by Ian B
My heart sank when I saw the Hall guilty plea. Yewtree needed a first scalp, and now they have it. The concept of justice has been entirely trampled now by a stampeding mob frenzied by moral panic.
I can understand why an elderly man in his position would accept a plea bargain, for the reasons described by Ecks above. But it is sad.
Ecks quotes me, some time ago, saying they want a Steven Lawrence Moment. I still stand by that. The thing they are after though is a complete repudiation of the 1970s. It represents the period between the two Feminist waves, when First Wave Political Correctness all but collapsed, and before Second Wave PC had been installed, under which we now live.
First Wave PC was the Victorian/Progressive system. It was installed at the behest of upper class matrons, seeking a puritan value system to maximise their own benefit (strict control of men and morality, such as temperance, censorship etc). They then demanded the vote in the expectation that women voters would maintain that system in place. Having achieved as much as they could, FW Feminism withered away. Intelligent educated women gravitated to marxism and other such ideologies. As such, there was nobody left minding the Feminist store; and as a consequence, that first wave of PC broke down.
It turned out that women en masse, even with the vote, didn’t really like it that much; because it restricted their freedom too. Feminists believed that women are naturally reluctant virgins who only have sex due to male pressure. That isn’t true. When the Pill arrived, the women were truly free. And Puritanism wasn’t what most of them wanted.
So, the second wave arose, out of a small cabal of upper class, prudish protestant and Jewish princesses. By tying themselves to the Left, they could pretend to be new and radical, even though all they were doing was resurrecting the aged Victorian system. (A few more liberal feminist writers spotted this, and denounced the Radicals as “Neo-Victorian” in the Village Voice, but were sadly ignored).
One has to grudgingly admire them for their success. The breakdown of the Victorian system by 1970 was so complete that people less motivated- or less mad- would have thought the situation hopeless. But they persevered. It took torrents of propaganda, endless political manouevering, moral panics of an insane nature like Satanic Ritual Abuse, and a cunning alliances with remants of first wave puritanism on the American Religous Right, the adoption of “trauma” narratives from loony therapists, the Recovered Memory cult, and enormous dogged persistence, but they did it. They reinstalled sexual Puritanism.
Hence the need to kill, specifically, the 1970s. It represents the world without puritan feminist rules. It represents a time when they were not in control. It is thus vital to their campaign to show this period as one of horror, degradation and misery. It is saying, “look, when you tried freedom, see what happened! Do you want that again?”.
People have forgotten that men like Savile and Hall and Dave Lee Travis were once, in the 70s, genuinely big names, admired by millions, especially youngsters. By the 1980s, they had become rather faded stars as the 1970s became tragically unhip, with memories of flared trousers and everything made of nylon. The Smashie And Nicey characters represented that perfectly; these two faded, naff, minor celebs past their sell-by date. A bit creepy, old hat, representatives of an era that had entirely passed in the wake of Punk and Alternative Comedy and so on. Nowadays, it is rather hard to believe that they were ever cool, and so the idea that any young woman might have thrown herself at them seems so hard to believe; indeed the women themselves, now older, would have found that they had once done so hard to believe. Unlike the big rock stars who (besides being considered generally left wing and thus jolly good sorts) are stil considered admirable and “cool”, if in a retro-nostalgia kind of a way, and who everyone knows had numerous underage girls on their tour buses and who, surely, some of whom must have been more insistent than a naive young groupie expected- these faded 70s has beens were perfect targets for represnting the repudiation of the era. Because all one can imagine today is a naff old man in an ugly sweater and combover, seedily fiddling with a naive waif. The mental image is important. In the mind, we might well create a sympathetic mental image of a young Mick Jagger with a fangirl. But not that silly old fucker off It’s A Knockout. Perfect!
Well, the Radicals have played their joker on this one, and it looks like they’re not heading for an early bath. (How long before we hear of Eddie Waring in his pork pie hat, doing something unspeakable?) This is the damnation of an era. An era when the matrons briefly lost control of everybody else. They will not willingly let that happen again.
Dark times ahead, I fear.