Re: S&A 1974 Film - a retrospective view


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Posted by Peter Ceresole on May 11, 2012 at 23:47:46 user PeterC.

In Reply to: Re: S&A 1974 Film - a retrospective view posted by Dave Thewlis on May 10, 2012 at 05:26:01:

the scene described by Fergus Mason depressed me so much I put it out of my mind at least for a few hours.

I admit that I just groaned internally; the problem is that many people would agree with the clear intention of the piece- which was helped by the fact that it was skillfully done, the resonances of 'sociospeak' nicely conveyed- expressing dislike of the 'post-Orwellian' features of our present society, contrasted with the Ransomian world of decent families where the children can be trusted to spread their wings in a responsible and muscular way. But this ignores far too much of the reality around us; where I live in Peckham, in south east London, a knife is far too often a weapon. It's a high crime area, full of delightful and friendly people, good neighbours, but where there is serious crime committed by young people, many stabbings, lots of drug dealing which is often, like the priesthood in 'Le Rouge et le Noir', the only aspirational path for young men. And dealing with such a society is a hard path for social security workers. They have genuine problems to deal with- BETTER DRUGS THAN NOTHING, IF NOT DRUGS THEY DROWN. If social workers and the police don't respond to problems they encounter, if they deal with them in a way that doesn't tick the right boxes, then you get horrors like the 'Baby P' case in Brent, in which they are second-guessed by the press and the authorities, they are vilified, their careers destroyed. Yet those tick boxes are necessary, they arise because there are genuine cases of abuse which in the past were ignored, swept under the carpet. It was so much easier that way, in AR's time. So yes, it really is (sort of) this bad, but for good reasons. It's like our attitude to the Empire. We simply know so much more about the bad that we did, rather than just the sanitised accounts of the 'good'.

I think that's all to the good.


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