Man’s Crisis of Identity at the Dawn of the 21st Century
“London is no longer an English city, says John Cleese. Is he right?” Ed West (no relation) of the Telegraph asks:
David Cameron’s speech on immigration may not have gone down too well with the parliamentary Liberal Democrats, but I can think of at least one Lib Dem supporter who probably agreed with the PM on this one. In an interview with Seven magazine, the Lib Dem-supporting comedy legend John Cleese explained why he had moved from London to Bath:
Cleese also spoke about the shift in British attitudes away from a “middle-class culture” and the emergence of a “yob culture”.
He said: “There were disadvantages to the old culture, it was a bit stuffy and it was more sexist and more racist. But it was an educated and middle-class culture. Now it’s a yob culture. The values are so strange.”
He added that he preferred living in Bath to London because the capital no longer felt “English”.
“London is no longer an English city which is why I love Bath,” he said. “That’s how they sold it for the Olympics, not as the capital of England but as the cosmopolitan city. I love being down in Bath because it feels like the England that I grew up in.”
It is certainly true that London explicitly sold the Olympics on the fact that the city, while less pleasant than Paris in every conceivable way, was multicultural. And while there are many positive things about cosmopolitan London – a dark-skinned Frenchman once told me that London was paradise because nowhere in France could he go about his business without fearing his skin colour might cause some problem – it is certainly not English in the way that Bath still is.
And Bath is English in a particularly liberal way, in the same way, I suppose, that Monty Python was. In fact, one of the strange things about immigration and enforced diversity is that it destroys the very things that liberals love about this country – its egalitarianism, its secularism (including the ability to laugh about religion), an unarmed police, a public willingness to pool resources to pay for publicly owned libraries, arts services, education and health care. Personally, being a latte-sipping European girly-man, I quite like those things, and yet they are slipping away (could Life of Brian even be made today? I’m not too sure).
John Cleese morphed into Theodore Dalrymple so slowly, I hardly even noticed.
But what did he expect? (Cleese of course. Dalrymple saw this coming ages ago.) Besides being, at times, one of the greatest comedy shows ever, Monty Python was a weekly assault on the values of post-war England. And England’s societal bedrock of wisdom and knowledge proved in retrospect, to be surprisingly fragile. If you’re throwing traditional values onto a bonfire every seven days, isn’t the inference you’d like to see them changed?
Of course, you shouldn’t be all that surprised if change for its own sake doesn’t go quite as planned. Or that, as West hints at above, the new era turns out to be, in many ways, less tolerant than the old one.
As a fellow resident of Bath I’d second Cleese’s sentiments. It’s peaceful, beautiful and despite having a cosmopolitan population it’s been largely spared the ravages of New Labour’s multiculturalist blunderings. I feel very fortunate to have ended up here, and I’d heartily recommend that Americans visiting the UK put us on their itinerary. Sadly, when I watch the news from London and elsewhere these days it often seems like dispatches from a rather unpleasant foreign country.
Sadly, when I watch the news from London and elsewhere these days it often seems like dispatches from a rather unpleasant foreign country.
Funny, I get the same sensation every time I read a news story out of California.
And when I read a news story from Illinois or Michigan.
I have lived in California my entire life. It IS a very unpleasant foreign country.
I totally agree. Since the 1965 Immigration Reform Act which opened up the flood gates to Mexico and the rest of the 3rd world there has been a hugh demographic shift. In 1964 one year before the Immigration Reform Act only 5% of the population of California was Latino and now it is 25% and the Asians especially since 1990 have poured into the city where I live to now the city I grew up in is now 22% Korean.
California’s great.
The problem is that it’s been invaded and taken over by aliens.
And they not from south of the border, either.
Or New York City.
I don’t find NYC much changed. It’s always been a multi-cultural city, the original melting pot, crossroads of the world and all that. I remember the first time I went back to New York after living for a couple of years in white-bread Newport Beach, CA (late 60′s). I was meeting my Dad at Port Authority during rush hour and stood watching the onslaught of every variety of humanity you can name. It felt…normal. I go regularly and was there last year; it still feels normal. Haven’t noticed the emergence of a “yob” culture either. Perhaps you have to live there.
Sukie,
Aren’t the terms “multi-cultural city,” and “the original melting pot” two very different things? The former tries to segregate groups, the other integrate them.
I made a return visit to NYC after 10 years-
The hot dog stands were replaced by Halal stands- The music in the Yellow cabs of the local radio stations replaced with Asian music. The first channel I hit when putting on the hotel TV was an Imam preaching in Arabic.
Will I be returning- Not if I can help it-
And yes the same goes for London and many of the provincial cities in the UK-
Have I become a racist- Maybe I am being pushed that way.
…or Washington DC.
Especially Washington DC!
The same can be said for Vancouver.
As an American visitor, I heartily agree, and have done so in every conversation I’ve had since. My sister and husband went to Britain last August, and were thinking of blowing by Bath, but I encouraged them to rethink it. They visited and confirmed that my description was everything I’d claimed. It’s a jewel.
I enjoyed a great meal at “The Bathtub” our first night there.
I visited London and Bath in 1986. London was exciting for a 20-year-old but when I think of “England” and it’s people, I think of Bath.
I visited London as a college student in the early 1980s and had so much fun. Such a great city. I returned in 2006 with my husband and daughter and it no longer felt like England. While we enjoyed our time outside of London, in Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon and other places, London felt like any other city. Nothing distinctive, nothing English.
Plus, we were there the week that the terrorist plot to blow up airplanes was discovered. Very disconcerting. August 2006. Not sure when we’ll return to Europe.
We have similar issues here in the US. I do wish the best for England.
“I do wish the best for England.”
Good on you. Let them keep having these absurd plays that makes one think the monarchy has any meaning at all.
These descendants of Victoria haven’t a clue in so far as the destruction Of Great Britain is well under way.
They’re in an arrogant silly bubble of elitism and stuffy historical privilege.
The mudslimes without a doubt….want them gone, crucified and non existent.
And the Brits in general, who might remember the blitz and the V1 attacks…are in an ignorant stupor. I think they need those smoking ruins and bombs back again so that they can identify their new enemies…..burkas and bombers.
One day, the multiculturalist, progressive “yobs” and Islamists from London will ruin Bath, England and make it less and less English, like London. Then all of England became less English and more like Eurotrash.
This yank lived in Oxford for a few years and seconds the recommendation to visit Bath. Also, the Cotswalds are still paradise.
Hopefully, the libtards will not ruin Oxford, but the drive towards “diversity” will surely result in more worthless academic majors. Beware…once “Womyn’s Studies” takes root, you’re doomed.
I hope Texas succeeds. The lower midwest and virtually all the south will be lining up to join in. The USA has left the moral value system that made it the greatest civilization in human history. That dream of freedom and the values of our founders still lives… In Texas.
In El Paso? Not so much…
Did you mean “secede” (to leave from the Union)? I hope so. Of course, I want Texas to “succeed”, as well.
It’s time for South Carolina to secede also.
I was on my way home from work today in North Carolina, day-dreaming about my time in Bath and how much I enjoyed it. I spent about a month there.
And then I get online and read this…
Now, I must really plan a trip there an quit just reminiscing about it.
Cleese probably hasn’t changed his politics and is busy making sure Bath follows London down the multi-culti rat hole.
Holy Moly, this is really one great post/article: it is amazingly dense and covers a huge amount of ground. And I agree with all the statements as well as the inferences. Nice job.
Thank you, friendly but obsequious robot.
It’s a fair cop.
I know this will be added days after the freshness date of this post, but I had to respond. And after reading what I wrote, I’d have to agree with Bryan. Even tho’ I still agree with the content of what I wrote, this was a very good post.
My one quibble, something that has occurred to me in regards to the follow-up posts, Krugman et al, is that I think the status quo of the immediate post-war era was itself too fragile, unstable even, to last. I’m pretty much all for blaming Boomers as the source of or willing participant to all sorts of today’s problems, but I don’t think they can be blamed for this one.
If anything, they can be accused of having been such Good Little Boys and Girls that they assumed, regardless of whatever they did, that Mommy and Daddy would make sure that things never changed. That Bath would always be Bath.
The good may die young but dying young isn’t good.
There’s something to be said for experience.
Our world is being destroying by people who know nothing with absolute confidence.
…”…people who know nothing with absolute certainty”.
Thank you, very well said.
However, that phrase also sums up very well most of the “authoritative” comments right now which one reads on certain Blog-sites around here.
However, my all time favorite site in London, Westminster Abbey, with it’s incredible history partially represented by the tombs of the famous interred there, can never, ever, be altered by this trendy “multiculturalism”….this grey, socialistic, homogenization which seems so politically correct today.
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I will, as an American, however, dispute the opening statement of the author’s that “…England, having won the war..”…
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…sorry…correction: Read…”confidence”, not “certainty”….
[...somehow I couldn't cut-and-paste the right quote, and by the time I reached the blank white space I'd forgotten the key word.....]
I hope your last sentence was not meant to disparage England’s contribution to the war effort. The Battle of Britain marked the first defeat of Hitler’s military machine. “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few,” I hope that is the correct quote. The heroism of the British pilots was notable.
England continued to make significant contributions in radar technology and by breaking the Enigma code at Blechley Park. A worthy ally, indeed. I hope the ” special relationship” can be repaired after Zero leaves office.
I imagined you saying that in the voice of Winston Churchill and it was very moving.
I, too, question whether England won the war. Not in the sense of whether she made a critical contribution to defeating her enemies — there is no question of that.
But England ended the war bankrupt, her Empire falling to pieces, and her traditional liberties in the uncaring hands of Atlee. I’m not sure you can call that victory.
How is London different from say, Los Angeles and much of California? In 1960, so the WSJ informs us, California was 80% White. It is now … 40% White. Latinos are now 38% of California’s population. UCLA is now only 32% White, Asians outnumber Whites at 37%.
Everything Cleese dislikes about non-English London applies to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Tuscon, Phoenix (the kidnap capital of the US and narco-trafficante central), Miami, NYC, Chicago, Atlanta (massively transformed by an influx of illegal aliens from Mexico), Raleigh-Durham (same), and Texas. “It’s all over for Anglos in Texas” ran the report in the Houston Chronicle regarding the Census news that 3 out of every four kids in Texas is Hispanic (and Hispanic rates of poverty are far greater, and lasting generation-wise, compared to Whites).
America is basically a few “Whitopias” (ala “Searching for Whitopia” by journalist Richard Benjamin) surrounded by variants of Tijuana or Mexico City. LA went from near totally White to the second largest city of Mexicans after Mexico City. Yes, LA now has more Mexicans in its borders than any city except Mexico City. [Big Government reports that the US Border Patrol has been ordered not to arrest illegal aliens crossing the border, just to turn them back now.]
America has ceased to be a nation, in any credible sense. Its a place on a map, that’s all.
And you can’t ask people to die for it, or give up their tax money for it. Lennon asked people to IMAGINE nothing to die for. Well, he got it. America is gone. It’s just a mish-mash of what Victor Davis Hanson calls Mexifornia. Like London it only exists in memory. And eventually there are no more Baths to flee into. It is only a matter of time before the non-English migrate en-masse to Bath. Cleese no more has a country than I do, both England and America no longer exist save in memory.
Actually, all those “non whites” make perfectly serviceable traditional type Americans, and many have. What’s standing in the way of a re-emergence of an authentic America are the multiculturalists infesting the government-education complex.
“Actually, all those “non whites” make perfectly serviceable traditional type Americans, and many have.”
No they don’t. What they lack is the old Protestant work ethic that was the backbone of both England and America.
It depends on who you’re talking about. Some of my Korean neighbors can work just about any American into the ground. They start businesses, work very long hours, and raise good families. Funny thing, they also happen to be Protestants.
What? I’m a white Catholic and work just as hard as anyone else. To assume you work harder because your “protestant” is ridiculous.
Some of my Korean neighbors can work just about any American into the ground.
But they’ll always be Koreans. They can never be Americans so they will never be loyal to it. People are loyal to blood, not ideas.
Coisty,
BULLSH*T. America is a nation of ideas not a nation of blood.
I am a first-generation immigrant and I’m American. If you call me otherwise to my face, you’d better be smiling.
Sarah,
Preach it, sister!
It’s an honor to be your fellow citizen.
Sarah, you’re late. We already re-designed the place. Can we call you American No.32 or something like that?
My mother fought at Bull Run and I’m very protective of her.
Signed: Nelson Riddle
Nonsense.
There are to be sure a number of illegals who sponge off American society. Our fault for not securing the borders.
White or Protestant has nothing to do with it. For example I had some landscaping work done a few years back. Our contractor hired Mexican (legal) workers on temporary visas because he could find not American workers to do this kind of work as well, even paying more. These guys go through a great deal of hardship for a temporary job. Never saw anyone work harder. Great skill. They built a stone wall and patio, among other things, that will be here long after I am gone.
America is unique. I see little clash of culture race or anything in my area. My concern is that there seems to be less bootstrap ethic these days. Maybe euros combined a socialist economy with large influx of immigrants too quickly.
Don’t want to go on about Israel too much but if you read the book Startup Nation the case is made that immigration was key to Israels success. The huge influx of Russian immigrants presented huge challenges, yet they were key to the boom in technical ability and development of a technical economy.
In my career I have worked with many people from all over the planet. Some came with good basic education and drive but could not get realtime experience at the level we have here. The majority excel and are positive members of our economy and culture. Some left and went back to their home countries after training.
Least of all nations, the united states should fear immigration. There needs to be clear and open policy about that.
Protestant work ethic is neither Protestant nor white. Work is work and tomorrow gonna bring it down.
“Protestant Work Ethic” is a historical term. Some people here need thicker skin. No, it’s not a perfect term – the fact that it uses the word Protestant to cover all non-Catholic Christian faiths is not fair either as some like Baptists and Methodists are not Protestant – but it fills a void. Just relax people.
That’s true. In fact, many “non-white” immigrants make excellent Americans. My observation is that quite a lot of the small-scale entrepreneurism in SoCal is Hispanic and Southeast Asian — tiny housecleaning and gardening and handyman companies, restaraunts and bitty franchise operations, gas stations and mechanics shops, et cetera. Indeed, immigrant Southeast Asians and Mexicans tend to be a fair bit harder working than, say, black Americans, whose families have been here longer than the families of most European immigrants.
Honestly, I don’t think the problem is immigration per se. The United States has thrived on huge waves of immigration before this. The problem is the culture of entitlement and equal OUTCOME, not equal OPPORTUNITY, which infects WHITE AMERICAN culture today. Stop thinking government owes you stuff because you “need” it, and put the fork to all that public wealth-transfer programs and entitlements, and the problem will dry up. People will only immigrate here for the good reasons they did 150 years ago: because it’s a land of opportunity (not entitlement), and they’re eager to work free of the stifling cultural and governmental restraints at home. We could use more of THOSE kinds of immigrants.
Indeed, I’d offer to trade some of the opportunity-seeking immigrants for some American couch potatoes who want taxes raised on “the rich” to pay for their entitlements, bail out their stupid real-estate investment decisions, or let them sue their retirement out of a big corporation because it gave them actual hot coffee in a cup or can’t prove its accelerator pedal didn’t go haywire and violate six laws of physics to cause permanent disabling psychological damage to the driver.
Cleese also complains of “Yob Culture.” In British slang, “Yobs” are stupid, brutish white Working Class youths. In other words, English White Trash.
And shame on you for dragging Victor Davis Hanson into your rant. You obviously have no idea that Hanson is writing about CULTURE, NOT RACE.
Yobs aren’t working stiffs – they are brutish kids – i.e. punks.
The working class actually don’t bother anybody – they kids are roaming bands of thugs who will attack anything that breaths.
Where, exactly, do you think culture comes from? Culture is one part of any nation/society’s structure. A society (applies to animals generally) is a group of related individuals pursuing conventional goals by conventional means. ‘Conventional means’ refers to the rules which maintain and define the society. Basics being given, the rules don’t matter — it’s the acceptance of them which makes one a member of the society. Culture is part of this body of rules, and the rules in any particular society are simply the result of the society’s members’ individual personalities writ large. The reason Mexicans have different rules than Englishmen is that Mexicans are a different people. Tiny minorities of aliens can be assimilated into a society because their numbers are insufficient to maintain their natural society. The danger for the host nation comes when enough aliens invade their country to establish and maintain their own society. Now there are two (or more) societies inhabiting the same environment. Now there will be competition for dominance. This is Human Nature, not subject to alteration, much less improvement. Mexican culture will remain the same, wherever enough Mexicans live to maintain their natural, innate, inherent society. English society is not changing; it is disintegrating into a behavior-sink as the basic structure of English society is destroyed. Non-English inhabitants of the UK will establish different societies because they are different people. If you want to preserve your society, your first step is to eliminate any large group of aliens from your country. Assuming endogomy (normal, natural human behavior), a Mexican or Pakistani born in England of third-generation migrants will remain genetically non-English. Healthy societies restrict alien migration; dying societies fail to enforce cultural rules and border security. I’m not familiar with any decadent society’s rejuvenation, although many societies which have been dominated by an alien society have survived to become dominant again. The Balkans would be good examples. Notice that the price of societal survival was constant conflict. Sorry, that’s the way it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, on planet earth among carbon-based life-forms
Yer crazy – Hanson grows sunflowers and I once saw a sunflower in Patagonia shaped just like a swastika.
Ipsos Factoid, byaatch!
What has gone has nothing to do with color, but with culture and the failure to trasmit a respect for societal norms at the primary/secondary educational levels. When I lived in Britain I could see the slide beginning at the university level. By 1990 the students coming up to uni were of a vastly different mindset, having no respect for rules, professors/tutors or the traditions of the place. There was and always will be a degree of acting out by students, but we had never seen the vandalism and violence that would sadly become the norm.
Whiskey:
America is still majority white by a large margin. You’re projecting a possible future and claiming it exists now. Your are correct that there are large, populated states like California and Texas that have already reached this dystopian future and are a cautionary tale for the rest of America, but the nation is still majority white — 70% to be precise. The Census Bureau insists it’s only 65-67% (I forget the exact figure) because they insist on including illegals in their count. The reason I stress this is because presenting a distorted picture makes it more difficult to mount a pushback, and discourages people.
Also, birthrates among minorities are not as high as advertised, although you did not refer to birthrates. As you know, Whiskey, it is immigration, mostly illegal, that is causing the distortions. The reason why birthates matter is because, if something is done about our borders and illegal entry, minority population growth drops dramatically.
I’ve spent quite a lot of time in England. I think the difference between London and LA is that London has a thousand plus year history. The British culture runs very deep and is being assaulted relentlessly. LA is what, less than two hundred years old and formed by a hodge-podge of nationalities and you are comparing 1960′s LA to ancient London? A rather substaintial difference. But, your point is well taken nonetheless, and accurate.
You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone… turns out a society with moral underpinnings beats one based on vulgar, degraded narcissism after all. Not to mention the latter becomes weak and vulnerable.
The once-absurd scene in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life of the professor (Cleese, I think) having sex in front of his classroom is now not far off reality at such institutions of “higher” learning as Yale University and Northwestern University. It was a funny scene when the reality of it was so preposterous, but now? I do wonder what John Cleese thinks about it.
Suzy, I think I have an answer for you:
About ten years ago, John Cleese also noted that satire is pretty well dead: satire can only work when set against reason and sanity. Modern society has pretty well abandoned both of those standards—the result of moral relativism. It’s not for nothing that Pope Benedict talks about “the dictatorship of relativism”: once we turn our backs on truth, anything goes.
And, as far as satire’s concerned, the truth of the matter these days is stranger than anything one can make up. (Obama is to President as Clouseau is to Detective—and that’s a FACT!) No wonder Cleese has moved to Bath—probably to retire, as his old job is pretty well obsolete now.
(Britain still has lush scenery, beautiful cathedrals, and exquisite choral music: sort of like cosmetics on a corpse, though. Pity . . .)
lookout – Excellent points about satire and relativism. I could not agree more.
I don’t really see a path out of this, unfortunately. Things will have to get far, far worse for a long time before any correctives are asserted. I’m 49 and I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see sanity return to Western society (if it ever does). So it’s “Islam is peace!” and “The government must discriminate against white people for the good of the collective” until the day I die.
““There were disadvantages to the old culture, it was a bit stuffy and it was more sexist and more racist. But….”
…hey, I was on the right side of the racial and gender divide.
I’m afraid the debacle began many years before the war. One only has to read Chesterton or C.S. Lewis to confirm it. I think “That Hideous Strength” and “The Abolition of Man” are enough proof that the decline began perhaps a century earlier. Cleese et al are minor participants in the closing act.
Catino,
I agree. A few years ago, In 2005, Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard had an exceptional portrait of England’s pre-World War II university elites, and how much they resemble America’s dissipated left today. Its subhead seems remarkably prescient these days: “Liberal elites ruined Britain as a hyperpower. Could America meet the same fate?”
Wiemar England.
Mr. Driscoll,
“Lest We Forget”–Kipling’s prophetic prayer-poem:
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
I pray that I am not wrong in thinking that America is different. We have a reservoir of faith that is going to be very difficult to the left to erase. The first thing England lost was her faith.
May be we can profit from their experience.
I also agree. WW1 did a great deal to advance the rot in Europe in general and France was ruined. But the rot began in the 1800′s particularly amongst Britain’s upper class.
HEY WORLD,….Welcome to DETROIT!!!!! So NOW how do YOU like it???
AHAHAHAhahahahahahahahahaha Stupid Libratards.
What the “f” did you expect to replace it,…when you were done trashing the place?
Personally, I think this is reading too much into it. Python was pure satire. It didn’t really matter what English society was like, they would have found a way to mock it. That’s who they were. That’s what they did. Examples. Did LIFE OF BRIAN or HOLY GRAIL bring down Christianity? Did the grotesque organ donor scene in MEANING OF LIFE affect the organ donor process? The English liberal left is merely reaping what every other similar society in Western Europe has sown through rampant Socialism, stifling PC and multiculturalism that has brought those cultures down to the lowest exterior common denominator.
This cultural slide would have happened whether Monty Python ever existed or not. You certainly can’t lay the unjust persecution of Geert Wilders in Holland at Monty Python’s large stamping foot. And John Cleese is certainly far from alone in bemoaning the demise of a great society. We here in America have our many troubling issues as well. In my humble opinion, England’s problems are no more attributable to Monty Python than ours are to South Park. And we certainly have more in common with John Cleese’s cultural gripes than we’d care to admit. PJM would be out of business if we didn’t. Food for thought.
Hi Johnny,
Of course. But I always find it fascinating when someone his adult years tearing down what was then the establishment is surprised that what follows it isn’t quite the utopia he had in mind.
I dunno.
I don’t think Cleese had utopia in mind very often. He did have the classical liberal go ahead to poke fun at anything but the fun part was that you could tell that he and the crew actually would not trade it in for anything else.
It is a loss in this world that a lot of what was just irreverent silliness would never pass today. Can’t put too fine a point on comedy or it isn’t funny anymore.
Fish called Abdul? Doesn’t work. Try something else.
Okay, Ed. I get it. Black irony. Can’t be bad. BTW I’m an optioned and award-nominated screenwriter who occasionally blogs for Breitbart’s Big Hollywood. All four of my scripts are comedies, with plenty of black irony to go around. I do agree that Mr. Cleese, who is a rank liberal, should have been more careful for what he wished for outside of comedy. Lots of headlines out of Britain these days that far exceed Python’s madness. But when you’re neck-deep in writing material to to make people laugh, you just reach into the kitchen sink to pull out and throw whatever you think works. The only thing I want to bring down is the house, and I’m sure that’s all the Python crew had in mind when they did their brilliant shows and films. All that said, I’d probably get into fisticuffs with Cleese if I ever met him and politics came up. He’s a very humorless and bitter man in that respect. Spewed the whole liberal leftist Tea Party = racism meme without having a f*cking clue. And Now He Has Something Completely Different lol!
Johnny I was raised by rattlesnakes and my ancestor fought with Julius Caesar against Pompey and Olive Oil. Plus I co-wrote the screen play for “The Empire Strikes Back” under the alias of ‘Leigh Parentheses’.
LOL! More Prozac, Jim
I have also written the Def Jam Hip-Hop version of “The Dead Parrot” sketch starring Sezdat Sezwhat and Sphinxter Payne.
The difference here is that leftist liberals are not being satirical. They say and do this stuff with a straight, honest face.
I have no problem with people from many cultures and backgrounds bringing new celebrations, new traditions, new religions or whatever to a multicultural country –AS LONG AS THEY MAKE AN EFFORT TO BECOME A PRODUCTIVE MEMBER AND PART OF THE FRAMEWORK OF THE COUNTRY!
Our so-called liberals seem to have dismissed the founding concepts behind our country way too easily in the name of bringing new immigrants to the country. It isn’t the immigration I object to, it is the racism, misogynist, supremacist nonsense they bring with them that I object to. After all that we and our parents fought for in the Civil Rights movement, why are the Left so eager to dismiss it?
I feel sorry for the city of London and the people who live there. But there isn’t much I can do for it. There IS something I can do to prevent the great cities in the US from following in London’s footsteps.
I have heard for decades the praise for the “Salad Bowl”, that great coming together of people with different cultures, different viewpoints and different values.
What a crock! Culture and peoples being different is fine. Having people with different values moving in is complete idiocy. It’s a horror story. The people of a country MUST have the same basic values or one ends up with Yugoslavia or most of the African countries. You have tribalism and division and violence and atrocities.
Come to this country and become Americans in your values, in your language. If not then don’t come or just leave. Period.
“Did LIFE OF BRIAN or HOLY GRAIL bring down Christianity?”
Considering Mosques are now occupying all the old churches in England one couldn’t be blamed in thinking that YES – the constant assault did, indeed, bring down Christianity.
I think you’re falling into cum hoc ergo propter hoc. Python was able to find an enthusiastic audience for mocking Christianity because Christianity was already dying in Britain; parish churches were and are being boarded up at a much greater rate than mosque conversions.
I doubt sincerely that Pyhton’s mostly all-Anglo-Saxon humor had much to do with multiple Governments’ decision to admit unfettered numbers of immigrants from the Dark Ages; the Nationalities Act came long before, and the even worse Act that Enoch Powell memorably sacrificed his career to oppose 43 years ago was passed before the first Python broadcast.
(Note also that Cleese was always the “libertarian” Python, whereas the two Terrys were and remain hard-line Red Banner socialists.)
Wait a minute–I think that’s a post hoc, propter hoc fallacy.
Letting open the floodgates of immigration from Pakistan wasn’t required by the Monty Python crew.
I think it would be more correct to say that a decline in the importance of Christianity in Britain, already long-established, allowed the Python attitude to flourish and poke fun at religion.
Sadly, you can’t imagine any comics making a movie that satirizes the life of Mohammed, can you? Or poking fun at ridiculous Moslem practices a la stoning sequence in Life of Brian?
Wait, that’s a Coptic Non Feelum. Just remember when Liz Taylor crossed her Rubycon’s: “Vini, Vidi, Vici, Vini”.
And that was that.
“Did LIFE OF BRIAN or HOLY GRAIL bring down Christianity?”
I dont think so…I thought it was funny….irreverent, a bit “insulting” if over analyized, but I appreciated it was satire, not mean spiritedness that drove it.
“could Life of Brian even be made today? I’m not too sure”
The real question is, could the Life of MOHAMMED even be MENTIONED without violence and death?
We (even secular) “Christians” have the grace and intelligence to tweak our own noses, just to be sure we arent “too far on the deep end” of our own self-importance. We accept satire as free speech.
Our willingness to mock ourselves is a sign of honest intellect.
Too bad we dont hold others to the same standard;
And the Islamists will happily exploit Lefts “soft bigotry of low expectations” to further erode our culture.
Want to understand a culture? Look at what it holds sacred. Most people do not appreciate that the etymological root of “culture” is cultus, or worship.
Want to understand how a culture is diseased? Look at what it mocks. While individual self-mockery shows a lack of self-importance and is healthy, mockery of one’s own culture’s sacred ideals is a marker of decay.
Right now in America, gauging by the social, legal, and/or professional consequences of potential acts and statements, our currently-sacred ideals include multicultural equivalence (a.k.a. “diversity”), recycling, the “holy” Koran, homosexuality, female superiority, male-female equivalence, racial equivalence, intrinsic white guilt, global warming, and the “right” to Social Security/welfare. These are what respectable folk dare not denounce in public for fear of ostracism, career suicide, or prosecution. The fact that several of these contradict others in the set is merely proof of our cultural incoherence: we don’t have any underlying metaphysical basis for believing any of these disconnected feelings.
When womyn’s-studies professors start telling rape jokes, you’d be right to think they no longer believe their own dogma. Likewise, if Catholics desecrate the Eucharist or any kind of Christians tear out pages from the Bible to line birdcages.
John Cleese got rich holding up English tradition and particularly Christian beliefs/practices for ridicule. His life’s work has been to show Brits that their ideals are silly and foolish. If he’s going to start complaining about decadence, he should at least acknowledge his own sin in bringing it about.
lolly, not all!
There are still many beautiful cathedrals and parish churches that are alive and quite well in England: my husband and kids have sung in them—quite recently.
Just last year, one of my daughters and I were staying in North London. We went to a pub in a very large ex-church: probably Baptist, certainly Protestant, not Anglican or Roman Catholic. It made a great pub! (We didn’t see any Muslims there.)
I particularly like the spa in Bath where you can take milk baths in old graves and bungee jump from a church steeple. It’s called ‘Smuggler’s Spa’ and all the staff are dressed in faux seaweed and nets and have an anchor chained to their ankles.
An integral part of being a liberal is that you blindly work very hard to destroy everything that works, and everything that is good. Once it collapses, a liberal is shocked, and wonders what the heck just happened. Then he moves to a new field and works like crazy to degrade and destroy that as well.
Liberalism is a mental disease. It is like cancer or AIDS.
Presently in the midst of “Amazing Grace”, Eric Metaxas’s amazing biography of the principle voice of abolition in England, the one and only William Wilberforce. Encourage everyone to read it and gain a lifetime of perspective from it’s pages.
Reflecting on it as I read Ed Driscoll’s “nostalgia”, I’m disheartened by the “casual innocence” of some of the remarks. Look to the history of 17th and 18th century England. Wilberforce a great man of incredible moral courage, undoubtedly led the parade that took the reigns of the 17th century enlightened man, and my God their were very few of these men that existed. Ironically as few as probably exist in a present day Palestinian marketplace looking to purchase the Passover wine to imbibe with a West Jerusalem neighbor.
Yes, Wilberforce ended slavery in the British Empire but not before the slave trade dragged and average of 50,000 human beings out of Africa, for over a century, and yes, made England a “darker place”.
Just a splash of indigo blue dye into a centrifuge will change the clean clear water a different hue, yet we imagine if the centrifuge stops spinning the clearness of the water will return to it’s original clarity? Wise up and lets hope to one day drink the wine (Palestinian and Jew possibly?), with nostalgia, remembering regretfully the truly bad old days that Wilberforce fought so bravely against.
London is what it is, as is every city and town in the Western World because of one thing; Slaveries legacy. And a half pint of colonialism. Do you all live in a bubble?
Oh get a job! Slavery? Really? Then please tell me why Islam – the number one slaver of all time – is exempt of the crime of both slavery and imperial expansionism and comes out the victim – instead of the perp – in all of this?
What? Other than recent immigrants from former English colonies in the Caribbean, who are you talking about?
Oh, dear God! Say rather that every city and town in the ENTIRE world owes part of its being to slavery. The West is not unique at all for having participated in slavery– it is unique for having ended it.
thank you, Bohemond–awesome (and accurate) response.
That the West dreamed of and more or less established an end to slavery is an accomplishment one rarely hears mentioned.
Too bad for John C. In fact too bad for all of Europe. They sold their souls for the promise of this european utopia and now their “chickens are coming home to roost.” Europe is about two steps away from turning in Europestan. Such is the price of this multiculturalism at all costs. It may appeal to their vanity and their conscience but in terms of creating a society with values, principles, morals, a sense of personal responsibility, and economic self sufficiency–no way!! They created this mess and now they will likely not live in it. No the hypocrites like Cleese will likely migrate to the USA, just like the good liberals of California, Michigan, New Jersey, etc migrate out of the hell holes they create too!!
“It may appeal to their vanity and their conscience but in terms of creating a society with values, principles, morals, a sense of personal responsibility, and economic self sufficiency–no way”
How true. Societies are the product of values that the people choose. Love them or hate them, these values arise from experience passed down. What we have now is a society based on the negative counter-culture of preening so-much-nicer-than-everybody else elites who have deliberately abandoned what was learned.
One small quibble. They didn’t actually “create this mess”. They didn’t understand that protesting as they did about what they didn’t like would result in a society that has no foundation.
How true. And when they move they take their mind with them and destroy the next state. I site Colorado as a formerly nice place to live that is headed California way.
Pray for Kansas and the rest of the midwest states that still have a semblance of a former time that I for one do miss, albeit my liberal friends, who I find impossible to talk to anymore, find revolting, racist, backward, hateful and neanderthal in nature.
They should be careful what they wish for, but they won’t.
A very interesting article when it comes to politics and culture. I don’t know that I agree with Johnny Simpson that it is reading too much into it and that MP would’ve found a way to mock today’s society. Mocking society in the challenging way MP did could be a little dangerous today; South Park’s retreat into self-censorship showed that as well as its own lack of courage. The reason MP was considered so cutting edge is that it laughed at itself and at the same time tacitly called for its own destruction by revealing the core values of its society to be corrupt. The new generation is smugly surveying and reigning over the scene of all it has laid waste and not so ready to mock itself.
The interesting scenario is one where we ask ourselves what happens when the Marx Bros. no longer have a ship to stow away on as outcasts that make fun of the captain and challenge the stodginess of the passengers. What happens when the entire ship sides with the outcasts and half the people on board are stowaways? The liberal Left definitely had its own ideas on how to move forward from the 60s but also defined itself by what it was against, much the way teenagers do against their parents and why some people believe that decriminalizing marijuana works – when it’s not naughty any more young people lose interest. What happens when we all agree with Monty Python and there’s nothing left of the ancien regime to laugh at? What happens when you win and your parents are discredited and even dead, no longer around to rail against?
What happens is what happens in all revolutions: the inmates take over the asylum. Rebels become the establishment, the institutions and their leather jackets, jeans and tattoos become silly and empty escutcheons of a by-gone era – after all, every one has tattoos now. There are no more enemies or humor because revolutions do not mock themselves.
Going back to the idea of the new generation of Monty Pythons finding a way to impose their own satire – well, they haven’t. How can you make fun of adults who admit their culture is debauched and irrelevant? How can you make Monty Python-like attacks on minorities that have absolutely no sense of humor about themselves from anyone but themselves and that little enough? Is there a new troupe of comedians that will make ‘The Life of Mohammed” or “The Marx Bros. and the Dome of the Rock’? Can such a thing be done only by a muslim comedy troupe and if so, where are they?
The new generation and its minority constituents, as I say, has no sense of humor about itself because they see themselves as some type of social crusaders or engineers whose work is above reproach. How do you write a comedy sketch that effectively mocks John Stewart?
To date, the adherents and inheritors of political correctness remain unassailed and unassailable in their own domain. A new satirical movie true to its goal would invoke words like ‘retard’ or the new establishment of the Congressional Black Caucus or La Raza or the Democrats. Humor attacks a type of perceived fascist behavior but Conservatives are increasingly occupying the philosophical space of rebels by default if not intellectually and so don’t make such easy targets any more but at the same time lack the wit to produce a Monty Python from a grass roots base that would ‘get it’.
Instead of intellectual wit we have ‘Jackass’ where people rail against society but without one bit of insight into why and maybe that’s a good thing as what would happen if we all become practical jokers? But maybe that’s exactly what happened to the West as it took itself out of the picture by defeating itself in Reginald Perrin’s one-man boxing match.
We have a blithe faith that the new immigrants are just like the old without a stitch of evidence that such is the case. Latinos and black Americans have had a half century to state their case in America as the new generation of innovative, eccentric and Jeffersonian Americans and nothing could be further from the truth. Minorities rail like Monty Python did but without a humorous approach and what your left with is a Western society that has partially destroyed itself and a wave of immigrants that simply want to replace it physically and not philosophically.
No surprise then in Cleese’s statement about London – it’s not a new hep generation in London but simply lost territory, lost to people who have not fulfilled the dream of the next wave of culture in the theatre unless you consider Alan Rickman’s play about Rachel Corrie to be art. No new satirist’s who still safely play the field against now dead competitors like the 50s. No new novelist’s who challenge the legacy of socialism, immigration, and welfare for ‘retards’.
The new generation of film makers and novelists are as steeped as ever in monumental and rancid political correctness and the destruction continues apace. Where is Monty Python when you need them? Well, they’re gone. The new regime’s goal is to continue to dismantle itself as if it still resides over empires and colonies. Monty Python’s satire may have been timeless in a sense and very specific in another but what does that matter if it’s simply not even there anymore?
Agreed. It is sort of like the devolution of Saturday Night Live. They never missed an opportunity to make fun of any and every President. (they had a hard time at first with Bill Clinton, but the adultery thing gave them material). But, now we have a ‘cool president’ and week after week I see stories the old Saturday Night Live would have jumped on and run with. No more.
I think some of the criticisms of the Pythons are a little off-base. The may have mocked the stuffy establishment (and it was stuffy), but so did the Marx Brothers and the Stooges in this country. On the other hand, I can’t recall a single sketch promoting the subjugation of traditional British culture to immigrant third-world cultures as has happened in the last couple of decades. Also, don’t forget the savage send-up of leftist revolutionaries in “Life of Brian”, such as the “What Have the Roman’s Done for Us?” bit.
I’m just an American who likes to laugh, but I never thought Monty Python was aimed at destroying British culture. In some ways it celebrated it. I loved the military scenes with respectful soldiers, harsh NCO’s, and aloof officers.
and let’s not forget Life of Brian probably provided the only proper Latin lesson that most of its audience ever received.
(OK, but other than the What have Romans Done for Us and the Latin lesson, what did Life of Brian give us… )
Fwedewick….they gave us Fwedewick.
Yes, except that they called domum a locative (which would be domi, “at home”) instead of an accusative of the end of motion (“(to) home”)–otherwise, that was a wonderful Latin lesson.
Hail, Suzanne. We who are about to decline salute you.
Today’s lesson, translate:
“Always wear your underwear.”
Dear Over50 (me too!):
I could not AGREE with you more!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yep, another case of ‘you don’t know what you got until you lose it’.
Cleese did make a lot a money tearing down Britain though. He really should be one of the last to complain.
> could Life of Brian even be made today?
Well, yes it could. It is perfectly ok to trash Jesus and Christianity. As insulting as “Brian” was, “Piss Christ” was far more offensive. Then there was “Temptations of Christ”, et. al. There has been a steady stream of offensive anti-Christian art and film released to the public, and often subsidized by the taxpayers, in the decades since “Brian”.
The film that could NOT be made today is a Monty Python-esque “Life of Mohammed”. The slightest appearance of mocking the murdering pedophile rapist “prophet” is guaranteed to cause members of the “Religion Of Peace(TM)” to go ape-sh@#$ and start rioting and murdering people.
Wait, wait, there may be an untapped gold mine in that concept. Sure, it couldn’t be shown in theaters because of bomb threats, but what about individual video sales? I bet it would go big.
Hard to feel sorry for Mr. Cleese and people of his ilk. These are the same people who embraced the European lie of “multiculturalism” and now they’re paying for it, big time. London is turning into Mecca, or at least the Mecca for every Muslim who wants a free ride on the British social-welfare train. And boy, do they get it. It’s one of the many reasons the UK is in such terrible financial shape. The secret today is that nobody has to actually defeat any European nation in battle. Nope. If you want to destroy a European country today all you have to do is flood it with immigrants. France, England, Italy, and Germany are learning that the hard way right now. Problem is, what are they going to do about it? It may be too late for any of them, especially since few of these new immigrants want to assimilate into any of these countries.
Lennon was smart. He was aware enough to know when he was being a jerk. He might well have become a conservative had he survived.
C. S. Lewis, in “the Abolition of Man”, pointed out that when the smart young people claim to be able to “see through” every classical bit of wisdom as just an accretion of habits which are probably better off dispensed with so we can get to “the truth behind the accumulated obscuring flotsam of societies”, etc, then the solidity they claim to be trying to arrive at usually doesn’t add up to anything. To be able to “see through” every set of morals, customs, traditions and wisdom becomes, in the end, the inability to see anything at all. The culture destroyers of the past two generations didn’t really notice that the thing they wanted to replace it with was…. nothing.
aaaaand here we are.
It is the fundamental misapprehension of human nature. They believe the accretions of social habit are the problem, and that a “freed human spirit” is the solution. they believe in the inherent nobility and perfectibility of man, and are understandably fixated on the problems of their own time, within their own range of vision.
I believe human beings contain the problems. Human nature corrupts every system, situation and culture. It isn’t “the old ideas” that are corrupt, it’s the people. Getting rid of old culture throws out the baby with the bathwater, abandoning centuries of wisdom in favor of… what? A vacuum in which the corruptibility of man will probably be more stimulated, faster, than in the traditional society which at least partly benefits from the wisdom of its experiences.
Just because you call the bible names and throw it in the trash doesn’t mean the wisdom in it is invalid, only that you insist on denying it to yourself.
“Just because you call the bible names and throw it in the trash doesn’t mean the wisdom in it is invalid, only that you insist on denying it to yourself.”
Yes – the flaw IS in man and the bible called it original sin. Nothing is new under the sun and if people don’t think people weren’t whoring around back then they’re nuts! The “moral” rules put in place to guard society was precisely because they discoved that immoral behavior caused disease and birth defects. They weren’t being “mean” or “unfair” to people – they were trying to protect society as a whole.
The problem is cultural, not racial. I can think of few things that would benefit the United States more than increased Asian immigration and yes, I am generalizing and yes, I know that not every Asian is a law-abiding, hard-working person.
I agree with J Reece regarding Monty Python. They were satirists and it was their job to poke fun at the existing situation, not suggest replacements. And how else would I know that there is positively no cannibalism in the British Army, or at least that the situation is under control? Satirists aren’t expected to be constructive…and no one expected the Spanish Inquisition.
Or that. pace American repeal of DADT, the British military are all dead butch (apart from the Marines).
And to be clear, I chose the bible as an example of old wisdom, not to inject religion specifically. Same goes for aristotle, cicero, aquinas, hume, etc. Rejection of old wisdom on the grounds that it BROUGHT corruption is silly. Corruption comes to all ages and cultures. The secret to reducing its influence is for us all to see the importance of our own personal behavior and choices. Collectivism is no answer, to this or any other human problem. Nor is a movement toward “new institutions” that turn out to be only chaos and anarchy.
Well, for once I have to (sort of) disagree with one of my favorite funny men.
I don’t think John Cleese, or the rest of the Pythons, have one solitary thing to apologize for. Because They Didn’t Do It.
The Pythons were the court jesters of post-Beatles England. Like their predecessors in the medieval court, they held up a fun-house mirror to the society around them, essentially saying not “you’re wrong and you know it” but “if it looks silly when we do it, imagine how it looks when you do it”.
Their “critiques” of British mores were aimed most often at the absurdities, not of traditional British culture, but the very “modern” culture that Cleese (justifiably) dislikes. The “Upper-Class Twit Of The Year Competition” was inspired by the twits who lived next to Cleese and kept him awake at night with their car-racing and door-slamming; the “Sloane Rangers” of this type were less like traditional British minor nobility than they were like Dian de Momerie and her lot of “Bright Young Things” (dopers all) in Dorothy L. Sayers’ “Murder Must Advertise”. Hardly a snark at tradition.
The portrayal of the British Government in MPFC was a semi-satirical portrait of the Labour Government of that day, which gave rise to the pseudo- “conservative” (and totally feckless) Cameron dog-and-pony show of today. Quote from Cleese; “Last year the government spent less on Silly Walks than it did on national defense”. A joke like this only makes sense if you know the government in question spends less on national defense than it does on the tea lady each fiscal year. Which was the case then, and under Cameron still is. The nearest the Pythons ever came to snarking at the other side was stating that Margaret Thatcher kept her brain in her right calf. That pales in comparison to their indication of where the (Labour) Cabinet kept their naughty bits in the same gag.
Some of the Pythons’ skits did take a swipe at British attitudes on social issues. “The Mouse Problem” was a thinly-veiled swipe at the laws and social opinions on male homosexuality. Which, by the way, was originally written for the movie “The Magic Christian”; it was considered too “daring” for the film, and was replaced in it by Raquel Welch wielding a whip on the backs of galley slaves(?).
“The Piranha Brothers” was a sendup of the business with the Cray brothers and their competitors who were vying for control of London’s underworld in the Sixties. (It was actually one of their competitors who had the habit of nailing bits of peoples’ anatomies to the floor, BTW.) The gist of the skit being; “Memo to CID; Next time, try arresting these yobs before they get to the point of constituting a strategic military threat, OK?”
Finally, most of the Pythons’ funniest bits had exactly nothing to do with British mores, and very little to do with reality. The idea of alien blancmanges from the planet Skyron in the Andromeda Galaxy invading England and turning everyone into Scotsmen so they can win the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament by default is worthy of “Doctor Who” or “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”. The most you can say of it is that Sir Arthur Eddington only got it half right; the Universe is not only stranger than we can imagine, it is also probably even more absurd than we can comfortably cope with.
If the Dead Parrot Sketch helped bring down “Old Brittania”, then “Mr. Neutron” really was the most dangerous man in the world (no matter where he came from to start with). It would be more accurate to say that the Pythons spent four years giving us all some much-needed laughs in a very unfunny time, while occasionally saying “You’ve got the gas pedal to the floorboard, but are sure you’re on the right road?”
Thanks for all of it, Mr. Cleese. And tell the lads (and ladies) that some of us still remember.
cheers (with a fish)
eon
Correct.
John Cleese’s next generic old man rant in 5…4…3…2. Duh. Times change.
That things change irrespective of our wishes is called “hope.”
In one generation both in Europe and the United States you had a singular group of people that decided that they simply would not grow up. That being a grown up was not cool. It was reflected in every cultural format, including but not limited to Monty Python.
Of all the facts about plots and plans of the 19th and early 20th century getting people to not want to mature was the accelerate that made it happen. It is now so ingrained in society that it will be almost impossible to eradicate.
It is why you have people that need (and expect)government to be a father to them. It is why the people, in general, don’t understand when Daddy says “I’m sorry Johnny, we can’t afford to support you for the rest of your life”. Johnny throws a temper tantrum (riot).
Whether Monty Python, South Park, or Seinfeld or Friends the idea of maturing and raising children who want to mature is uncool. Oh I know, it was all just a little harmless fun. But, it is still going on. You undoubtedly heard it the other day. Mr. Obama made fun of Paul Ryan for “wanting to be America’s Accountant” for wanting to be “responsible”. So Paul Ryan is a nerd because he wants to be responsible and Mr. Obama is cool because he makes fun of the nerd.
And it goes on and on.
Thank you for a very perceptive comment.
For a confirmation of this point in a minor way–just look at how everyone dresses now. As old as we get, we’re still wearing jeans, etc. There’s been a sort of explosion of ‘costume-wearing’ (where once there were the serious people and their uniforms); I think it was around 1985 that I suddenly realized there were young men in college who were wearing ‘outfits’ (with turned-around baseball caps), instead of just looking scruffy (yes, a sort of outfit, too, but less planned, somehow).
Yet, children no longer have clothes that mark them as children, at least by the time they’re out of toddlerhood.
You look at old photos of young women (like my mom, in the 1940s) and it’s hard to tell they’re only 15: they could be anywhere from 15 to 25. They’re trying to look ‘grown up’; somehow, that was a desirable status.
John Cleese morphed into Theodore Dalrymple so slowly, I hardly even noticed.
There is one huge difference between John Cleese and Theodore Dalrymple: Dalrymple is conservative. I see no sign whatever that Cleese has become conservative. Just look at this brief YouTube video where he ridicules Sarah Palin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMyNk8J1c8g.
At best, Cleese is just showing a bit of nostalgia for the good old days before, as the Brits might say, “the wogs [foreigners] took over”.
Exactly, Mr. Reardon. Cleese is a typical leftist ninny so lacking in self awareness that he can’t see that the policies and politicians he supports caused the conditions he laments. It’s too bad that he has the resources to escape what he and his ilk have inflicted on others.
Nimby – seen that, heard that -
Fact is, Humpty Dumpty can’t be fixed – it’s over -
As far as who’s fault is this disaster…
One baffling phenomenon I’ve noticed is the disconnect between many a person’s worldview and any number of their personal beliefs.
My late father was a quasi socialist who kept me out of Virginia grade school because it was segregated at the time, but in later years railed against blacks because they had not fulfilled the promise that billions of dollars of Great Society investments were supposed to make happen.
I used to have some friends who were self-employed but wanted nationalized health care and thought that Americans should only strive for “adequacy,” as opposed to my insistence that striving for prosperity was a very American thing to do; they found the word “prosperity” to be literally offensive! They themselves owned a Boca Raton house on a canal with a 44-foot power boat parked out back; they defined adequacy as being much less than what they had! They are no longer friends of mine.
Cleese wants to project liberalism up front, but reserve “reactinary” views for his private life.
I visited London twice in the 1980′s. I travelled through Europe and I have to say, I disliked England the most. Rude people, punk rockers everywhere, very aggressive Africans and Arabs selling their wares, (one Arab chased us down the street when we wouldn’t buy from him) anti-semitic comments in restaurants, by taxi drivers and in bars. I have not been back since, nor do I plan on it.
That’s like judging all of Canada based on a visit to Quebec, or the U.S. based on a weekend in NYC.
And he’s still a Lib/Dem, so he really has learned nothing.
Ever since I first saw Holy Grail during high school in the 1970s I have always been a lover of Monty Python and much of the Alumni’s solo work. I subsequently found the Flying Circus on PBS (the only thing that ever brought me to that network). However, I always thought they were in sync with my (then nascent) libertarian/conservative mindset. It seemed to me they were critiquing the “socialist paradise” that Britain was during the post-war years, until Margaret Thatcher. Life of Brian was a good whack at the Church of England, which seems to no longer believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, but rather was just a proto-NGO do-gooder. The lobs against more traditional English culture seemed affectionate. Maybe this is because I’m American and the cuts aren’t so close to home. I always thought that it was a confident culture that could laugh at itself. This impression was all capped by Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. It wasn’t until the alumni of Monty Python started doing their “grand old men of the theatah” interviews that I learned their personal politics were so liberal/soft left. Since then I laugh at them for being so blind and obtuse (Cleese in particular seems to be that which he satirizes), but I still laugh with them when watching the DVDs of their heyday. However, now my initial impressions are burnished by knowing the troupe itself didn’t realize that they were what they made fun of.
Take your medicine Cleese…you made the bed, you lie in it. I LOVE it when leftists get their comeuppance for their stupidity and treachery, it’s just sad that those without the means he has will not be able to flee as he did. WTH did he think would happen when you attack the foundations of your society and replace them with platitudes?
On Graham Norton show, Cleese was revisiting a Fawlty Towers skit, saying how embarrassed he had been at his own country and their failure to properly forget WWII — and how he had admired the Germans and their marvelous ability to forget the war completely. How sick is that? Like most Lefties, he has the mentality of a 12 year old perpetually embarassed by his wiser parents. What a sad old man.
Don’t you also think that what is best in the Python sketches tends to be the pointless, free-floating absurdity? I mean, I don’t think society (other than certain obnoxious types, characterized by their pretentious accents, esp. their put-on, learned pretentious accents) was being brought down by the hilarious cheese-shop sketch.
Is there anything more despicable than these soldiers in the anti-bourgeois army, like Cleese, who look around 40 years after their “victory” and suddenly have regrets? I can’t think of any who are worse.
So somebody tell me – is there really a Ministry of Silly Walks? Do all pet shops sell dead parrots?
1. No, but there used to be a Ministry of Footpaths, intended to preserve “historic nature walks” throughout Britain. It tended to be staffed by intense pepperpots with blue hair, and often got the last word on where roads could be built, or even just widened. (Arthur Dent’s debacle with the local council over knocking his house down at the start of “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” was probably due to the original intended route for the bypass arousing the wrath of this or a similar Ministry.)
Then of course there was, and is, the UK Olympic Committee, of which the less said the better, as nothing about them is either rational or particularly amusing. (Like requiring Olympic rifle and pistol competitors to go over to France to practice because of the UK’s Draconian laws on firearms. Even France’s anti-gun laws are more tolerant, which tells you all you need to know about “Cool Brittania” today.)
2. The trick was to get a parrot that didn’t have psittacosis (“parrot fever”). They tended to drop dead after a day or two.
Of course you could get a dog conversion (beak on, wings on, feathers, etc.). It wouldn’t talk… but it’d howl a bit.
(That’s a joke, son, as Foghorn Leghorn would say.)
cheers
eon
If Bath feels English then the people are walking around very slowly and whispering “Don’t Make Waves”, “Don’t Make Waves”.
I have no problem with Monty Python (the boxed set is on the shelf across the room from me right now), or any other satirical humor. It would be a dreary world if we can’t make fun of our own culture and institutions.
The problem is that such snark and deconstructionism used to represent youth culture, which people were going to eventually grow up and leave behind, except to trot it out for nostalgia on special occasions.
The unfolding disaster is that we now live in a culture in which so many intend never to grow up at all. The anti-establishment is now the establishment. Humor used to be formative rebellion, the work of young people testing the limits and learning to be independent. Eventually, they would mellow, mature, except responsibility, and realize that the previous generations weren’t so dumb after all.
That process isn’t happening much anymore. The foundations of society are getting kicked out from under us, and there won’t be anything to replace them. As I like to ask left-over hippies sometimes, “Wasn’t rebellion more fun back when there was still something left to rebel against?”.
First visited England about 25 years ago, and made a second visit four years ago. The area around the British Museum had been transformed into what looked like Peshawar–we got to the Museum via the Tube stations that were bombed just a week later. We noticed abandoned and up for sale churches in quite a few places as we toured the country and, in London, we were told by our guide that some of these abandoned churches had been turned into “welcome centers’ for the Muslims who had taken over whole neighborhoods that had formerly been solidly British.
And this was such a proud, strong, brave, and accomplished people! I am not likely to return to the home of my ancestors, for I do not want to witness any more its slide into some form of dystopian nightmare, nor its ignominious capitulation to Islam.
“[C]ould Life of Brian even be made today?” Of course it could. These idiots, even in the midst of lamenting the collapse of their culture, continue in their willfull ignorance that all religions are the same but there is only one religion today that you cannot laugh at or make fun of. Cleese and these other leftist twits need to ask, “Could the life of Abdul (i.e., Muhammad PBIH) ever be made?” Maybe that will clue him in on why England is dying.
why doesnt john cleese use his clout to make a movie, tv show, or a play, that demonstrates his current state of mind– if he is truly talented then the product should make an impact
maybe part of it can be that when one is young he usually doesnt know what the hell he is doing and only as one ages and sheds off the pros/cons of youth does wisdom make a cameo
it never ceases to amaze me how so many in the entertainment industry so easily shun the environment that creates their opportunity
“Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him.” Plutarch
England “won” both WWI and WWII and they have never fully recovered. Consider that Keynes and Krugman when you pontificate that WWII spending “saved” American.
Cleese and his lot were hardly the problem; English society then needed lampooning and he and his mates – comic geniuses all – were the right people for the job. Rather than criticize Cleese et al. as the cause of the problem, which is incorrect – we ought to hold them up as something that is being lost in the nation England is becoming. He is entirely correct; the London of his youth is gone, it is now Londonistan. And the mullahs don’t like to be ridiculed!
I live in Oklahoma City, and fortunately it is still a real american city. And it remains so even with a large foreign born population. For example, we have a large asian community, and I have a Vietnamese friend, but they, and he, are hard working and self reliant, and just as gung ho americans as the rest of Oklahoma. Being foreign born does not mean you cant be an american. It is about beleiving in our constitution, and american values. In that respect, many immigrants are better americans than 4th generation american leftists.
I sympathise with anybody from CA who still wants to be an american. When Reagan was still gov, CA was one of the most american of cities. Lots of immigrants, sure. But also hard working, entrapeneurial, self reliant, patriotic, looking to the future. But the leftists have destroyed this once great state, and the only values they still seem to beleive in are multiculturalism, soaking the rich, and preserving gov worker jobs and pensions.
And for those lefties who say, how dare you say what being an emerican is,just tell me, isn’t it beleiving in the constitution, capitalism, hard work, the great melting pot, self reliance, all of which the left has renounced. I wont say you must beleive exactly as I do to be an american, since I beleive in dissent and free speech. And I have disagreements with many conservatives on social issues, being more libertarian. But if you want us to be Greece or Sweden or Cuba, then why not just move there.
You can point to nay number of reasons why England has sunk so low, but some of the main ones were the slaughter of practically all of the men in the upper/ruling classes–the leadership cadre that has built the Empire and made it Great–in WWI and then again in WWII, so that we are mostly working with the third or forth team today. Add the loss of Empire, the determined efforts of various Socialist British governments to dismantle this class via ruinous taxation, inheritance laws, and regulation, and the destruction of many great ancestral homes (and their way of life and ethos) during this same period, estates that were simply too hard to keep up in this tax and regulatory climate, factor in the change from an agricultural to a manufacturing ^ service economy, one of whose effects was to dry up the people who used to form the agricultural/workman/servant class, and to redirect a majority of them from the rural countryside to the cities and into manufacturing, sales, and administrative jobs, factor in the enormous decline in the Christian church and, with it, in belief and in the morality/ethic is supported, and just a general sense of cultural exhaustion and ennui, (the EU and an inbred, often cretinous royal family and Peerage, especially since WWII, didn’t and doesn’t help either) then–as the cherry on top–add in an enormous influx of inassimilable and actively subversive and hostile Muslim and other “immigrants” and, voila.
Churhill said that the summer of 1940 would be known as ‘their finest hour’.
How prophetic. It’s been downhill for England ever since. Will the last Englishman please lower the Jack and turn out the lights? Thank you.
I think this article is a little unfair to Cleese and Python generally. They didn’t mock or attack traditional English values any more than “The Love Boat” mocked middle-aged divorcees trying to find love on a cruise ship. It’s just situation comedy: they took the culture as they found it, and amused themselves by imagining the hilarity that might assume if certain bizarre situations occurred.
For example, what happens if someone buys a pet parrot that turns out to be dead from a dishonest shopkeeper, but is restricted by English customs of civility to acid verbal complaint?
The only cultural values the Python’s *really* attacked were the Catholic Church (which is an English tradition anyway), media airheads, and bone-headed judges and military officers. All quite reasonable targets, I think.
I don’t think humor is a sign of a sick culture. I rather think a sententious lack of humor is a better sign. Know any good Islamic comedians who make jokes about the Koran, the way Jewish comedians make cracks about foreskins? See what I mean?
London; Not much of a cheese shop, is it.
I live near one of Americas great ghettos.As crime spreads like cancer into nearby towns,i am experiencing the same wistfulness as Mr.Cleese.
Our area was settled by Germans and the reference “to do it the German way” meant to give 110% and do a job worthy of taking pride in.Now it seems only gang members express pride in their drug deals and drive-bys.
http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/il/east-st-louis/crime/
I went to Scotland on vacation.I hoped to see a kilt or two, hehe, but much to my surprise i got to see muslims walking around in two major cities.I did manage to see Culloden and some historical places but i somehow felt cheated.
John Cleese is pompous amd boring. Monty Python, aside from a few funny sketches like “The Argument Clinic”, was also fairly boring. Who gives a rat’s ass what that windbag says, or any other Brit. Just go read the comments that appear on the Guardian, Telegraph or Daily Mail. Much of the population of the UK appears to be clinically insane, screaching about the US, raving about flouride in the water, poison in food, overpopulation, foxes, grey squirrels, whatever pops into their reactionary brains. If anything bad happens to anyone, their knee-jerk impulse is to demand criminalization of whatever had any involvement in it. Vicious misanthropy seems to be a common theme, cloaked in “animal rights” lunacy, where anyone who has the temerity to swat a fly is deemed to be a blood-lusting monster worthy of public execution. Nosy snitches are rampant, ratting people out to the police or “council bosses” over whatever abusurdly trivial “offence” the local Gruppenfuhrers have concocted.
Orwell knew these people well. Goldstein and the 2 Minutes of Hate wasn’t just pulled out of his ass. It was what he saw around him. Now it’s pretty much 60 minutes of hate every hour of the day. We need to cut our ties with Brits. They are a bitter, miserable, angry and hate-filled bunch, blaming everything on the US, of course F*ck ‘em.
As for Illinois … apart from Cook County, it’s a wonderful place. Great people with solid, traditional, Midwestern values. People tend to forget, Illinois is primarily a rural state, with all that implies in the very best sense in terms of values. I know whereof I speak–though I live in Cook County, the belly of the beast, I spend a lot of time in small rural towns of Illinois. I should note that, in the last election, all but one (or was it two?) of the state’s counties voted for the Republican candidate for governer, and against the Democrat, Quinn (may he rot in hell). But Cook County, with Chicago, is populous, and it is controlled politically by the corrupt Democrat Party, which rules state like a medieval fiefdom. Cook County, with its coalition of powerful unions and perpetually loyal Democrat minorities (mainly Blacks and Hispanics, who actually aren’t minorities in the strict sense) and North Shore liberals, overwhelms the rest of the state: so Quinn won. If there had been an electoral college for the governor’s race the Republican candidate would have won in a landslide. We did manage to elect a Republican senator, Kirk, but he’s a RINO not a conservative, and something of bullshit artist too. But what can you expect. The Republican Party in Illinois is weak, sniveling entity.
I pretty much agree with Landru (# 47) about Britain, although I wish he hadn’t tried to kill Captain Kirk.
Ed West wrote, “a dark-skinned Frenchman once told me that London was paradise because nowhere in France could he go about his business without fearing his skin colour might cause some problem”
Wait, what? What about Dumas father and son? Josephine Baker?
I missed this the first time I skimmed your article, and someone else pointed it out.
This is the first time that John Cleese is actually genuinely funny,
I keep thinking of the steely rulers of England past like Queen Elizabeth.
I am not an expert by any means, but in all this sad and infuriating story of British retreat, and decline, deracination, and degeneration it seems like the Royal Family could have been a very strong rallying point in defense of traditional England and its heritage, history, Christianity, and culture but, instead, it appears that at some point in time they either decided to simply withdraw from the fray and became rather expensive and ineffectual ornaments and/or they where shoved off the public stage. Moreover, the actions and statements by some of the Royals over the last couple of decades have made them just too easy to parody and, therefore, very easy to discount.
Whatever happened, what could have been a major stabilizing and directing force has now not only become largely irrelevant, but some of the members of the Royal family are actively involved in the effort to push England off the cliff. The aging Queen, admittedly very widely loved, along with her husband the Duke of Edinburgh seem to be about the only stable ones of the bunch, and when she dies, the heir apparent is Prince “I’d like to be Camilla’s tampon” Charles—-a man “often in error but never in doubt”– who is, well, bat shit crazy, and already half way (or perhaps he is there already) to becoming a Muslim.
Thus, when the elected government goes disastrously, suicidally astray, as it has done in this case, the essentially powerless Royal family—having lost credibility and major influence–is not in any position to influence things in a decisive way, or to act as a backup government, and to again take up the reins of power, and move the UK in a radically new direction. Of course, with Prince Charles as the heir apparent, perhaps that is just as well.
London not an English city? (Note he says an English city, not a British city. And WTF is ‘English’? Norse, Roman, Norman, Huguenot?) Anyway, as a Londoner, I couldn’t disagree more.
Can I translate for non-English readers? “[I]t was a bit stuffy and it was more sexist and more racist. But it was an educated and middle-class culture.”
Longer translation: London was boring, sexist and racist, but at least if you were white and born into the upper middle class, your position was guaranteed for life.
Shorter translation: Elderly has-been.
Londoner? What’s that? There is no such thing, no-one is anything at all in that city, you have no identity you’re a cultural Mr. Nothing and Ms. Nobody when you live there, your identity is ‘British-Something’, where ‘something’ is never ever ‘English’ (as they don’t exist and never have done, remember?)
Oh and no-one likes anyone else, racism is an equal opportunity pursuit in London, it’s traditional.
Same problem in France, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden and in whole Europe. And in the U.S.
That is by immigration politics that aims at transforming the white Population into a minority to the advantage of stone age cultist (a.k.a. the Religion of peace).
What is all this ‘policies aimed at reducing the white population’ balls? More like ‘policies aimed at providing cheap cleaners, plumbers and gardeners.’ While undoubtedly there are social problems in the UK today, anyone who lived through the 80s and says now is worse than then in any quantitive way is a liar. Given that the bet our leaders have made on the tertiary economy doesn’t seem to be paying out, and manufacturing has largely been allowed to leak overseas, things may well get worse here on in, but that is neither the fault of Indian shopkeepers nor John Cleese. Get some perspective, folks.
Lots of California bashing.
In the 1700′s and 1800′s Californians were called Californio’s. Spanish and Anglo rancho’s alike more or less getting along in a new country.
My dad’s house was on land tracing back to a Spanish land grant. Suddenly some people who moved in from back East are bewildered by spanish culture in cities like ‘Los Angeles’, ‘San Jose’ which is the oldest city in the US, and ‘San Diego’.
Don’t be so worried about it, the roots are old and deep. Its not ‘Mexican’. its ‘Western’.
john,
Different era, different people, different set of morality, no drug cartel, no Latin Kings or MS-13. No Reconquista Movement back then. No MTV, and no govt-sponsored welfare system to reward bad behavior. No political correctness and no playing the victim card in order to get ahead.
Apples and oranges I’m afraid.
multiculturalism has ruined the allure of other countries and cultures. in the past you could go to a foreign country and really appreciate it’s differences and reinforce your own patriotism. Now those differences are stepping on your own toes and you feel like an alien in your own neighborhood. multiculturalism killed the melting pot. We’re all different, thin-skinned, and no longer Americans.
I don’t care about skin color. Work hard and play by the rules. Appreciate America and her opportunities despite her warts and moles. Obey the law. Contribute back to your communities. Take responsibility for your actions and don’t play the PC victim card. In other words, just be normal.
And support the Tea Party, too.
Our forefathers who fought in WW1 & WW2 to protect Christian values, democracy and liberty would turn in their graves to witness what is happening not only in Britain but world wide. 2011 and no lessons learnt by September 11 terrorist attack, the west, continues to jump hoops with no fear of repercussions to accommodate multiculturalism – a politically correct idea that has failed in every western country. Western progressive governments selling out democracy to an Islamic culture that doesn’t believe nor embraces democracy and hate Christian values. The civil unrest in Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan etc fight under the banner ‘for democracy’ is propaganda by Islam and communists to eliminate Israel, the only true democracy in the middle east. Who do you think will be next? Europe and America?