Thursday, 16 August 2007

Spurious Temporal Generalisation (dark note sandwich)

Now I was promised a future that was down and dirty full of, yes, weird new crime but also gaudy animal excess and a lowered everything age.
So what's happened?
Why are they talking about raising the drinking age, say?
Who do they think that's going to calm down?
What happened to our pre-packed longpig sandwiches and mescaline patches?
Someone recently posted on their profile the simple question "What in the name of God is going on?" and I posted back "The fifties" because that has been my consolation. It's what I said to Ms. Meikle back in the caravan when she expressed a global hopelessness: that for all the paranoia and the bangs and the juvenile delinquency and the dead-eyed certainty of a culture telling us how badly our lives were being led, that this was just a bad decade and a smarter sixties future was just around the corner full of excellent music and second-hand clothes and popular art that made no sense and kids expressing their discontent with society through slapstick and dirty comics. "This is just the fifties," that's what I kept telling myself. "History's a cycle. I can't wait for the sixties."
But, Ms. Meikle, if you're reading this: Dudo, I doubt. There is another possibility that seems increasingly likely to me every time I step out of work and see the news-stands and a surrendered public... that history in fact is like a pellet in a game of pong, not a cycle... that we're going the other way, and that what in fact lies just over the horizon is not another 1960s, but another 1940s. And not a cool Lauren Bacall 1940s either, with lots of great roles for women and smoking in the library but, you know... 1948... Strength through Joy... Lights out.

But on a lighter note: I came home from work to find that Morgan had left us a big black bin-liner full of pain au chocolat.

And on a darker note:

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