Popular Culture and Human Nature

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/46574/sec_id/46574

by David Hamilton (September 2009)

I remember being in The Yacht, a fine pub in Torquay, 3 years ago. They had murals of various rock stars and I remarked on their insincerity and the landlady and the barmaid seemed offended. It was as if I had insulted their friends or family: so much part of people’s psychological lives are these icons.

But they are little more than cardboard cut outs: they pose constantly but only show one side of themselves and this pretence is kept up by the media. The pose as rebels but live in fabulous mansions, have gardeners, butlers, nannies and send their children to the best schools.

Human nature is corruptible which is why attempts to degrade our young people work.

They are talented but to get these great riches they corrupt young people by example and by advocating things such as drugs. They are very much part of the general orthodoxy or their careers would soon be destroyed. Their personae are usually an embodiment of a fashionable idea. David Bowie in his early days embodied the feminist idea of androgyny; Madonna popularised sado-masochism, though the philosophy came from Foucault. In real life she tried to live as an English country lady while in public she pretends to be a rebel effing and blinding and snogging Britney at award ceremonies.

The New Left would never have replaced traditional liberalism in the 1960's if it were not for pop singers. An attack on Enoch Powell was contained in the early versions of the Beatles 1969 hit “Get Back” which began as a send up of telling people to "Get Back" to their own countries to satirise the “Rivers of Blood” speech. But Paul McCartney thought better of it and made the lyrics more oblique.

Pop stars are arbiters of taste and behaviour and must take personal responsibility for the harm they have done to young people by creating degenerate images to make themselves millions. Young people identify with them and are beguiled by their rebellious and exciting poses. Those whose pictures they have on their bedroom walls are their role models.

Of contemporary music rap is very popular but corruptive as the aggressive misogynistic lyrics changes the attitudes of young men who start to treat their girlfriends roughly. It also decultures us as it is replacing traditional verse in pub poetry.

Pop stars have replaced religious and national icons for millions of people. The man who undermined the western world Elvis Presley has a religious devotion 32 years after his death and his home Gracelands attracts worshippers on the scale of Lourdes.

Soaps show young females as objects to arouse male desire and break down inhibitions to grooming young girls. I recently heard a man who has an 11 year-old daughter lustingly commenting on Sophie Webster! Those who promote this are not innocent television producers and writers but know what they are doing. In East Enders Jim Branning’s daughter Lauren (born 29th March 1994), usually wore a very short dress; Lucy Beale (born 9 December 1993), looked as though she was wore a push-up bra. On Coronation Street Kevin Webster’s daughter Sophie's breasts push out of her top and she was about 14. Contemporary art and entertainment is creating a climate where our young women are only worth sex. Parents who watch these programmes should start to realise what is being done to their children.

Photos of Girls Aloud posing as "sexy schoolgirls" shows a look to be imitated and turns children into sexual targets. Dressing up little girls like prostitutes signals that this mode of dress is sanctioned by the Establishment to paedophiles who are made to feel their behaviour is becoming accepted.

The modern manipulators are leading us into degeneracy through popular culture. In a recent TV series "I'm a Celebrity Get Me out of Here", simple people, described as Celebrities, were so degraded as to eat live worms and stick insects.

There are several levels to this: there is cruelty to lesser animals; encouraging children to eat insects and slugs in the garden and the decline into more degradation of our people and culture. For example, on a “reality” programme one masturbated a pig and on another, one fried and ate Kangaroos testicles. They do not see themselves as lowering their esteem but reacting to the old image of Twin Set and pearls!

Culture is social engineering now and the desired attitudes are arranged and presented to be sympathetic and thus to change people’s attitudes. The Soaps promote “gay” lifestyles. This does not happen by serendipity. It is planned in meetings. The “Goodies” are shown sympathetically and glamorously, every character they want us to imitate is attractive and cool; the “Baddies”, those they want us to hate, are thick and unlovable. It does not occur in a vacuum but in tandem with other developments and helped to manipulate acceptance for the Government plans to equalise the sexual marriage laws.

Contemporary art is used to undermine the Sacred needs of people. Every year time-warped artists stage a ritual by setting up an ordinary member of the public. The script is this: an elderly person takes a youngster, say grandchild or niece, to an exhibition and is shocked by something on display, like an unmade bed or something that requires little imagination, and complains to the press. Then the curator is quoted as saying, “Art is to make people think, and to provoke feelings”. This hackneyed response has been used on each occasion for at least the last 30 years.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the modernist movement set about destroying the form and grammar of traditional art and thus the content, and made it both unintelligible and uninteresting. In the 60’s the New Left became the new "elites". Aristocrat rulers had sense of “noblesse oblige" towards the working classes and a sense of responsibility but the elites, who grew out of the new left, corrupt them out of contempt and personal gain.

What are the effects of this constant debilitation of people?Ordinary people lose contact with our civilization and become disorientated, lost, suffer from bereavement and become depressed.

Our culture is still amenable to the elites but our manipulated young and those from a de-culturalised background give up. They cannot take refuge in a smaller cultural world like the elites who live in large houses in posh areas of London, or beautiful English villages as country gentlefolk. They lose heart and, having nowhere to go descend into vices and viciousness; they are no longer civilized and do not know how to behave. They become prey to amoral meritocrats who use and exploit them.

The papers devote pages to the drugged and drunken antics of “celebs” and footballers while the celeb magazines and radio stations promote those who have degraded themselves on Reality TV shows. They show them leaving night clubs drunk and question whether they are wearing knickers or not. The people who make these programmes and write the magazines are educated and intelligent people so they know what they are doing to our young people.

I looked at the covers of two celeb magazines: one stated, “Posh is looking tired and stressed. Is it too much partying?” The other, “Britney and Paris’ wild night out.”

They are constantly belittled by TV shows that call them chavs and show them as stupid and dysfunctional which almost subliminally deprives them of self worth and they seek it in drink and drugs. There is a trend in drinking amongst people as young as 10 -15. We see them all over the country in subways, on recreation grounds, schoolchildren drinking cans that they have been sold by shopkeepers.

Our young people do not understand their loss of identity, the loss of the sense of who they are and loss of self-worth. What are the consequences? The degradation shows in their social lives when they try to escape from themselves.

A 20 year-old young woman told me how she and her cousin go on. “We were so drunk,” she said beaming, “...we couldn’t stand.” They could not remember how they got home. I asked if they like getting drunk. “It’s social” one replied; the other, ”It’s good fun.” “It is acceptable now like sex and dress.”

Some politicians claim stopping “Happy Hours” would stop drunkenness but there are ways of getting drunk quickly and cheaply like “drinking glasses of water while drinking alcohol because it reacts in your blood and you get drunk quicker.” There is also a trick of gulping air down while you drink. I asked who originates these tricks. “Probably, the breweries”, she replied.

They have been educated to see themselves as equal to men but in practice women’s vital organs are not as strong as men’s and they have a greater chance of liver and kidney damage as well as permanent brain damage.

Children are selfish, but become civilized as they grow older and take responsibility for the world around them. This is becoming adult. But the new culture prevents them from growing up and keeps them immature which is causing so much uncivilised behaviour. Bar owners and the drinks companies play on the weaker part of people’s nature rather like a sales scam would play on, say, someone’s greed. It is preying on the young’s need for fun and adventure with unhealthy adventures.

Young people drink drinks that have pretty colours and fruity flavours and seem like soft drinks but are about 6% alcohol, or pretty, pleasant tasting cocktails. At the same time in a “cool bar” the hypnotic music pounds away disorientating them. There are often TV screens all around showing sport, pop acts or models on catwalks. One bar had a couple of bouncy castles upon which customers bounced gleefully, mindless that outside their bubbles of pleasure there is a dangerous, hostile world. Recent bomb attacks were outside London nightclubs.

Some say it is their own fault but a cool bar is unreal and like being in a dream so people lose sense of the real world outside that they will re-enter at closing time, and drink too much. There is the use of the hallucinatory effects of drugs in adverts. I saw an advert for vodka shots, which was a square of undulating shades of blue light. You do not see these colours by drinking vodka, gulps of air or not. You see this by taking ecstasy.

On a normal evening in every town and city you see young women collapse onto the pavement and often being attended by paramedics and stretchered away comatose or with cracked heads. Is this all our young women are worth? They walk up to cars waiting at traffic lights and ask for lifts and often just open the door and get in. You see them staggering around the streets at 2 to 4 am lobbing their boobs out to stop passing cars for lifts many get raped but do not remember properly.

On internet “Social Networking” sites young women present themselves as tarts and most say they “like getting drunk.” Their clothes and poses show them as anybody’s meat. They are imitating people on TV talent shows and think they will be spotted, and slappers who have made fortunes showing their silicon boobs. The main article in the Mirror of Friday the 14th of August was about Katie Price (Jordan)!

Our elites promote these as role models for our young people, but only promote honourable and worthy people as role models for ethnic minorities. If you walk around an inner city school or community centre the walls are festooned with heroes from the histories of ethnic groups like Gandhi, Marcus Garvey or Harriet Tubman.

Some bars are used for pills and others for cocaine and most door staff are pumped up on steroids. The drug goes with the music. The coke-heads are hyper and constantly making a sort of chewing motion. The staff of these bars put Vaseline on lavatory cisterns to try to stop customers doing lines of coke on them but the owners are usually on it themselves and door staff are often dealers.

Another mode of destruction is Clubbing on Ecstasy. It is a special occasion like going to church on Sundays. A common feature of ecstasy clubbers is a need to escape from themselves which in a healthier age would have led to a mystic journey in solitude as eremites counting their beads and communing with God. In our degraded times they are prey for the hard-headed business people who use any fashion to make money out of people.

A young woman explained to me: “It heightens the music, makes it more epic.” In common with others it helps them to dance longer, but the important effect is that “It fills you full of love towards those around you, if a girl is being sick in the toilets you pull her hair back for her. I have only seen two fights in eight years of clubbing.” She compared this with aggressive pubs when people are drunk and violent fights ensue. It is a response to the betrayal of the needs of our young people by Christian leaders and has fuelled artificial communities and the illusion of transcendence through drugs.

Popular culture does not have to be destructive: we must revive local fairs and festivals and renew Folk music traditions by expressing contemporary meanings through traditional forms. Bob Dylan did this - “A Hard Rain’s-A gonna fall” is based in the Border Ballad Lord Randall. (1) His anthem for the new age in 1965 “The Times They Are - Changing” used traditional balladic language and was carried by the tune of “Irish Rover” but expressed contemporary matter.

The idea is that the culture grows from the community and is not imposed on the community or by manipulating people to conform to an artificial culture. Contemporary examples are Joanna Newsome(2) in America and duo Show of Hands in England. (3)
These are not rationalist formulae for I leave that to ideologues, but suggestions for creative people to develop in practice. There are countless traditional pubs that need customers now the Government’s totalitarian anti-smoking laws have destroyed their trade that would rent out rooms for performances. New cultural movements grow from joy generated by people with common bonds getting together to produce and enjoy music. They will be able to forge emotional bonds with their culture and begin renewing popular music traditions naturally.


(1) A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall lyrics
Lord Randall lyrics
(2) Joanna Newsom
(3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5h4PFBuzv