Woke nostalgia
The worst generation, ever.
My brother went to the Oasis concert in Croke Park, Dublin. “How was it?” I asked. “Amazing, fantastic, there were grown men crying all over the place,” was his reply. “Did you cry?” I asked. “No” But he looked a bit sheepish.
My brother and his wife attended the Oasis concert and had a great time. We both grew up in the Brit pop era and being in the Pale that’s what we listened to while watching Manchester United dominate the Premier League and eventually Europe.
When my daughter attends concerts today it is with an adult and seating. That’s not how we rolled in our day. I reminded my brother that I attended REM in Slane, where Oasis backed. He seemed unconvinced by this but I was 14, I was there and there were no adults or seats in sight. I also went to Blur, Pulp, probably Oasis again and a few others I honestly can’t remember. I can’t remember because I’m old and because I can’t remember…..
All the reviews of the Oasis concerts say they were excellent and brought down the house. That’s nostalgia for you. I have absolutely no problem with this. I have written before that if you grew up in Ireland in the 80s and 90s you had won the lotto. You were too young to remember the recession but came of age in Italia ’90 and the Celtic Tiger.
(80s movies on video tape. You had to drive to the Xtravision to hire the film and play in on your machine. It was important to rewind the tape when you finished. These days everything is on demand. That makes us demanding.)
I was very lucky as I left for London just before the crash and did not buy any property at the top of the over inflated Celtic Tiger. (A few of my friends were not so lucky). I was penniless in London which means when the crash hit in 2008 I did not have far to fall.
Now it is our turn to indulge in some nostalgia and although the Irish Times and others will tell you how awful Catholic Ireland was at this time, most of it is utter hogwash. Maybe it was different in the countryside but not where I was.
So we now challenge the boomers who have for at least for two decades indulged in the most epic forms of nostalgia, especially the Americans who set the tone for western culture. There they are with all the wealth, all the power and their hands on the cultural levers. So they roll out boomer nostalgia after nostalgia, the most recent I heard was a BBC Radio 4 series, What happened to Counter-Culture?
That came on the radio (as you know I listen to BBC Radio 4 in the car) and I instantly turned it off. What happened to Counter – Culture? Well they all grew up and went into banking and the law I suspect. But a lot also went into movie making which is why we have About Schmidt (a great movie but still boomer ) the Hours (which I have an odd obsession with also a boomer movie) and many others. In music the old folks, the ones that should be in nursing homes by now, such as the Rolling Stones are still with us.
It has come to my attention that the rockers and the bad boys who once told us all to tear up the rules and get trashed on drink and drugs often ended up opening some kind of yoga farm in the Shires. See Geri Halliwell, Alex James from Blur and even Liam Gallagher. Alex James for instance owns a sprawling “17th-century, honey-stoned farmhouse in Kingham, Oxfordshire that he shares with his wife Claire and their five children.” Rock on!
You have got to hand it to Geri though, she was the slutiest of all the Spice Girls and then went on to have a very traditional wedding, complete with white dress and veil (she was 42 for goodness sake) and lives in some massive country pile. Shame about the husband though.
Anyway, it got me thinking. We had it good, we truly did. The 90s, to state the obvious, was pre 9/11 and post 1989 when the Wall came down. It was, we were told the End of History. All the big battles and ideas have been settled and liberal democracy and the free market had won. Political commentators actually used to write pieces wondering about what they were going to write about. Turns doubt that was hubris and it was just a pause before the next big threat – Islamic extremism. Things have gone downhill ever since.
What will the sad saps that had to grow up in the 00s and came of age in the internet reminisce about? How will the Snowflakes and woke Generation Z tell their own story?
Why they will pull up a chair in their communes (as they still cannot afford a house) and are still paying off their student debt and they will tell their tales of woe, of how they joined the online mob to get some one other cancelled for saying something they didn’t approve of. Those were the days! When Nobel laureates could get cancelled in an instant. Remember how fast they took that scientist Sir Tim Hunt down? You don’t remember him, but I do.
They shall remember fondly how they shouted and swore in the face of their professors over Halloween costumes and it was their professors who had to resign? Good times.
It is unlikely the students will have matured, even in their debt ridden homeless state. Having your every demand and whim indulged rarely encourages maturity. They will luxuriate in the memory of MeToo, a worthy cause before it turned ridiculous and dangerous taking down Ministers for the evil crime of touching someone’s knee. They will recall fondly how they almost took out a Supreme Court judge until he faced them down. They had the run of the place, everyone was terrified of them until President Trump came on the scene. He started the turn around.
Indeed those were the days! Who could forget Black Lives Matter and the burning down of minority neighbourhoods. What was even worse was how this was then transplanted to a very different cultural and historical landscape in the UK and Ireland.
And then there was the transgender madness, where they got people to lie to themselves, to convince themselves that men could become women and women could become men. Then they got started on the children; a truly evil development that encouraged vulnerable and gender confused children to mutilate their bodies. A lot of blood was spilled along the way, so how they will eventually spin this in Hollywood will be interesting to see.
The Snowflake/Woke nostalgia will all be set to a Taylor Swift soundtrack and other youth music I know nothing about. Who am I kidding? They won’t be playing music when the snowflakes are reaching retirement as they will have handed the whole place over, lock, stock and barrel, to the Islamists.
This week left-wing politicians in Britain and Ireland were falling over themselves to denounce the flying of their national flags, saying they have been hijacked by extremists who want to use them to ‘mark territory.’
Well, if flags mark territory, and that is nearly always the case, then what does it say about all the Palestinian flags you see flying over government buildings? The latest being flown outside St Andrew’s House, the Scottish government home. The Palestinian flag is frequently flown in the Republic of Ireland or every single weekend in ‘pro – Palestinian marches in London.’ Just marking territory…
Claiming territory
Well just blow me down with a feather, Labour politicians in both Ireland and the UK are down with flag waving. In an interesting but certainly not a coincidence, the line has been sent out, that flag waving is a bad thing.
I spent the summer of 1968 with my Irish Grannie and Aunt just outside Omagh.
We walked the 6 miles round-trip to mass where the men sat on one side and the women on the other, except me as a foreigner from Britland who sat with my Gran and Auntie.
We walked the 8 miles round-trip to Cookstown to watch South Pacific.
We had fresh eggs from the chickens and water came from a stream, no electricity and bread baked in an old stove.
It was the best holiday I've ever had.
Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. I was a child in the 1960s on the northside of Dublin. Money was always short. For instance my mother sold her beloved bicycle in 1962 to get some cash. Aged ten in the mid 1960s I remember the local women gathered around the cashier in Campbell’s shop at the top of Ballymun Ave. bewailing the fact that minister for finance Jack Lynch had removed the subsidy on flour and as a result the sliced bread went up by a halfpenny. Yet even if money was scarce couples could still save to buy a house.
Only three families on our long road could afford a car or a telephone yet we children always managed to buy a copy of our favourite weekly comics such as the Victor, Hotspur, Dandy, Beano, Bunty etc.
The Finglas mobile library would arrive every week with its treasures - ‘Malta Convoy’, ‘The Wooden Horse’, ‘Swallows and Amazons’, ‘Kidnapped’, ‘Treasure Island’ etc.
We grew up aware that a magical land called England existed where delights like Opel fruits were available as well as well-paid jobs. When I was eight the three lads in their 20s next door left for England and came back three years later with a second-hand Thames Trader tipper, a old cement mixer on steel wheels, a dumper and various other bits that allowed them set themselves up as builders.
Another neighbour’s son went off and joined the Met police as only Culchies got jobs in the Gardai.
RTE then was a wonder that served up programmes like ‘The Avengers’ (with Diana Rigg as Mrs Peel), ‘The Fugitive’, ‘F-Troop’, ‘Green Acres’ etc.
Yet according to the Irish Times etc those sunny days I recall in the 1960s were actually on a par with Stalin’s Gulag.