The Cultural Cage

(Photograph taken from Jean Genet’s stage play “The Blacks”)

On the 6th December 1961 the French-Caribbean writer and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon died. He was just 36 years old and had been suffering from leukaemia. In his mercilessly short life he nonetheless managed to garner immense acclaim, both in his professional life and in his literary career. His lived experience as a black Frenchman allowed him a unique insight into the psychological effects of colonialism, and conversely the enduring mental struggles involved in decolonisation.

However he observed a more profound disturbance in his patients, a consequence of the politics and culture of France, and the French attitudes to the lands that they had colonised. In his seminal book “Black Skin, White Masks” he details the process, stating that,

“All colonised people…whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave-position themselves to the civilising language”.

Fanon explained that the demotic, vernacular idioms spoken in the Caribbean were perceived as inferior to the official, formal language of the colonisers. The notions of superiority and inferiority in terms of race are entirely culturally determined.

Racial stereotypes are driven by cultural attitudes. The old idea of biological essentialism has been debunked as unscientific. Unfortunately it is a concept which continues to resonate and reverberate and also deepen and complicate the dilemmas of our contemporary world. The crude binary of “black” versus “white” denies people individual agency and traps people into confining and stifling roles. It promotes segregation rather than inclusion, uniformity rather than diversity and far from liberating continues to oppress people.

Fanon’s work has been reinterpreted in modern times by bad actors. Those who quote him fail to acknowledge the historical context in his writing, the years immediately after World War Two when a post-imperial world had not yet been redrawn. It is therefore completely disingenuous to cite his work in relation to the conflict in Israel-Palestine.

Fanon was vehemently opposed to the notion of an ethnostate which is more or less the goal of the Hamas terrorists who seek a purely Arab state cleansed of Jews. Israel, in contrast, does not object to the self determination of its Arab neighbours, it merely seeks to maintain a safe haven for Jews from all over the world to live in peace. Contrary to the prejudices of left wing activists, Zionism is not a racist or a nationalist ideology it is solely a religious philosophy.

Fanon observed that ingrained attitudes affected behaviour in a profound way, people felt they were perennial victims. This perception, that fixed people into the mode of the vanquished left them demoralised and silenced. Consequently the culture of control and manipulation simply perpetuated. It was a process that infantilised subjugated people.

Fanon’s philosophical arguments for decolonisation are far more nuanced and subtle than the angry polemicists who continue to misquote and misrepresent him. He ultimately believed in freedom from the prejudices that prevented people from achieving their potential.

The Picture People

Next Thursday is St Andrew’s Day, a date of particular importance for the people of Scotland, and the Scottish diaspora. However the modern nation of Scotland is itself a construct, a political and economic entity that is distinct from the culture and people who live in the historic land we know today.

The indigenous Scots were in fact known as “Picts” by the Roman occupiers. They were called “Picts” because they painted their faces with woad. This was a traditional signifier of tribal identity and a warning that terrified foreign intruders. The Roman invasion of Britain subdued most of the population. There were notable uprisings but the military might of the Roman Army was too much, and these were quickly quashed.

However the opposing forces of the northern part of Britain were more than a match, perhaps this was a consequence of the frequently inhospitable weather. The people themselves were hardy and fearless. Their resilience and courage was remarked upon by Roman generals, especially the tribe of Caledonians who maintained their warrior reputation in the face of imperial oppression.

The warrior’s reputation even compelled the Emperor Hadrian to build a wall in an attempt to quell the rebellion. It is this combined spirit of defiance, pride and strength that distinguished this part of this island from the rest. The people from the far northern edge of Great Britain had resisted any attempt at cultural imperialism and this helped them keep their traditions intact.

However as Roman power within Britain came to an end, the island was vulnerable to further invasion. The northern part of the island came under attack from an Irish invading force. The Irish invaders were called “Scoti”, this was a pejorative term which meant “marauders from the sea”.

The ancient land of the Picts virtually disappeared, only a few landmarks remain. The language, customs and traditions vanished, the people were the same but the foundations of this new “Scotland” were built by the colonisers. A new social hierarchy emerged, along with a new system of governance. The Scoti also introduced a new language, Gaelic, which replaced the original and rather primitive runic form of communication. Their takeover succeeded as their culture was superior to the Picts, and eventually this once hostile force integrated.

However this was not the case for the rest of the island, the native people were once again subdued, this time by Germanic tribes. The native people here now resided in “England”, a land ruled by Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Unlike the Scots and the Picts, there were frequent conflicts. It was far from a harmonious relationship because the cultures could not have been more different.

The days of barbarism and war dwindled when Christianity returned to the island. It was believed that a faith that preached unity could help repair a disunited land. However England was much stronger economically and politically than her poorer neighbour Scotland. The Scots, who once felt pride in their independence and resilience grew bitter and resentful. Alliances between the two nations were forged and then severed over the centuries, a consequence of the cultural differences that were often too vast to be bridged.

Scotland in the twenty first century is battling with an uneasy legacy, it is a proud nation forged by its warrior ancestors but it is becoming increasingly anglicised due to political and economic expediency.

The Dark Cancer

This weekend we honour the sacrifice of the men and women who gave their lives in both world wars. The first Remembrance Day was established to mark the end of the First World War, and it is a solemn occasion that is commemorated annually. It is one of the few rituals left in our national calendar, and despite the aggressive forces of progressivism and secularisation it remains an event rich in religious significance and meaning.

This year, however, there is an additional piquancy to the commemorations. Global events have conspired and inimical elements within our society could threaten the peace that is essential to the services on Saturday and Sunday. The war between Israel and Palestine has raised the hackles of left wing agitators who have never expressed any degree of allegiance to this nation, or even respected our history or culture. They are also fundamentally opposed to the notion that the West is a positive and civilising influence in the world.

A few well meaning but naive individuals have been subsumed into this Pro-Palestinian movement as they genuinely believe that peace is a common goal of the marchers. Peace is a laudable aim, but violence is both an unfortunate and inevitable part of the human condition. The violent part of man leads to war, and it is a terrible paradox that the only way to achieve peace is to fight. The Second World War was necessary and just, a moral fight to defeat the darkness of Nazism and Fascism that was spreading like a cancer across the globe.

Both of these ideologies were characteristically atheistic and materialist. It was a mode of thought where some human beings were diminished and others were dehumanised to the extent that they were convinced that they were a virus that needed to be exterminated from the earth. The economic and social collapse that ushered in Adolf Hitler hardened the sensibilities of a demoralised populace.

Hitler scorned Christianity as a sentimental folly. He conceived a more scientific philosophy of humanity and a dubious system of racial classification. He believed that the “Aryan” race was biologically superior and other races, especially Jewish people were inferior. When the Nazis assumed power most of Europe still maintained a Christian faith, but in this degraded and demoralised continent it was easy for a charismatic demagogue to manipulate the population and disabuse them of their beliefs.

The Nazis loathed Christianity owing to its Jewish roots, they were convinced that older European cultures had been destroyed and supplanted by its influence. They argued that the distinct and unique qualities that made Europe different from the Middle East had foundered in the wake of the Christian civilisation. Integral to this was their total sense of superiority, stating that,

“Can we still tolerate our children being obliged to learn that Jews and Negroes, just like Germans and Romans, are descended from Adam and Eve, simply because a Jewish myth says so?”

The cold, calculating arrogance of such statements is chilling.

Civilisation is taken for granted, but it is fragile. History has taught us that barbarism is always waiting at the gate to send us back into another dark age. This weekend must be a time to pause, to reflect and respect our common humanity.

Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair

(Scene from the 1922 Danish film Haxan).

This weekend the people of Britain commemorate a unique event. The foiled “Gunpowder Plot” is seared into the consciousness of every one of us, and it is part of a collective folk memory. It is remarkable that this uniquely British tradition continues to remain a part of our lives. However its significance is waning in an increasingly globalised culture.

There are a few elements to the celebration that continue to resonate, but others less so, for instance the infamy of Guy Fawkes is reiterated in the nursery rhyme “Remember Remember”. This rhyme is an indelible part of our childhood. Older rituals have vanished.

The refrain of “penny for the Guy” is no longer heard in our neighbourhoods. We no longer see children asking neighbours for donations to help them build effigies of Guy Fawkes. It used to be fun to make them with old rags and wood, and watch them burn on the top of bonfires.

Bonfire night is a celebration, but it is also a salutary reminder of a much darker period of our history. It is often forgotten that this country was once a divisive, tribalistic and violent place. There is a uniquely human craving for order, but this often comes at a heavy price.

Jacobean England had its own challenges. We believe that the “culture war” is a modern invention but it has always been with us, there was a febrile battle between Protestants and Catholics that seemed perpetual and impossible to resolve.

The King’s vain promise to unify these almost implacable factions was doomed to failure. England’s Catholic minority were dissatisfied with his attempts to make their lives easier and fairer. A growing militant faction of Catholics sought inspiration from the continent, believing that an absolutist Monarch would solve the problem of religious persecution and oppression. When this failed to materialise, the Gunpowder plot was hatched.

Fawkes and his fellow conspirators planned to assassinate King James I on November 5, a date set for the state opening of Parliament. It was a deliberate terrorist act, designed to unseat Protestant power and influence permanently from the country. However if Fawkes’ plan succeeded, this country would be unrecognisable. It would not be a free and democratic nation, it would be a strictly authoritarian and totalitarian religious state.

It is a tragic irony that liberation movements ultimately become forces of oppression once they achieve power. Human beings are all too often consumed by their own pride and this corrupts their good natures, and it is then used for malign purposes. In the Bible, the prophet Samuel was superseded by the Israelite King David. When he expressed his displeasure about the people to God, He proclaimed,

“It is not you they have rejected, they have rejected me as their King. As they have done from the day I brought them out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other Gods, so they are doing to you”.

The failure of Fawkes only inflamed the militancy of the Protestant cause, rather than dampen it. In a perverse twist of fate religious bigotry in this country increased. This sparked the imagination of William Shakespeare and inspired “Macbeth” or the “Scottish Play”, a sublimation of the superstition that characterised the reign of King James I.

During this time the more literal minded Protestants were given the epithet “Puritan” as this characterised their philosophy, and their irrational prejudices surrounding Catholics. Many held unfounded suspicions about their religious traditions and rituals, as they were convinced that they practised a form of witchcraft.

The play is replete with supernatural imagery, there are witches and spectres of the night. The ambience is as dark and menacing as any ghost story. It is another dark reminder of the terrible human toll of religious persecution and revenge. However this same story keeps repeating itself, and it only serves to tear nations apart.

The Earth Exhaling

On October 20th, 1972 Sir John Betjeman was appointed Poet Laureate. His appointment followed the death of the previous Laureate, Cecil Day-Lewis. Lewis himself was chosen after the death of John Masefield who held the post previously. After Masefield’s death in 1967 Betjeman was initially considered but was later rejected. The appointments committee regarded his work as frivolous and trivial.

These sneering and demeaning attitudes dogged his career, and continue to resonate in certain rarefied circles. However his critics misunderstand the purpose of poets, especially those poets who are employed to represent the nation and encapsulate the everyday thoughts and feelings of the people who are part of it. Poetry is not designed to be elitist, it is an inherently democratic art form.

Betjeman has been unfairly characterised as a purveyor of “light verse” which belies the complexity and depth of his poetry. Betjeman was a deeply religious and conservative thinker, and this imbued his poetry. Although he grew up in the Edwardian era he was more enamoured by the values of his Victorian forebears, particularly their civic and public works. He campaigned for the restoration of old Victorian buildings, and succeeded in saving the foundations of St Pancras Station.

The architects of the Victorian age, unlike the modernist wreckers of today, were more respectful of historic buildings. They did not seek to destroy the past, but to build upon the foundations that preceded them. The Victorians paid homage to the traditions of the 14th century by constructing grand Gothic arches. St Pancras station and the hotel that is joined to it have Gothic features that imitate the structures of Westminster Abbey.

However it is also unfair to dismiss Betjeman as a snob. He grew up in relative privilege and benefitted from an education which was beyond the means of most people. Crucially, he did not regard himself as superior, his education simply allowed him to develop a deeper understanding of who the English are as a people. He had a great affection for this country which is sadly lacking in today’s discourse.

His 1937 poem “Slough” is frequently misunderstood as an example of his snobbery. However it is in fact a lament for an old town in Berkshire threatened by the forces of industrialisation, militarism and modernity. At the time of the poem’s publication Slough was used as a repository for war surplus materials and assigned as a “trading estate”. Over 800 factories were built, and Betjeman was fearful for the future where precious countryside could be sacrificed for the construction of a war machine.

Two years later the Second World War broke out, and it seemed that his nightmare prediction came to pass. Slough could have been the symbol of any industrialised town in England, Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool or Hull all experienced the same devastation. It is time that we paid tribute to a poet who ultimately defended our culture and values.

The Violence of Silence

On the 10th October, 1930 the playwright, actor and poet Harold Pinter was born. He came from a modest family, his mother was a housewife, his father was a tailor. He attended Hackney Downs Grammar School where he discovered a love for English and Drama. His English teacher, Joseph Brearley was a mentor and encouraged him to write and to act.

He was an accomplished poet and actor at school. His poems were published in the school magazine, and he performed in numerous school plays. He attended drama school and continued to write as well as act. However at this time he was also called up for compulsory national service, and he refused, stating that he was a conscientious objector.

He had lived through the horrors of the Second World War and understood the barbarism inherent to war. Although this was a war that was just and necessary, the world in 1948 had changed entirely, and every conflict that Britain was implicated in since then seemed to him entirely unjust and unnecessary. Fortunately, he escaped imprisonment, paid a fine and his status as a conscientious objector was accepted.

He worked as a touring actor throughout the fifties, and took various menial jobs to supplement his meagre income. Post war Britain was a dismal, austere place filled with severely traumatised, unhappy people. Pinter observed with great acuity how people were filled with negative and disturbing emotions but prevented by a severely repressive national culture from expressing how they truly felt.

In 1957, an old school friend Henry Woolf directed his first play “The Room”. This was performed as a student production at the University of Bristol. This was a dark and mysterious play which introduced the themes that characterised Pinter as a unique playwright. An undercurrent of menace imbues the whole play, chiefly in the silences of the actors. A young producer called Michael Codron was impressed by the quality of the play and offered to direct Pinter’s next play at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith.

One year later “The Birthday Party” opened at the Lyric. This was a deeper exploration of the themes presented in “The Room”. Stanley is the lodger at a guest house in a seaside town. His landlady knows that it is his birthday and plans a party, but this is interrupted by the appearance of two sinister guests, Goldberg and McCann. They proceed to inflict mental torture and mind games upon him. The meaning of the drama is derived not from what is said to him, but from the silences that ensue.

Pinter became a prolific playwright throughout the sixties and seventies. Many of his plays were broadcast on the BBC. In the latter part of his career his work became explicitly political, in the sense that he was attempting to hold the powerful to account and give voice to the powerless. The starkest example is “Mountain Language”, a 1988 play about an oppressive colonial power depriving the native people of their own language.

The play reveals how words can be used as weapons and how the weak can be subdued into silence. It was interpreted as his response to the plight of the Kurdish people in Iraq, but it is relevant to any minority community living anywhere in the world.

Pinter perceived the politics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century as an unending saga of oppression and persecution. His works fundamentally express the need for human liberty and freedom. In 2005 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature but by this time he was in poor health. He died of cancer three years later. His poetic message still resounds today.

We of Me

On the 29th September 1967 the American author Carson McCullers died. She was just fifty years old and had endured a lifetime of illness, depression and isolation. Her short and painful life experience was poured into her writing, it was both cathartic and a means of expressing it to a largely indifferent world.

She was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1917. Columbus was a conservative town which felt stifling and conformist to a young and imaginative woman like McCullers. She was a sickly child and spent most of her childhood and adolescence alone. Her father bought her a piano and typewriter to encourage her creative side. She was unsure whether to pursue a career in music, or in writing.

She left Columbus at the age of 17 hoping to acquire a place at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. However rheumatic fever prevented her from realising her dream of becoming a professional pianist. She returned to her childhood home and renewed her ambition to become a professional writer instead.

She worked as a waitress and took evening classes in creative writing. Three years later she married Reeves McCullers, who had left a career in the Army to become a writer himself; they moved to Charlotte in North Carolina. The marriage to Reeves was volatile and tempestuous, complicated by his and Carson’s increasing addictions to alcohol. There were also strong rumours that both of them were struggling with their sexuality.

Carson’s first novel was published in 1940, when she was at the tender age of 23. “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter” depicts the inner lives of the inhabitants of a small, conservative town in the American South. The main protagonist, John Singer is a profoundly deaf man struggling to fit in with people who do not understand him. The other characters attempt to communicate with him, but Singer is permanently on the periphery of a community which cannot accept him. When his closest friend dies, his isolation is compounded and he takes his own life.

Singer’s suicide stuns the local community and it is the apotheosis of the novel. His death is especially traumatic for Mick Kelly, a young tomboy with a passion for classical music, and keen pianist. Kelly is quirky and eccentric and an outsider so she gravitated towards Singer and sought some kind of connection. However it is almost a cruel joke that Kelly’s overriding passion is music and she fails to connect with a man who cannot hear or speak.

This novel revealed empathy and a wisdom that belied her youthful age. She continued to write novellas, stories and plays after this early success. However her personal life was distinctly unhappy, Reeves plunged into depression and eventually took his own life, Carson’s health continued to deteriorate and suffered a series of strokes that eventually led her to become wheelchair bound. The most devastating episode occurred after she suffered a miscarriage.

After Reeves death she grew closer to her female friends and confidants, in particular the glamorous Swiss writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Her devotion to Annemarie had been long standing and played a major role in her eventual estrangement from her husband. However this devotion was entirely one sided and it left her feeling very lonely.

She lived her life in an almost permanent state of emotional detachment, a state of being that is familiar to a lot of us. It is especially acute in the lives of those who face particular challenges like long term illness or disability. Carson McCullers may have felt unloved for most of her life but her books reveal a great love for others excluded from society.

A Curious World

On a portentous September day in 1933 H.G Wells published his futuristic novel “The Shape of Things To Come”. The date of publication was eerily prescient, occurring exactly six years before The Second World War broke out. Wells predicted that world war was possible, but not probable, or even an inevitability. Instead he imagined a future world in a state of permanent peace and harmony.

The book presents an alternative world unencumbered by competing systems of finance and commerce. He envisages a world where complete cooperation exists and has supplanted the older systems that lead to entrenched unfairness and poverty. The vanity of individual nations has also disappeared, and a new humility has emerged in its place.

Wells lived in a time of aggressive militarism. Nations sought power over one another, economically as well as culturally. In the introduction he explains,

“My instincts about foreigners are as insular as my principles are cosmopolitan”. Europe had already torn itself apart in one world war, and there were genuine fears that another deadly war could destroy the values that made the civilisation glorious in the first place. It was a paradox that troubled all of the leading intellectuals of the era, that brute force was necessary to maintain decorum.

Nevertheless Wells attempted to reassure the reader that in the future,

“…mankind broadens out…unifies…ceases to be a tangle of more and more interrelated histories and it becomes plainly and consciously one history. There is a complete confluence of racial, social and political destinies”.

Wells had socialist sympathies and looked on more traditional ideas and ideologies with disdain. Conservatism and religious sentiment were of no use to him, as he appeared to have only a very basic understanding of human nature.

He naively envisaged a world state, which by the later stages of the twentieth century was entirely assimilated. It now looks like a preposterous fantasy, as he predicted that Russia would play the most enthusiastic part in the process of global integration. The whole book now reads like a foolish fantasy, but it is only due to the fact that we have lived through a series of extraordinary events.

However the book provides useful material when analysing the flaws of socialist thinking. It provides the clearest explanation for the rather puzzling confluence of socialism and antisemitism. Wells was hostile to the notion of Zionism, and regarded Jewish people with suspicion.

Left wing thinkers cannot comprehend why the Jewish people seek their own culture and traditions because in their vision of utopia every citizen thinks and acts in the same way. Wells promoted a nascent form of globalism which is being resisted in the most strenuous form in the Brexit debates. Clearly, this dull and utilitarian vision where every inhabitant on the planet is a “citizen of nowhere” is a telling insight into the socialist mind.

Cities In Dust

The 2020s have been a decade dominated by pandemics, poverty, conflict and a gradual and insidious decline in general health and wellbeing. This growing sense of dissatisfaction has led to a reassessment of our values in this supposedly modern and progressive society. The most glaring example is whether urban living means greater wealth and comfort, or precisely the opposite.

Living in a modern city is now characterised by crime, social alienation, noise and pollution. It is almost unnatural for human beings to live in such a stressful environment. Until the nineteenth century most people would live and work in rural villages. Towns were the centres of commercial trading and administration. However the Industrial Revolution changed the pattern of life irrevocably.

The factories replaced the farms, and rural labourers found new opportunities in the industrial heartlands of Manchester and Birmingham. These new urban areas created wholly new societies, cities and by extension civilisations. This new vista of chimneys billowing smoke and dirt altered the perceptions of a people once attuned to the natural world.

Industry was the key to prosperity, but it was at a cost. The acquisition of profit had a negative impact upon health and wellbeing. The discovery of coal, for example, transformed Britain’s economy but it also condemned its workers to a life of misery and early, painful death, not to mention the dreadful frequency of mining disasters when men would be trapped underground or killed by explosions.

A new hierarchy of wealth was created, an emerging middle class was formed. These were citizens fortunate enough to acquire wealth through merit alone, rather than inheritance as in the previous system. This allowed them more opportunities for leisure and intellectual pursuits. However this did not make them completely insensitive to the plight of the labouring classes, in fact this was the era when leading intellectuals like John Ruskin highlighted the miseries that they endured.

Victorian luminaries like Ruskin championed the need for green spaces to counter the deleterious effects of industrialisation and urbanisation. He was an unashamed romantic who felt a yearning nostalgia for England’s rural past. His example inspired an entire movement that was committed to a return to rural living, as this was believed to represent a more authentic existence.

Ruskin’s philosophy has been revived in recent times, but his message seems more vital and pressing in this technocratic age. Technocracy represents a third industrial revolution, but with greater harms than the ones that preceded it. This new age has led to atomisation, alienation and a fragmentation of community.

The values and conventions that once held society together have foundered. Now that most of our work can be done at home on a computer, and our goods can be delivered remotely, city centres have little purpose. More of us dream of living in peaceful, rural communities but that dream is simply an unrealistic fantasy.

Weather Report

On September 13th, 1970, Timothy Leary, the hero of the counterculture movement managed to escape from the prison where he was serving a twenty year sentence for drug possession. This audacious act was aided and abetted by two radical groups, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and the Weathermen. The Weathermen then helped to transport Leary and his wife to Algeria. Algeria was then the headquarters of the Black Panther Party.

However this exile to Algeria was not permanent, his protectors were reportedly not happy with his drug use interfering with their serious political activities . He spent a further three years hiding from the authorities in various locations all over the world, until he was eventually captured.

He faced the prospect of 95 years of incarceration, as he was a subversive and dangerous threat to conventional American society. Whilst in prison he agreed to work for the FBI as an informant, and he was released in 1976. Leary’s philosophy of “dropping out” from society was incredibly alluring to young, idealistic and impressionable Americans. His reputation and infamy had a huge influence on students.

The Weathermen was a political collective founded by a group of radical students at the University of Michigan. Their aim was clear and unrepentant. They sought to overthrow the American establishment through revolutionary means. Their sole mission was to build a new society free from racial and gender inequalities. They believed that all of the oppression and hardship endured by minority communities was due to the inherently imperialist structure of the American government.

The Weathermen soon developed a notoriety that eclipsed Leary. They conducted a wave of bombings, targeting government buildings and banks. It was a campaign designed to show their righteous indignation against the oppressive power structures of politics and finance. They were designated a domestic terror threat and were placed under surveillance throughout the seventies.

The poet and novelist Marge Piercy knew The Weathermen, as she was also a young radical. Her experience and familiarity with the group inspired her 1979 novel “Vida”. The eponymous Vida is a terrorist and fugitive, struggling to exist in a society that she despises. Vida is caught in a terrible bind, between the demands of her conventional middle class family and her comrades.

Piercy’s narrative is deliberately written in a tone of moral ambiguity. There are no heroes or villains in the story, it is a very human account of youthful passion, and folly. Vida’s character seems shallow but she is also capable of great compassion.

Her pomposity sometimes grates upon the reader, but this is a conscious decision of the author. In one interlude,

“She had resented Johnson as the gross successor, but she had come to hate him as the one who showed the corporate inside of Camelot, the imperialistic dreams behind the clean-cut Harvard rhetoric”.

Her naivety about politics and politicians is evident. Nothing it appears softens her sense of purpose and militancy. In the closing chapter she stubbornly maintains that,

“I am at the mercy of history…one thing I know is that nothing remains the same. No great problems in this society have been solved, no wounds healed, no promises kept except that the rich shall inherit”.

The novel is redolent of the dark atmosphere of 1970s America. It was a country stuck in a state of fatigue by the continuing war in Vietnam, and disillusioned by the false promises of the political leaders. The hope of the sixties dwindled into despair, the dreams envisioned by the youth were crushed. In hindsight it now seems obvious that vain and self righteous people will always suffer in ignominy and defeat. It is the one political lesson that we never learn.