This week's war: The Sixties
29 Aug 2004 by Josh Hannan
Declaring war on things is very much in vogue right now: terror, racism, vandalism, junk food, apathy, political correctness, binge-drinking; where once there were social challenges (or 'problems' as we so misguidedly used to call them before the age of rhetorical enlightenment) we now have enemies. No longer do we have social ills to be cured, but enemies of an economically productive society that need to be fought. The ambulance has been given an armour-plated makeover and it rushes to do battle with no reverse gear.The latest enemy to be named and shamed is 'The Sixties'. The fabled incipient promiscuity of that decade has apparently grown, evolved and mutated into a monstrous moral bankruptcy, and the monster now leads an army of pugnacious binge-drinkers onto our streets every Saturday night. Who would have thought to make the connection between 'All You Need is Love' and an over-stretched A&E department? Thank God for those who are able to bring to our attention things that, for all intents and purposes, would otherwise not be there.
Sadly our latest enemy is too sneaky to allow itself to be tackled head-on, having cleverly manifested as a conceptual ideal protected by a moat of time.
Naturally an arduous amount of thinking was undertaken by a tank in order to identify the enemy. Many and varied were the possibilities mooted by the cream of New Labour intelligentsia: a need for better 'education', tougher licensing laws, greater numbers of CCTV cameras, more 'bobbies on the beat', photo I.D., retinal scans, genetic fingerprinting, colonic cartography; even single mothers were proposed before somebody realized they had already been done.
I found Ivan Prescott, newly appointed 'Booze Czar', grizzling into a double vodka and black following one particularly gruelling session. "We live in the second free-est, sixth richest country in the world for Tony's Sake!" Ivan sketched out a quick visual aid on a beer mat to reinforce these statistics. "So you tell me, what's wrong with these ungrateful plebs?" he enquired.
The focus groups and questionnaires had, apparently, been even less helpful. Ivan pulled a wad of beer-stained papers from his briefcase with an invitation to "take a look at this crap".
TO WHAT, WHOM OR WHEN WOULD YOU ATTRIBUTE BRITAIN'S CURRENT DRINKING CRISIS? (Open ended... please probe)
I only had time to read one of the answers before Ivan snatched it from my hand with a belligerent gesture:
...Britain may well be the sixth richest country in the world, and on paper this seems a positive statistic. The reality of the situation, however, means a longer working day in order to afford a greater cost of living. For most, little time is left to cultivate the skills that enable a person to spend their leisure time in some constructive pursuit: reading, sports, creativity; these are activities that require sustained, disciplined, concentrated effort before they give gratification. 'Education' is now synonymous with 'training for jobs'. Excess, for those who have not been primed early on with the ability to appreciate any kind of cultural fulfilment, is a quick and easy means of letting off steam...
"You disagree?" I asked. "With what?" he replied. "What the hell does it mean?
For myself, I was reminded of a passage from Dostoyevsky's Memoirs From the House of the Dead, a book recording the day-to-day lives of inmates in a Siberian prison camp. The author describes how the prisoners would scrimp and save over a number of months, often going without food, heating fuel and whatever other feeble luxuries were available to them, in order to buy a single bottle of vodka. Once the goal had been achieved the man would drink himself into a state ferocious oblivion. On these occasions fellow inmates, usually surly and unhelpful as you might expect, would actually hide the reveller from the eyes of patrolling guards; who also, I suspect, turned a blind eye to the infraction, understanding the necessity of these men to enjoy one night of 'freedom' amid the usual cloying drudgery.
I put this point to Mr Prescott, who answered with a blank stare and a referral to his posterior.
In fairness, it is not hard to see how the reasons behind the current state of affairs should have been attributed to a time when promiscuity and excess came back, once again, into fashion. The sixties must have been the most obvious choice. But that was a different kind of excess, born of positivity. These days, the average binge-drinker probably couldn't tell you who painted 'Gin Lane' and 'Beer Street', or indeed when and why. But I suspect they are seeking escape from exactly the same flatline monotony as their nineteenth century counterparts, though of course without the cathartic benefit of ITV's 'Loose Women'.
"That's the trouble with 'peace, love and harmony'," Mused Ivan. "It gets boring after a bit."
And maybe he has a point. Any screenwriter will tell you that the audience's attention is engaged through conflict. Those in power understand this and have tried to give us our hit. But it didn't take long to discover that Iraq was bad shit (man). It just left you with a headache and bad paranoia.
Maybe that's why society didn't follow through on the sixties ideal, why we stopped wearing flowers in our hair, why we abandoned socialism for competitive capitalism, and why the enduring myth of 'The Sixties' isn't to blame for a bloke getting bottled on a Saturday night.
I asked Ivan if he had ever seen 'Bob Roberts'. "Bob who?" Ivan waved another tenner at the barmaid. "Is he a party member?"
