Quote Originally Posted by Ash View Post
I think you're possibly close there, but Julie Birchill has surely lapsed from that priesthood. Isn't she rather more Daily Mail these days?

I wasn't exactly 'there' as you put it, being more on the fringes of the fringes, but knew people who were closer to the height of the fashionable scene, or at least some more secretly fashionable subset of it, and part of the uniform was the politics. Even then I found it to be rigid and intolerant.
Oh, I wouldn't have any idea what became of her exactly, but it fits alright; you say yourself that each side's behaviour and attitude is as bad as the other. "Tiring", you said. Thing is, we don't mind demonisation when it happens to those we don't like anyway, do we. So that has become the normal way to engage with alternative views and opinions. See Also: AKB v WOB; in a way, saying that electing Theresa May is the end of the world is from the same thought process as saying no manager can replace Arsene Wenger. Or if you don't agree with me, you're worse than Hitler. "Rigid and intolerant" makes sense then, doesn't it, because who wants to be (or even be seen to be) tolerant of Hitler.

I was speaking of the "self-appointed aristocracy.. controlled by a tiny metropolitan-based media/pop cultural Brahmin caste who effectively see themselves as being the arbiters of all that is or isn't acceptable," as B put it. That sounds extremely familiar from those days.

Now just imagine that sort and their "hangers-on and lickspittles .. of similar outlook and location, but lesser status, who seek reflected glory by mindlessly parroting their views," transposed from fashion etc. to politics, as well, and other areas of apparently serious adult life, like football. Perhaps you'll even recall a Spitting Image skit mocking the youth television programming of the time, Janet Street-Porter and a' that, which featured celebrities going in and out of fashion every few seconds.

Politically, there's no Margaret Thatcher anymore, of course, but Donald Trump, say, will do just as well as a bogeyman. The antis simply never grew up, they didn't have to. We don't need values anymore, we have Facebook statuses and pinned tweets instead.

I was there, on the fringes of the fringes, as you say. Being from the sticks, I was taken by the urban, edgy, sophistication of the thing and I'd say it was actually the Arsenal that got me away from it all, helped me keep everything real. Certainly the Arsenal and the punk scene. Hard to imagine now, isn't it