Brutal

…but sadly true in today’s world, measured in 20 Memes. (Link contains NSFW material, btw.)

The key words are “in today’s world”. Of course, it wasn’t always that way — hell, it was never that way before now. Which takes me back to Cappy’s excellent take on living in a 1950s world:

However, I have a bit of good news for you, and it is one of those rare bits of good news indeed. For while “we” as a country can’t and never will return to the 1950’s, YOU as an individual can. And there’s nobody who can stop you.

It’s an excellent, thought-provoking piece and I urge you to read it and reflect. The critical nugget of wisdom in the whole essay is this sentence:  “YOU as an individual can.”

Albert Jay Nock’s precept comes to mind, that one can never and should never try to change the whole of society. The way to effect massive societal change, Nock suggests, is to present society with one complete individual (that individual being, of course, yourself). In a larger sense, of course, one tries to make not just oneself a better person, but one’s family as well: by example, by education and by rearing. (Just understand that as one moves those efforts from oneself out to others, the results may not be perfect, nor even realized.)

And that’s Cappy’s point. Don’t expect the world to revert to the 1950s ethos. In fact, as he points out, modern society is being taught that the 1950s were a bad time because racism / McCarthyism / Cold War nuclear holocaust / oppressed women etc. What’s being omitted from the indoctrination is its purpose, which is to undermine what made the 1950s great:  patriotism, a sense of honor, hard work, deferred gratification, strong family ties, Judeo-Christian morality, modest living and so on. The purveyors of this indoctrination seek to replace all that with (initially) chaos and nihilism, followed closely by an omnipotent and malevolent State which would control our lives.

But what this indoctrination cannot do is stop you from living according to those values. All you have to do is eschew those aspects of modern society which repel you —   rampant promiscuity, immorality and amorality, hyper-materialism, greed, etc. (you know what they are: they’re the Seven Deadly Sins) — and replace them with the values of the 1950s, both for yourself and for those closest to you. That begins with family, and extends to a close circle of friends (always understanding that at some point, others’ values and your own may come to differ slightly or even quite a lot — and you can reassess the benefits of those relationships as they do).

I’m often teased by my friends (and on occasion by my Readers) for being so unashamedly old-fashioned about life, and the things and people with which we associate ourselves.  To this teasing I am entirely inured, and about my attitude I am utterly unrepentant. I am a conservative man, and that’s because I believe that in our own pasts, and in the history of civilization, there is much worth conserving.  Certainly, that is true of our recent history (the 1950s), as much or more as it is true of earlier decades and even centuries.

The whole purpose of civilization has been the freeing of individuals, whether of their physical being or their minds.  What I’m seeing in the modern world is a massive attempt to reverse that — and while the 1950s were often derided for their societal conformity, that conformity was largely benevolent. The conformity of today, as imposed by the Left, is largely malevolent — it is suppression and oppression, all while the Left is claiming (falsely) that it’s about escaping oppression.

This, in fact, is precisely what the 20 Memes link above is describing:  how women were supposedly “liberated” by the tenets of feminism, but how that liberation has come with outcomes that are both horrible and demeaning — for women.

So while the diagnosis is depressing, the prognosis for you as the individual is not. You just have to make it happen — and I know for a fact that a great number of my Readers already have, and all power to them. (WeetABix’s ears, for one, should be burning about now.) Just because society is the way it is, that doesn’t mean you have to conform to it.

I’ll leave you with this piece of the 1950s, a ’55 Chevy Bel-Air station wagon:

I’m not saying we should all go back to driving one of these magnificent beasts. What I am saying is that if it were equipped with just a few safety features from today (e.g. seat belts), we would not be substantially worse off by driving one.

Now apply that attitude to society in general, and you’ll see what I mean. The best part of what I’m saying, however, is that you get to choose those parts of modernity you want to keep — and then discard the others completely.

Too Much

Was it Gloria Vanderbilt who opined that one can never be too rich, or too thin?  My answer is that it depends.  If one is going to use one’s wealth to evil ends (e.g. George Soros), I believe we can certainly make a case that some people, at any event, can be too rich.  As for the “too thin”… well, we all know about anorexia, which is the low-hanging fruit in a counter-argument to the wealthy (and skinny) Vanderbilt’s wrong-headed aphorism.

But there’s another aspect to the latter, which happens, say, when a woman with a perfectly-acceptable figure gets teased about being “fat” — by, one presumes, skinny people — and goes about getting skinny just to, I suppose, restore her self-confidence.  Here’s a case in point:

A size 16 woman who was fat-shamed by her boyfriend has got revenge by losing four stone – and becoming a British bikini bodybuilding finalist.
Emily de Luzy, 24, from Horsham, West Sussex, revealed how her boyfriend told her that he made sure she was properly fed because ‘the fatter [she] got the less people would look at [her]’.
Emily, who previously weighed 12st 8lb [176lbs], described how she used to hide her body away, after years of comfort eating.
She decided she wanted to transform her relationship with her body by overhauling her fitness regime, and now weighs 9st 2lbs [128lbs] and is a UK size 8.

Now that seems all dramatic and such, but here are the B&A photos:

 

She’s obviously quite a big girl — large frame and so on — and I would suggest that while 176lbs might have been a little too much, her weight loss was likewise too much:  her bust has disappeared and her face is now quite unattractive, almost skeletal.

  

I think 25-30lbs would have been fine to lose; 50lbs was excessive.  Of course, if she feels better about herself (and has managed to shed her asshole boyfriend in the process), then there’s no harm done, I suppose.  I still think she looked better before: more attractive, more womanly and certainly less manly than she does now. (The bodybuilding pics in the linked article, by the way, are quite repulsive.)

But no doubt I’m in the minority, as usual.

The Other Blues

Having convincingly defeated all the others to win the Premier League in 2016/17, my beloved Chelsea FC had a lackluster season in 2017/18:

However, the Blues did redeem themselves last Saturday by beating the foul Manchester United 1-0 in the F.A. Cup Final (and the match wasn’t even that close; Chelsea could easily have won 3-0).

So bite me, Mancunian scum.

The Blues

I was saddened by the news of the death of the brilliant Steven Bochco, co-creator of the best cop shows ever put on TV, Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue.

Hill Street Blues came out when I was still living in Johannesburg, and as US shows couldn’t be shown on South African TV because apartheid, my friendly local video store owner managed to get copies made in the US and smuggled into South Africa, where he transposed the episodes from NTSC into the PAL system.  He recommended the pilot show to me, and I was hooked in the first five minutes. I’d never seen anything like that show before — and I suspect not many had, even in America. I grew to love the characters and watched their antics fondly each week, waiting for the call from Jim to tell me he’d finished transposing the latest episode; he knew I loved the show and as my apartment was literally across the road from his store, I’d stop over on my way back from work, grab the VHS cassette from him and watch the thing twice before returning it to him the next morning.

I had a major crush on Assistant D.A. Joyce Davenport (Veronica Hamel), and loved the way that she and Captain Frank Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti) had this antagonistic professional relationship at the precinct while having a love affair in secret. I even loved Furillo’s awful ex-wife Fay (Barbara Bosson) and how she always caused trouble for him when she came storming into the station. And I could go on and on: the relationship between cowboy cop Renko and Black cop Washington, the grumpy Belker always getting interrupted at critical moments by phone calls from his mother, the silky psychopath SWAT commander Howard Hunter (James B. Sikking) and so on and so on. And like many, I mourned the real-life death of desk sergeant Phil Esterhaus (Michael Conrad), whose post-briefing “Let’s be careful out there” so often went unheeded, and so often with tragic consequences. I think the show went a little downhill after his passing.

You will understand how much I loved this show that I can still recall so many of the plot details now, some thirty years later.

Much less so was NYPD Blue, which was a grittier, more New York kind of show (as opposed to the still-rough-but-somehow-gentler Chicago South Side of HSB). Still, there were parallels: I had a huge crush on NYPD’s Assistant D.A. Sylvia Costas (Sharon Lawrence) — yes, two ADAs in two shows, go figure — but whereas HSB was mostly drama, NYPDB, made in a more permissive decade, threw in a healthy dose of sex between the characters, with actual nudity. That aside, though, whereas Hill Street Blues had been a truly ensemble show, NYPD Blue belonged lock, stock and barrel to the brilliant Dennis Franz as Det. Andy Sipowicz, whose loud, profane and irritable persona was all New York — still more remarkable when you consider that Franz was the archetypal Chicago cop. (His one-man stage show about cops in Chicago had the accolade of being the favorite stage show of actual Chicago cops, who nightly formed much of his theater audience.) There were other characters on NYPDB — good if not excellent ones — but Franz owned the place.

Anyway, as Readers other than of my own vintage won’t know what the hell I’m talking about here, I’m going to resort to pictures, first of ADA Joyce Davenport and then her New York counterpart, ADA Sylvia Costas.

 

Finally, here’s a totally-gratuitous pic of NYPDB‘s Det. Diane Russell (Kim Delaney), so everyone can see what I’ve been talking about:

R.I.P. Mr. Bochco, and thank you for the Blues.

“Sit, Ubu.”