq.

I'm not writing this to discuss my opinions on the issues (I'll get back to these later on), my primary interest here was the sociology of the demonstration. Because I've got to make an embarrassing admission here, I couldn't face attending this demonstration for more than an hour, after walking from Hyde Park for 2/3rds of the distance to Trafalgar Square,I fled to a pub in Soho.

I was stunned by the demography of the marchers. Take a closer look at that photograph at the top... The majority of the people who felt compelled to take to the streets to demonstrate on this issue were old. If I were to make a statistically inaccurate and subjective assessment of the people I was on the march with, I would say 3/5ths of the attendees were 55+, 1/5th was the young hippy contingent, and 1/5th was the diverse groupings of the left (including, of course, the political Muslim constituency). This shocked me, as a semi-political blogger I've digested all of the fluff written over the past couple of years about the new commentariat. This rather feeble way of describing those of us willed to write and link to each other does signify a group that unquestionably has clout, a notable example could be seen last week when Tony Blair was forced to publicly comment on the proposed road pricing scheme. Anyone who reads Comment Is Free on The Guardian's website sees this massive body of predominantly young, politically active, intellectuals who will spill forth bile and opinions on any topic that happens to capture their interest. The commentariat, in whatever form it actually exists, has something approaching tangible political power. Having read over the last few US elections of the king maker ability wielded by the key American political blogs and the interaction between the Howard Deans of this world and blogdom I had assumed that direct political action might show the stamp of these people... They are the active force in amateur politics after all. Since this Saturday was the most significant political march this country has seen in over a year, and these people were nowhere to be seen, I must now assume that I was being naive.

Instead I found myself amongst a crowd of people who could feasibly have attended every demonstration on this topic since Bertrand Russell was arrested in 1961. I suspect part of this may be the fact that the demonstration was aimed at a confusion of targets (not good PR at all to mix The War and Nukes, they have little in common beyond their opponents) and that one of these targets was Nuclear Weapons. To the Baby Boomer generation this issue is visceral, with memories of a time when nukes took on implications of life and death for everyone they cared about. To me, while I still care about this, it is a much more nuanced issue. I am as yet open to argument as to whether Britain needs an independent nuclear deterrent. But I am quite, quite certain that to pay the American Military Industrial Complex, so the money and it's related research benefits are lost to the European economy completely, is fiscal insanity and poor defence strategy when America's role in the world is so ambiguous. Maybe it is understandable that such a political situation has difficulty in bringing people to the streets.

I talk to friends in continental Europe, where the tradition of public demonstration is much stronger, and they speak of the sedate nature of British demos. From personal experience I was present for a much smaller Anti-War march in January in Athens (Greece is not directly involved in the war effort) and there was an edge of violence and aggression to the demonstrators that was completely lacking in Saturday's grey dawn. Much as I respect what the baby boomers are doing when they come to stand up for their politics, it must be remembered that the last time a government was felled by direct action (the poll tax riots had a dramatic impact on Margaret Thatcher's political career) there was a strong flavour of anger in the body politic - a feature lacking in a sedate march with walking sticks, easily written off on page 4 of the broadsheets. Direct political action has a real role to play in the politics of resistance, and we need to be able to stand up to our political demons. But unless the bodies organising these marches learn to mature away from their Vietnam-era leftist prejudices, then these marches are a statistical group the Establishment know they can get away with ignoring.

The Baby Boomer left have failed to convince the younger generations of their political beliefs, and while they remain highly active, and must be respected for their dedication, their actions to me appear to marginalise the issues they care about. If this audience is all that a demonstration against Trident can pull (and I am certain many, many more people care about Trident than those attending this demonstration) then we (if there really is a we) - the Commentariat - need to perform a hostile takeover of CND.

And so I hang my head, and say I will not be attending another march when it is dominated by this constituency - these people's politics are too far from mine.

The People's Queen - A Rant.

We at LMWN would not usually deign to honour The Oscars, and particularly their nomination stages, with discussion. However, there is something about this years awards that have stuck themselves deep inside my, Edwin's personally, craw. Judi Dench, Britain's most internationally celebrated actress is up for - yet another - Oscar for playing (drum roll please): Judi Dench.

Right... Ok... Just a second...

Please bare with me while I burst into flames of righteous fury...

So.. "She's done important work on the stage", "she's the biggest draw in the West End", well maybe she is - but her international reputation has nothing to do with that. Barely 100 000 people total will have seen her collected works as she treads the boards of Shaftesbury Avenue - this is not what has got her a list of honours as long as your arm and an honorary doctorate at The University of Durham. No, that reputation is based on her work on the telly, and the last 10 years of her cinematic career.

15 years ago she was working for the BBC making lame SitCom vehicles like "As Time Goes By" and "A Fine Romance". Then boom, she hits the big screen and in the last decade has been nominated for The Oscars 8 times. 8 nominations for queens, upper class authority figures, and noble Englishwomen easing gently into old age. Yes! It's the same darn character again, and again, and again.. Austerity, Regality, Virginity with tedious moments of touching sentimentality as she demonstrates her ability to shed one tiny tear. As if anything with repressed emotion is soulful, anything with shouting is dramatic, and anything with a female aristocratic despot (preferably dead and Saxe-Coburg) is somehow significant.

Is this clever? Is this good female acting? Does this deserve for one second to be considered in the same pantheon as Kathy Bates's role in Misery?

So... Christmas was coming, was it? Let's throw Judi another honour to give the day we close the deal on this years peerage contracts a bit of celebrity gloss.. Already an MBE? Make her an OBE, already an OBE? Make her a Dame. Already a Dame? Invent some "Companion of Honour" nonsense to give to the inflated harridan, that'll keep the prole magazines happy as Lord Levy raises us a bit of cash.

And old Elizabeth II loves every second of it, because by going through all this ceremony every year with these proxy royals (Dench who I expect nothing else of, and Mirren and Smith who should be ashamed of themselves) she underpins the Englishness of the occasion, being more queen than The Queen. What better support for our dysfunctional monarchial clan can you get? Elizabeth II appears ill educated and somewhat baffled when talking in public? Contract out the job to Dench, she'll underpin The Firm and help us gloss over all of those underpaid servants.

Each year they stand in a line and shake hands. Two months later Denchy runs over to America and swaps the British Luvvies for the glowing hair and permatans of LA, lending their clothes show some gravitas. The camera focuses on her for 30 seconds, she gives a look of intense authority, then they pass the award to someone else.

When you cant get Liz, Wills, Katie or Charlie... There is always Judi to prop up the creaking old edifice.

-

An Irrational Hatred

Why is that man Bill Oddie on my TV again making noises he presumably thinks are English sentences?