Literary Ramble VII: Richard Ford & Mike Hosking. + Rugby World Cup in Wowser World.

Some scattered thoughts with the loosest relationship to literary life, (in which I’m still struggling through Richard Ford’s Independence Day - [for the Philistines, that's not the movie with the aliens in it]).

Much of my problem sixteen years ago when giving up smoking (tobacco) was the publicly funded anti-smoking group, ASH. They were big then. I’d go cold turkey for a week until one of their busy-body-bossy ads wanting to clamp down on this, tax that, came on the telly, and then in a blind fury I’d get myself direct to a dairy and buy another carton. They turned smoking into a principle.

Since September last year I have dropped twenty percent of my body weight, making me four fifths of the man I was surprisingly easily despite my love of food and booze (it takes a little discipline, that’s all really) . The rough spots have been every article and news item with an academic wowser wanting to tax the foods and the booze I love; an Arrogance of Altruists who insist I be forced to their monotonous mantra that a long lived low calorie life is better than a happy one. I didn't lose my weight by counting calories, and had to sacrifice little enjoyment of life, but if I had wanted to remain my weighty self that was my business, so bugger off.

This dreadful state-advocacy wowserism slithering its way out of Progressivestan continues to take more words in here. Previously mentioned, as proof we have a progressive literature, I’ve even had the Going West Literary Festival lecturing me about my booze intake (for fucks sake).  

Progressivestan. I first mentioned that term in this post regarding the Progressive campaign to get Mike Hosking fired - not to make a point, to have him fired - over an interview he did (or comment he made – I can’t remember which and don’t care) regarding Ponytailgate:

… I’d rather a bit of discomfort, hurt feelings or anger from time to time, than a regulated media, thanks, or forced to live in Progressivestan [snip] ... The geography of Progressivetan is a grey and indolent wasteland, populated at each town centre with a public stock in which rebellious thought is captured and put on display for public learnings … for the common good (of course). There is but one colour in this lifeless land, red, the rivers of blood flowing from a Marxist past into the future.

After posting that a helpful follower on Twitter told me although I have some great ideas, I marginalise too many people.

Really? No, I'm not the one trying to close everything down, so your advice goes unheeded, but thanks.

American/Canadian author Richard Ford, of the Left politick before the Left destroyed any use they had via identity politics, pinned down the (Left)-liberal character well.

Quoting Ford’s character Frank Bascombe in the novel Independence Day:

“In truth I don’t much like Betty McLeod, despite wanting to rent the house to her and Larry because I think they’re probably courageous. To my notice she’s always worn a perpetually disappointed look that says she regrets all her major life choices yet feels absolutely certain she made the right moral decision in every instance, and is better than you because of it. It’s the typical three-way liberal paradox: anxiety mingled with pride and self-loathing.”

Now, go look at some of the vitriolic threads against Mike Hosking on Twitter. The ruling ethos of Progressivestan is an arrogant bitterness which overflows and poisons all it touches, as it attempts to control language, silence thought crimes, segregate the delights of difference, and control our bodies through our diets with its curious wowser’s puritanism that, as H. L. Mencken said, can’t stand seeing somebody – Mike Hosking for example - happy, with his upbeat, can-do, satisfied view on life. In reference to ponytailgate it’s what separates an important feminism born of individualism from the dreadful feminist sharia born of Marxism that would eradicate individualism and with that, free expression.

In that same novel, Independence Day, Richard Ford could have saved the Left (and its prisoners victims) a lot of trouble if they had heeded Frank Bascombe’s wisdom as he …’

‘… peer[ed] up at a control-less TV, bracketed high and out of reach and where Reverend Jackson in an opened-collared brown safari shirt is being interviewed by a panel of white men in business suits, who’re beaming prudish self-confidence at him, as if they found him amusing; though the Reverend is exhibiting his own brand of self-satisfied smugness plus utter disdain, all of it particularly noticeable because the sound’s off. (For a time this winter I considered him ‘my candidate,’ though I finally decided he couldn’t win and would ruin the country if he did, and in either case would eventually tell me everything bad was my fault.)’

Amen.

But then, Richard Ford; I guess he’s just another privileged, middle-aged white man, whose words are not valid because identity is validity in this world where we have cast adrift philosophy, volition, self-responsibility and meaning.

If you wonder why a man of reason like myself comes to the Gulags being built in Progressivestan with such anger, that’s because you can’t be party to the ‘why’ of my deep seated antipathy towards puritanism and humourless wowserism gained from an Exclusive Brethren past. My (immediate) family buried our father just this last March (here’s my eulogy given at his funeral to this gentle-man): during the burial, hiding behind a hedge of the Springston cemetery were two of his Exclusive siblings, or some type of direct relations – I couldn’t care less about them or who they were - who, as with all four of my grandparents, and all aunts and uncles bar one, have not been allowed anything to do with my family since I was four years old, when God (dripping irony here) was good enough to have impregnated my mother with an IHC daughter who the dour, whiskey breath elders took to be the work of the devil – nice buggers aren’t they - so we were happily cast out. And don’t panic, my IHC sister is probably the happiest of our clan.

So you better be worried when I see the same abusive, bullying thou-shalt-not-puritanism in Progressivism and its devotees humourless campaigns to silence and publicly shame every individual who is not them, and is found wanting. They need to be driven back to the joyless prisons they've created of their minds with all the passion and non-violent ferocity we can muster as free wo/men.

Another post in the service of whatevers; thank you.

Sorry, one more thing: if you're thinking of going to the local pub to watch Rugby World Cup games with friends, forget it, this is Wowser-World, there won't be pubs able to meet the new YOU CAN'T DRINK OR ENJOY YOURSELF regulations, and even if you could find one, and you drank moderately, under Iain Wowser-Galloway's halved blood alcohol limit you couldn't drive yourselves home again: that's why rural hospitality is, effectively, dead. Seriously, revolution: we're way past the time for one.


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