cod'ead wrote:He's younger than me.
Reading the synopsis of the book, I'm not surprised that Dally is attracted to the message. Both he and the author seem to live in this fantasy where 30+ years ago we all lived in harmony, through fear that we'd be outed as shirtlifters, divorcees or non-church goers.
Now my memory may have faded somewhat but I can't recollect a time when there were no child abusers, murderers, thieves and assorted vagabonds. The only reason the odd person wasn't thieving from a charity shop in the 1960s/70s was because there were no charity shops to thieve from.
Spot on.
My parents are as stupid. They have this mad belief that, at some point in the past (I'm convinced it's the 1950s), everything was somehow perfect and that it's all a mess now because of the permissive society.
And yet they know that domestic violence is not new (and not even limited to their own fighting). They know that sexual abuse is not new – as just one example of this, my father, as a clergyman, has found himself dealing with very elderly parishoners whose lives were blighted by abuse that happened before WWII (and see Billy Connolly for another example of this).
My own father admitted to me one day, that he'd lost his virginity when 12 to a 14 year old girl in his Cornish backwater – a village on the edge of Bodmin Moor, with no TV or anything else to spread that permissive filth, in the days shortly after WWII: an admission that reveals how utterly crass his subsequent drive to 'blame' post-1960s life for sex are.
And as I intimated in my previous post, if you know anything about the history of this country, beyond the names and dates of monarchs, you'd know it is utter nonsense to pretend that there was any such halcyon era when nothing impolite ever happened.
18th century, cross-class gangs of young men holding up coaches and then burning them out (car jacking was new?).
Not that long ago, when this sort of subject came up, I posted a raft of links to stuff about gangs across Victorian England.
You could find stuff about looting during the Blitz. You could find things about police no-go areas in cities across the countries (specific examples in London: Borough at the end of the 19th century, Bermondsey in the early 20th century). Read Dickens to see that political corruption existed long ago – look at Hogarth to see the same thing, along with boozy brawling. And on the subject of that boozy brawling, read Virginia Woolf to see that women getting wrecked and then fighting in the street is hardly new either – she wrote of such a thing in a book first published in 1921.
But Dally and his ilk don't care for facts. They'd far rather have the pleasure they seem to derive from their Chicken Licken approach to everything.
