Inspiring, and very encouraging. The best speech I have heard from Britain all year.
I've seen that boy described more than once, in rabid newspaper comments online, as a "spoiled middle-class wanker", precisely because he's so cogent, so articulate and so impassioned (and of course because he has a middle-class accent). And this is how it works. The less well-spoken (though no less impassioned) kids from the South London banlieues, who also turned up in their thousands, are simultaneously castigated as "louts", "chav scum" and worse.
The common denominator is very low indeed: a simple hatred of youth and of passion per se. The desire to stay seated at all costs, even if it's at the cost of your own children.
Really, Wilhelm Reich described the entire process in detail, and what's behind it, nearly eighty years ago. And that was, of course, at the end of the Weimar Republic. Let's hope this doesn't end in deaths. But let's also hope that the chronic and neurotic sitting is finally coming to an end.
Inspiring, and very encouraging. The best speech I have heard from Britain all year.
ReplyDeleteI've seen that boy described more than once, in rabid newspaper comments online, as a "spoiled middle-class wanker", precisely because he's so cogent, so articulate and so impassioned (and of course because he has a middle-class accent). And this is how it works. The less well-spoken (though no less impassioned) kids from the South London banlieues, who also turned up in their thousands, are simultaneously castigated as "louts", "chav scum" and worse.
The common denominator is very low indeed: a simple hatred of youth and of passion per se. The desire to stay seated at all costs, even if it's at the cost of your own children.
Really, Wilhelm Reich described the entire process in detail, and what's behind it, nearly eighty years ago. And that was, of course, at the end of the Weimar Republic. Let's hope this doesn't end in deaths. But let's also hope that the chronic and neurotic sitting is finally coming to an end.
-w.