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That, the title, an infamous media line, immortalised by ‘The Dude’ in the cult classic The Big Lebowski.

But that’s not what I came here to talk about…
(another infamous line, coined by Arlo Guthrie in Alice’s Restaurant)

Both, in their way, are about what I’m thinking about writing about. I’ve observed a thematic tendency to my own blogging – and often the inspiration is a combinational synergy of information triggered by exposure to something in particular. Often art, film, or music. From that, I do further research which, inevitably, leads to further exploration of disparate, but inter-connected, information… and so on, and so forth. But my theme today is not about my thinking process…

The original inspiration was seeded by watching Tom Brown’s Schooldays (the 2005 ITV adaption) the other day. Set in an English boarding school of the 19th century, it, for me, represents a strong storyline of the paradox in the ‘Britishness’ of the day – class based bullying and bastardisation – and, what we might see as, the more positive aspects of the ‘young British gentleman’ of the time – dignity, right thought, and right action – ‘christian values’. A line which stuck in my mind (from Tom Brown to George Arthur)…

“Of course you believe in violence, you’re British”

For the story overall, it surprised me that I recognised the modus operandi of the boys. Thinking through that a little more I realised that that actually wasn’t too surprising. The modern military establishment has its roots in the school cultures of 18th and 19th century Great Britian – and having spent my formative years (15-28) in the male culture of the R.A.A.F. I experienced, first hand, that culture.

On reflection, it just seems like a bit of a time-warp, that, that harsh culture – roughly speaking, a societal version of the survival of the fittest – was probably appropriate to its day, but where does it fit today? I mean, the Britsh Empire of that day was led by slave traders, forced colonisations, and a war machine fighting for the supremacy of European waters – in this light it might make sense to create creatures who were arrogant, cruel, and largely devoid of moral fibre.

That seeded aggression is still with us today it seems to me. But I don’t quite get its relevance, or its usefulness, though. In related thinking I’m currently re-watching Civilisation. And one of the assertions which Kenneth Clark makes through the first half of the series is that civilisation is fed by, and undertakes its most major ‘growth spurts’ during, periods of societal confidence.

We, in my opinion, are not in one of those growth spurts of civilisation, quite the opposite in fact. This might be attributable, loosely (using the opposite of Clarke‘s thinking), to the systematic seeding of societal fear, lack of confidence, and the subsequent justification of organised (or state sanctioned) violence as a response to this.

Adam Curtis has produced a series of quite interesting documentaries (The Power of Nightmares, 2004, in particular to this line of thought) about the management of the ‘mass psyche’ – asserting that a state sponsored campaign of fear is used to control the political masses and ensure little dissent, or at least ineffectual dissent, against such state sponsored violence.

Our current example is the attempts at justification for the Iraq war – clearly the military invasion of a UN sovereign state – roughly, that we are all so terrified of ‘terrorism’ that we are willing to abandon moral, legal, or social arguments against imposing foreign governance and civil war on our fellow human-beings inside the boundaries of the country we call Iraq… I wonder if this will be seen by history as arrogant, cruel, and largely devoid of moral fibre…

And all that seeded by 90 minutes of story telling drama on television…

This aggression will not stand, man, but that’s not what I came here to talk about… :-)