In search of a Happy Medium

The Slog’s new emphasis on old freedoms lost to base-metal promises of extra virginity continues with a harsh but fair analysis of contemporary media serfdom in the service of Surveillance States and indirect influence via largely invisible Bourse investment arm-twisting. He presents a news contrick based not on “less is more” as “more & more is less & less” with every month that passes. Media that promote lies and smear whistle-blowers are not just useless to the innocent citizen: they degrade democracy and lambaste liberty.

Up until the final years of the Nineteen eighties, consumption of media in the UK was a relatively straightforward thing. In the mornings, we took the Daily Express (its general position was that we should nuke the USSR and have done with it) and at lunchtime we could hear the midday news bulletin in the school’s enormous main Hall radio set – news that usually included people called Kruschev, Makarios, Nasser, Gromyko, Eden, Gaitskill, such names being solemnly intoned by the voice of Alvar Liddell. Only swots listened to it.

After school there was the Manchester Evening News, whose back page featured stories about Manchester United and, occasionally, City. On page five inside were the television listings; there was only the BBC until 1955, when the private sector launched ITV with regional programmes. The main interest in ITV surrounded an amazing innovation that shocked and amused Britain to its core, the “adverts”. There was also some programme sponsorship at first, including a dire effort set in a pub and starring Jimmy Hanley, called Jim’s Inn, during which brand names were dropped into the script as if they might be so many anvils falling to the floor:

“I say Jim old chap, what do you make of this new beer from Ind Coope?” one of the regulars would ask Hanley, who played the publican.

“Oh,” Jimmy would say, suddenly ECU to camera and brandishing the can, “Yes it’s called Long Life, and here it is….I’m stocking up with it and all my regulars say it’s absolutely First Class”.

The show was a guaranteed cure for chronic insomnia, and soon faded away. It was the ads themselves that brought TV to life, and began – for me, anyway – a fifty year love affair with the profession of persuasion. Mainly, there was a belief in ad agencies at the time that one had to have a slogan: ‘Murraymints the too good to hurry mints’, ‘Did you Maclean your teeth today?’, ‘Don’t just say brown, say Hovis’, ‘Cross & Blackwell ten o’clock tested foods’ and not forgetting, ‘Don’t be an amber gambler’.

You may detect in all this a certain degree of order-barking and accusation. This reached its nadir with a government poster showing a tiny citizen with a giant finger pressing down on his head, with the command, ‘Don’t drop Litter’. It caused a furious backlash among a public criticising the ‘Big brother’ totalitarian overtones. The young actor Peter Cushing had three years earlier starred in a terrifying TV play of George Orwell’s Nineteen-eighty four: his performance made a massive impact, and so the Government was forced to withdraw the poster.

Compare that outrage with contemporary apathy. In those days, you see, Britons didn’t comply, they complained: they had enough common sense to know a slippery slope leading down into a pit of Gothic horror when they saw one in full view.

The appalling irony in this context is that having hundreds more media channels to choose and use has led to electorate distractions that allow the elites to get away with murder…a reality exacerbated by the lowest common denominator yob TV “entertainment” programming aimed at the arse end of Sun readers.

Coupled with dumbed down education employing the utter falsehood that everything has a right and wrong answer (a schooling variation on the cacophony we get from the autodidact political correctness bots in the media) the sitcoms, game shows, and soaps seem to the majority of the electorate to be a welcome relief from political and economic news debates “’cos they’re like borin’ innit, they do me ‘ead in”. On occasions, the prole verdict can deliver the ultimate in condemnation via the addition of the universal suffix “an’ shit”.

Net it all down, and we arrive at the deadly descriptive term undiscerning. In 1945, the election rejected national hero Winston Churchill because they’d heard all the empty Tory promises before. What followed was one of the best and most practical governments Britain has ever seen, despite the strictures of the UK having bankrupted itself to defend democracy.

Sixty-four years on during 2010’s General Election, the puddle-shallow Libdem leader Nick Clegg managed – during the televised live Leader debate – to avoid (a) agreeing with Cameron or Brown about anything (b) committing to any specific policy or (c) soiling himself. The polls the following day made him the favoured choice of 53 per cent of Britons to become Prime Minister. He and Cameron in coalition were followed in due course by Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.

Do any of us have the right to be surprised by this stream of human mediocrity?

The reader should not regard this as an elitist attack on a dense proletariat: taxi drivers for instance, it seems to me, have their finger on the pulse of the State’s heartlessly beating drum of creeping dictatorship more than most.

Much of the above explains why (more in frustration than anything else) I put this tweet attachment out on Twitter a couple of days ago:

Be it a TV set, a smartphone or a pc monitor, pretty much all eight billion of us now are screenaholics distracted by every kind of text, call, notification, recommended update, dopey cartoon, soporific soap, misleading war coverage etc etc ad nauseam. You perhaps suspect I exaggerate? Last month in Brufut, just a few miles from here, I saw a cart and donkey being used by an old guy to transport coconuts to market. He never stopped using his 4+G phone. It felt like watching a Jacobin in 1791 consulting Google to see the beheadings update for the day, courtesy of Mdmleguillotine.fr.

Only a tiny percentage of humanity has the faintest idea – nor would they care if you told them – that smartphones already have the ability to tell Langley Virginia, Brussels and Whitehall military intelligence nosey parkers where every Homo sapiens tribe member is on the planet within four seconds. [I’m not about to justify that ‘four’ number, but every informed student of the Biden administration will know pretty much for certain where and how I got it]

But this wasn’t the case in 1957. It was a very silly kid back then who told his parents he was bored by 6.45pm: in our household we’d be given some potatoes to peel or dinner place settings to lay on the table. Largely because of this, in the evenings my elder brother worked on various albums about postage stamps, cricket or sports cars; I started reading novels by Dennis Wheatley and quickly progressed to sci-fi and yes, I was an obnoxiously precocious nine-year old.

The voracious reading habit was directly passed on from my father’s genes: although he was forced to leave school at twelve and find a job, he finished his education at what were known in those days as Nightschools. Pop read Hitler’s self-dramatising My Struggle (Mein Kampf) in 1933 at the age of fourteen – some five years before UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain got round to it.

The 1930s were years of slim pickings for working class Catholics like my father, but the desire to “better oneself” was primarily a thirst for knowledge rather than an obsession with money. Our multicultural, multimadness, multimedia Hell has not just slaked that thirst, it has severely diluted self-starting desires by young people to be learnèd. Asking a joint honours Bristol University graduand five years ago what he thought about Kafka’s novel The Trial evoked the response, “Is it on the syllabus?”.

Such is simply more evidence of educators dictating what we may or may not read. The d-verb there is deliberately chosen.

Because they are encouraged to conform and be “correct”, so-called millennials are almost literally petrified to think for themselves. They are now aged 20-25, and we the near-decrepit post-war boomers are dropping like flies. Those nearer my age group (the former Peace Camp wimmin sporting sensible boots and knitting their farts) are basking in a twilight glow of having turned London over to an Islamist porg who may yet prove to be the best (indeed, the only) weapon the Conservative Party has left.

The emerging new centurists who parrot ‘diversity is our strength’ and ‘humane treatment of illegal boat migrants confirms our British values are intact’ remain – despite these illogical holier-than-thou birdbrain assertions – completely unable to explain why they imagine a Tory Prime Minister might be willing to eradicate his Party’s 2024 election chances by blundering ahead doggedly with the most unpopular domestic policy since the short-lived Poll tax that finally did for Margaret Thatcher. What is very obvious indeed is that they sport the blindfold that keeps them merrily goose-stepping along with their fellow wishfully-unthinking comrades….or rather, “colleagues”, as I believe the correct form of address is this week. The one-liner to sum up this parlous mess is as follows:

Logical common sense in the UK is now massively outnumbered by bollocks.

Blindfolded as the rigid Left, the flip- floppy underclass and the bourgeois smuggies often are, they tend to wear their eye protection extra-tight when approaching any evidence, critique or debunk-numbers that prove official sources to be talking out of an inappropriate orifice. They are suckers for “it is your duty as a citizen” and fall for every last smear applied to those from Putin via Meryl Nass to Michael Yeadon who make any attempt at reality construction.

Cries from the online community that much of their work is censored are greeted as clear signs that the Resistance is paranoid.

In more ways than one, a key thing lost while signing up for the New Normal over the last sixty or more years has been the ability to arrive at a happy medium.

State media are controlled, and social media are censored. The latter of these are not happy media at all.

We who rightly fear the truth (but refuse to cram the elephant into the understairs lavatory) need a medium of our own free from State interference, and the will to exercise our civil right to sabotage every surveillance and databank created for iniquitous totalitarian use against the citizenry.

I appeal to all those close to techies who are ethical and awake – and others too who know where to find “clean” freedom money to finance such things – to contact me at the usual electronic roost, [email protected].

As I wrote at the outset of this series about Old v New Normal, nostalgia has nothing to do with the motive. I have no desire to bring back soda fountains, the Ford Edsel, putting golf balls on the White House lawn, smelly french toilets, grey flannel trousers, drip-dry shirts, hoola-hoops, Davy Crocket hats, the Sovyet Union, Gary Glitter or even Jimmy Hoffa.

The point is to aggregate realities we have lost – and, in this particular post, to summarise how serious the loss of a free press, unbiased State media and even the ‘private’ snail mail we used to send or landline phones we once used to stay in touch and speak our minds without fear of being tapped – have been largely abandoned in favour of faux-private smartphones, blogs, emails and msm sites under the cosh of both neolib and neocon money that directly or indirectly censors anything deemed to be “off-message”….a hideous phrase invented by the Blairite Labour Party.

More posts to follow. Thanks for reading.