Royal fantasy versus grim reality - we need both

   The week started on the fairytale euphoria of the Royal wedding, wended its way through #metoo campaigners celebrating Harvey Weinstein in court and closed with a resounding victory in Ireland for repeal of the inhumane abortion laws.  It’s an odd juxtaposition of light and dark events. Being cheered by the happy-ever-after froth and flummery dream (and I’m a Royalist, just adore the pomp and pageantry) and inspired by the endurance of those who fought gruelling battles over decades for justice. 

  One Irish tweet after the vote result said: ‘Old Ireland died tonight. The old Ireland of asylums for “fallen” women, children sold abroad, shame, secrecy, and fear. Rotten old Ireland’s gone. Long live new Ireland.’

   Alongside respectful awe at their grit, I have an angry despair about how long it takes before these marathon struggles reach the finishing line against bitter resistance. Countless numbers die before common sense and humanity prevails.  

   Despite an avalanche of evidence that predators walk the face of the earth and that not all ‘holy’ behaviour lives up to the founder’s creed of love and forgiveness, there is a solid core who cling on to their illusions with desperate ferocity.  Talent, money, success on one hand and religious garb on the other have proved to be formidable camouflage for a multitude of sins. 

  Maybe it was significant that Philip Roth also died this week a few days after Tom Wolfe – two great writers who shafted a spear through hypocrisy and warped social values. Not that the passing of their abilities is a cause for celebration. The baton needs to be picked up by younger satirists and questioners who can tear back the veil to shine a light on the underside of human behaviour. 

   The problem being that staring into the abyss for too long runs the risk of the darkness eating us up. T S Eliot’s ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality’ is both a judgement and an acceptance of what is tolerable. The ‘unreal’ ideal is the antidote to what lies below. We slide into Pollyanna-land as an escape from toxic and paralyzing shame. 

‘Is the truth destroyed because it distresses you?’ Euripides. 

   Sex crimes contaminate the victim and wash over anyone who hears their sad tale; though not the perpetrators whose narcissistic pathology allows them to shrug off any notion of responsibility. No surprises the public would rather believe the latter (colluding in the lies) because it leaves them feeling less polluted. There is a mountain to climb against head winds of self-serving hostile disbelief. 

   Becoming conscious is a painful process where hope recedes and depression looms. Julian Jayne’s notion that consciousness arose in humans through natural disasters may have been discredited, but in individual psychology it holds true. It usually takes a major crisis to crack the old mindset, allowing daylight in.

  Television drama and novels often lead the way to change or magnify what is already happening. The two best offerings in the UK, also this week, are Patrick Melrose, adapted from Edward St Aubyn’s searing tales of childhood abuse, drug addiction and recovery; and the 50 year old Jeremy Thorpe political scandal of sexual mayhem and conspiracy to murder, brushed under the carpet by those in power at the time. 

   While it’s tempting to imagine we’re at a game-changing moment, past experience would suggest the pendulum can and does swing both ways. Ground gained is lost as the revulsion against too much unpleasantness takes over. 

  Our divided selves, in RD Laing’s phrase, see-saw between delusionary optimism that life is better than it is, and horror when we glimpse grim realities. The up-the-golden-staircase Royal fantasy may be exactly what the doctor ordered to provide an injection of brightness into the gloom of real lives. 

  

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Outsider or insider - more unites us than divides us.

As a confirmed and committed outsider I’ve never understood the attractions of fitting in with the like-mes. Is that arrogance because I think I’m so special; or the Groucho Marx thing of distrusting any club that offered me membership; or more likely an aversion to being stuffed into labelled box? 

   Not everyone lacks social glue. Kids growing up in urban ghettos get tattoo-ed into a gang, giving them a sense of belonging. Similarly the English upper-crust cling to a clique defined by school, marital and family connections, and, for the male of the species, business and leisure clothes cloned like military uniforms. 

   Nations also confer their own stamp of acceptance. The French are belligerently proud of their national traits and history, as are the Scots and many other races. Traditional kinships and attitudes are not easily given up even in the melange of a globalised world. 

   Which is a problem. If your identity depends principally on being an insider in – take your pick – your racial background or the Double Trey gang or the Eton Bullingdon Club then everyone else is an outsider. Clashes are inevitable as cultures and values don’t mesh. 

   And ‘culture’ has become one of these precious, trigger-sensitive words flashed up as a warning if anyone is foolhardy enough to criticise the actions and behaviour of ANother group. 

  So here goes. We (as in UK-ers) used to have a culture of hanging, drawing, quartering people and sticking their heads on pikes, sending little boys up chimneys, trading in slaves, never mind supressing women.  The French publicly chopped heads off. We stopped doing such things, got more civilized. It’s called progress.  Cultures change over time, usually painfully slowly, but sometimes accelerated by convulsive pressures. 

  What sparked this line of thought, well to be truthful detonated it to the forefront was a twitter exchange this week about whether a Niger man marrying a 12 year old bride should be condemned as a paedophile.  One bright Brit spark wondered whether in so saying we were imposing Western moral and cultural values as an act of colonial oppression. NO. Underage marriage and pregnancy shoots up the maternal mortality rate and for those poor girls who survive it can cause serious internal damage (fistulas). Go read Abraham Verghese’s novel Cutting for Stone. It’s barbaric, inhumane and mediaeval. It’s a human rights issue and wrong. 

   Cultural appropriation has become another buzz word as usually minority cultures object to their heritage being stolen and used in disrespectful ways - advertising sports teams or in fancy dress outfits. The fear being that the indigenous culture will be diluted and destroyed. 

   History matters, but I’m stuck in a dilemma going two ways at once. Many of our fashions, like three-piece suits were evolved from the styles of faraway peoples. We eat a global cuisine. In England the Romans came, left good roads behind, then the Germanic Anglo-Saxons invaded and the Druids disappeared over time. There’s always been a fluidity of beliefs and lifestyles which ebbed and flowed with the tides of time. The Tibetans were exiled from their homeland and spread their faith, suitably adapted to Western tastes, throughout the free world. Being ousted from their landlocked existence gave them more influence. 

   Western culture is slated for being too me-centric, partly a result of the growth of a more psychologically oriented mindset and in Europe because the carnage of two World Wars broke up the old extended family system. But it does mean identity resides to a greater degree than elsewhere in the individual rather than in the group. Which has its pluses and its minuses. On the downside there’s a lack of cohesion. But there is a greater degree of tolerance for individual expression; and along with it an intolerance of more restrictive lifestyles, perhaps because it reminds us of where we once were. 

  My wish is for a world like a Kandinsky painting, a glorious hotch potch of different colours and shapes, all swirling around to create an engaging whole – greater than the sum of its parts. More unites us than divides us.  Remember ‘everyone smiles in the same language.’

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Why do we find fictional scoundrels so attractive?

Rooting for the bad guy is a delicious pleasure and that’s not just my warped sense of values. Popular drama and fiction are awash with anti-heroes who inveigled their way into our hearts. We cheerlead their lack of morals in stark contradiction to current snowflakey pc sensitivities. 

   I love paradoxes. How we tie ourselves in knots holding two polar opposite viewpoints at the same time. One digressionary example from the height of feminism’s second wave - female cinema audiences of Gladiator swooning over Russell Crowe in a very short leather kilt growling ‘Give them hell.’ We’re Amazons but please can we have one of him as well.

    Back to the real louses of whom there are myriad examples from Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester, Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliffe, through to modern day George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman, James Bond, even Lee Child’s killing-solves-the-problem Jack Reacher. There’s an even more fervent fandom in television addicted to the Mafia Sopranos, meth-cooking Walter White in Breaking Bad, snakey politician Frank Urquhart in House of Cards (until Kevin Spacey turned out to be a really bad guy), gypsy gangster Peaky Blinders and money-laundering McMafia. 

  It struck me forcibly this week watching Billions (best thing on the box at the moment) showcasing Bobby Axelrod, an amoral billionaire hedge-funder (Damian Lewis) and Chuck Rhoades, a ruthless, corner-cutting US Attorney (Paul Giamatti). They are lionised as they both cheat, lie, manipulate, indulge in egregious criminal felonies to wriggle out of trouble, with the audience willing them to succeed.  

   A financier and a scumbag lawyer? Two of the most hated species on the planet and we don’t want them to get their comeuppance.  The one decent character who grasps the full horror of their sins comes across as a sap and he isn’t winning.  Scrape off the millimetre top layer of civilized behaviour, which murmurs pious words about justice and fairness, and up pops gleeful envy of the rule-breakers.

   Although maybe that only lives and breathes in fantasy land. In real life, there’s precious little attractive about the sharp practices of the obscenely wealthy ones, Mafiosa brutality, drug dealers, the #metoo offenders, let alone the present US President’s multifarious malfeasances (I’m not going there).

   Usually there’s a back story that evokes sympathy. Poor childhood followed by an anything-goes struggle to make good in an unfair world. Or doing the wrong thing for the right reasons – terminally-ill Walter White providing for his family allows us to blank out the damage wreaked by his money-making meth. 

  

 Living by society’s strictures – law, order and fairness – provides communal cohesion. But clearly in great swathes of the population there’s an inner anarchist and gangster  lurking below the surface that needs an outlet. The absolute joy of casting off the Ten Commandments, being wicked and getting away with it. We covet our fictional heroes’ risk-taking bravado, their chutzpah in assuming rules weren’t made for them. A vicarious pleasure since deep down we know if we tried it there would be instant retribution.

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