The Lonely Londoner

Retrospective review:

‘Natives: race and class in the ruins of empire’ (2019) – by Akala

Virtue! a fig! ‘tis in ourselves that we are thus, or thus..

– Othello

You labelled me – I’ll label you!

So I dub thee “unforgiven”

– Metallica

1

There is a particular scene in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather where the Don instructs his son, Michael, telling him:

“There are men in this world,” he said, “who go about demanding to be killed. You must have noticed them. They quarrel in gambling games, they jump out of their automobiles in a rage if someone so much as scratches their fender, they humiliate and bully people whose capabilities they do not know…”

The Don continues, explaining to Michael how he made a loyal weapon out of the brutal baby-burner Luca Brasi. An interesting thing about that passage, aside from its obvious truth about the stupidity of many, is that Puzo cannot use the expression ‘road rage’ because – in the early 1970s when the novel came on the scene – the expression hadn’t been invented. However the behaviour which later became known as ‘road rage’ was and is a real phenomenon of human behaviour.

Not all expressions minted to describe human behaviour describe something new. Sometimes the expression is new while the behaviour it describes is old. ‘Binge-drinking’ is an example. ‘Binge-drinking’ means ‘getting drunk’ – a behaviour almost as old as the human race, and is a sub-set of ‘anti-social behaviour’. But if one gives an old problem a new name, then – as if by magic – there is a new ‘problem’ for mouthpieces of ‘authority’ to complain about, while demanding new legal powers from the government of the day.

Whatever happened to the Man of Mass Murder?

Retrospective Review:

Joker, (2019) director Todd Phillips

I was in my mid-teens when I realised the Joker character was a murderous maniac. Until then I had only the Batman television series to go on. There were two Batman-comic stories which stood out when I was a mid-teen. The first, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke, is always cited as a ‘classic’ work or a ‘seminal’ work by reviewers. It is certainly a disturbing work. The Joker, wanting to turn Commissioner Gordon mad, calls at the home of Gordon’s daughter, Barbara. As she opens the door she is shot in the stomach: the bullet severs her spine leaving her paralysed. Joker then strips her naked and takes photographs of her. He uses huge blow-ups of these pictures as part of a depraved ‘ghost-train’ ride he forces Gordon to experience. The second story is A Death in the Family: an odd story (Batman and Robin go to Ethiopia) collected as a graphic novel, in which Joker uses a crowbar to convince Robin’s face and skull into a new shape. This was so obviously not ‘kids’ stuff’ that the television series seemed to hardly feature the same characters.

Jack Nicholson’s turn as Joker in Batman pitches the character exactly halfway between Cesare Romero’s television version and Alan Moore’s sadistic lunatic. Tim Burton’s movie contains the kind of ‘dark humour’ that would be used by Quentin Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs (Mr Blonde talking into a severed ear) and Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (Lestat dancing about with a corpse.) Although we never see Nicholson’s Joker do anything properly sadistic on-screen we do know that he does something unpleasant to Jerry Hall’s face. This is at least a nod to the character’s real personality.

Douglas Murray: The Strange Death of Europe and The Madness of Crowds

 

Under all the mattresses of Mr Murray’s logic, reason, research and dry wit there is a pea of pessimism lurking. It’s difficult, after reading both works, to have any hope for the future of our culture. One cannot slot-in a new foundation once the house is built. The house is in the way. The house has to fall before a new foundation can be inserted. That’s bad enough in itself. But once our culture has fallen what could the new foundation be?

It Leaves a Jagged Edge

My mother told the A and E receptionist ‘He’s sustained a bad a cut.’ I leant in to the window and corrected her. ‘Actually, I’ve been stabbed,’ I said. It’s possible I sounded irritated, but I was speaking the truth. My sister had stabbed me in the upper left arm with a long, white-handled kitchen-knife. I had a small towel wrapped around the wound to soak up the blood.