A Nasty Business

1,943 words

Smoking cigarettes
And writing something nasty on the wall.
You nasty boy!
— Stevie Wonder, “I Wish”

[C]ontinual fear, and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

I recently celebrated my 62nd birthday, if you can call successfully cooking chili con carne and drinking wine with it instead of beer a celebration. It set me to thinking about what has changed during my lifetime, since I first sniffed the air in north London in March of 1961, sharing my birthday with Prince Edward, Sharon Stone, Bix Beiderbecke, and Osama bin Laden. So, what has changed?

Technology, obviously. When I was a little boy, the family telephone was made of the famously unbreakable Bakelite, a sort of toughened plastic. It was huge and fantastically heavy, as well as having a rotary dial and a plaited electrical cord. To call the emergency services you dialed 999, the number chosen because it would not be dialed by mistake. To call someone else, you dialed 100 and spoke to an operator, always a well-spoken women. You gave her the number and she patched the call through. After all these years, I still remember that our telephone number was Caterham 42805. Everyone, of course, now has their own telephone, and with global reach.

What else? Cultural ephemera, certainly. Everyone under the age of 40 now seems to have tattoos. When I was a kid, only squaddies (soldiers) and football nutters had tattoos, and you stayed away from both. Now, it seems mandatory. Full declaration: I have two tattoos myself, both small and discrete, one on either shoulder blade. The first, the worm Ouroboros, I had done primarily to see how much it hurt. The second, the name of my old boat, I got done in Alaska when I was drunk. I wasn’t that drunk, mind you — no reputable tattooist will decorate a person who is properly (or improperly) drunk. This is not because you might wake up and wish you hadn’t had your favorite band tattooed on your calf, but because alcohol thins the blood, and things can get messy. My brother told me that, and he is a tattooist in Sweden, so this is not fake news.

Then there was television. We didn’t get one until I was four, and the first thing I remember watching on this strange little monochrome set was the football World Cup Final in 1966, famously won by England. Some neighbors came by to watch, as they didn’t have a set of their own. Incidentally, and for anyone who has even the vaguest idea of what I am talking about, that disputed Geoff Hurst goal crossed the line, as far as I am concerned, because of Roger Hunt’s reaction. For those of you who don’t know what that means, that will be as obscure as Aramaic.

World Cup 1966 – Geoff Hurst’s Controversial Goal in Color

I remember watching the Moon landings with my dad while we were on holiday at the seaside. The screen was larger than ours because property-owners were much better off than we were.

But what else has changed, bar technology and the habit of scarification? It has to be more than just telephones and tattoos and TV. Funnily enough, it took two television programs, one from my childhood and one a bit over a decade old, to show me the major cultural shift that has happened to my country in my lifetime.

The comedy writing duo of Ian La Fresnais and Dick Clement is well known to Englishmen of my generation. They co-wrote many successful shows and films, and were perhaps best known for writing Porridge, featuring the great Ronnie Barker as a jailbird with a cynical sense of humor. They also wrote Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, a short-lived but brilliant sequel series to a 1960s original, and first broadcast in 1973. My father and I would watch it together, and even the opening credits and theme tune ^[2] can still reduce me to tears. The lyrics have much to say about the change in British society which concerns me:

Oh, what happened to you?
Whatever happened to me?
What became of the people we used to be?

Likely Lads revolves around two old school friends, Bob and Terry. The latter has been in the army and returns to Newcastle, where the series is set, and finds Bob a success in business and happily married to Thelma. Their lifestyles clash, although their old allegiance lives on. And that’s it. These were the days of comedic writing which didn’t need anything more than mildly sarcastic dialogue and a comedy of errors set in a living-room or a pub. The most complex and malicious plot I can remember was the one where Bob and Terry have a bicycle race and brakes are tampered with. This was the great genius of British comedy, and saved a fortune in production. Watch an episode of Steptoe and Son and you are unlikely to see many outdoor scenes, and I would estimate that 90% of Porridge took place in a jail cell. It was like Beckett with laughs. To what can we compare it?

Forty years later, in 2003 and running for 12 years, the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show broke records and became a cult classic. The plot is, in essence, the same as Likely Lads: Mark and Jez are university friends who end up sharing a flat (which is what the British bleakly call an apartment), Mark being reasonably successful in middle management and Jez being a hopelessly untalented musician and inveterate dope-smoker.

I am very fond of both shows, and their similarity strikes me just as forcefully as the great divide that separates the cultures that produced them. I can find no other way to put this other than to sound like a seven-year-old. Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? is a nice program, Peep Show a nasty one. In Likely Lads there was simply banter, poking fun, and social embarrassment (standard fare for British comedy). In Peep Show, there are not many scenes in which someone is not acting in a vile, self-serving, malevolent manner. It is funny, but very nasty. I was reminded of this listening to the late, great English polymath Dr. Jonathan Miller — who was a former research fellow at my university and with whom I once had a very enjoyable chat about Plato’s Symposium by the canal in Camden Town — talk about his erstwhile colleague, the English comic genius Peter Cook. Cook’s work, said Dr. Miller, “was not nasty humor, but amiable satire.” How nostalgic that made me feel.

“Nice” and “nasty” are, I suppose, the childhood, starter versions of “good” and “evil,” like training wheels on a bicycle. “Nice” we can leave to its own devices. That was a nice evening, he’s a nice guy, that’s a nice dress. One knows it when one sees it, an all-purpose thumbs-up or nod of approval. “Nasty,” as a word, has had an etymologically rickety ride across Europe, via Norse, Germanic, and French before lodging itself into Anglo-Saxon. It is one of those words with a great stack of definitions and, by the time it reached English, it was appropriately polyvalent.

You can have a nasty cold, a nasty accident, or a nasty cousin who spreads nasty rumors. You can have a nasty cut on your hand, be warned of coming nasty weather, or watch a football player commit a nasty foul. There is far more nuance here in terms of approval or disapprobation. The word also took its place, when we were children, in a sort of semantic league table in which “nasty” played a singular role.

If you were deemed a silly little boy, or a stupid child, or a naughty boy, the blow was a light one, easily shrugged off. If, however, your parents or teachers called you or an act of yours “nasty,” the stakes were higher. To be a nasty little boy carried a moral underpinning which naughtiness did not have.

And that was my minor epiphany. My country has become nastier during my lifetime. But why? I haven’t been in England for over three years, not since people thought COVID was a Roman poet, but I have spent enough time on the poorer streets of London to know exactly why that city — and, increasingly, the country — has become rather a nasty place to live. The reason is the importation of, or at least failure to stop, black immigration and its attendant toxic culture, particularly from the Caribbean.

This is, at its base, a nasty culture: a combination of high testosterone, trash talk, an aversion to education as “acting white,” a virulent but currently unmentioned and unmentionable hatred of both women and homosexuals, a vile musical culture (I refer to rap and its bastard offspring rather than reggae, which I have always liked), and a keen awareness that white people are better viewed as prey than potential mentors. This all combines to act on any civilized society — as England was in my youth — with a fast-acting toxicity. And this venomous culture is very infectious. In the world of nature, there are various animals that mimic other animals, either for food or protection. In London there are many white kids, and increasingly Muslims, who dress, speak, and act like blacks for much the same reason. These kids — and teachers have told me this — see that black kids are not afraid of the police, not afraid of teachers, and not afraid of the disapproval of their parents (or parent, as is more likely the case for blacks). So they mimic them, and thus the malevolence, arrogance, violence, lawlessness, and disrespect spread like a virus. Ever wondered why blacks go on so much about respect and disrespect? It is because it is a reserve currency the legal tender of which is fear. The statement is not, “Respect me because I feel I have earned your respect.” It is rather, “Respect me or I’ll stab you.”

No white person in their right mind would live in a black or Muslim area of the United Kingdom. The old American adage springs to mind, that a university (or college) degree teaches you all about colored people while enabling you to earn enough money to live far away from them. As the black population, and the concomitant rust of their culture, increases, this will become less possible for white people, who are rapidly becoming the soft underbelly of Western countries, including and even led by my own. The UK will become, inexorably, a nastier place in which to live.

It is no coincidence that the two cultures that will not allow themselves to be laughed at in Britain are Muslims and blacks. They are allowed to laugh at themselves, of course, and there is plenty of self-referential humor. But the white man is not allowed to point and laugh. Nietzsche wrote that all humor contains cruelty, and Orwell that every joke is a small revolution. My mother used to say, as I am sure many mothers did, that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.

So, thank you, O black people. We helped you, educated you, taught you how to do things you would never have chanced across by yourselves, and then we foolishly accommodated you and your tiresome culture of machismo and laziness, both moral and literal. The Empire Windrush was a ship carrying a more dangerous payload than the deadliest of German warships. A nasty business, and one in which echoes that line from “Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?”:

What became of the people we used to be?

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