The Watchtowers Reverse Polarity
Striking how in the past few months the discourse-dominating elite has started to decree that it is OK to express the fact of having reservations about immigration, that not being happy to see a stable settled land being transformed for the good of incoming peoples is something which can at least be acknowledged as part of life's tapestry. Reminds me of the scene in Pinter's 'Mountain Language' where a guard suddenly turns from staring out of the cell-window to tell the terrorised, battered political prisoner within the room "The rules have been changed - you can speak now". Of course, oiks like me don't recall that it was not permissible to talk of X before last week.
The levels of incoming population are only part of the story of course (albeit a big part): descendants of those who have immigrated since 1948 or so are not dwindling in number, and the thing that binds one part of this latter segment together is growing in self-confidence in the face of the elite's vacillation (evidence of the fact that the elite doesn't see itself as connected to the people it governs and whose fate it can affect) whilst another segment's chaotic debauchery grows. What do you expect, relocating Africa in NW Europe?
The title? JG Ballard's short-story 'The Watchtowers' describes an enervated listless town whose pop'n's conformist apathy and fearfulness hinges upon the presence of obervation towers protruding from the ever-cloudy skies over the rooftops, towers whose presence the very acknowledgement of which is squirmingly deemed "improper". When a central character forces the issue, openly acknowledging their presence and influence the rest of the population withdraw from him before returning to coalesce around a collective position in which the very idea of watchtowers elicits baffled looks.
Striking how in the past few months the discourse-dominating elite has started to decree that it is OK to express the fact of having reservations about immigration, that not being happy to see a stable settled land being transformed for the good of incoming peoples is something which can at least be acknowledged as part of life's tapestry. Reminds me of the scene in Pinter's 'Mountain Language' where a guard suddenly turns from staring out of the cell-window to tell the terrorised, battered political prisoner within the room "The rules have been changed - you can speak now". Of course, oiks like me don't recall that it was not permissible to talk of X before last week.
The levels of incoming population are only part of the story of course (albeit a big part): descendants of those who have immigrated since 1948 or so are not dwindling in number, and the thing that binds one part of this latter segment together is growing in self-confidence in the face of the elite's vacillation (evidence of the fact that the elite doesn't see itself as connected to the people it governs and whose fate it can affect) whilst another segment's chaotic debauchery grows. What do you expect, relocating Africa in NW Europe?
The title? JG Ballard's short-story 'The Watchtowers' describes an enervated listless town whose pop'n's conformist apathy and fearfulness hinges upon the presence of obervation towers protruding from the ever-cloudy skies over the rooftops, towers whose presence the very acknowledgement of which is squirmingly deemed "improper". When a central character forces the issue, openly acknowledging their presence and influence the rest of the population withdraw from him before returning to coalesce around a collective position in which the very idea of watchtowers elicits baffled looks.
posted by Reimer at 5:18 PM
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