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Friday 5 September 2008

Glastonbury: a celebration of wrong

I won't be at Glastonbury this weekend. This piece of mine from three years ago explains why:

Do you long to free yourself from the shackles of convention? Do you gaze into space, bemoaning the fact that your life is one long obligation to family, work and friends? Are you panting with anticipation at the thought of this week’s Glastonbury Festival, knowing that for just a few days in the year you will be free to be yourself, free to commune with Nature and free to indulge in the hedonism you think life should really be about?

Then grow up.

There are few more pathetic sights than the annual paeans of anticipatory pleasure in the run up to the Glastonbury Festival. To hear the drivel that pours forth from its habitués, one would imagine that Glastonbury is some sort of mystical experience: an opportunity for the world to be a better place thanks to the positive karma that spreads throughout the ether, for those who make the effort to attend to turn themselves into better people for communing with Nature, and for those who miss out to think about how, next year, they too might take part.

The truth is that, far from making the world a better place, Glastonbury represents much of what is wrong with it today.

Glastonbury is not a departure from the norm but its very archetype — a clichéd, typical and deeply worrying reflection of how those with time and money choose to abrogate any sense of propriety, decency and upholding of legal, let alone moral, values.

The illegality of the drugs that fuel the Glastonbury experience is the least of it. Far worse is its sheer immorality and hypocrisy, based on the idea that law-breaking is fine so long as it is confined to “our sort of people” and takes place in a field of teepees. It’s only wrong when it’s committed by oiks.

There are few more grotesque double standards than those of the moneyed middle classes who take their children with them to experience the “mellow” (or, to be precise, drug-addled) atmosphere. It is what used to be known as the moral corruption of minors. They complain about drug-fuelled crime. Yet they somehow think it right to teach their children, by their own example, that drug taking is a good thing — the best way to relax.

Glastonbury is the epitome of the “let it all hang out” attitude that has so warped society — the idea that restraint and attentiveness to others is something not to be admired but to be sneered at, and that we are only truly free when we respond to our inner-most urges. It is the difference between sitting still and quiet at a string quartet recital and lying spaced out on the ground as the caterwauling of a fellow drugged-up performer wafts over you. One is despised as old-fashioned and buttoned up, the other commended as being at one with nature.

Not that Glastonbury is entirely without merit. It does allow one to apply the “Glastonbury Test”, a useful guide to public policy. Whether it involves welfare (“the tests for benefit eligibility are too harsh”), education (“a proper education revolves around children being allowed to express themselves”) or crime (“we need to appreciate the social stresses that force people to commit crime”), we can use the Glastonbury Test to determine the moral framework from which such ideas emanate. If the advocate eulogises Glastonbury then we know immediately to rule out his opinion as being based on the same dangerous, deluded fantasy that underpins the festival.

If you doubt me, look at the sheer crass stupidity of those who worship at the Glastonbury altar and claim that they are somehow leaving their usual life behind. Tickets to this year’s event started officially at £112; they were trading yesterday on eBay for more than double that amount. Add in the cost of getting there, camping (or, for the true hypocrites who want to empathise with nature but then retreat to the comfort of a hotel, the cost of a bed) and the ubiquitous drugs and we’re talking perhaps £500 a person. It is no more a retreat to Nature and feeling at one with the rest of humanity than a meal at Gordon Ramsay’s or the August villa in Tuscany.

Glastonbury should, rather, be seen for what it really is: the ultimate well-off druggie-wannabe- hippy weekend — a venue no less exclusive than Cowdray Park, Royal Ascot or Glyndebourne but without the restraint. And a gathering which, in its celebration of so much that has destroyed the norms of decent behaviour, has nothing to commend it beyond making for an easy identification of the forces that continue to warp society.

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