The ritual of public anger

N

What does this have to do with faith Theo?

hadrian

Of course no politician is going to be pefect or anywhere near it. Tories and Calvinists, of all people should be the first to realise this hard fact for their politics rests on the consequence- namely, government and State are innately limited in what they can achieve.
However, what we have in the expenses scandal is sheer and blatant milking the system for all it is worth. Public outrage is well justified and indeed healthy. The old Archbish of Cant got that very wrong. However this mess throws up a deeper problem- our increasing irresponsibility as a people; our politics is in a mess not just because of its own overblown promises but also because as a people we have become too averse from responsible attitudes and behaviour; in the words of another, we've been entertaining ourselves to death. This has allowed the political process to fall into the hands of a distinct 'elite' or 'class' and what we've got now is the toxic results. As they say, 'like people, like priest'. Indignation is only a danger when it tips over into self-righteousness or when we look to our politicians in infantile manner to have better standards than the rest, like nanny or parent.

David Bouvier

Theo likes it because it feeds his obsession with inventing new hippy rituals.

The fact it involves a classicist making some sub-Marxist cultural assessment of the ancient greeks, and trying to settle a few scores with the post-modernists, on the basis that their metaphysics suffers from a lack of limits (which he says is something to do with money) leaves me unimpressed.

I suppose this is another attempt by Theo to poke a stick in our eyes to generate comment, as an alternative to running a decent blog, so I am going to ignore this post from now on.

Alf Tupper C.R.O.F.

I can honestly say that I am not afflicted by this need for unlimited material wealth.

Which is just as well because I've always been skint. It would only take a small lottery win for me to give up my job, pay off the mortgage, buy a little van and just do the odd job here and there for cash.

No tax.

Mouse

Re David Bouvier's comments - I couldn't agree more.

The remarks on the drift of scholarship are especially perceptive. The methods Bouvier describes are now often 'required' and 'expected' - i.e. forced on students and scholars who want to be published. And since some of the biggest publishers are based in Germany....

No wonder journalism in English is in the state it's in. I really also wonder about the health of the businesses involved: do people really read this stuff?

No need to answer - like Bouvier, I'm 'outa here'.

Sinker

If the anthropologists are right, "public religion" has its origins in the greed of tribal chiefs.

With agriculture comes a stored surplus, which the politicians ration out, first to themselves and, eventually, the rest of us.

For most of human history, and in poor countries now, greedy politicians have an excuse for this. It's the religion of the state.

About two hundred years ago in Britain all this broke down, and people made their own money, and a lot of it, which the state, strangely, didn't stop.

Then about a hundred years ago in Britain the state began again to dole out the dosh as the rulers' beliefs dictate.

The outrage is that British politicians are acting too much like tribal chiefs, giving themselves the money that in the 20th century they used to spend on ideological, public follies.

You know, building silly things for their own gardens, not great big monuments.

Adrian P

We could solve this current problem in about 6 months, all we have to do is stop borrowing worthless bits of unbacked money at full face value and Coin our own.
It may come as a surprise to many to learn that the Bank of england is nothing of the sort, it is a Private Company.

If we Coined our own money, there would be no loan or interest to pay back, no govt debt hence absolutely no need for income tax at all.

Of course, the Puppetmasters would never allow their puppets in Westminster to do that.

Roderick Blyth

What on earth is 'a strong new narrative'? What form would such a 'narrative' take? Would it be in the form of a novel by Martin Amis? A single by Amy Winehouse? A pronouncement by Jack Straw? A press statement from President Obama?

The use of these grandiloquent but meaningless phrases as substitutes for thought and action is absolutely typical of the contemporary world, and the conservatives, socialists and liberals are all at it, and wouldn't be unless someone had given them the impression that it went down well with the rest of us - or with the media, and pressure groups, who are the people from whom they take their perception of who 'we' really are.

The parliamentary scandal owes as much as anything to this modern mania for calling things by names that disguise the reality. We know know that expenses were loaded to 'compensate' MPs for the fact that it was perceived as unacceptable to raise their salaries. It is richly ironic that those talented MPs, such as Willam Hague, who has had the gumption to build alternative sources of income by writing and public speaking, are now to be prevented from doing so, by David 'Placebo' Cameron.

Same with banking - the use of the ugly and meaningless word word 'leverage' took the place of the word 'debt.' And in the field of law, 'insolvency' took over from 'bankruptcy' and 'family' became the preferred word for divorce.

Falsehood has become deeply embedded in a language the main point of which has become to serve as the tailoring department for Hans Andersen's Emperor of China.

As for the anger, there is something comic about the paroxysms of rage to which the behaviour of our MPs has reduced us. You would have thought that people had never heard of the sale of baronetcies by James I, the clinging to office of the discredited Parliaments of the Revolution; the bribery and corruption presided over by Walpole; the rotten boroughs; more sales of baronetcies by Lloyd George, coupled with a little insider dealing in Marconi shares.

And how honest are many of the people affecting outrage? Not, it would appear, the BBC, about whose cavalier way with tax payers money we are now discovering.

Oscar Wilde said something to the effect that the voice of public outrage was the voice of Caliban catching site of himself in the mirror.

A pox on all of them.

CCTV

Just because a child fails the 11+ doesn't mean they are second-grade,

John Prescott is third-rate and his failure of the 11+ proves it.

David Miliband was selected by his father to take a place at Oxford set aside for disadvantaged inner city Inner London educational 'victims.'

Labour has all the talents !