Welcome to my world

This is my first effort on Blogger so, for those who haven't followed me previously on Medium (who are legion), allow me to introduce myself.

I'm a seventy year-old pensioner living in London, my home of almost forty years. My career was spent almost exclusively in the arts.and politics, particularly that space where the two overlap, in local government-run or -funded delivery. So I've worked on festivals, in arts centres, on new arts centre project teams, as chair of a local arts council and (briefly) in Ken Livingstone's culture team at City Hall in preparation for the 2012 Olympics. That last job was snatched from me by Boris Johnson's 2008 Mayoral victory - or was it Ken's complacency? In any event I have developed a jaded view of politics and politicians, despite having briefly been a Labour councillor myself (and that didn't end well either).
  
Since retiring I've looked on in increasing dismay and disbelief as a series of Tory goverments over the past thirteen years has systematiclly worked to dismantle state support for the arts and sought to undermine every valued British cultural institution (the BBC, Channel 4, the Proms, the National Trust, opera companies, orchestras, touring venues, galleries, libraries - you name it, they will have gone after it) whilst at the same time hollowing-out local government, formerly a mainstay of the arts at the local level. 

From my personal experience I can vouch for the fact that arts and culture, certainly in the community, was much better off under Margaret Thatcher than under the current Tory incumbents - in fact it was a positive golden age in comparison. Thatcher neither knew about nor cared for the arts but she did know a good way to massage unfavourable unemployment figures when she saw one, especially in the North. So community arts teams flourished in the early-'eighties. Tories now, to use Oscar Wilde's acid definition of a cynic, know the price of everything and the value of nothing. They are, to paraphrase the divine Oscar, the unspeakable in pursuit of the unbeatable.

Now, in my retirement, I've become involved in climate activism - or as active as one can be at my age - I'm not climbing any motorway gantries let's put it that way. I am appalled by the climate crisis and the rapid deterioration of the planet's ecosystems due to Humankind's rapacity, greed and crass stupidity. I look at the world and society I inhabit now and echo Cicero's despairing cry, "O tempora, o mores!' - a feeling made the more acute by the recognition that my generation, the post-War 'Boomers', created this God-awful mess for our inheritors, the hapless 'Zoomers'.

Where did it all go so horribly wrong - and why? Yesterday a kind friend took me to the Noël Coward Theatre in Soho to see their stunning production of Best of Enemies about the struggle between left and right in late-'sixties America, which culminated in the election of Richard Nixon as Republican President in 1968 and paved the way for Ronald Reagan's neo-liberalism, which haunts us to this day. I was fifteen at the time and becoming more savvy about the parlous state of the world, having been aware, even as a young child, of something going very seriously awry - think the Cuba blockade, the assassinations of JF Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and the ever-present Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation.

Short of all-out atomic destruction (which may yet be assured if Putin has his crazy way) it's been downhill ever since and it appears our species is now going to hell in a turbo-charged handcart, sadly taking many other species with us. So, don't expect a Panglossian outlook from me. The consumer society my generation created and hugely benefited from (at least in the Global North) clearly isn't the best of all possible worlds. In fact it offers a dystopian future for us all, but especially, catastrophically, for the young.

As a consequence, while I may not offer a cheery read, I hope at least to provide a clear-eyed one.

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