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July 31, 2006
If all our heroes are yobs .....
The latest outburst of football mania has seen the usual crop of hero worshipping youths imitating their footballer idols. Now I have no doubt that the young men who play the game are very good at it, but their behaviour on and off the ptich tells me that they are little better than hooligans in their private lives. Taking the recent world cup behaviour of the French Captain and the Italian player in their contretemps - what does this say to youngsters? That it is OK to behave in this fashion? Or taking the English footballer Rooney who has trouble controlling his temper at any time? Is this saying that its OK to vent your temper on everyone around you?
It seems to me that the hero models which young men and women adopt as their role model will influence their attitudes toward others, their behaviour and their expectations for their own lives. It cannot be otherwise. It would also explain in large part, why our society is now beset by yobs, managed by vandals and seemingly rewards the very worst traits in humanity. Looking back over the last few years I have to ask myself why wearing one's wife's underwear (I'm told that some people do and are still very nice people ...) should be something one's wife would tell a journalist - or why the journalist would ensure it is headline news. Why should boys be encouraged to aspire to the achievements of a man who cannot string together two sentences without expletives and, however good he is with a ball at his feet, cannot control his temper and behaves violently toward anyone who challenges him. Why should we expect our sons and daughters to idolise the Pop stars who use cannabis, cocaine and other 'hard' drugs, consume vast amounts of alcohol and throw up in public, and still grow up knowing that this is not how decent people behave in a society that actually has some sense of decency? Obviously we need to think carefully about this and other related issues, there is likely to be no 'quick fix' to it and there is certainly not going to be a short term solution.
Looking at the heroes of the likes of Mr Blair and his cronies in office you rapidly discover that, although they now try to hide it, their heroes were the likes of Lenin, Marx, Che Guevara, Castro and other equally evil men. Those that did not go for that clutch are adherents to the cults of Dr Spock, Freud, Scargill and other "worker" leaders, most of whom one soon finds lived the life of Riley at their "members" expense. It is Blair's "60's" generation who have raised the anti-hero to the status of saint, actively promoting people whose attitudes and actions have caused the collapse of decency, morality and even of the societies they were supposedly reforming. Dr Spock himself stands exposed as a man who wrote best selling and extremely damaging claptrap about raising children while not following any of it himself. Lenin was possibly the most evil man of all time - millions died for his version of Marx's flawed theories and Che Guevarra is described as a psychopathic killer - but these are the portraits one finds decorating the studies and offices of our leaders today. Mass murder for "socialism" is evidently justifiable, as long as one can categorise the dead as "capitalist swine", "bourgeois pigs" or "fascist obstructionists" and instantly turns the perpetrator into a hero for the Left wing liberal.
Looking back at the heroes of my own youth, I find that there were one or two sportsmen, mainly cricketers, and a couple of round the world yachtsmen, but the main 'heroes' in my life were people around me, people who knew life, who had fought in the War and had learned the lessons of life in a very harsh environment. Several were decorated pilots, one was a decorated naval officer, others were likewise ex-servicemen with and without decorations. My heroes of literature and the media included Winston Churchill (and I know he can be described as a drunkard and all sorts of other things), a couple of Admirals who had served their country well - and a Bishop who had likewise served. Many of them were ordinary people - the most ordinary being a man who held the Distinguished Service Order for acts of bravery bordering on lunatic disregard for his own skin whom I had the privilege of meeting - yet they not only knew how to behave with decency and respect towards everyone they dealt with, but they applied common sense to everything they did. Boy's comic magazines of the period provided lots of decent, clean-cut and, yes, idealised stereotyped heroes for youngsters. Some readers may even remember "Roy of the Rovers" in the old Lion weekly, an idealised football team that seemed staffed entirely by good role models, but sadly, todays equivalent seems to be as foul mouthed as the real ones.
I grew up admiring the likes of Nelson, Tyrrwhit, Jellico, Keys, Fraser, Sommerville, Cunningham and Ramsey (surely the only Admiral to have ever flown his "Flag" on an MTB?), Hipper and Scheer also featured as did Graf von Spee. My fathers tales of having served under Mountbatten (and meeting him several times) gave an interesting insight into the way these men behaved and how they led the men under them. Do we have anyone of that calibre leading our young people today? I'm afraid not, so I think we can expect our society to continue its downward slide into oblivion. A pity to waste so much that was good - squandered by the likes of Blair and his cronies for their short term benefit while they exploit a situation of their own promotion. Our society will not improve until our current crop of anti-heros are replaced by real ones, the politicians, popstars and footballers, replaced by real leaders of men and women who are true heros and not the money-grabbing, coke snorting, foul mouthed and ill-behaved shower of complete ordure we currently have shoved at us in all the media.
As the old Yorkshire saying is, "Clogs to clogs in three generations", their success will be measured by its duration. And so, sadly, will our present society's success.
Posted by The Gray Monk at July 31, 2006 08:41 AM
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