I'll be 82 in September (2011). So I've seen a fair bit of life. I lived through the second world war. I've been widowed twice. I had cancer twice. I've raised two kids of my own and had a hand in raising three grandchildren.
One thing you learn fairly quickly when you're parenting is that children need discipline and guidance. If they're allowed to run riot, they will. At least, for a time they will. And while they do, they'll hurt themselves or the people around them. I believe that out-of-control behaviour is scary for everyone concerned - the people who're out of control and the people who have to witness that and deal with the consequences.
When people in England turned on their TVs in August 2011 and saw kids running riot in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham and elsewhere, it sparked a big debate about what had gone wrong in English cities. Night after night, youngsters were out on the streets, breaking into shops and other businesses, burning buildings and looting stores. They weren't stealing the necessities of life. They weren't after bread and meat. They were stealing computers, phones, plasma screen TVs and other electronic gadgets along with cigarettes, beer, wine and spirits and the usual street gear preferred by kids - trainers and hooded tops. The more 'ambitious' were looting jewellers as well.
The TV showed the rioters at the outset were mainly black kids and then the white kids joined in when they saw that the police were standing back, watching, doing nothing. To me, it seemed incredible that - as many guessed - the fear of being called racist prevented the police from arresting people who were smashing their way into businesses, looting and committing arson.
But certainly things have changed in England since I was young. Of course there were criminals around in the 30s and 40s and all the decades since. But here were thousands of utterly lawless young people on the rampage across England, burning and looting and smashing like the Barbarians at the sack of Rome.
There were of course older people involved too, mainly people in their 30s, and there was part of the problem. Many in the generation which has parented today's children are themselves lawless and out of control. They've given their kids virtually no discipline and precious little guidance, apart perhaps from the advice to pinch things when they can. There's a whole section of the English population that pours scorn on society, law and order, education and the idea of working for a living. That's no secret and the English and world press have widely discussed the problem of 'feral children' and 'feral parents' in England.
The liberal elite tend to argue that the rioters are a lost generation for whom more should have been done. The core problem, for them, is not that these people are profoundly anti-social and have no concern for others. The problem is that society hasn't given them enough. They should have more benefits, more education, more understanding. That's an awfully one-sided view in my opinion. It entirely leaves out the question of individuals taking responsibility for their own behaviour. One TV report showed a woman leaving a court with her young son - a child of about ten who'd been in court for rioting. She swore and railed at the interviewer speaking to her. The whole problem she said was that the government hadn't done enough for kids: there was nothing for kids to do. The interviewer seemed entirely unable to challenge that view. And yet around the world and throughout history, kids have found plenty of things to do without governments getting involved! That mother was making excuses for her own inability to guide or discipline her child. No surprise then if the child blamed "guvment" for his own thuggish behaviour. But it's preposterous to say kids in England need the government to do more for them. They have free education and, in this case I'm willing to bet, free housing and free food and amenities. That's already a heck of a lot more than a huge percentage of the world's children receive and adults like this mother should have that pointed out to her over and over again. Her son, properly guided by parents, would have plenty to do apart from rioting and stealing. He could take an interest in his education, read, play with friends, use his computer, learn an instrument, sing, play football with friends....there are clearly a thousand activities a healthy kid can do in England. And they don't need to cost much either. It would be no good that mother telling me or my generation that her kid is deprived. We lived our childhood during the war and often didn't have enough to eat. Most of us wouldn't have dreamt of stealing from others. It wasn't a question of what we didn't have. It was a question of what we did have: some proper social values in our heads, put there by parents and teachers.
One interesting report on the trials of rioters gave an indication of where English society has gone wrong in recent decades. A teenager was jailed for a month or two for looting. As he was led from the dock he shouted a very coarse insult at the judge. Nevertheless, he was led away. What should have happened is that the judge should have hauled him back into the dock right there and then and added to his sentence to teach him a lesson. Instead, the child learnt that he can insult a judge without consequence. Liberals may say that's too harsh but in the long run it does the child - and society - a lot of good. It instils respect for others and that has been sadly missing. The same report described the behaviour of a grown woman on hearing her boyfriend sentenced to a few months jail for rioting. She swore, ran out of court to the custody suite where her boyfriend was being held and tried to break in. Security men escorted her out of the court and as she left she kicked over a dustbin, scattering rubbish. Again, she should have been hauled into the dock by the judge there and then and given a fine. Instead - she too learnt that her bad behaviour went unpunished.
Justice needs to be consistent if it is to work. The English courts seem to have woken up to the fact, rather late in the day, that crime needs to be punished. They should now ensure that anti-social behaviour is met with jail sentences especially where it involves any form of violence.
It is true that English society is very unequal. The rich are fabulously rich and the poor are poor. But there are many opportunities for those willing to take them and for those willing to take responsibility for their own lives. The greatest opportunity lies in education, which is free. Many children and parents in the developing world understand the importance of education and would jump at the chance of free primary and secondary education. English kids have that and take it for granted. There needs to be a new emphasis on the importance of education - after that, parents and children can take notice of the opportunity or not. But we should all be challenged - repeatedly challenged - about our behaviour if it's anti-social. Those who choose to be lawless and commit crime should be left in no doubt that their crimes will be punished. The excuse that the government should have "done more" won't wash.
vendredi 26 août 2011
lundi 31 janvier 2011
Someone was talking to me the other day about nuclear fall-out shelters. I can't remember who it was offhand but the point being made was that sometime during the Cold War people started thinking about nuclear shelters because politicians and journalists and other people were talking about the possibility that Soviet Russia would drop a nuclear bomb on us.
I remember the Cold War and Suez and John F. Kennedy and that whole period very well. (Elsewhere on this Blog I've written a bit about the Suez Crisis.)
But anyway, I began to think that the whole idea of nuclear shelters probably owed quite a bit to the experience of the British during the war and during the Blitz. After all, it's not very likely that a shelter would protect people from a nuclear bomb. It sounds like an idea based on the triumph of hope over common sense to me...
What I think happened in the Cold War perhaps was that people had this idea of the British taking shelter from German bombs. During the Blitz, of course, people used to scramble to get down into the London Underground when the air raid sirens sounded. I don't suppose my grandchildren would even know what I meant if I used the words "air raid siren" now but during the war we all knew what it meant when that siren went off. Londoners would hurry down to the underground station platforms and sleep there if necessary to avoid nazi bombs. It might have been reassuring to be safe underground during a bombing raid but you wouldn't necessarily know of course if your friends and family were safe and you wouldn't know till the all clear sounded and you came up above ground again if your house was still standing.
I lived in Lancashire during the war and was a child. (I was born in 1929.) We didn't have underground stations there, naturally, so people improvised. Most people just went under their dining table when we heard the bombers fly over. Fat lot of good that would do, but you felt you had to take some sort of shelter. After the war began though our next door neighbours devised a bomb shelter.
They had labradors - big dogs - and had built a huge kennel in their back yard. It wasn't tall enough to stand in but it was long and wide. Once the man of the household - Mr Stuttard - realised we were likely to be bombed by the Luftwaffe (the German air force), he reinforced the kennel's sides and roof and put sandbags all round it. He and his wife had no children so they had room to let my mother, my father and me shelter in the kennel with them and their dogs when bombers flew over. I remember crouching in that kennel during bombing when the nazis were dropping incendiary bombs and hoping to high heaven that the reinforced kennel roof would stop a bomb from killing us all.
Looking back, a bomb dropped from a plane and exploding on the Stuttards' kennel would more than likely have killed the lot of us instantly. But it felt good to feel we had some kind of shelter, a place to run when we heard the bombers. My father removed part of the fence separating our garden from the yard next door so we could nip through in a hurry when we needed to. Still, I don't suppose the kennel-air-raid-shelter would have been terribly effective. Its main function was probably just to make us feel a bit safer - it was more a psychological help than anything else I imagine. And I suspect the same applies to the idea of the nuclear fallout shelter.
I remember the Cold War and Suez and John F. Kennedy and that whole period very well. (Elsewhere on this Blog I've written a bit about the Suez Crisis.)
But anyway, I began to think that the whole idea of nuclear shelters probably owed quite a bit to the experience of the British during the war and during the Blitz. After all, it's not very likely that a shelter would protect people from a nuclear bomb. It sounds like an idea based on the triumph of hope over common sense to me...
What I think happened in the Cold War perhaps was that people had this idea of the British taking shelter from German bombs. During the Blitz, of course, people used to scramble to get down into the London Underground when the air raid sirens sounded. I don't suppose my grandchildren would even know what I meant if I used the words "air raid siren" now but during the war we all knew what it meant when that siren went off. Londoners would hurry down to the underground station platforms and sleep there if necessary to avoid nazi bombs. It might have been reassuring to be safe underground during a bombing raid but you wouldn't necessarily know of course if your friends and family were safe and you wouldn't know till the all clear sounded and you came up above ground again if your house was still standing.
I lived in Lancashire during the war and was a child. (I was born in 1929.) We didn't have underground stations there, naturally, so people improvised. Most people just went under their dining table when we heard the bombers fly over. Fat lot of good that would do, but you felt you had to take some sort of shelter. After the war began though our next door neighbours devised a bomb shelter.
They had labradors - big dogs - and had built a huge kennel in their back yard. It wasn't tall enough to stand in but it was long and wide. Once the man of the household - Mr Stuttard - realised we were likely to be bombed by the Luftwaffe (the German air force), he reinforced the kennel's sides and roof and put sandbags all round it. He and his wife had no children so they had room to let my mother, my father and me shelter in the kennel with them and their dogs when bombers flew over. I remember crouching in that kennel during bombing when the nazis were dropping incendiary bombs and hoping to high heaven that the reinforced kennel roof would stop a bomb from killing us all.
Looking back, a bomb dropped from a plane and exploding on the Stuttards' kennel would more than likely have killed the lot of us instantly. But it felt good to feel we had some kind of shelter, a place to run when we heard the bombers. My father removed part of the fence separating our garden from the yard next door so we could nip through in a hurry when we needed to. Still, I don't suppose the kennel-air-raid-shelter would have been terribly effective. Its main function was probably just to make us feel a bit safer - it was more a psychological help than anything else I imagine. And I suspect the same applies to the idea of the nuclear fallout shelter.
mercredi 26 janvier 2011
Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Matt Damon, Jude Law - Boyish Film Stars Replaced the Rugged Stars of the 40s and 50s
I'm knocking on a bit - 82 in September - and I don't like much contemporary music or some work that passes for art now, but do I like to see new films. The other week I went to see The King's Speech and thought it was excellent. Helena Bonham-Carter always gives interesting performances and Colin Firth was very good.
But it did get me thinking - again - that today's male film stars are quite different from those I grew up seeing in the cinema. I was chatting to my daughters about this a while ago and they agreed. The thing I notice is that the male film stars today seem far more boyish than the stars of the 40s and 50s. I wondered if that's because I'm so much older now, but Idon't think so.
Think of the old film stars and then the new ones. Actors like Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Kirk Douglas, Cary Grant, Robert Mitchum, Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, John Wayne.
Whether you liked their performances or not, or thought they were great actors or not, you'd have to agree that they were all men - fully grown, adult, mature men. None of them were boys or boyish when they were up there on the cinema screens. Even the less rugged stars like Fred Astaire, David Niven, Dirk Bogarde and Frank Sinatra were undeniably men.
And some of the male actors who came along a bit later on, like Marlon Brando and Richard Burton, were men rather than boys too.
I remember seeing The African Queen when it came out in 1952. I was newly married, living in Washington and was in my early 20s. Bogart's performance as Charlie Allnut seemed quite familiar to me because he was like many of the men I seemed to know, including the man I'd married - men who'd recently fought in a war and won and had somehow retained all their humanity despite being toughened up by danger and fighting.
The male stars we saw in the films in those days were pretty much all like that - whether they played dependable men or dangerous men or even suave, rather pampered men they were all men, not boys.
I suppose that reflected the world that had shaped them - specifically, the second world war.
And I guess that's why today's male stars are different. To me, they seem much more boyish. More hair oil than engine oil, if that makes sense. Think of Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Ryan Phillippe, the two in Brokeback Mountain, Ewan McGregor, Leonardo diCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Johnny Depp. They're all boys compared to Bogart, Mitchum, Cary Grant, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster!
Can you imagine a remake of Spartacus with Orlando Bloom or Jude Law rising and saying "I'm Spartacus"? I can't. They're too delicate, too pretty.
Brad Pitt was quite manly in Fight Club but I can't really think of any other young - or youngish - current male stars who could recreate the roles played by the classic film stars. Harvey Keitel is one of the few rugged male actors we've seen in recent years. (Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman were wonderful in their heyday but they've become aging pussycats sending themselves up, which is amusing I suppose, but to me they don't match the legendary stars.)
Now, all this may be partly because I'm so much older - perhaps that's why the newer stars look like boys to me. But I don't think so. I think there's just a fashion for rather soft-looking, sensitive-looking male actors whereas in my day the fashion was for tougher male film stars.
The reason I think it's a real change and not just the way I see actors is that I don't see a huge difference in the female stars getting cast in films now. True, I did prefer the style and the beauty of the older stars - Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren. I did think they were very beautiful women. But there are plenty of beautiful actresses now too and they don't seem less womanly than the screen legends. They don't seem like 'girls.' Actresses like Sigourney Weaver, Sharon Stone, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, Rene Zellweger, Penelope Cruz, Reese Witherspoon, Charlize Theron and Helena Bonham-Carter don't seem less mature than their counterparts in earlier decades. (They do tend to go out in public, some of them, looking less than their film-star best which is a shame. As Joan Collins once said, the public don't need actresses to look like the girl next door - the girl next door fills that role already.)
Still, that's how this elderly film fan sees the young male film stars today. Much more boy than man, most of them.
I particularly noticed this in the film Titanic. Leonardo diCaprio was famously cast opposite Kate Winslet as the leading man and love interest. I don't much like Kate Winslet as an actress. She seems very smug and there's just something about her face and expressions that I don't usually find terribly watchable. But what struck me was that, when I looked at her with DiCaprio, she seemed like she could be his mum! Here was this rather robust, mumsy looking woman cast opposite this pretty young boy who seemed far too young for her. You could never have felt that if she'd she been playing opposite an actor like a young Humphrey Bogart or Kirk Douglas! For my money you only have to glance at the male stars of the 40s and 50s and their counterparts today to sort the men from the boys...
But it did get me thinking - again - that today's male film stars are quite different from those I grew up seeing in the cinema. I was chatting to my daughters about this a while ago and they agreed. The thing I notice is that the male film stars today seem far more boyish than the stars of the 40s and 50s. I wondered if that's because I'm so much older now, but Idon't think so.
Think of the old film stars and then the new ones. Actors like Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Kirk Douglas, Cary Grant, Robert Mitchum, Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, John Wayne.
Whether you liked their performances or not, or thought they were great actors or not, you'd have to agree that they were all men - fully grown, adult, mature men. None of them were boys or boyish when they were up there on the cinema screens. Even the less rugged stars like Fred Astaire, David Niven, Dirk Bogarde and Frank Sinatra were undeniably men.
And some of the male actors who came along a bit later on, like Marlon Brando and Richard Burton, were men rather than boys too.
I remember seeing The African Queen when it came out in 1952. I was newly married, living in Washington and was in my early 20s. Bogart's performance as Charlie Allnut seemed quite familiar to me because he was like many of the men I seemed to know, including the man I'd married - men who'd recently fought in a war and won and had somehow retained all their humanity despite being toughened up by danger and fighting.
The male stars we saw in the films in those days were pretty much all like that - whether they played dependable men or dangerous men or even suave, rather pampered men they were all men, not boys.
I suppose that reflected the world that had shaped them - specifically, the second world war.
And I guess that's why today's male stars are different. To me, they seem much more boyish. More hair oil than engine oil, if that makes sense. Think of Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Ryan Phillippe, the two in Brokeback Mountain, Ewan McGregor, Leonardo diCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Johnny Depp. They're all boys compared to Bogart, Mitchum, Cary Grant, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster!
Can you imagine a remake of Spartacus with Orlando Bloom or Jude Law rising and saying "I'm Spartacus"? I can't. They're too delicate, too pretty.
Brad Pitt was quite manly in Fight Club but I can't really think of any other young - or youngish - current male stars who could recreate the roles played by the classic film stars. Harvey Keitel is one of the few rugged male actors we've seen in recent years. (Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman were wonderful in their heyday but they've become aging pussycats sending themselves up, which is amusing I suppose, but to me they don't match the legendary stars.)
Now, all this may be partly because I'm so much older - perhaps that's why the newer stars look like boys to me. But I don't think so. I think there's just a fashion for rather soft-looking, sensitive-looking male actors whereas in my day the fashion was for tougher male film stars.
The reason I think it's a real change and not just the way I see actors is that I don't see a huge difference in the female stars getting cast in films now. True, I did prefer the style and the beauty of the older stars - Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren. I did think they were very beautiful women. But there are plenty of beautiful actresses now too and they don't seem less womanly than the screen legends. They don't seem like 'girls.' Actresses like Sigourney Weaver, Sharon Stone, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, Rene Zellweger, Penelope Cruz, Reese Witherspoon, Charlize Theron and Helena Bonham-Carter don't seem less mature than their counterparts in earlier decades. (They do tend to go out in public, some of them, looking less than their film-star best which is a shame. As Joan Collins once said, the public don't need actresses to look like the girl next door - the girl next door fills that role already.)
Still, that's how this elderly film fan sees the young male film stars today. Much more boy than man, most of them.
I particularly noticed this in the film Titanic. Leonardo diCaprio was famously cast opposite Kate Winslet as the leading man and love interest. I don't much like Kate Winslet as an actress. She seems very smug and there's just something about her face and expressions that I don't usually find terribly watchable. But what struck me was that, when I looked at her with DiCaprio, she seemed like she could be his mum! Here was this rather robust, mumsy looking woman cast opposite this pretty young boy who seemed far too young for her. You could never have felt that if she'd she been playing opposite an actor like a young Humphrey Bogart or Kirk Douglas! For my money you only have to glance at the male stars of the 40s and 50s and their counterparts today to sort the men from the boys...
Inscription à :
Articles (Atom)