Tag: Culture Wars

Civilization vs. Barbarians

Killing Off Your Favorites

Business

This story got me thinking:

Ed Sheeran has got his neighbours choking on their chorizos – with plans to turn a much-loved Spanish restaurant into a music bar.
The star bought the Galicia tapas bar in London’s swish Portobello Road for £1.5million last year.
The 28-year-old, who lives nearby, reportedly wants to transform it into a live music venue with a ‘members’ club vibe’. But residents who described Galicia as ‘one of the last authentic Spanish restaurants in London’ spoke of their dismay yesterday at finding out its new owner is one of the world’s biggest pop stars.

There are all sorts of issues to be addressed here.

I think we’ve all asked the question, “What happened to that cool place where we used to go..?” (the typical answer being, of course, that if you’d gone there more often, the place wouldn’t have disappeared).  I have no idea whether the Galicia fell into this category, but I suspect it might have.  After all, Spanish food is pretty much an exotic cuisine in London, and people will not go there all that often (much as, say, Murkins don’t often visit Greek restaurants Over Here unless they’re of Greek origin or if they, like myself, love Greek food).  Clearly, the owners of the Galicia either wanted to sell the place for personal reasons or had to sell it because they weren’t making money off the place.

The second issue is that of course, if you buy a piece of property, you’re quite within your rights to change it (subject to the usual restraints, of course), and pop star Sheeran wants to create a private drinking club for himself and, probably, his buddies — which makes nonsense of this wail from a local:

‘If it turns into a members’ club where they charge £3,000-4,000 a month to join, nobody from around here will go.’

Hate to break it to you, you idiot, but you’re probably not welcome there anyway.  Sheeran doesn’t need the money from the subs:  it’s a means to keep the local riff-raff out, much as the restaurant in L.A. that used to sell $100 burgers and was frequented mostly by celebrities who welcomed the privacy those prices afforded them.

No, I can’t say I have too much sympathy for the complainers here.  If Galicia was indeed “one of the last authentic Spanish restaurants in London”, it doesn’t say much for the popularity of Spanish food there, does it?  (You only have to go to southern Spain, where Brits go to avoid the crappy London weather, to see the truth of this.  Almost all the restaurants and bars offer “Full English Breakfast!”, “Fish & Chips!” and “English Bitter Ale!” — Spanish food clearly doesn’t satisfy the visitors.)

The only thing that mystifies me about all this is how the reedy-voiced Sheeran managed to amass an £80-million fortune.

Blast From The Past: Right And Wrong

Culture, Essays

Right And Wrong

January 8, 2006

I watched the movie of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent this morning, and through all the legal twists and turns, I found the most egregious twist to be that innocence is relative, guilt is sometimes not guilt, and perverting the law is okay if it helps someone else.

Of course, Scott Turow is a lawyer, so all these things are to be expected.

Plot summary: A DA has a fling with some female lawyer, she’s found dead, and he’s accused of the murder even though we know he didn’t do it. The evidence against him is substantial, but he’s eventually found not guilty. Then [plot twist warning], he discovers that his own wife actually killed the woman, and planted all the evidence, thinking that it’s so thin that he’ll never be accused of it—but of course, he is, and it’s only through some skullduggery that the evidence against him disappears, during which time we discover that the dead tramp was a Truly Evil & Corrupt Person (which, clearly, makes her murder sorta-okay), and the prosecution aren’t angels either, being pretty corrupt themselves (which also exonerates the defense’s wrongdoings).  (There’s a huge gaping hole in the plot, by the way, but that’s not relevant to the point of all this.)

The end of the movie has wifey confessing the crime to him. He doesn’t turn her in, of course, and the voice-over (his) which closes the movie says that he’s not going to deprive his son of his mother, and he’ll have to suffer the torment of knowing that he’s living with a murderer.

Am I the only one who thinks that this is relativist nonsense?

I am reminded of the real-life FBI agent in (I think) North Carolina who discovered that his own son had killed someone. Rather than protecting his son, which he could have done simply by keeping his silence, the FBI agent turned him in, even knowing that his own son might fry in the chair or go to jail forever. Now thatwould have made a good morality play, and a fine movie, because every single parent could say to themselves, “I hope I’m never faced with that decision, and if I am, I hope I have the moral strength to do what that man did”—because few would. I don’t know if I would.

But that movie will never be made.

When I compare real life to Hollywood, I find that in Presumed Innocent, Hollywood has made an open-and-shut case of morality into something a little more cloudy (surprise, surprise), where “the slut deserved to die because [blah blah blah]”. And the torment of the hero knowing his wife’s guilt, and of his own complicity in not revealing this, somehow makes up for the fact that a woman was killed just because she screwed another woman’s husband. And it’s okay to hide evidence because the prosecution is also doing the same kind of thing. And, and, and… the list of moral excuses runs on and on.

After watching the movie, I cannot tell you how dirty I felt. Because I’d followed the story avidly, seeing morality being bent and twisted this way and that, and all I could think at the end was: No wonder that murderer O.J. Simpson was acquitted.

That’s the pernicious effect of Hollywood, and its insidious effect on our modern culture cannot be underestimated. Wrong is right, provided there are extenuating circumstances, right can be wrong if the other side isn’t being honest on their part, and so on.

At the end of all this, there is no moral compass left on which one can make the proper judgment. The only important thing is winning in the short term, regardless of what harm comes from so doing.

It’s not just in the movies.

I watch people playing sport, and bending the rules to their utmost extent to try to gain a little advantage. I see little honor in sport nowadays: if I were playing Wimbledon, and the linesman made a call against my opponent which was clearly wrong, I would either tank the next point in protest, or I would complain to the umpire and insist on the call being reversed—warning that if not, I would tank the next point in protest.

But that never happens, and these so-called “sportsmen” go on and win huge sums of money, sometimes based on the certain knowledge that they won because of a wrong decision. How do they sleep? I’m not interested in saying that “it happened to him today, it could happen to me tomorrow” and using the law of averages to excuse a wrongful action. I’m not interested in excusing such behavior because great sums of money are involved, either. That’s like excusing a shoplifter because he only stole “a little” money.

Because not correcting an obvious mistake, and profiting thereby, is as wrong as committing an unnoticed foul and going on to win in consequence.

People ask me why I watch golf. You know why? Because golfers call fouls on themselves, even if they may be disqualified from the competition thereby. Golf may be the last true sport left in the world, because people still play the game with scrupulous honesty.

I’m not setting myself up as some paragon of virtue, and that’s not the point of all this.

But in the so-called “bad old days”, Hollywood movies were supposed to show that crime doesn’t pay—even if there are extenuating circumstances. In High Sierra, Humphrey Bogart dies for his crimes, even though his downfall was caused by his feelings for a crippled girl. In modern-day Hollywood, that would be sufficient to secure his escape, and with all the money he’d robbed from a bank into the bargain.

We all chuckle at those old-fashioned rules, where wrongdoing had to show its consequences, and sneer about “censorship” and censors inflicting their “morality” on others.

Let me tell you something.

When the history of this era comes to be written, and people wonder how a society which had become so prosperous, so healthy and so settled, could have sunk into such depths of depravity that the Menendez brothers weren’t executed for cold-bloodedly shotgunning their own parents to death, all the evidence will be found in novels and movies like Presumed Innocent.

 

Absentee Parents

Advice, Music

Many years ago, my boss came into my office and said:

“Ever hear of a band called Whitesnake?”
“Sure;  plays hard rock, the lead singer is ex-Deep Purple’s David Coverdale, and so on.  Why?”
“My daughter won two tickets to a Whitesnake concert in some competition, but I can’t face going with her because it’ll be too loud.  Would you mind taking her?”
“Nope.  Gimme the tickets.”

So I took his 14-year-old daughter to the concert, which was okay as concerts go, and then discovered that — surprise, surprise! — the tickets included backstage passes and a chance to meet the band.  (I guess she’d forgotten to tell her dad about that little bonus.)

Anyway, all went well:  Coverdale and I chatted awhile about Deep Purple and such, she got all the autographs, and that was that.

I was reminded of that occasion when I was reading a series of articles about how David Bowie is supposed to have bonked a couple of underage groupies (among many others) back in his early years, and more recently too.

 

…and in similar vein, how Led Zeppelin did same with some “baby groupies”, also back in the 1970s.

 

No shit.

Listen to me tell it:  I played in a (vastly-less successful) rock band back in the 1970s, and even though we were never groupie-bait to the extent that the big guys were, there were plenty of opportunities to get up to (or more correctly, into ) mischief.

Which leads to my my main question:

WHERE WERE THESE GIRLS’ PARENTS?

How could they be so ignorant as to think that unaccompanied young girls were not going to get into trouble in the heady, loud and licentious atmosphere that was a rock concert?  How could they allow their adolescent daughters to go by themselves or (worse still) only accompanied by their giggly friends?  (For those still unclear on this aspect of parenting, let me explain:  without the presence of parents, one kid can get up to mischief;  two kids can get up to mischief-squared;  and multiple kids will — not can —  get into Hiroshima-scale trouble.)  As Jimmy Page memorably said: “Everyone knows what they come for.”   Groupies gonna groupie, as the modern idiom goes.

I’m not excusing the musicians for doing this stuff, but remember, most of these bands were (and still are) themselves only a few years older than the baby-groupies.  Asking young musicians to behave with decorum in such circumstances is an exercise doomed to failure — as is expecting young girls to behave with restraint when coming face-to-face with their sweaty heroes in the excitement after the concert.

Let me get even more explicit.  When a fresh-faced young girl presents herself to a whacked-out musician, don’t expect him to ask her for ID before he fucks her.  And he is going to fuck her.

It’s just stupid for people to clutch their pearls and accuse these now-septuagenarians of statutory rape committed half a century ago.  Leave them alone.

Young people are going to fuck up.  What’s needed is responsible adult supervision — just as I provided to my boss’s daughter on that occasion.  So if any of you are faced with a similar situation, either with yer kids or yer grandkids, act accordingly.  Somebody has to be the grownup, and it might as well be you.

Aw, Diddums

Freaks & Loonies

OMG it must be so difficult to be a vegan these days…

British vegans claim they have been mocked, derided and snubbed by waiters because of their lifestyle choices.
MailOnline spoke to three women about their experiences of adopting a plant-based lifestyle and all three said they had encountered problems when dining out – from milk in their coffee to salad containing eggs.
It comes after a study found that well over half of vegans (61 per cent) have faced difficulties and been ‘snubbed’ by waiters when eating out at restaurants because of their choice of diet.
A further 41 per cent claimed that waiters have accidentally served them food excluded from their diet, with a third (35 per cent) said they struggle to find the right foods when eating out.

Listen to this tale of horror:

‘On another occasion when ordering a vegan salad from the menu – I was brought the wrong food – a salad with anchovies and egg on it. When I pointed out that this isn’t my order, in response I got: “No, this is vegetarian, just what you asked for!” I then embarked on a long conversation explaining the difference.’

I can just imagine the tone of the “long conversation”.  And by the way, a “study” of a sample of a splinter section of society isn’t going to yield credible data, so take your 41% and 61% and eat it — provided the numbers are plant-based, of course.

Let’s see if I’ve got this right:  you assume behavior that sets you apart from the mainstream of society, then try to make everyone change to fit your freakish choice.  Ergo:

Oy.  Nothing like an evangelist, eh?

Veganism is not a lifestyle choice, it’s a religion.  And I’m an atheist.  The same, by the way, goes for bullshit eating restrictions like halaal and kosher.

All this talk of food has done the usual to me.  Time for brekkie.

And I apologize for the “vegetable” part of the meal, but it was  cooked in beef fat.

Mary Poppins, Racist

Modernism

Unlike many people, I have no problem when some “woke” professor from Karl Marx U. decides that a beloved fictional character is in fact a closet racist for not wiping soot from her face.

Yeah, I know it’s ridiculous.  And the more that these tools sink into ridiculousness, the sooner the ensuing ridicule is going to sink the Good Ship Wokeness beneath waves of scornful laughter.

What amazes me is that The Onion and Babylon Bee are still in business, what with all these prickly hypersensitive fools defying satire on a daily basis.

As for Mary Poppins (the original movie), the greatest crime remains not Mary’s sooty face, but Dick Van Dyke’s attempted Cockney accent.  Can’t forgive that one.

Western Civilization

Africa, Culture, Ethics, Gummint, Politics

Here’s a map which ranks the various countries of the world from light to dark, from least corrupt to, well, Somalia.

Pop quiz:   Of the lighter-colored (i.e. least corrupt) countries, find the common thread.  (Hint:  it’s in the title of this post.)

For those who are surprised at the relatively-low ranking of the United States among the civilized nations, I would suggest that we would rocket upwards with the conviction of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the dissolution of the Clinton Foundation and the imprisonment of all its officers.  To reach the top of the charts, we’d have to convict all members of Congress (active and/or retired) who became millionaires whilst earning only a Congressional salary.

And by “conviction”, of course, I mean this: