Saturday 28 July 2012

The Awesome Condescension of Posterity

Look it up.

As John McDonnell has just tweeted, the usual suspects are "railing against Danny Boyle's ceremony because it was our culture & recent history essentially from a working class perspective."

Quite so.
Posted by at

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous28 July 2012 at 02:36

    I'm surprised there weren't lefties moaning about it because of the nostalgic view of Merrie England.

    ReplyDelete
  2. David Lindsay28 July 2012 at 18:50

    We have always rather liked Merrie England. In fact, we very largely invented the idea.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous28 July 2012 at 19:42

    Vintage, putting that mistake in to see if anyone spotted it. Obviously no one did. You might not like me for saying this, although then again you might, but there is a touch of E.P.Thompson about you. You really do take working-class culture seriously in a way that almost nobody still does. You are also right, and needless to say you know you are, about the left's role in creating the idea, ideal and idyll of Merrie England. Also about the left and the rural population. You are the last figure under 50 and still bothering to write anything who knows anything in the least about any of this or would even want to find out about it, never mind tell other people. Keep the faith.

    ReplyDelete
  4. David Lindsay28 July 2012 at 19:56

    You are very kind.

    The correct quotation appears on page 60 of Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory. Yes, I do occasionally put these things in. People used to pick me up on them, which was and is the idea. But they never do anymore.

    I recently mentioned that to someone a great deal older and more erudite than I, and he said that they were probably afraid to, assuming that they and Google must be wrong if they disagreed with me on such a point, and "afrighted to approach the Throne of Your Celestial Majesty" (at which point I was duly despatched to the bar). Have I really become that? Be assured that I am a great deal more the Wizard of Oz than the Old Testament God.

    Anyway, shall we venture back on topic?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous29 July 2012 at 14:08

    With HE at 19 or at all now out of the reach of us plebs, won't it be necessary to revive the great working-class intellectual organisations and institutions of the past, as chronicled and served by Thompson?

    ReplyDelete
  6. David Lindsay29 July 2012 at 14:32

    Quite so. But where is now its economic base?

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)