The Masters Now

In reply to a comment of mine (very similar to this) over on Neil Clark's blog, Robin Carmody writes:

We now have something we never had in the past: an Establishment in denial, a group of people who love to pretend that they're not the elite when in fact they are the overwhelming ruling power in this country. I had no problem with sharing an anti-war position with the Americosceptic wing of the old elite, because those people have long since lost the power they may once have had to stop me doing the things I want to do, nor are they ever going to get it back. I can quite understand why boomer liberal hawks think these people are worth hating, but they need to admit just how much things have changed rather than pretend they haven't so as to protect their own self-image.

and

To my mind, a key part of the neocon ideology could pretty much be described as "rock'n'roll at gunpoint" - and some babyboomers don't want to admit this because it would destroy both their own self-image and the image they have of rock music. I understand why this is psychologically hard for them. But if they really cannot admit that rock has in the end been more of a force for the right than for the left, *someone* has to tell them. That someone might as well be me.

re. David's post, I can think of one leftist-mutated-into-neocon on Usenet of old whose main argument of support for the Iraq war was that "public school pooftahs" (his *exact words*) opposed it and that British people had been inspired in the post-war years by American music (so what? At the time, that merely implied musical preference and has nothing to do with a war concocted in a completely different era - and if anything it was *against* an imperial venture in the Middle East). When defenders of an ideology have to resort to decades out-of-time class-war rhetoric and to mendacious invocation of a territory which for the most part has no direct *inherent* connection with war (though it has come to seem so the way some people have used it), you know their ideology is bankrupt.

Where modesty permits, I couldn't agree more.