TRASHFUTURE - Nostalgia Avengers: Infinity WW2 feat. Owen Hatherley

Episode Date: February 19, 2019

We love Britain and British things. We’re a podcast suffused with the Blitz Spirit, the Dunkirk Spirit, the Dying of Black Lung Spirit, and in honour of that, we decided to take on the big issues of modern Britain, such as the following: some rich people tried to sue the Tate Modern because they didn’t want to buy curtains. This week, Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Nate (@inthesedeserts) spoke with Tribune Magazine culture editor Owen Hatherley (@owenhatherley) about the Tate Modern viewing platform, architecture in London, Winston f**king Churchill, and much more. Please bear in mind that your favourite moron lads have a Patreon now. You too can support us here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/overview — and if you do, you’ll gain access to our Discord server, where you can talk about soup with us all day. *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We have an upcoming live show in London on February 21st at the Star of Kings (126 York Way, Kings Cross, London N1 0AX) starting at 7.30 pm. You can buy tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trashfuture-live-ft-josie-long-tickets-54546538164 *COMEDY KLAXON* On 27th February at 8 pm, Elf Lyons and a number of other comics will perform at Smoke Comedy at the Sekforde (34 Sekforde Street London EC1R 0HA). Tickets are £5, and you can get them here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smoke-comedy-with-elf-lyons-tickets-55825778406 Also: you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/, and what’s more, it’s mandatory if you want to be taken seriously. Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

Today's been a day when I've been, as the kids say, back on my bullshit. Um, so I did a tweet. This is how all these stories start. It might be familiar to some of you the format. I'm going to read it out now. So it says, such beautiful weather, a perfect day to continue my great job as a primary school teacher, or I make students recite the Shahada bracket, which they think is a nursery rhyme, and therefore turning them Muslim. The Department of Education knows all about this, but won't fire

me because I'll believe that it's racist. So it's pretty, pretty low hanging fruit. It's a classic of the genre. We've seen it before. It's performed well. Yeah. Yeah, I was, I was really glad to see it out here. You know, really raking in numbers. It's a large pale tweet. Absolutely got a respect for these tweets because we've got a live show coming up soon and we needed to push some tickets and usually it's quite good to kind of say, Hey, if you like stupid shit

like this, you can come to our live show. Yeah, we do live shows in order to turn more people Muslim. That's the right. It's an epic dollar exercise. Anyway, anyway, so it got like some moderate numbers. So I'm looking at now 2.4,000 likes, 226 retweets, like not it was pretty substantial, but not as substantial. These have done better. Not as substantial as like the doctor one, which got me reported to various hospitals slash the police. This is your communal garden numbers tweet

like yeah, yeah, yeah. This is this is putting up a respectable performance, right, but this is not Hall of Fame material. The question I have is where your response is half angry Tommy Robinson supporters and half other Muslims and media who are just like God, not again. Most of them were just like friends of the show or people saying, haha, this is very funny. Well done. I'll never get tired of this to which I to which I was thinking I absolutely do get tired of this. I'm trying to think of a

different format. I don't know which one to get but but the ending of this particular saga was very new. And the reason why is because some guy who responded to it got so mad, so angry at me that he drew a picture of me. He basically like I'm looking at now he basically like drew a picture of my of my Twitter picture, which is a picture of me like going for a run with like a bandana on like behind some waterfall wearing like a crappy Uniqlo jumper. So it looks exactly like that except

he's got like a bunch of speech bubbles around me which says pro Sharia, infidel with I N F E D L. Nice. Just Allah with the with the could forget Hussain's classic catchphrase Allah. Muslims do be saying that I want 70 Virgin boys, which is true, which is true. But let's make sure that like there's no more than five of them at a time. Yeah, you want 70 Virgin boys because you want to like start a business, right? I want to

start a castrato choir. Yeah, I have no interest in sexual things. It's all business on this show. But the best thing the best, the best speech bubble that he wrote was this cartoon suck don't draw to which Hussain said, Hey, I don't remember saying that. I say that all the time. I say this is random people don't draw cartoons of me. Hello again and welcome back to your week's free TF. The old familiar crew is here having all all been we've all been drawn

in loving pen portraits in detail by angry people online. We've been replaced by portraits of ourselves where this is all just speech bubbles. I'm we draw each other every week. This is the Trash Future speed drawing class. I am as ever Riley. I'm joined in studio by Milo. It's me, your boy. How's it going? Who's saying hello? It's me. I'm back. I like your boy. People people do be saying that Nate on the boards. Hello and we are very excited to be joined by the Tribune magazine's culture editor

and all round noted good author and critic Owen Hatherly. Hello, Owen. How are you doing today? Not too bad. Thank you. Fantastic. Also top of the episode. I'm just going to say we have some small amount of tickets for our live show remaining at the Star of Kings in Kings Cross at the time of recording. This may completely change by the time this is released. Who knows? But do click on the link. It is in the

description. We would love to see you there. And if you can't come to the live show or even if you can on the 27th, I have a smoke comedy event with elf lines, which is going to be great. And so far, I'm not going to lie, lads, we've not sold enough tickets. So if anyone wants to help a boy out and buy a ticket to that, that would be really great. Thank you very much. Good night. Interesting. This is the yin and yang. See, this is we're

flipping it around. You thought you could skip it. You skip the plugs just by like turning the podcast off a few minutes before the end. That's usually a mistake because we're also tired and weird by then that some like other jokes do make it in there. That's when all the slurs come out. If you want to hear me call someone a warp, tune into the last three minutes. It's weird. You get on the podcast analytics. I was like, why do the Australians only listen to

the last five minutes of this podcast? They call that the witching hour. But we have an enormous amount of shit to get into. So it is time. It is time to jump in, folks. I have to raise the trash future salute of the week. That's right. The salute of the week. Salute. We raise a glass of that heathen Italian delectable digits, decadence, Sambuca, yellow west of the yellow liquors and to comrade Tate modern. Anyone know why the Tate modern is a comrade care to take a guess

because they've enabled us to stare into the houses of the rich. Look at them as they go about their awful lives. That's right. We are now seeing into the various kinds of I assume sort of dark rituals of human sacrifice that are taking place in the flats at the Neobankside development. The real exhibition at the Tate modern is society. I mean, it's not what it is. Like really, like the mic is in, but you know, you would just see all these rich people

dressing up as the Joker and like having sex with each other. Isn't that what rich people do? It's the darkest and most expensive version of the Sims. It's a huge outlook on the wall. It's just a mirror. Having stared into those particular windows, which is so much more boring than one would hope that none of them are kind of like turning into flash eating monsters or dressing up in an interesting way. They just sort of take cocaine and look at books on

coffee tables and live sad lives. Moving on. Is it really called Neobankside? Yeah, it's the owners of the flats facing the Tate modern in the Neobankside developments, which are like worth four million pounds each, by the way. Calling it Neo anything unironically feels like the only people they are trying to sell it to are really rich anime fans because it's like, I mean, Neo Tokyo is going to explode. Neobankside, maybe not so much.

Well, they call that because you take a pill and then you wake up there. So the owners of the flats have claimed that the new viewing platform of the Tate modern, which I think as we can all agree is basically an unmitigated public good because it allows people to sort of hang out and see London claim the use of the platform represents a quote relentless invasion of their privacy. It is unrelenting. Can you not put curtains up? That's a preview of what the

judge said to do. It's actually due to product placement regulations. We have to say it is an energetic invasion of their privacy, but it is sponsored by relentless. The claimants had sought an injunction requiring the gallery to prevent members of the public observing their flats by cordoning off parts of the platform or screening most of it to stop what they said was this invasion of privacy viewing platform, but you can't look at anything black mirror. That's

the ultimate neoliberal. That's the ultimate neoliberal viewing platform, right? Just a closed box that's been totally bricked up because nearby property owners complained. Yeah, I mean, I have a podcast. You just said it already. Then you have a VR view of the London, but with all the with all like the rich people's houses deleted from it digitally. So, Mr. Justice Man dismissed their claim at a London hearing saying. Mr. Justice Man. Please, Mr. Justice Man.

I was really hoping we could get through just one name. Just one name. But he should be like he should he should change his name. My hero. That Robert, Robert, but let me say the same again. Please say his full name again. Mr. Justice Man said these properties are impressive and no doubt there are great advantages to be enjoyed in such extensive glass views, but that effect comes at a price in terms of

privacy. But Guy Featherstena QC for the take another great name sounds like he should be hosting a show about cooking game birds on BBC four told the court that quote the claimant's remedy for what they perceive to be a nuisance lives in their own hands and that and that he agree and that he was appreciative that the justice had said that the property owners could just buy curtains. That was the judge said we're

not going to grant an injunction to tear down an expensive and previously planned for a viewing platform because it makes your four million pound flat slightly less enjoyable because you could just buy curtains. Righty. But what you're not saying is that some of these people only had exactly four million pounds and they spent now they can't afford. What I'm going to say is that like these guys like in a very serious time like there's a certain type of person that

really wants to buy like a perspex house or like a perspex apartment, right? Oh, David Blaine. Well, besides David Blaine, who I feel like doesn't after like considering like what happened when he did hang out in the first ever perspex London house and like British people just like took the piss out of him. That's 600 quid a month now. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Right. Great, great, great view of the city near a tube station, all that stuff. Convenient crane.

I think they all just want to live like they all just want to live like Patrick Bateman lifestyles, right? And Patrick Bateman, he wouldn't like settle, you know, he wouldn't want he wouldn't put a curtain up in his house, right? He wouldn't he wouldn't do that shit. Like how would people like see him do crunches? People keep watching me murder people. Well, that's the I actually I'm I think we're all it's about another thing too. Like maybe that's what they're worried

about that people finally will people will see them doing murders. They'll see them doing all the weird rich people called shit. Like because that's clearly like there's every rich person has a lot of dirt and every other rich person. Why are they all in a bunch of crazy murder calls? Why are they wearing black masks, mummy? They're running for the governorship of Virginia. So here's the thing. I as I'm sure many of us are we're familiar with the actual

physical shape of these dwellings. What they what they do is they come to up. There's the viewing tower, the dwellings behind the viewing tower from the Thames and then the flats come to a point such and then inside that area is the is the live or the living space is that as as oh and you correctly pointed out just look very sad, but also it would be it would it would diminish the effect of the sort of sweeping view to like interrupt it with curtains and I think that's what they

were basically saying. Well, I mean the crucial thing with those is that you're supposed to look out from them rather than be looked in at. I mean, there's that advert that was doing the rounds that ended up getting pulled because it was so American psycho ask that you may remember which was some sort of city worker is it was for advert for flat actually not far from here like where white chapel meets all gate and you had someone sort of suited around you know sort of hanging

around sort of bits of London where he was in crowded lifts and then kind of walk past places where there was graffiti and then at the end of the advert he's in this new high rise flat and there's this whole kind of spiel over the top about the city that could have swallowed you and now you are at the top and they say kind of yeah there's sort of woman falling on him and he's got the books and the table and he's looking out of the window at the city and that's what you're meant to do now

if then in that view when you're looking out of the city that you have crushed someone's kind of looking at you and pointing at you it's you know like being caught wanking and like why is that man shocking himself every 15 minutes but daddy I thought a belt was supposed to go around the waist oh those oranges were for everyone so that my my question right is what what do you think this what do you think these developments because with me this

felt like a victory the small victory where a public good won out slightly in a very small symbolic way over whatever these flats represent this kind of place this sort of sleek unlived in post-modernity but I don't quite know what that represents what does it represent I mean well I mean the problem with the thing with Bankside and of all that sort of stuff is that it was always built in places that until fairly recently were working class and so in the cases of Bankside it was you know it was an industrial area

but not just you know only a few yards from now you've still got council estates and so the whole way to sort of sell that particular snake oil was always kind of like you are now moving into a desaspirational area and it's all completely different which has been said that council in particular strategy for about the last 15 years is sort of noticing that they're in the middle of London and then trying to attract these people moving to London rather than you know commuting out to Serbeton or what have you you can now live in a luxury living solution in the very centre of London next to the Tate Modern

and of course certain things had to go along with that you had to put up a lot of CCTV quite a lot of gates you had to kind of do things to make sure that like we know you live next door to a council estate so we're going to make sure they can't get in so that kind of paranoia has always been part of part of what the slats were all about and obviously initially it was all justified by lots of like you know if we get bankers to move in here we'll have loads of tax money which means we'll be able to build loads of council housing which obviously happened so the trouble was that poor people they don't like being looked at that's the

real they wish wouldn't move there couldn't be done I know you're making a joke but like that actually is a big part of it because part with one of the major things about making these areas safe and quote-un-quote prosperous was inundating them with sort of either predamages if they're in the city or like chain tourist restaurants if it's backside and then covering them in CCTV so that the remaining poor could then just be watched all the time just so that they don't you know disturb the then sort of frolics of the rich that have been promised on the hoardings of these developments well so that if they kind

of steal a bottle of water during a riot they can be found and apprehended oh absolutely I just kind of on a lark periodically to see how insane property prices are in London I'll just look on on the you know various real estate apps and I moved here from New York so obviously like I'm no stranger to insane real estate and also like insane sort of like juxtaposition of security and high rise luxury flats with you know with what we would the equivalent of council houses or you know poorer neighborhoods but what's been shocking to me here is that the marketing seems to

be a little bit more blatant I mean I've seen things where literally a home in a listing in Packham said you know inset a gated area for the security minded individual and I was like they wouldn't say that in America it's just kind of insane and it seems like it is very much more blatant to you know put in your face that you are going to live in a world apart and those worlds will never meet no one can get in or out the Austrian minded individual I think that comes a little bit out of the particular cultural cringe that that that that kind of came with this in London

there's a good bit in Douglas Murphy's book then compupilus about Boris Johnson and the kind of London that he built where he kind of quotes himself saying something about London actually you know being fairly crap compared to like Paris or New York and it kind of is you know I've lived here for nearly 20 years but you know you walk around a lot of a lot of London it doesn't look like the capital of a globe bestriding empire it looks like a sort of collection of sort of faintly shabby 18th century villages with some tower blocks in between which is great as far as I'm concerned but you know but it you know

you then have to kind of in order to kind of attract bankers from New York which is explicitly what they're trying to do you I think you do have to do that sort of rhetoric you have to kind of do like even more than in New York we will shoot any intruders you know it's well it's this is actually this this goes nicely to what you describe in as a new typology of building where the austere luxury flat and the and the tasteful fifties style modernist non-dom investment sort of gives way from being this Dubai on Thames as you've written increase to increasingly resemble a cross between

Islington in the 1820s and Poplar in the 1950s well if you go to Neobankside at least the last time I was around there this was still there might not be there now there is a grosses called Albion and it's kind of written there in like sans serif on like a kind of sort of 1940s style and it sells just sort of ordinary looking fruit and verge at a very very high price as if it's a sort of you know a greengrocer in like 1940s hackney rather than you know a greengrocer in Neobankside what if I told you that fruit and verge could cost twice as much and it's the same shit you have like generations of kids who are like oh I remember my time at Neobankside it's very fondly I'm watching watching all the weird men busting up

but like the cum curves in the air like he's starting to believe my mother gave me a sixpence to go buy some cherry gum my mother gave me a sixpence to whip at the poor from the top of my four million pound flat but you were saying of the grocer well yeah and so far as like and you know when this stuff was first being built it would you know the grocer would be called like a spire and it would be pink and it would be selling you like kind of you know street food from somewhere you've never heard of like you know and like coffee made by like people they've been the one that shits the coffee they could shit out by the thing that's supposed to make it good anyway it would have been very kind of high-ending and

there's kind of very explicitly kind of like look how fancy this is way and that's changed quite a lot there's sort of the the English middle class has gone back to their sort of default setting of trying to pretend they're not rich and that's that this is this sort of I think is this is I think a feeling that reached its apotheosis in 2012 right where with the Olympic opening ceremony was one of the times where where I think a lot of England started turning back to find its own nostalgia ridiculously appealing like before then we were coming off of new labor in the first couple of years of sort of modern Cameronism and we were supposed to be this this very forward dynamic country that was full of grocery shops called a spire where you could get an organic

baklava that was good that would make you very smart because it contained a new tropic but now I think in in in 2012 I think we fell in love with our own with our own history and a very rosy colored view of our own history and now everything is all of a sudden sort of very almost we it's and you can see this I mean the popularity of Jacob Reese Mogg and that and the brexit and so forth where we all want to go back now well I have a conspiracy theory about this which is that the keep calm and carry on poster was planted by a my five and so far as no one had really heard of it apart from design historians because of the fact that it wasn't actually produced during the war it would be too offensive it would just

piss people off various reasons what was the what is the story of the keep calm and carry on poster just because from from the start we have a we have a half American audience they only know just keep calm and chive on they thought that's where it came from I don't even understand this joke so well I mean there's one of three posters which were kind of put together by the ministry ministry of information in 1940 the other of which said freedom is in peril defendant of all your might and the other one oh god what was it your courage and your fortitude and your something or other will bring us victory and then there was this one saying keep calm and carry on and the first two were kind of put out in 1940 around the time they thought the Nazis might actually invade

and then they didn't so they didn't need to put the poster up but the other two the kind of market research type stuff that they're done and found that people have been quite pissed off by them and found them kind of patronizing and didn't really get them and so I imagine this one would have you know made people even more kind of like don't tell me what to keep calm you know type stuff so then it so disappears completely and then it reappears in a box of books given to a famous secondhand bookshop at a disused railway station in northumberland and then within months it goes from there to the victorian output museum and then it becomes the enormously successful and irritating meme it is now and this happens almost exactly coinciding with the financial crisis

really almost exactly that the poster sort of going from like you know being one of many kind of wartime images that you could like get at you know the imperial war museum shop or whatever to being something that's absolutely inescapable exactly coincides with that and therefore I think the conservative central office planning for their election winning campaign in 2010 you know got their mates and the who whatever's the success of the miniature information I don't know presumably mi6 and I marked it that is the most believable conspiracy theory I have ever heard in my entire life that's like that's just as wild as the whole like Saudi Arabia no it wasn't Saudi Arabia it was like some weird oh no McKinsey like funding supreme oh yeah yeah like McKinsey

having like some steak and like all these like streetwear like these hype these streetwear brands ah thus proving the truth of the McKinsey scale which is that McKinsey is never completely involved or completely not involved in any cultural phenomenon this way it just exists on a continuous scale of involvement yeah yeah this and the I think that's right to say that the keep calm and carry on poster is kind of the ur text for this very sort of strange and unshakable wave of nostalgia that is still gripping Britain I'm just still really enjoying the idea of like bankers during the financial crisis keeping calm and carrying on stealing billions of pounds they did though that's exactly what they did but also I mean I take your point that it seems like a kind

of weird self-referential almost like refracted national image that it's this idea of like a nostalgia for a wartime mentality that didn't actually happen because as you put it it was what was deemed to be way too patronizing and so but it's the same kind of like I feel like when people want to invoke the Dunkirk spirit or something like that as Milo has made many jokes about this on the show that's like the Dunkirk spirit of being saved in the nick of time by a bunch of blokes who fish because you can't be fucked to make a plan it's the same kind of thing it's it's it's nostalgia for an imagined era and but that that that nostalgia is is weaponized in politics even if it's referring to something that never really exists in so your your book on this

ministry of nostalgia sort of goes into this in in a great in a great deal more detail right where it's not just keep calm and carry on it's also the sort of fetishization of extremely expensive home goods that look like they were just made of rough spun linen or even take back control or make Britain great again or or even like the the popularity of like a like a weird cockney pie and mash shop over the road from my flat also like mugs of pictures of social housing on and which I had to photograph my own mug of a picture of social housing on as a sort of like self kind of you know critique um so um yeah it's completely a bit critis and I kind of thought it was going to go away and it hasn't I mean I don't really want to do like the review

of twitter every you know on these things but literally like the an entire week of people talking about Churchill you know just ludicrous fucking things um just it doesn't matter if I know no we will be a dear listener we will be going into that later I try not to try not to be um but um yeah and I think this this this it had an obvious like almost too obvious kind of political use and so far as you know the particular slogans used during the particularly the coalition government were so kind of designed to appeal to the 1940s you know the very idea of this being a period of austerity rather than you know and more obvious thing like cuts you know austerity sort of just ah yes austerity that's you know we we we eat we know what austerity is

we eat spam you know we make our own stuff and we you know we we go for improving walks on the hills and you know everyone feels very good about themselves and I think that similarly there was a kind of you know the slogans like we're all in this together and so forth and even the kind of like the very sort of mr chelm the warner way that david Cameron used to kind of give his speeches almost seemed to have that kind of reassuring sense that you were kind of watching a wartime broadcast it's not just even though I think the wartime broadcast I think a lot of what these people want is they want to live in toad hall basically I don't think it's toad hall I think it's um toad in the hole yeah it's toad in the hole very excellent that's that's that's beautifully

done um so it is I mean it's it's it's not really about um being kind of lord of the manner it's about sort of living you know sort of being like george all in 1948 and like living in a georgian house and listening to a dying tv yeah bud and time when racism was allowed precisely he was was encouraged by certain prime ministers but it's a sort of fetishizing poverty that that is that makes it not very total yeah well so we in fact you've you've you've you've connected this yourself where you say austerity's look and historical syncretism it's rejection of the real human advances of the post war era had seeped into the consciousness of people who would when pressed probably be into opposition to it even as they performed its aesthetics yeah this is

one of those bits where i'm basically having to go out myself is this about the mug again there's a lot more than the mug i'm deep in this yeah but i mean i i i think that i i take your point and i base i think i agree that the this the nostalgia for an era when we were tougher and you only have to look at every conservative politician talking about how suffering builds character whatever that may be you can always tell take a brief moment like in the 1940s i was ripped as far as you literally have the man on television yesterday going concentration camps on that bad what it's a great opportunity to get involved in personal fitness why people keep defending the Nazis he basically no he was talking about the british concentration camps

in south africa and he basically said like well standards were not as good for health back then and like that's why people died it's like yes and you put them in fucking concentration camps too i mean it was it was an argument he basically debated the semantics of how you define a concentration camp and then he said bless you when we did it it wasn't so bad so it was kind of like it was like the people on twitter that are called like starlin pal 69 who like tell you that gulags were totally okay he's talking about my old starlin 69 baby he was a very good-looking man daddy joe holy starlin i just remember this because we've talked about this a little bit on the show periodically but it seems to come back so often the some of the the images in the opening ceremony

of the olympics and you were bringing it back to that yeah that i think particularly the the two things that really get me were the sort of dramatization of like the founding of the nhs and also the windrush generation it's like simultaneously as this grand spectacle was taking place policies were being put in place to to fuck over both of those to damage both of to deport those same exact people and then to critically underfund the nhs with the express purpose of of yielding it to privatization i mean we've got to have some new stuff to put in the next opening ceremony come on what's the sequel what's the sequel that's what you've always got to be asking yourself well it's because that's the thing it's we we imagine when you're going

to take away an open a britain that's open immigration you're going to take away a britain that care cares about people's health the best thing you can do is substitute the reality of that of that actual thing with people's sort of imagination of what that thing would look like and maybe they won't notice i think that's the politic that that is really the political function of nostalgia it's because it's like oh we're gonna we're actually going to make your life worse and you're going to fucking love us for it i was like jackass it's kind of like yeah it's a like jackass bit of a sort of spam and kind of cold houses and so forth it's sort of but it's similarly a kind of like look at look at the amount i'm enduring it'll make me more british

to have totally i the working class are getting their mouse spin their dick in a mouse bitten by a snake which is austerity it's more kind of like it's hilarious the working class in britain is just stevo come on this fucking hilarious dude it's more kind of like i look i've spent a million pounds on this flat covered in damp isn't that wonderful look at this damp you know just sort of documenting it on your instagram you wouldn't want it without damp that's the thing we have this whole i mean i i don't i don't know if i want to take it back to to walter benjamin i mean i might but where you get that thing of aura right where you you're desperate for that place in that time of that either of that thing that's created that i think you can extend as a concept to be to authenticity

with a big capital a and that there is this enormous premium paid and it's payable and authenticity now because all of a sudden people don't want to live in bank and perspex banker filing cabinets whether or not they're overlooked by a viewing platform they want to live in somewhere with crown molding that looks like an anthropology catalog and so the difference is are you living in an actual council house where most of your life means that you're constantly getting kicked out of london to go live in a cheaper area or are you living in a quote-unquote council style house that is in a retro modern block with 1950s furniture so you can live in this imaginary more authentic time where you're less sort of relentlessly alienated by structural forces i mean not to

not to plug myself here but i kind of wrote something about this a couple weeks ago which i wanted to shout out on the show but i guess we were too busy talking about dragon dicks or something of that nature about the irish or dragon dicks or a little dumb shit that we talk about in between all this i wrote this piece a couple weeks ago for about vaporwave and about like this thing called more waves so a bunch of these teenagers were listening to like hour two hour long like lo-fi mixes of what were what was essentially supposed to be more music so it's like music from the 80s and the 90s but are like purposely reduced and purposely like edited so it sounds as if it's background music and i was talking to these teenagers who like spent hours

and hours listening to it not like out of like reasons of wanting to focus or anything but just because they had told me they wanted to imagine what it was like to live in a time that they never really experienced so they were saying that oh like i'm having all these memories come back to me but it's like dude you're like 16 years old like you did not live in the 80s like you haven't like listened to abba until like now um you know i don't understand what like the appeal of like lo-fi limb biscuit is like why do you just listen to the whole thing damn this is just like being in a lift this is crazy what a cool ass lift right when it's just like being in a lift at a hard topic but it was like they were kind of what they what i had gathered from that was that these are

like a group of teenagers who are really anxious about the world that they live in and they're really like uncertain and they use this as kind of they use this music as a way of like basically getting themselves like imagining like a different kind of world where things are okay and everyone's safe and everyone's beautiful and like they can exist in that world and i sort of feel like the examples about you know you know as you say like living in an anthropology castle really is like that right it's kind of like living in you know living in this fantasy world that you've created yourself which is safe and secure and like you can control it and it's the perfect anstote to like a world that you can't control where you know yeah oh fuck so the future

isn't black mirrors twin peaks i mean probably yeah oh no they didn't create it themselves they it was they it was created for them by by by capital essentially i mean there's like different variations right the only like you know the only the real fundamental difference about owning a flat that looks like a 1950s council estate is like the longevity compared to like a two hour youtube video and that comes with you know purchasing power right so when you're a teenager who doesn't have any money like you can access youtube and like live in that fantasy world for a couple of you know a couple of hours if you're someone who's inherited a lot of money like you still exist in this really insecure world that controlled by you know controlled by dark

capital but you can live in that fantasy world for longer i mean it's like poor people who as you said like they live in the actual world where they can be booted out of like their council estate which is literally a 1950s council estate because you know acid fucking comes out of the sink all the time or like you know it's basically they're deteriorating um you know they're the ones who have to like think about the future do i mean the thing that kind of struck me um recently on this was someone pointing out that jacob reese mog is exactly the same age as marilyn manson yeah he was he's like born in the late 60s i think yeah and that's why people think marilyn manson had two ribs removed to suck his own dick when actually you recall that photo of him wearing

the suit in the monocle that was taken in like 1981 he was 13 like he's not that old he just seems that way he seems like he should be like a character from a dickens novel who gets killed halfway through by like a falling pale of soot that's because that's what she decided to become it's it's it's a it's a persona yeah it's all it's it is you know it is just a series of performances but really the the main performance in britain is the same performance that like an annoying teenager will do when they claim they were born in the wrong generation and that they should have grown up listening to led zeppelin and they basically just dress like bill hicks but without really knowing that say they might not have gotten vaccinated for as many things as

they as they did back then which of course they might not now because of their insane nostalgic parents yeah exactly jacobries mogat she did grow up in the ear of led zeppelin but he was nostalgic for the hindenburg if we're gonna talk about nostalgia we couldn't possibly talk about nostalgia without talking about the prime minister of nostalgia himself mad hancock no no he's a future he's a future thinking mad hancock is a relic of like the two of the 2010 2011 britain we're talking about the man who represents today's britain who i will introduce with another man represents today's britain michael a quote from michael portillo oh shout out fellow patrion michael portillo i'm sure he said something good um patrion someone who went to peter house

i'm sure this is why every fucking episode there's always like fucking oxbridge references i have so many stories about michael portillo which are probably libelous not libelous if they're true um let us teach our children the history of this remarkable country i don't mean the wishy washy by looking at statues of cecil roads thomas colston no no he says i don't mean the wishy washy sociological flim flam that passes for history in many of our schools today i don't mean the politically correct debunking anti patriotic nonsense of modern textbooks i mean the real history of heroes in bravery of good versus evil of freedom against tyranny of nelson of wellington and sound the fucking horns of Churchill pies and nonsense that's what makes

this country what it is the history do do put in some horn sounds like he wants a history book written by enid blighten that's his that's his vibe the history that created a sovereign nation the defense that protected our parliamentary democracy when every other country in continental europe fell to the dictators the defense that will sustain that sovereignty yet he protected democracy when no one else was yeah so you know he wants like some real like social history like um he wants some lefev shit basically he wants history from below told by the real people who are the heroes of good against evil obviously i mean i you know as a fan of micah portillo's great railway journey so i think he should really sort of follow this and sort of micah

portillo's great journeys of empire where he goes around different countries and steals from them he goes and comments how good the indian railways are he pays them in railways yeah so this is this is what and this is of course leading into us talking about Churchill but this is how britain now looks at its own history everyone is cosily tucked away in a fake council flat covered in um covered in artisanal coal dust essentially uh just dreaming of being like you know called a racial slur by by Churchill because they're like italian or irish i'm convinced that some of it so i mean i realize not all of it is going to be one thing but i'm convinced that some of the nostalgia is because of the popularity of the of the crown which fixates

on Winston Churchill the first two seasons like clement atley's administration basically happens you know blink like there's zero coverage of it besides him being portrayed as indecisive when the fog hits but half of the first season it's just Winston Churchill being like the british people need coal and it's just over and over again and this is like it creates this idea that that's the natural state of things is him yelling and being the leader that everybody trusts people in the way needed coal heroes this i mean i mean it is heroes bravery good and evil freedom and tyranny this manikin way of seeing the world that's literally mythology that's literally what how you describe mythology it's avengers infinity war but the infinity war is

world war two which we never got over much like the 2016 elections episode title avengers infinity world war two jesus christ but it's something that would be very hard to imagine anyone who had actually lived through the second world war unfortunate ever actually saying well didn't what didn't some brexit so very pro mark françois said my father at with regards to the european commission saying something or other like sorry we can't disobey our own laws said he said my father fought for freedom against the germans and his son would gladly do the same would you really you bloated it's basically a country with daddy issues working all out on the national stage i i said this thing which got a lot of brexit people mad which was that like the kind of

nostalgia for winston church was like more indicative of like all the this generation of men that just need therapy because their dads kept forgetting their names um and just hated them and like i feel like there's some truth to it right i do i do genuinely feel like there is some truth to like their projection on church or being a conduit for this weird form of like when no one like really addressing these big problems of masculinity and like what happens to a generation but number one didn't have to fight a war but didn't have video games either right they didn't have video games but also like had to deal with dads who did have like fucking ptsd right and like who didn't who didn't like show love to their their mums and stuff right i do

genuinely think there is something there is something there and that's why so many people got mad at me did not mad at me enough to draw a picture of me but mad nonetheless what is the end of history right it's just it's been the end of history for them it hasn't been the end of history for us we who've sort of suffered at the hands of the economy that they wrought it wasn't the end of history for their parents who spent most of their lives fighting a war but they did live through the end of history they became niches last man they were they stared into the abyss of having a completely pointless life bereft of struggle and the abyss stared back at them from the tape viewing gallery they stared in the they stared in the abyss and put their dick in it yeah

yeah every one of the tape before every one of the tape to go see yeah they had they had an empty life and so they needed to create their own chaos i've said this before and it's just it i mean obviously i'm i didn't grow up here but you know my grandmother survived the the blitz in norwich but she was she was sick with meningitis at the time so she was left overnight in the hospital because they couldn't take her out of an iron lung to the air raid shelter um she's never been normal she was six years old you know and she was traumatized by this and she's still alive and she's still just not normal she's never been particularly normal person um and i imagine a lot of it has to do with the fact that like that entire generation of people had fucking PTSD from

the experience of the blitz and so it just seems so so cynical to to to invoke or to make claim to the that's the spirit that got us through the blitz because it's like lots of people didn't make it through the blitz lots of people got killed by bombs in their sleep or in the middle of the day and it's just it seems so like cynical to the point of being venal but it seems to work that's the thing that really surprises me as an obvious outsider in this country is that it seems to work it seems to have traction that people who should know better in the same vein that we're always like why do people why do certain genres of british people love the nazi so much nazis bombed the fuck out of this country but it does seem to have cachet i don't understand a thing

i'm sure i'm sure oan has something as a more intelligent way of putting this but i always feel like it's it's the same thing as the dunkirk thing it's like a miss selling of the phenomenon which is like things like the blitz spirit and dunkirk are demonstrations of like the british public's ability to like withstand things and solve problems but what they also completely demonstrate is just like the government failing them like and so the government co-opting it as a like oh everything's gonna be fine remember when everything was fine that time when the government completely fucked up and you had to solve it for yourselves like it just doesn't yeah and then like church is kind of the same thing like church is like emblematic of like a spirit in the brit like

those speeches and things are great and they represent like a resistance to fascism and like britain standing alone for a period against fascism and that kind of stuff and it doesn't mean that Churchill was a great guy alone it was 1940 fucking one those guys were fascist as fuck until 1941 referring to india rather than the us as you were yeah um yeah i mean like well that was basically the end of my point but yeah that's another thing that annoys me about the starlin stand is that like starlin was more than happy to cooperate with the nazis until they invaded russia like he was not like it was he was not a committed anti-fascist in any way shape or form until until of course he was he was a committed this is my land you know take you take everyone

else land fine that's always been the russian foreign policy i mean in georgian accent comrade yes in a more in a more like extended way like dunkirk sort of feels like a certain generations like american psycho or like you know just like these guys who like watch business movies i was saying the other day that i met this kid who said that he i met this guy who said that he was inspired to get into finance because he watched a big short so good that was like i wonder if like is this how like boomers see dunkirk for like they have this imagine view which is like yeah war war looks really cool it would be really good to like go into a dingy while being shot at by artillery yeah um but i think i i think what was somewhat of what you said is true but i think also there's

an enormous amount of nastsism in it like like one of the things that even before the financial crisis when it all became inescapable was every time there was a tube strike and people would talk about blitz spirit as if like you know having to take the bus for a couple of days was exactly the same as literally nazi's raining bombs down on your heads you know it was an extraordinary kind of narcissism because and it's all basically it's like all those kind of like twattish little journals all think they're jaw jaw well it's kind of stuff that makes you sound hard it's kind of like yes i am doing the blitz spirit i am getting through this thing it's like no you're not you're like you're being mindlessly inconvenienced on your way to work and i think there's a kind of

that brexit has a similar thing of like we you know making a political choice is somehow exactly the same as being up against the 20th century's biggest war machine it's it's weird but i think it's it's based on sort of self-love in many cases self-care baby for me the greatest irony of the blitz spirit tube strike comparison is that the blitz spirit involved actually spending a lot of time in the tube so without further the sleeping bag yeah without further ado let's jump in to tom harris's article in the telegraph the left thinks it's rebellious to hate churchill but it just shows how little they understand britain premium concept telegraph premium premium premium iconoclasm he writes has always been an important feature of left-wing philosophy

though only with regard to its opponents like yeah that's that's how politics works you try to destroy the icons of your opponents so that you win but never mind where is the bipartisanship compare the number of times leftist politicians in the uk have attacked winston churchill for example with the number of times they've raised even a smidgen of criticism against mass murderers like uncle joe stalin or mauset dawn everyone on the left love stalin it's absolutely true when they admit you to the left they ask you first do you love stalin you say that's the pass yeah you get a little you get up that picture of him when he was like looking super fucking yoked when he was young and you get a little heart frame around that i mean there are some people who may or may

not hate listen to this podcast and who may or may not love certain forms of overall wear uh who do love stalin they do read okay there are some on the left who do unironically just love every single thing stalin did what else do they love anime and locking their twitter account because they don't like it when people don't agree with them as opposed to taking a balanced view of the man for example as well i think we try to do of churchill anyway there is something rebellious about daring to criticize someone who is regarded globally as an inspiring politician and leader but it is the rebellion of the student politician of the teenager hoping to impress that girl in the student union bar with his clever and anti establishment take on politics i love it when

i get laid by telling girls genocide is bad it therefore exposes older more mature politicians to accusations of grandstanding and hypocrisy i love how ridiculously specific uh mr harris has gotten with this yeah that one time that cool leftist came into the bar and totally took the girl i was talking to you're basically telling yourself in shock and shattered yeah is what he's saying no actually if you don't hero worship churchill or if you try to counteract the hero worship of churchill that's just immature as though it's it's like it's like if you told someone santa isn't real and they say well that's pretty childish of you to say it doesn't make any fucking sense so the point is that churchill is infallible yeah because the

pope churchill churchill is the pope but he probably hated italians hidden hidden in mom miscellaneous yeah oh yeah he was a big he was a big fan of miscellaneous for a while oh it's interesting to me because it seems like that completely negates the fact that churchill lost quite handsomely in 1945 in the general election like because it were all those people you know they were all trying to impress girls every single the entire british the entire british electric was all trying to impress girls by electing atley they were all trying to impress the same girl who was on the lacrosse team and was also a second year rep for earnest nyong who is this person who is this tom harrow actually i have the quote here but churchill

was booted out at the first opportunity crow his left wing critics imagining that the electrics voted in 1945 was based on unhappiness with his views on cultural diversity in fact he was rejected by voters who after six years of war wanted to build a new britain to which the conservatives seemed ill-disposed but it's like okay so he's not fucking infallible then it's just yeah i don't want to repeat myself but yeah it's it's it's it's such a myopic reading of what took place that it just seems as though he's not actually engaging with he's engaging with the same sort of bizarre strawman creation that they always want to engage with we're like the you know it there's a male brooks quote he says uh comedy is when or tragedy is when i cut my finger comedy is when you fall

into an open sewer and die and it's the same kind of thing here it's like it's like when when the left when politicians who i don't like get elected that's the left being juvenile when politicians that i do like get get elected that's wisdom coming to the fore and it's just like it's the same warmed over shit we always encounter from these people uh the best response to uh john mcdonnell's latest barb against Churchill who called him a villain for quite rightly john mcdonnell is such a bitch oh my god he said he loves drama for for what Churchill did uh in the uh tony pandy minors strike in wales where i believe other the quote was the minors complain their bellies are empty while we'll fill them with lead he was just a cartoon villain for most of his life i mean he

don't realize is and i'm being jacobry's monkey but in those days it was normal for people to eat lead and now that might seem outdated and trite but in those days it was very nutritious i mean you must know this the romans actually did eat a small amount of lead hell yeah that's what gets your dick hard a small amount of lead every day because they used it as a because they didn't have sugar so they used lead as sugar they used this as a sweetener for food powdered lead and that's the time we have to go back to that's the time but i'm nostalgic for personally yeah i'm i'm so nostalgic for the glory days of empire that i'm going in licking lead paint off of the walls of a normal council flat so i can really experience what it must have been like to

mean ancient roman it makes you impervious to nuclear war it's great like the spectate the spectators editorial board are probably like two drinks away from like competitively and performatively licking lead paint so what does it what does he continue to say so what he continues to say thank you thank you thank you name that's a really graceful segue courtesy of me the best response to mcdonald's latest barb came from none other than none other than nicolas somes mp churchill's grandson who said quote i think my grandfather's reputation can withstand a publicity seeking assault from a third rate pound land lenin but did nicolas somes's reputation withstand the assault from an and woman who said having sex with nicolas somes is like

having a wardrobe fall on top of you with a small key stuck in the lock i would argue that it did not he's a big boy ladies and gentlemen he's a very big boy no further questions and that's like we we're desperate to preserve churchill's legacy because if we want to go back and live in these sort of storybook times we have to we have to resolutely and systematically fail to confront the fact that we basically invented concentration camps and and churchill was an ardent proponent of them or the people who died under his policies didn't matter yeah fundamentally that that i think that's what i guess the heart of that that that those people didn't matter and those people were unequal and so um you know if it warms the hearts of people to go back to that of a certain class

and that's fine in these people's opinion i mean maybe that's the harsh harsher reading than is necessary but it's just i don't see how you can look at them you're like oh i'll tell you when grandpa massacred those minors because he was a nice guy or when he committed several different kinds of genocide yes here but it's not based on some compulsory triviality like the sort of this about oh it wasn't because of culture churchill's views on cultural diversity it's sort of like the idea that what people are sort of angry about is maybe the church will might have said a racist thing as opposed to him like you know literally saying during the bangal famine that indians breed too much that sort of thing a famine which he inflicted

you know that's that's kind of and it's a sort of weird sort of accusing people of campus politics were sort of engaging in a sort of really weird sort of student triviality like you're kind of writing with some sort of combination of like the enemy in history today it's gossip basically what they're doing is they're they're treating they're treating all of history like a gossip magazine because and i know i brought this up before but i think it's worth restating these people see racism as a personal insult not a structural force it's like oh you call churchill racist because you love to be mean to people you hate because that's just an insult to them it doesn't mean that it does it's not connected to actions or power it's just you being mean by

saying the worst thing you can say to churchill which is to call him racist and i agree with you own because it feels like when they're reacting to something it's basically them saying well okay churchill might not might not have been woke but neither was hitler but nobody is saying that that's such a good bit well you we asked earlier how could someone like see all that together i'll tell you precisely how because tom eris goes on to do precisely that others who have jumped to wisdom churchill's defense miss this vital point he requires no defense in fact to focus on his many faults and weaknesses only serves to magnify his many remarkable achievements and insights hitlers not owned this is actually you're making yourself

look bad this is like a gcse coursework essay like what the fuck is going on there there's a point to this isn't that because when we were talking about michael portillo stuff about learning real history about like good guys versus bad guys none of that none of that like pc evidence-based shit a level based you know maybe we should get a textbook from somewhere that isn't eddxl maybe we should get a textbook from somewhere that from a textbook that wasn't published by ukip and that's why i like some of that free base harry potter's shit and i mean and i mean that's why they really hate like university history departments so that's why they hate like history departments like the soas history department and stuff right because at

some point like you have to get out of like the gcse environment where like number one and also like this is a very this is an educational question too i studied i studied history up to university level but i remember like in my gcse's so much like number one i learned i had learned nothing about like the empire or anything which you know we just literally learned about like the second world war and um you know the cold war for a few weeks and that was it and the whole point was literally just like here are the things that are going to get you the marks of the exams right so all you have to do is pass this exam all you do is have to pass it get through this institution i mean you can find whatever like fucking managerial job you you know you can want

like the world's your oyster up to like i don't know like london bridge or something um you know and what i what i really like what i realized especially when i speak to people about like things to do with history um is that so much of it is still like stuck in this mentality that understanding history is as simple as like a gcse exam where you balance all sides and there are good guys and there are bad guys and if you don't know enough about like the supposed bad guys then evidently like the way that you're going to answer a question is is that i know all this shit that Churchill did and it was like super good um but i don't know anything else about you know uh what he did after the war i know nothing about like the bengal famine and stuff like that

and that's why like when you bring me bring it up to these people people who have only really studied history up to gcse or maybe a level standard who's like main engagement of history is like books from w8 smith yeah like you know there's like very dad books about like the war like this huge volume about 100 facts about church hell it's not even nice kind of like these i mean do you know what i'm talking about like these kind of great wit and witticisms of the 20th century books oh no you mean Churchill a life or a whatever yeah like Churchill a life or like you know if you are you know history of like the raf and stuff like that where like in order to kind of get that level of access into like somewhere like the raf you have to be like somewhat sympathetic towards

and this is like popular history right so like all these very challenging volumes all these like counter histories even like the decolonization movement is so kind of contained within universities but when i think there was like a there was a conversation that happened on good morning britain this week in which pierce morgan again got angry because like some because a phd student who also works in navara media was talking about decolonization and simply said we're not like trying to erase history we're not trying to kind of say we're not trying to say we're not going to engage with these books we just want to like engage with more writers and you want to engage with like writers in the global south who like by the way can write in english and like pierce morgan

just got so mad about that saying that oh you just want to take down the statue of like sassel roads which is like number one yeah okay yeah you know um but number two like so so fucking what right like isn't that the point of edgy but like to them again this isn't about education this is about patriotism yeah it's about together you know so we're ideally heading towards us for them we're ideally heading towards a society where history and arts departments will be gussed but you can buy lots of books about the second world war from w8 smith on your way back on your way back to the home counties join wing commander chuff piflington on a riproaring journey to the history of the wrath in fact so harris carries on in real life because this is where this is where harris does actually

bring in real life here in real life our heroes including our national heroes are only human Churchill drank to excess was prone to depression was arrogant hankered after britain's diminishing empire and considered black people inferior to his own race but if you can't handle him at his worst you sure as hell they're deserving of those are all the same like being a white supremacist imperialist is the same as like being a sad boy who drinks too much those are not parallel but they're not in these latter traits he would have fitted in well to upper class and working class by the way society of his time love of empire seems clunkingly out of place in modern britain but this is an irrelevant observation Churchill you see died in 1965 and was a product

of victorian it's identity politics for dead people at this point that's what they're doing they're like it's like what we need to do self care for dead people which is called embalming yeah i mean well it's one of those things where i mean they kind of they are on some weird level they have a point which is that like yeah Churchill was born in like what 1870-ish like so i mean he's gonna have to like i mean some of the suffragettes were pretty racist like i mean it's like it's not like it's not unusual someone of that time to have been racist the unusual element is how much he's deified by certain elements yeah it's like some random victorian like coal like like like coal shoveler isn't deified today as like the example of what

our politics need to be and i think more than anything else is that people aren't saying like we're gonna cancel Churchill they're just saying to take it in context and to stop saying that like this man had no faults that's all they're asking i think there's an issue that some people then get really excited and they're like we're gonna cancel Churchill and it's like no you're also he's been cancelled by time yeah cancelled by time yes he's been cancelled already it's probably like root gahauer i have nothing further to say on Winston Churchill do you think the dragon he was riding on was actually his dick well look i think with Winston Churchill Nostalgia for him is moronic and again like every culture war thing serves only to obfuscate from the fact i think that

there is a group of powerful like politicians and business owners who are basically making our society worse on a more or less day to day basis and by sort of making all making everything about well can you say Churchill was a racist what we're not doing is talking about the rest of it we're talking about it on this comedy podcast because it's really really really stupid yeah only one perfect man has ever lived by modera for the benefit of my favorite non plus look i've ever received thank you for the benefit of the listener oh indeed look at my low very puzzled just now like it is our Winston Churchill has who had been served a strange new kind of tea that she didn't much approve of please unpack um how do we begin we're big fans of bad modera on

this show modera on the show we think he's uh we think he is he is our nostalgia for the early to mid 2000s the pinnacle of western culture they're too young to remember it and i'm a little bit older than them so i can recall jackass and viva labam and be like the show fucking sucked why do you guys like it so much what they do the thing was like you were like oh yeah you were old of us so you could watch it be like this big fucking suck is boring yeah i watched jackass a lot we were like 14 15 years old and like all i wanted was to like build a skate ramp all i wanted was to live in a castle full of a skate park and then like throw my mother out a window and say pranked it's like phil and april were like the oppressive bourgeoisie class and don vedo was like this kind

of chaotic neutral you definitely went on to no but in this my nostalgia for viva labam is that as a teenager i wanted to be in my early 20s and hang out with like ryan dunne and rob himself and rake yawn and then like just be a cool guy who like drives a lamborghini off of a small cliff as a joke ryan dunne rip cancelled by time so if are you saying that if people the margera is my church oh yeah that if they sold you on the bam margera spirit you would support reactionary politics a thousand percent i would do i would i would do whatever he would he would tell me in any case i i think we are about up on time uh nate looking at the time god the time god nate nate the time god i like being the time god i think i'll keep that from now on known as chronos yo nate eats his

kids um so it it falls to me now just to say oh and thank you very much for coming on thank you and uh also to say actually we said at the beginning that we have a live show we have a live show we have a live show we are alive unlike winston churchill we have a live show yeah um what would he have a dead show that wouldn't be very good don't go to that uh maybe you can get some of your favorite facts about winston churchill's many historical crimes printed on a t-shirt from little comrade should you be so interested in so doing uh or you please get someone get bam margera is the winston churchill of modern modern people of modernity yeah and you could also get one of our many fine soup mugs yep they're available put your soup in them yeah for put soup coffee same thing

or drinking with a spade finally yeah you could listen to our theme song which is from ginseng it's called here we go you can get it on spotify listen to it early and listen to it often in any case it falls to me merely now to say for the last time good night everybody you