The Coarsening of Our Culture

[Virgil]

In another thread (God’s Purpose, now closed because we’ve strayed off topic and of which I’d like to continue here with a new topic) madhura presented a situation quoted below that must happen a lot more frequently than I imagine. She was surprised at my feeling that this was a small minority of men.

Is it so inconcievable that man could ever be decent? Or is it that standards have fallen all around, so its a shock to most people to come across someone who expects others to actually be genuine? Situation: Girl on bus. Girl fights her way through sweaty crowd of people and takes an aisle seat. Standing over girl holding onto rails is gentleman of about fifty. Three minutes later, girl realises gentleman is not merely leaning over her because of the bus lurching, but that he is shoving his dick into her shoulder, while staring straight out of the window with a blank expresion on his face.

She asks about falling standards, and I think that is a important question to ponder. And I have pondered it in the past several years (perhaps even more than that), but somehow in that thread it didn't occur to me to bring it up. Then a couple of things I observed in the past day led my thought's back to madhura's question.

Number 1: I was jogging yesterday and my path took me around a local high school (14-18 year olds, for those outside the US). At the near by bus stop there were lots of kids standing and some dance music playing and what looked like a 14 year old girl was grinding her backside up against the front side of a young boy's hips, if you know what I mean, to the music, of course.

Number 2: I was in a waiting room last night with my mother-in-law, who's in her upper sixties and there was another fellow there who I would guess was in his seventies. The TV news mentioned some teen agers who were caught planning some terrible act, and the two of them got in a conversation how kids are horrible, direspectful, and out of control today as opposed to when they were young, which I guess had to be the 1950's. Normally I would chuck this up to nastalgia, but they got very specific: houses that didn't need to be locked, and that's in Brooklyn NY, no grafiti, parents feeling comfortable with their children out at night, and respectful dances that teenagers went to. Sort of like the Happy days TV show, at least that's the image created in my mind.

It has seemed to me that our culture has coarsened. Has respectful dancing been replaced first by giggling of body parts and now actual grinding of body parts together? What about the "shock jocks" on the radio making infintile jokes, and not just of sexual nature but the lowest, crudest type? what about the violent video games and movies? And why do most movies have to have a sex scene in it?

I know this is not a question that applies to our times alone. Someone once pointed out that the mores of a culture go in cycles. There is a quote from Cicero, O tempora! O mores!, [Oh, the times! Oh, the customs].

Here are the questions I'd like people's responses to:
(1) Has culture coasened over your life time?
(2) Why do you think that?
(3) If so, how do we improve our culture? What are the solutions, if you think solutions are warrented?
(4) And for the women, has that experience (or something similar) described on the bus happened to you or someone you know, how often do you think it happens, and how many men do you think participate in such behavior?
(5) Does music, art, and literature play a role in the coarsening or are they reflective of society?

[blp]

I was ready to laugh this off as the usual myopic handwringing from the title, but you've won me 'round to some sense of coarsening - even if you're not sure about it yourself.

As a first stab at thinking about it, and without wanting to go full on Marxist about it, I'm inclined to say yes, there's been a coarsening and put a lot of it down to economic factors. The rich have got a hell of a lot richer in the west since the fifties or even the seventies, while overall GDP has remained about the same. Since GDP's an average, that means there's also a hell of a lot more poverty. The work of a journalist like Barbara Ehrenreich in investigating what life is like at the lower echelons of society in the US reveals a scandalous level of hardship and poor prospects in one of the richest societies in the world - one that has always prided itself on providing all its citizens with the opportunity to get ahead by sheer dint of hard work.

Some of this is paralleled here in the UK, though the situation's less extreme.

[kilted exile]

1/2) Has culture coarsened over the coarse of my lifetime? This depends on what you are refering to if you mean in a purely sexual nature, then yeah I guess it has got a bit "coarser" but only in so much as people are familiar with sex at a young age.....after all the '60s/70s were not exactly the period of chastity and purity. If you are referring to overall attitudes of the youth of today I would say we still have taboo subjects and there are still lines which are quite clearly there - for example I would suggest that jokes of a racist/homophobic/ mentally handicapped nature are far less acceptable in culture today than even 10years ago.

3) How do we go about improving society? Well this would depend on what you think would be an improvement, and whether you believe it is societies place to change the attitudes of todays youth or whether this is an issue best left to parents (and if the parents are the ones to blame, sorry that aint my generation). To use the sixties example again, I am quite sure people were interested in changing the attitudes of youth then as well.

5) Role of Music,art,literature: lead or reflect? In my opinion both they influence fashion and attitudes, but if they did not also reflect the culture of the time period they would soon be ignored.

[Nightshade]

I suppose really I should stay out of this conversation because
a) Im not old enough or stayed in "this" culture long enough to qualify or for over your lifteime and b) I havent had any of that kind of experiance (thank goodness).
However having said that I cant resist.
last week here was an article in the newspaper blaming the way society is today on the Baby boomers. According to this essay it said some Calfornian wrote a book about it and how the baby boomers have never grown up so are a bad example and thinghs are going to rot. However becasue of this the younger generation having to live with this are become more and more moral and well stern and committed to rules and structure. That being said cant say Ive seen much evidence of this "morality" I rember being on the stairs behind some year 8s or 9 so 13/14 year olds and they were talking about how theyd got pissed and ratarsed at this other girls party
I mean honestly!
And there was somthing else I read recently ah "Romantised sinning on the television" or somthing ( it was a novel about a woman dealing with druggie daughter) and how this encourged the acceptance of somthing that is after all wrong. And acctually even Ive noticed on tele recently how its more oohh a convicted felon How lovley can I help you rob/cheat/ commit your next breaking of the law..
But I wouldnt say its really new I think its cyclic like you said (is that what you said I got ) anyway if you look at it historically it goes up and down like that you get the "wilder" generations then you get hit by reformations and some type of puritan (and Im not talking about the religon but rather the actual word as in wanting to makle the socity more pure like ohh the victorians?) and then you have a backlash against that that eventually gets worse and worse (about where we are I think) then bang someone decides society needs cleaning up and we are stuck in thyhe handmaids tale, though I highly doubt it will be that extreme butI hope you get what I mean.


EDIT actually Ive just thought crime doesnt equate with coarsening does it? And the coarseinig was sort of dimmed in the media anyway in the what was it (1930s/20s???) with the decency act or whatever it was that banned all sorts of things form being shown on the screen as Irember suggestive dances nudetity and the like were on the list of banned things which means that maybe if media really does influence the behaviour of people then isnt it possible I suppose for the people who were more easily influenced whikle the media was at its most "innocent" lived in a less coarse society becasue they werent being shown it all the time and thus didnt belive it to be a socially acceptable norm?

[emily655321]

I agree with what everyone's said here. Night makes a very good point about the pendulum effect in our society. (By "our culture" I assume you meant Western culture, Virgil?) From the 1890's (the "Gay Nineties") through the 1920's (the "Roaring Twenties"), American and European culture made great strides in recovering from Victorian repression, and women began wearing shorter dresses, they cut their hair and started drinking and smoking, homosexuality became more accepted than it had been, etc. Then of course the Great Depression hit America and WWII hit Europe. People became more sober and conservative, and in the Post-War '50's a Conservative bent on life became the norm. These are the days Virgil's mother and friend seemed to be remembering as the Happy Days.

True, in more conservative times rule and order can make it seem as though everything is perfect and right with the world. But then, why did it change? Why did all those people in the '60's seem to think there was something wrong with it? Well, to begin with, the days were decidedly happier if you were a White middle-class Christian. Especially if you were a heterosexual male with no leanings toward liberal politics. Otherwise you might find yourself being beaten by the police for accidentally looking at a White woman the wrong way, or not smiling enough when someone ten years your junior called you "boy." God help you if your neighbor felt compelled to tell people you were a Communist, no matter whether it was true. True, you wouldn't find young girls bumping and grinding at the bus stop, but it was in large part due to the fact that female sexuality was preached against as shameful and women were confined to the kitchen, unless they felt like cutting loose and vacuuming in their heels and pearls.

We may see more "coarse" imagery these days, but it's due to a greater amount of freedom in society. As Kilted pointed out, our culture also encourages us to be much more respectful of others' differences, particularly with regard to race and homosexuality. Women are free to have careers, and men are encouraged to take on a larger domestic role. Of course, the downside to such openness is that the hard moral repression of the 50's has been lifted, and many people react to that by having lower personal standards for their behavior.

Although, I also believe what blp said about the worsening economic situation. "Coarse" behavior has always been around, and it doesn't go away and come back again. It is the norm for those stuck in poverty, and with growing poverty rates, it is becoming more widely seen. Teenagers think sexual promiscuity is pretty cool, and they emulate the behavior, regardless of their economic background. In this way, trashiness has come to be en vogue. But not to worry, polls have shown today's youth to be leaning back toward conservative values, so the good old social repression is waiting just around the corner.

As to skeezeballs on the bus... no, thankfully I've never experienced sexual abuse, in public or otherwise. I've never heard of public abuse happening to any of my friends, or of any man I know having done it. I don't hear of it happening very often at all, but it may just be that I don't get out much. I tend to agree with Virgil's own impression that it is not at all the norm—most men I know are steadfast in their protection of women from perverts. But I don't believe it's quite as rare as you seem to think, Virgil. Still, I believe such men are in the minority.

[Petrarch's Love]

I tend to agree with a lot of people here that society goes through waves of being more or less repressed, and that we've left certain kinds of coarseness behind even as we've become more coarse in other ways. As for dirty old men on buses, I have experienced some of that but I sense it is a very small percentage of men (certainly have never been remotely tempted to make a sweeping judgement about all men because of it) and though I'm willing to believe it occurs every day somewhere in this city (just about anything occurs on a daily basis somewhere in Chicago), it certainly isn't anything that happens to me personally very often (not something I'm thinking about everytime I get on a bus by any means). Strangely enough, though, when I was in Italy I got pinched and harrassed (or at least men attempting to do so and succeeding less and less as I caught on to how to deal with it) fairly regularly on buses as compared with here in the U.S., where it's really probably occured once or twice to me personally. It was during my travels that I really got expert in the most efficient ways of getting a man to back off. I wonder if it had to do with being an obvious foreigner and hence an easier looking target though? I suppose Koa would be able to tell us if her bus experiences differ as a native Italian woman. I certainly don't think there's a higher percentage of perverts in Italy or anything (I mean we're talking a few weirdos compared to the many many really wonderful people I met there--most of the people were so polite and friendly and I don't want to give a bad impression of a whole country or something), and I sure didn't think it was such a big deal that I couldn't figure out a way to handle it pretty quickly while expanding my vocabulary (it's the way I learned the word "basta!" ). Incidently nothing much appears to have changed bus-wise. My mother's experiences as a young girl twenty-five to thirty years ago (both here and on a trip to Europe) seem to have been pretty similar to mine, and I believe my grandmother (from the WWII generation) can think of at least one minor incident on a bus in her youth.

[emily655321]

My mother's experiences as a young girl twenty-five to thirty years ago (both here and on a trip to Europe) seem to have been pretty similar to mine, and I believe my grandmother (from the WWII generation) can think of at least one minor incident on a bus in her youth.

An interesting observation. It would certainly seem that, while overt "coarseness" in our culture may wax and wane, it's the behavior on buses and the like that seems to remain constant. It's not the people who change; it's the acceptability of putting what's already there out in the open. My mother also has stories of male indescretion from 30 and 35 years ago, which I remember because she scared me with them to keep me on my toes when I went out with friends in junior high school.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

The "youth of today" have always been out of control and degenerating into bestial debauchery and the old have always looked back on their youth as a time of greater innocence and simpler pleasures.

Neither of these views are true - both are stereotypes. There have always been "wayward youths" and there always will be. The past was never as rosy as it appears seen through the rosy vision and cataracts of hindsight.

What has changed recently is that sexuality has been demystified and brought out of it's closet. But even this is not new - there have been periods in history that were considered just as licentious as ours is now - Take England in the years following the restoration as a prime example. Our prim and proper Victorian ancestors may have appeared so on the surface but their staid exterior concealed a London where brothels outnumbered churches by more than 100 to 1.

Human nature doesn't change, only the opportunities given to express that nature; and as has been pointed out already, this tends to go in cycles, there is a period of sexual freedom which is foillowed by a moral backlash, which in turn gives way to a new sexual revolution. And all the time, whether out in the open or behind closed doors, babies are making babies, or at the very least, practising hard.

[Sami]

These debates do recur. There’s also the problem that they tend to be cast in very vague terms and refer to things/problems that are very hard to accurately measure. For example, how are we to measure whether more men are harassing women on buses than a few years back? And, even if we could accurately gain this info., it’d still be very complicated to explain why this was happening. In any case, this is not really the kind of question that these debates about coarseness and declining moral standard usually focus on. Often I wonder if they’re wheeled out now and again to distract attention away from other factors, some of which would be easier to measure, such as the economic changes that have been mentioned earlier. (I’m not suggesting that any of the responses here are deliberately trying to conceal anything - I just mean generally).

My local radio show was covering a similar topic to this one the other morning, and the presenter read out the passage I’ve copied below. I thought it was funny, so I looked it up. It sounds a little like Virgil’s comments on coarse dancing, but in this case the dance is the Waltz. These comments were published in “The Times” in 1816.

"We remarked with pain that the indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced (we believe for the first time) at the English court on Friday last ... it is quite sufficient to cast one's eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs and close compressure on the bodies in their dance, to see that it is indeed far removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society by the civil examples of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion."

It’s interesting that the waltz is presented as a “foreign dance”. What is considered “coarse” or “proper” could be seen as very culturally specific. The accounts of experiences traveling on buses in different countries might suggest this is the case. This probably poses another problem for measuring whether culture has become more or less coarse.

[The Unnamable]

As usual, I find myself in neither camp. Yes, every age has probably looked back and lamented the loss of the world of yesterday but there has been a worrying enlargement (in terms of both incidence and influence) of the forces of ignorance. The self-regarding, mawkish, ill-educated, scarcely brought-up scum assemble in ever greater numbers to set the tone. In this they are helped by a media industry that is as devoid of principles as it is of talent.

Moral panics sell newspapers. Responses to moral panics sell more, albeit different, newspapers. A few years ago The Sun newspaper’s campaign to ‘Shop a Yob’ was as predictable as the backlash of outraged liberal sentiment that it activated. Although, for many people, yobbish behaviour is a part of the fabric of everyday life, for a journalism practised as a business, it’s simply a source of copy.

For those who believe that there is a social behaviour problem, neither the advocates nor the opponents of ‘name and shame’ offer much hope. Debates over whether saturation media coverage reflects or constructs an image of lawless Britain are of little relevance to anyone who has spent a Saturday night in any large town there.

Saying that there is widespread yobbish behaviour usually brings the kind of awkward silence that follows a suspected racist remark. To assume that yobs themselves are responsible for their behaviour is to deny Liberals an opportunity to display their sensitivity credentials. Anyone who can be represented as a persecuted minority must have their behaviour ‘understood’ and must be protected. Revealing criminals is a criminal offence.

To suggest that there has been any enlargement of the forces of ignorance is to invite scorn. Those who complain are marginalised as out of touch in their supposed yearning for an idyllic, non-existent past age. Their complaints are dismissed as the recalcitrance of an elite terrified by the waning of their power. Somewhere in the middle of this, the problem is forgotten; The Sun’s lack of concern for the rights of the individual is admonished, yobbishness continues unchecked and real debate is avoided.

Fear of such a debate arises from fear of the terms in which it would be conducted. The trepidation felt in confronting sensitive issues is apparent in the disclaimers that precede every potentially contentious opinion. “I’m not racist, but…” and “I’m not saying dyslexia is…” and so on. In schools, pupils’ behaviour is no longer ‘bad’ but ‘challenging’, people are no longer ‘unemployed’ but ‘job seekers’ and offenders are dealt with not by a police ‘force’, but a police ‘service’. If language is sufficiently sanitised, the unfashionable idea of personal responsibility can be eradicated: ‘challenging’ behaviour shifts responsibility to the teacher; ‘bad’ behaviour supposes free will. Western Liberalism demands that the right not to be exposed as a yob is as important as the right to be free from yobbishness. It’s an easy right to defend when your neighbourhood is yob-free.

For different reasons, both the tabloid and the broadsheet press are failing to do much to promote the rights of victims. In the case of the tabloids, it isn’t difficult to see why. The motivation behind “Shop a Yob” is financial. Editorial decisions are made on the basis of more readers, more profits. Telling people what they want to hear is a more successful business strategy than informing them of the complexity of issues. That simplification means falsification is overlooked.

Nevertheless, The Sun found it necessary to give us a justification of its campaign. The business ethic underlying its pretensions to be serving a democratic function can easily be masked if the correct sentiments are expressed. They are "proud to lead the fight back against the yobs... For too many years law-abiding parents trying to raise decent families have watched tearaways pulling society apart.” Such sentiments strike home precisely because people do perceive a decline in standards on the evidence of their daily life, not merely as a result of media coverage. Too many broadsheets ignore this. They are too concerned with not upsetting a readership that has subscribed to a populist ideology that insists that all values are now relative and the only absolute judgments to be made are those that condemn the values of the past. This new agenda insists that everyone is equal and every opinion valid. The remarkable thing about this process is the way that it has proceeded unchecked by the charge that there is nothing egalitarian about it.

This is where the media has failed in their duty to perform the vital democratic function, which, as long as it exists simply to stay in business, it cannot. Presenting readers with ideas that do not conform to their existing values and beliefs is the surest way to bankruptcy. Journalism’s role in creating an informed and circumspect electorate comes second to its role as a business. The development of journalistic discourse can partially mask this fact and enable us to remain oblivious to the inherent contradiction of truth as commodity.

Attempts at social engineering through politically correct representations in the media results in what an American visitor recently described as “propaganda with a straight face”. While commentators plot the revolution with manicured fingernails, the British National Party wins a seat in Broxbourne. It’s a reminder that if Liberalism fails to address the concerns of the electorate, there are darker forces waiting. Those who see a deterioration in behaviour are not looking back in anger, but around in despair.

[Sami]

Unnameable, I don’t agree that a focus on personal responsibility has become "unfashonable" in public discourse– if anything, it’s become more prevalent as a focus on structural/systemic problems has fallen out of favour. To use one of the examples you mention: Previously an unemployed person was seen as lacking a job, and this lack was met by a form of social responsibility. According to the critics, this allowed too much passivity. So, the unemployed have been replaced by the “job seekers”. The issue is no longer defined as a lack, but as an activity, “seeking”, for which the individual, rather than society, is seen as responsible.

[The Unnamable]

Sami,
The rebranding and repackaging of words and ideas have become all-pervasive but I was referring primarily to personal responsibility for bad behaviour in “lawless Britain” – or do you consider unemployment as precisely that? Have you lived in the UK for any length of time in the past thirty years? The linguistic sleight-of-hand you focus on is yet another example of the way those in positions of authority use language to mould our perceptions. However, it is not the result of any attempt to reposition personal responsibility so much as a simple way of pretending that Government is addressing the issue while, obviously, blaming the victims for their predicament. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used that one small example of renaming as you see it as contradicting the main point. I nevertheless stand by my claim that there are Liberals everywhere trying to explain and justify appalling behaviour – mostly those who don’t have to live next to it. Perhaps we should look closely at the men who shove their genitals into the shoulders of females on the bus and offer a heartfelt plea for compassion and understanding for those who are forced to live their lives on such degrading terms? It’s not the men’s fault – they are deprived / poorly educated / underprivileged etc. (for the stupid, I am being sarcastic).

[blp]

Attempts at social engineering through politically correct representations in the media results in what an American visitor recently described as “propaganda with a straight face”.

And that was said with a straight face was it? I'll take the UK media over American any day.

I nevertheless stand by my claim that there are Liberals everywhere trying to explain and justify appalling behaviour – mostly those who don’t have to live next to it. Perhaps we should look closely at the men who shove their genitals into the shoulders of females on the bus and offer a heartfelt plea for compassion and understanding for those who are forced to live their lives on such degrading terms? It’s not the men’s fault – they are deprived / poorly educated / underprivileged etc. (for the stupid, I am being sarcastic).

Well, my post probably sounded like a step towards that liberal justification you're decrying here. I certainly have those tendencies - something to do with the fact, perhaps, that so few of the young men I met from Westminster and Eton grew up to be football hooligans or aspirant gangstas, though some of them, god knows, are probably into some tidy white collar crime by now that of course hurts nobody except for thousands of facelesss shareholders. Just nicer boys I guess - and let the rest eat torts.

I should say in my defense that I do live next to it - not the guy with his dick out on the bus, but I can barely step out the door without running into last year's UK tabloid moral panic, kids in hoodies and, almost as if they were trying to live up to the hype, as soon as it started, I started getting hassle from them - at one point a gang of them surrounded me and tried to pull me off my bike and take my bag. A friend of a friend was attacked down in Whitechapel and his face was permanently disfigured with a brick. On an almost daily basis I see kids riding down the wrong side of the roads on their weird, too small little dirt bikes and it seems to be a matter of pride with them to try to frighten people. One of them even asked me, rather plaintively I thought, if he'd succeeded in frightening me. Say anything that might seem like admonishment to these kids and they start screaming obscenities at you and, gangsta style, making gun shapes with their hands.

Oh, but it's complicated. You also get kids who look exactly the same, but are the soul of politeness and good humour. And anyway, I can't tell if any of this is relevant since I also remember being scared of skinheads when I came to the UK some 25 years ago - and some of them also turned out to be nice enough, non-racist kids who'd gladly help an old lady across the road, even if she was black. I imagine I see an anger at a quotidien level that wasn't there before, but the present is always going to be more immediate than the past, so who knows. Still, to finish my address to Unnamable's woolly liberal blandishments, that anger is something I'm seeing among the poor and decidedly not elsewhere and that makes sense to me. I've been a little poor myself at times and poverty is bloody stressful. If this sounds like justification to anyone, I advise that they re-read my post. I haven't said anywhere in it that I think violence is just.

When we talk about 'our' culture, well, in this context, what that sounds like is what's coming from the States and this complicates things further, because what may have a specific socio-economic explanation at the source probably doesn't have quite the same one when it's copied abroad. It's hard to say the next bit without sounding like I've got a pole up my sphincter, so, hang it, I'll dive right in: I'm thinking particularly of the culture of bling and gansta rap. How doe we get from 'Power to the People', black pride and the civil rights movement to uzzis, glocks, diamond teeth and niggas as a term used by blacks and 'I like big butts'? Yeah, I see a coarsening there, a tragic one.

[Sami]

Have you lived in the UK for any length of time in the past thirty years? ...I nevertheless stand by my claim that there are Liberals everywhere trying to explain and justify appalling behaviour – mostly those who don’t have to live next to it.

Yes, I have lived in the UK. I’m English. I grew up in London and I’ve spent most of my life there, although I don’t live in the UK at the moment. I agree with your criticism “liberal excuses” to a very limited extent. I think you’re pointing out the naivety of some middle class lefties who feel badly about social problems, but don’t reflect on how their own comfortable lifestyle insulates them from the realities of those issues. If so, then this annoys me too.

But I really don’t agree that these liberals are “everywhere”. Willingness to look to social causes of “bad behaviour” doesn’t seem to be on the rise. I would say it’s declined in the UK over the course of my lifetime. Also, there’s a big difference between trying to explain cultural problems in terms of issues like poverty, and justifying them in the sense of excusing the individuals from any responsibility at all. Is it the same thing to try to understand why something happened, as saying that it’s okay that it’s happening? I think you’re collapsing two different things in your comment above. As I said earlier, debates about declining moral standards often seem to be a means to detract attention away from how cultural questions are connected to other areas, such as the economy.

[The Unnamable]

It’s a funny old world, blp – you and I are polar opposites in so many ways. I’m from the kind of housing estate currently infested with the vermin you mention. Some of my primary school playground companions did go on to graduate in petty and not so petty crime. My mother telephoned me only last month to tell me that another one of the old gang had been murdered. He and his brother were into small time drug dealing and had a disagreement that ended with the one kicking the other down the stairs before stabbing him. I can remember my eighty eight year old grandmother ‘red leading’ the doorsteps of her one-bedroom flat, sweeping the ‘front yard’ and caring about the cleanliness of the washing on her line. That simple dignity was precisely that – not some idyllic, rose-tinted image of my own - and I won’t allow it to be dismissed and replaced by the kind of mindless and aggressive lifestyle (as opposed to life) that you mention. Something happened to our world. As Larkin said, England has become "the first slum of Europe, a role it won't be so hard to win with a cast of crooks and tarts".

My way out of it was the local grammar school. I have no idea really why I went to university while my former playmates went to prison. I can think of no better place for them, though. This is perhaps why I have run out of sympathy for those who, in the words of a Telegraph commentator, “wear their ignorance like a badge of honour.” Too many of them had no more excuse than I did. Funny how I like the Telegraph and you appear to be a Guardian fan – it’s a paper I hate but one I’m supposed to read as someone educated into the middle class. Given our backgrounds, it should be you reading the Telegraph and me The Sun.

The cause of all this is unclear to me but a total failure of education is a prime suspect. Examination results have never been better and the number of young people going to university has never been higher. So why is everything so awful? Schools have become results factories in an era of pitifully low standards. Higher education seems more concerned with creating courses in Golf Course Management and Leisure Studies – either that or courses designed for no other purpose than to redress past injustice and validate minority claims.

It's hard to say the next bit without sounding like I've got a pole up my sphincter, so, hang it, I'll dive right in: I'm thinking particularly of the culture of bling and gansta rap.

You see – there’s that disclaimer I mentioned above. Why are we so scared of just saying what we are thinking? How did that happen? It’s a real loss, though – it means that we can’t discuss issues like single parenting and the culture of certain ethnic groups.

How doe we get from 'Power to the People', black pride and the civil rights movement to uzzis, glocks, diamond teeth and niggas as a term used by blacks and 'I like big butts'?

Aren’t you thrilled by the rich cultural diversity of it all?

I've been a little poor myself at times and poverty is bloody stressful.

I’m sorry but I couldn’t let that one go. So, would you say you’ve had a tough life, Mr. Orwell? I hope you didn't catch TB during your time on skid row.