And I nicked excerpts of this one (in a similar vein of "what are we coming to?) from the Aussies:

THE 2003 NATIONAL TRUST HERITAGE LECTURE

presented by

Don Watson

...Around the time of the Paris Commune, Flaubert wrote a letter to George Sand, in which he said that he'd suddenly become aware that all his life he'd been indignant. He said he was indignant in his marrow. He said indignation held him up and drove him along. His indignation just then was understandable. He couldn't stand the philistine bourgoisie and the idea of a philistine and stupid proletariat replacing them was just too horrid to think about. But Flaubert's protest was more than indignation, or rather I'd suggest a definition that takes in more than annoyance or pique.

Let's say indignation is a hopeless entanglement of thought and feeling, of mind and emotion. It's when we feel displaced by someone or something, unable to recognise what was once familiar or the authority of those who are now telling us what to do. Old people and children and those who never grow up particularly suffer from indignation.

Around the time of the Second World War, Simone Vale asked herself what sort of society would develop when economic necessity ceased to be the dominant force in ordinary life. Vale thought that some form of socialism was likely to bring this about. She was mistaken. A little bit of socialism brought it about but a lot of the free market brought it about for a fair proportion of the population.


In any event, Vale answered a question by saying that, freed of the necessity to put food on the table, people would retreat to a world of the emotions and she didn't want to live in such a society. She said there could be no good society where there is no life of the mind as well as the emotions; that the mind had a place equal to the heart's. She said the pursuit of some ideal was necessary.

The sort of society she imagined seems to me broadly to describe the society that's now emerging in Australia. We thrive on celebrity and the emotions of celebrities, on public grieving, on reality television, on all the varieties of narcissism that anyone ever thought of and some that have never been thought of till now.

And somewhere in that is some kind of confirmation (this seems to be a very French evening), a sort of confirmation of what De Tocqueville said when he was in America, that in democratic communities imagination is compressed when men think of themselves. It expands indefinitely when they think of the State. This, by the way, is not a socialist argument. It's about the individual thinking beyond his own interests – to God (some time ago), to patriotism (for a while) or to the interests of others.

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It is my contention that the Reagan recreational grievers and grief tourists who make up this current mass media Reagan propaganda film, believe they are reaching towards God and patriotism, when all they are really doing is playing their bit parts, as assigned by the mass propagandists of the Republican American Way.

Does anyone else get the feeling that Orwell is turning over in his grave about now?