This Temple of Souvenirs and Trinkets is Dedicated to the Almighty Market

If one ever needed further proof of the BBC's decline from a 'Temple of the Arts and Muses ... dedicated to Almighty God' to a corporate den of iniquity (from today's Times):

The BBC is spending £3 million on branded hoodies, mugs, umbrellas and promotional knick-knacks. 

The freebies will be given to staff and viewers to promote programmes and “corporate identities”. The money, equal to nearly 20,000 TV licences, will also be spent on fleeces, fridge magnets and bags, according to a tender document circulated to potential suppliers.

So much for the Reithian 'prayer that good seed sown may bring forth a good harvest, that all things hostile to peace or purity may be banished from this house, and that the people, inclining their ear to whatsoever things are beautiful and honest and of good report, may tread the path of wisdom and uprightness.'

We now worship the Gods of the Market Place. Our braindead society is kept alive on the artificial respirations of consumerism and corporatism.When will the modern right realise that it created the vapid liberal culture that tyrannises us? When will they realise that the marketisation of society has turned once noble institutions like the BBC into a purveyors of hoodies and mugs, whose chief contribution to modern culture is soulless game shows, allegedly comedic panel programmes and other unwatchable and unlistenable drivel. Norman Tebbit has, admittedly, finally begun to realise the role of the Thatcherite right in all this. 'I sometimes wonder,' he said, 'whether our economic reforms led to an individualism in other values, in ways we didn’t anticipate.' But why did it take thirty years for him to just begin to realise this?

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

I truly worry that what has been good will be neglected, that we will live among great cultural ruins, if not physical ruins too. We are clearly in an epoch of rejection. We dislike the past, we mistrust its achievements, and instead we trust fully in 'Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind'.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

Kipling wrote that astonishing, unforgettable poem after the devastation of the First World War -- devastation which we now know is permanent, and which we seem to have endorsed. The war was the beginning of the end for the old world, and we are clearly happy about it. Bulwarks against this change, like the BBC, are all surrendering if they have not already. The alarming thing about our descent back into barbarism is that so many people seem to be willing it -- they enjoy it. They think they are advancing things, pushing forward with the times. It's so heart-wrenching to see.

Our Empire of Ugliness

The recent violent attack against this lesbian couple has filled me with such anger. Late at night on a London bus, four men demanded the couple kiss for them. The men threw coins at them and made lewd comments. The couple naturally refused, and so the men beat up the couple, leaving them severely bloodied.

Sadly this story was all too familiar. I have not witnessed such physical violence before -- this attack is certainly an extreme but nonetheless relevant example -- but I frequently see vile behaviour by men (mostly) when travelling to and from London late at night. You hear men joking about gang rape, telling women they look like sluts, drunk men aggressively flirting with woman, men verbally sexualising a woman in every imaginable way, from her dress to her race, men telling less attractive women they look like men, men jeering whenever a young woman passes them in the carriage. An attractive woman, unless dressed in a burka, is likely to get several ugly remarks from men as she walks down a train carriage late on a weekend night. (And perhaps the women in a burka will receive ugly comments too, though of a different kind.)

(One never sees a conductor, though, and the transport police only seem to turn up once a year, usually in an almost empty train, or occasionally at the gates of a terminal station checking people's tickets -- which seems to be all they really do here, raising revenue for our confusing and overpriced transport system.)

We are an ugly society. We live in ugliness, we build ugliness, and so naturally our behaviour is ugly. It is an 'empire of ugliness', as Simon Leys called it. The beautiful is made pornographic. Selfish motives are the only ones that matter. Power is all that matters. 'Ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge,' wrote Leys, 'obscurantism does not result from a dearth of light, bad taste is not merely a lack of good taste, stupidity is not a simple want of intelligence: all these are fiercely active forces, that angrily assert themselves on every occasion; they tolerate no challenge to their omnipresent rule.' These four young men were asserting themselves. They could not tolerate the fact that these young women refused to live down to their pornographic, primal expectations of society.

Do these men realise the consequences of violent attacks like this? I don't think people generally realise the severity of such violence. On top of the mental trauma, which can alter the habits and psychology of a person forever, it can remove a person's sense of smell or taste, it can damage their eyesight, their hearing. One of my greatest joys is to play music. But just break one of my fingers and I will never be the same again; you will have taken away years spent advancing my skill. A life forever changed, almost ruined. Usually for the stupidest, most horribly meaningless of reasons. I hope these women suffer no permanent damage. And I hope the men who did it do suffer a just punishment, which, we can only hope, changes them for the better.

Oh, Fortuna, you degenerate wanton!

A Confederacy of Dunces is the most delightfully offensive and reactionary novel I've ever read. It might even surpass Tobias Smollett. Why is it that disgruntled reactionaries are always so much more fun than disgruntled idealists?

Ignatius J Reilly, medievalist and hot dog vendor, is a selfish, unfiltered reactionary. He should be entirely unlikable yet one cannot bear to part with his company. He possesses unrivalled rudeness, a capacity for wild fabrications and a love of being both appalled and appalling. His talk of mongoloids, masquerading sodomites, degenerates and abortions could fibrillate an entire university campus. I have read that there are many readers who just cannot find anything to like in Ignatius. But as far as I can tell such readers lack any understanding of theology and geometry.

Of course, Ignatius has no desire for their company or affection:

'I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one.'

Charles Ives's Holidays Symphony

I have wanted to hear this symphony performed for more than three years now. Perhaps more than any other piece of music, it has had the most transformative effect on my life. It was the first piece of classical music that I truly loved. For about a month I was entirely obsessed with it. I did not yet understand Purcell or Shostakovich, Josquin or Rodrigo, Bach or Haydn -- they were all fathomless streams of notes to me -- but something in Ives's music gripped me. And none of his work gripped me more than the Holidays Symphony.

It is easy to deceive oneself into thinking one knows why an important event in one's past occurred. Nevertheless, looking back I think I became fascinated with Ives because he was at once a traditionalist with a love of the most modest manifestations of civilisation, yet also someone who saw the grander purpose in these things, how they too lead to something transcendent. I approached Ives less as music and more as a Chestertonian argument in favour of re-enchanting the ordinary. It was at this time that my worldview shifted from the dreary utilitarianism and sensualism that I had acquired by osmosis, to one formed in reaction to this and in pursuit of truth, beauty and goodness. I was looking for meaning, and in Ives I began to find it.

Music has changed me more than anything else. In music I found something about the world that truly filled me with wonder and joy. I never before knew such music existed; for I never knew there existed something more than the numbing superficiality and vulgarity of modern popular music. In our anaesthetised society we have forgotten the power music can have over us. One thing I appreciate about Islam is that it recognises the danger of music. Music is the reason for squalor of urban nightlife (which could not exist without its barbarous music; silence would reveal the stupidity and evil of it), it can be the sound and rhythm that motivates the soldier, it can be a means of avoiding introspection and manipulating people's decisions (e.g. shopping and advertisement). But it can also be the sounds that bind a community and a nation, the consolation in times of grief, the complexity that reveals our nature more than any novel, genetic study or, God forbid, psychology paper. Ives understood this social function of music, which too many composers and musicians seem to forget.

The fourth movement of the Holidays Symphony, 'Thanksgiving and Forefathers' Day', is one of the most inspired and beautiful symphonic fourth movements. It far exceeds the tedium of Beethoven 9, and is far more rewarding than the buoyant life-affirming endings in most of the great symphonies (enjoy them though I do). 'Thanksgiving and Forefathers' Day' is first menacing, then indulgently simple, then modestly grand. When the chorus enters at the end does not feel tacked on like Beethoven 9 -- nor did Ives have the impertinence, unlike Beethoven, to make you suffer through 20 minutes of it, ruining an otherwise decent symphony. What Ives includes is, as I said, the most modest and yet the most grand of things: a hymn. The movement starts out with dense symphonic brooding, gives way to the most beautiful of folk songs, and ends spectacularly and yet humbly with the hymn. When you hear it you realise how much you love life. But not in the way that Beethoven 5 does -- that joyous rollick. Rather, you realise how much you love the ordinariness of life, the texture of life itself, not merely the exciting moments in an otherwise flat existence. I used to view life the latter way. I think Ives helped me see it more as the former.