I was sitting in the little apartment we had taken for a week in Florence after our Winter School.  Waiting to go out to dinner, I leafed through back copies of Gente (People) and read simple-minded interviews with whorish starlets and whoring TV presenters.  I looked at a picture of an heir to the house of Savoia, who, though claiming fidelity to his wife, was posing like a rough trade model.  Jeezum, I exclaimed in disgust, what nasty spoiled children, and I turned on the television to see the same people on game shows and variety shows.  Only Gerry Scotti, though divorced, does not seem to parade his dirty underwear in public.  I might as well have been in Rockford, watching American Idol or Dancing With the Stars.  The whole world has become the Hollywood America of retarded housewives and sports fans in arrested adolescence.

Flipping through the channels in a vain search for the Italian news—the apartment only got local channels—I came across a strange video.  A somewhat sluttish and not especially pretty female, wearing a demure though motley dress that might have been designed for the Mad Hatter’s  sister, was singing from out of  the window of a small travel trailer:

I want to be rich and I want lots of money
I don’t care about clever I don’t care about funny
I want loads of clothes and f-ckloads of diamonds
I heard people die while they are trying to find them.

She jumps out of the trailer singing her way into a mansion filled with dancing gentlemen (or are they valets?):

And I’ll take my clothes off and it will be shameless
‘Cause everyone knows that’s how you get famous
I’ll look at the sun and I’ll look in the mirror
I’m on the right track, yeah I’m on to a winner.

I don’t know what’s right and what’s real anymore
And I don’t know how I’m meant to feel anymore
And when do you think it will all become clear?
‘Cause I’m being taken over by the fear.

Life’s about film stars and less about nmothers
It’s all about fast cars and cussing each other
But it doesn’t matter cause I’m packing plastic
And that’s what makes my life so f-cking fantastic.

And I am a weapon of massive consumption
And it’s not my fault how I’m programmed to function
I’ll look at the sun and I’ll look in the mirror
I’m on the right track, yeah we’re on to a winner.

I don’t know what’s right and what’s real anymore
And I don’t know how I’m meant to feel anymore
And when do you think it will all become clear?
‘Cause I’m being taken over by the fear.

Forget about guns and forget ammunition
‘Cause I’m killing them all on my own little mission
Now I’m not a saint but I’m  not a sinner
Now everything’s cool as long as I’m getting thinner.

I don’t know what’s right and what’s real anymore
And I don’t know how I’m meant to feel anymore
And when do you think it will all become clear?
‘Cause I’m being taken over by the fear.

The video is available on YouTube.

The singer who co-wrote the song is professional bad girl Lilly Allen, whose faux-cockney puts her into the genre of music sometimes described as “mockney.”  Though claiming a childhood of poverty, Allen is the offspring of a popular comic actor and public school boy and a mother who is a TV producer.  Is this a naïve expression of the prevailing way of life today, satire, or—as I think—both?   (And, please please please don’t send in Wikipedia information on her scandalous life or her third nipple.)

Meanwhile, the redoubtable Fred Reed has come to a similar conclusion.  Here are two paragraphs from his farewell column on the internet sent to me yesterday by “Robert.”

My reasons for writing were, first, to see whether a web
column could work and, second, to get away from the strangling grasp of political correctness. A third reason, common I suppose to most 
olumnists, was the hope that, however minor my voice might be, in 
cmbination with thousands of others it might engender pressure for 
slwing the rush into the high-tech medieval twilight that the 
culure has undertaken.

This by now is clearly quixotic. The civilizational changes we now 
see re both irremediable and beyond control. The peasantrification 
and epty glitter of society, pervasive hostility to careful thought, 
onrushng authoritarianism, and distaste for cultivation are now 
endemic I do not know where these lead, but we are assuredly going 
to get tere. Fuming buys nothing.

I have met Mr. Reed and until a few months ago did not know of his existence, but looking over a few of his columns, I got an impression of a smarter and franker sort of man than is usually encountered in print or, especially, on the internet.

What else is there to say about the world we live in?  Miss Allen and Mr. Reed have just about covered it.  The other day I was talking with an intelligent telephone repairman, and he asked me if I had any hope in the younger generation.  I told him hope—sure; faith—no.  People under 50 are far more servile and cowardly than my own generation, and people under 30 are much much worse.   I think of Myra Viveash’s remark when someone mentioned (near the end of Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay) the word tomorrow: “Tomorrow will be as awful as today.”  Poor Mrs. Viveash was an optimist.

And, no, though I am delighted to be working again, I am not especially happy to be back.

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