Fascist

I felt strangely content and spent most of the day ‘revising’, which was really an excuse for sitting at the dining room table surrounded by books, paper, typewriter and outstanding work doing absolutely nothing. Andrew has gone, so the house slips back into the old routine.

In the evening I typed up several History essay plans as a way of memorising them before watching Gore Vidal on The South Bank Show talking about his book Creation. He seems a kind of quiet, intelligent man, and I really want to read that book. He said we really are a “programmed” species and that our actions and thoughts are just echoes of those of our ancestors; there is no beginning and no end to anything, just a continuous birth and death. We are here for a fleeting moment and then we vanish forever. As he said; “it’s a chilling thought.”

That set Dad and I off; and we had a long discussion about laws, morals, Governments, and inevitably swung back to my old favourite, communism. Dad is such a perfect example of the “working class mentality,” perfectly happy with our current situation, his position and all the inequalities. I tried to explain my views but he light-heartedly brushed them off, laughingly making pathetic comments about communism and naturally assuming that all communist thought is structured along Soviet lines. For instance: “They use that system of democracy, then they overthrow it.” The Russians do, true, but ‘actual’ communism (naieve communism?) would replace democracy with an almost Utopian system. He can't see beyond the end of his introspective, typically conservative, “I-love-the-British-way-of-life” nose.

This made me think about democracy as a whole and the way people make ‘decisions’ based on superficial and moronic criteria regarding themselves and crucial social issues  – male chauvinists deliberately not voting for a woman etc. –  and this is so pathetic and senseless that I always end up thinking fascist things like disenfranchising the masses and only allowing them the vote when they have enough sense and responsibility to cope with it. How can football thugs make decisions which will help themselves? Until they ‘know’ what they are doing, meaningfully and in the long term, they would perhaps be better ‘nursed’, like children. It’s all a case of education, bringing them up in the ‘correct’ way.