Selfish Whining Monkeys: How we Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy. Rod Liddle
And it works, I think. Although the boys are still prone to say something embarrassing about Hitler very loudly in German restaurants.
My long-term memory, which used to be pretty good, has become, of late, frayed and elliptical, its edges gnawed away by increasing age and a continual drip feed of alcohol. My short-term memory, which was never terribly good, is pretty much shot to fuck, for presumably similar reasons. The distant past, which I was once sure of, has become a sly and shifting place, a different country in which not only do they do things differently, but they also do things differently as to how you think you remember them doing things, if you get my drift. Now only the generalities remain, along with one or two flashes of total recall – like the toy plane, and the dog bite – so bold that they almost blind, so perfectly brought back that one begins to get a bit suspicious, to doubt their veracity. Sometimes, too, I remember stuff without recalling where it is I remember it from, some strange electrical impulse in the synapses, much like the one that made my old half-breed dog Skipper, when he was especially tired, circle the carpet wearily three or four times and then paw compulsively at the shagpile, as if it were a shallow, dusty depression in the Serengeti surrounded by lethal enemies a million or so years ago, rather than covering the floor of a 1950s-built semi-detached house in Middlesbrough with The Likely Lads about to come on the TV and an almost unending supply of Rich Tea biscuits.
It would be easy, given this conveniently acquired vagueness, to be nostalgic about my childhood and – contra Sartre – all that remains of it. Given, too, the fact that I was undeniably happy as a kid. But when I look back, nostalgia is not the first emotion which makes its damp and cloying presence felt – although nostalgia is always hovering somewhere in the background, like a flatulent ghost, and I suppose that from time to time it will need to be banished with a big stick. No, the primary emotion I feel, looking back at the years when I was a child, is one of immense guilt: that I do not do things as well as my parents did them; that my basic sense of morality is unhinged and at best equivocal, whereas theirs was, essentially, anchored, and furthermore anchored in decency. No matter how many places I fly to with an agreeably open mind, and with the kids dutifully in tow.
I suppose this seems a strange thing to say, given my parents’ views on a whole bunch of stuff, not least the poor old wogs. I don’t possess their views about wogs, or at least not all of them. In fairness to my mum and dad, their opinions were not quite as bilious as I may have implied; it was a more nuanced thing, more subtle. My mum, for example, quite liked Caribbean people, because she considered them to be ‘cheerful’ – and even Malcolm X and Papa Doc didn’t serve to disabuse her of this notion. On the other hand, she couldn’t abide ‘Indians’, by which she meant everyone who lived between Aleppo and the Burmese border just east of Cox’s Bazar, at which point they promptly became jabbering, slit-eyed, robotic and cruel Chinks. Chinks, then, were quite bad, although not so bad as Japs. Japs were cunning and cruel automatons.
Then there was her mild animus against Jews, which I found utterly inexplicable even when I was very young – but which presumably had its fascistic roots in her East End of London upbringing. I remember well the Yom Kippur War – with my dad and me cheering on the Israelis, whom we admired for their appalling travails, their Western-ness and competence, and my mother howling support for the valiant Arabs, who were nonetheless still wogs, of course, but sort of honest and steadfast wogs, unlike the Jews. A bloody rare thing, honest wogs. That’s how we viewed these new TV wars between competing angry wogs, back then: as a sort of Champions League semi-final, take your sides, may the best man win, let’s hope it goes to penalties.
My dad, meanwhile, had a vague fondness for ‘Indians’, a contempt for Americans, a visceral loathing of the French except for General de Gaulle, for whom he expressed qualified admiration, and a sullen disdain for the rest of the world’s people, ranging west from Monmouth to Copenhagen. I mean, really, west to east – Monmouth to Copenhagen, via Americas North and South, Asia and Africa. Everywhere, that is, except for New Zealand and Australia, and also – because of that nice Christmas tree they give us every year – Norway. It wasn’t racial hatred at all, mind; just disdain and utter contempt.
And yet once, in the year before he died, my dad told me he’d always wanted to visit Valparaiso. As a kid he’d seen it on a map, and heard it spoken about, and it somehow conjured a beguiling exoticism of a place far away where exciting and strange things might happen. Like me, he had a thing about maps, wanting to know where everything was, how all these awful, contemptible places full of dubious people connected up. And so somehow, staring at a map years before, he had got it into his head that exciting things might happen in the Chilean seaport of Valparaiso. It had never occurred to me that he wanted exciting things to happen. He had always rather intimated that he preferred that they wouldn’t.
But, all things considered, my parents held a somewhat narrow and rancid view of the world that seems determined to exist beyond our shores, one undoubtedly occasioned by the Second World War – a struggle in which we were opposed by bestial enemies and hindered by cowardly and devious allies, but nonetheless prevailed, as you might expect. And also, one supposes, occasioned by the vestigial tail of our old empire left dangling inside their brains. Whatever the causes, this is all I have on them, my parents – this lofty disdain for billions of people, a disdain shared close to universally among people of their social class and age. Not a raging racism by any means – until the 1980s, my mum and dad voted Labour, and would rather have voted Communist than NF – just a meme rooted somewhere deep inside, and which was usually not articulated at all, just sort of there, and ever-present.
But this is all I have on them; about everything else, they were right. And I, and my generation, seem by contrast feckless and irresponsible, endlessly selfish, whining, avaricious, self-deluding, self-obsessed, spoiled and corrupt and ill. We are the generation that has spent the small but hard-earned inheritance we got from our hard-working parents (mine went on that most irresponsible and selfish of all of our new and expensive freedoms, divorce lawyers), and are now busy spending the money we should be leaving to our kids. And while our own children are temporarily materially indulged, and deprived of that most crucial human right, boredom, they are otherwise neglected, too often considered an encumbrance. My generation is the one which will not wait for anything, because it feels it has the right to have everything now – and this is true not simply in material terms, although that’s bad enough.
Again, this isn’t nostalgia, a demand for a return to the values of 1964. A friend of mine up in Darlington died of polio in that year; another friend, back down in South London, had rickets. I don’t see much benefit in bringing back polio and rickets, still less smallpox, which I remember being terribly scared of back then.* And the various processes which have inculcated in my generation its sense of entitlement and adherence to a sort of endless and witless moral relativism have not all been for the bad, either. It is hard to argue against longer life expectancy, greater affluence, safer workplaces, the freedom to escape from a hopeless marriage, the rights of women to be treated equally, and so on. But a certain moral code has been lost along the way, which has contributed lately to our country becoming close to bankrupt, a nation of broken families clamouring about their entitlements siring ill-educated and undisciplined kids unfamiliar with the concept of right and wrong, where there is an ever-diminishing sense of community and belonging, a perpetual transience, if you fancy a cheap oxymoron.
This kind of complaint is often seen as one of those rather tired why-oh-why right-wing arguments, invariably followed by a finger pointed at those jabbering long-haired liberal bores of the 1960s, with their Marcusian and Gramscian idiocies, who rewrote our education system, demanded the new divorce laws, took over the criminal justice system and so on. And sure enough, there will be some of that in what follows – but it is not even half of the story. At least as many of the most repellent aspects of my generation, of where and how we have become so palpably wayward, so fucking full of ourselves, are the consequence, directly or otherwise, of that singularly grim and vindictive Conservative government of the 1980s. And when those two philosophies come together – they are not so distant as you might think, both concerning themselves, primarily, with self-empowerment – the result is especially toxic; a determination to do away with everything – society, authority – but ourselves.
And