THE UGLIFICATION OF BEAUTY

On the 30th December I was walking past the National Portrait Gallery in central London and on a whim popped in to have a look at a new exhibition, The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2011, and was taken aback by its obsession with portraying the human body at its most flawed, broken, diseased or infected. This was portraiture as selected by Hieronymus Bosch and styled by Joel Peter Witkins, where stumped limbs vied with pierced genitalia and diseased flesh for our attention, where deformity and perversion are celebrated over beauty and perfection. It is in fact an exhibition not of man’s beauty or even of man’s ability to overcome adversity or of inner beauty but rather it is a celebration of the ugly and the vile and the objectification of the grotesque in the name of diversity and the pursuit of equality, while beauty and the perfection of the physical, is like intelligence, brought down to its most base level.

The celebration of beauty and perfection and even of the human and the human body as an aspirational object is now fraught with danger, with every limb and sinew a minefield of politically correct catechisms. Where once the pinnacle of each race was of a body perceived to have been created in God’s image and that the best and healthiest examples of that body, if not attainable for all, were at least to be aspired to. Now we spurn such perfection as elitist and hurtful of those less fortunate or able bodied. At worst such displays of Greek and God like perfection are seen as Darwinian, fascistic, racist, or as a veiled attack on the disabled or physically handicapped and as such are increasingly taboo. 

Only in the freak show world of trash celebrity is the twisted and mercurial nature of the human body discussed, loathed or aspired to. In this world the celebrity aspirants in a gallery of ‘national portraiture’ would not be chosen for how many boxes they ticked on our ever burgeoning politically correct scales but rather for how many aspirational body segments that male or female celeb rated perfection in. Here, in a world as grotesque as its politically correct counterpart hanging on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery, the human body is dissected and scrutinized for each flaw, with each imperfection celebrated as evidence of a celebrities fallibility and vulnerability. In this world scars signify surgical enhancement, large breasts a sure sign that nature has been cheated, fat, a sign of gluttony or sloth, thinness a symptom of anorexia or bulimia, while cellulite and wrinkles show that age, even in celebrity, cannot be stopped. The celebrity body is, like its atrophied counterparts in the National Portrait Gallery, a caricature to be gawked at, fawned over or examined like some exhibit in a Victorian sideshow.

The human body, like the human mind and the skin that encloses them, is being brought down to its lowest level. In picture after picture men and women are shown at their most base. Disease and wounds are nolonger hidden or concealed but in the name of diversity and inclusivity put on display. So a portrait of a couple is rendered somehow more ‘real’ for showing (genital) warts and all, and the picture of a soldier who has lost a leg is somehow made more ‘meaningful’ for showing the actual stump or a cancerous face more pitiable for us being able to see each rotting cell of flesh. 

This is our brave new world, a world in which even beauty is to be tamed and restricted in the name of ascetic egality and visual equality. It was telling that even where real beauty was on display in the Taylor Wessing exhibition in the form of a large photograph of the actress Keira Knightley that the colours had been muted and subdued to the extent that all life had been removed from the picture. This left her flesh tones neither pale and interesting or bright and cheerful but rather dead and lifeless like those of a corpse in a morgue. 

This grey-green hue seemed to pervade almost every image as if the exhibitors, not satisfied with displaying image after image of diseased, wounded and broken bodies, wanted to imbue the whole exhibition with a veneer of death and decay. If this exhibition of British photographic portraiture says anything of our nation and its people it is not, as I am sure the selectors and judges intended, one of hope over adversity or of tenacity over prejudice or sexual diversity triumphant, but rather of misery and squalor, of death over life, of ugliness and egotism, of perversion, pain and penury. This is not a celebration of human life and the human body in all its glory but of human life and the human body at its most vulnerable and miserable. It is a portrait of flesh, cast not in God’s image, but in his shadow.

It is no wonder then that as we enter 2012 and the nation prepares to embrace the Olympics and the human form at its most vigorous and athletic that the UK’s diversity obsessed establishment should have chosen as its mascot not some God-like creature 

whose physical demeanor represented these noble qualities but rather its complete opposite. The 2012 Olympic mascot is in fact the antipathy of the Olympic ideal, a atrophied, limbless, grey, anaemic one-eyed shapeless blob that represents neither the human body, sexuality, intelligence, beauty or skin colour and as such offends none of the totems of multiculturalism, nationhood, gender, religion or able-bodied over disabled. 

The Olympic mascot is the natural culmination of the Establishments quest for a non offensive human form, a shapeless blob. This too is where in a few more years The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait will end up in its striving to offend no one and to subvert beauty. Soon diseased flesh and genitals will not be enough and no doubt excrement and faeces will vie with open sores and corpses as being more real and inclusive. Until one day a one-eyed grey-skinned blob hangs on the wall and we will have achieved perfection...

Happy New Year.

© Nigel Wingrove 2011

RELOCATION, RELOCATION: A MIDDLE CLASS NAME FOR 'WHITE FLIGHT'

The English, and the English middle classes in particular, are well known for their habit of saying one thing and meaning something else entirely. Racism is concealed behind a veneer of niceties and politeness, with prejudice being the hate that dares not speak its name. The liberal elites and sauvignon quaffing professionals who go out of their way to be broadminded and understanding on sexual diversity, race, religion and multiculturalism, would still be privately aghast at the idea of their son or daughter coming out, or marrying into another race, or embracing Islam. They would never say so, rather with British stoicism they would smile and carry on. Yet there is a perceptible change in the air, which since the riots is being driven by fear and a sense that our inner city populations are not the multicultural urban nirvanas that they were once thought to be, that they are in fact, an overflowing melting pot that’s been simmering for too long and is now getting ready to explode. 

The first signs of this coming explosion were August’s riots, but these should be seen not as the actual explosion but rather as the first salvo in what will effectively be a violent realigning and redrawing of English society as future outbreaks of rioting destroy and undermine the social order on which our current way of life is structured. A structure which is being eaten away and weakened by the cancerous effects of being force-fed a relentless diet of multicultural diversity for thirty or more years and is now facing the prospect of being physically attacked as well. In such a fragile state its survival is not guaranteed, and it will need to fight hard to maintain the current status quo between the state and the people, or risk losing and seeing the country slide into anarchistic barbarism or becoming some form of quasi Weimaresque democracy which constantly teeters on the brink of collapse and paving the way for a period of political or military authoritarianism. 

The middle classes know this not because there is an obvious sign but because there are little warning indications everywhere, in the papers, on the street, on the news, on the Net, in school, in colleges, in work, in the shops, and from the people they talk too. Everyday  there are little things and big things all flashing red and those warning signs are all saying that the pot is getting ready to blow.

The journalist Graham Archer writing in the Daily Telegraph this week announced that he was leaving the inner city London borough of Hackney due, in a perfect example of middle class double speak, to a lack of empathy among the ‘separate communities’ and more importantly because of the ‘repellent antisocial behaviour that marks out too many bus journeys’, and specifically he says, ‘we’re leaving because of the summer riots’. He denied that this was about race and went on to castigate and cite the ‘tram lady’, Emma West, whose mouthy and slurred tirade at the world in general and non English whites in particular has made her a hate figure worldwide, seen her children taken into care and extraordinarily imprisoned without trial until January 3rd 2012 ensuring that she spends Christmas in prison. Such is the fate of anyone who dares to get ‘mouthy’ about race or who, in a very non middle class way, speaks their mind honestly. Better for her that she had thought what she meant and spoken what she didn’t. 

Yet Emma West is also a spark, and the state’s brutal overreaction to what were in effect the drunken ramblings of a solitary woman on a tram has ensured that that spark rather than being extinguished will, like so many others, continue to burn. The police are adding their sparks as well by further talking up the doom-laden ante and demanding everything from tear gas, water cannon and new blinding laser lights to deal with future urban disorder. Those with a vested interested in portraying the riots as the cries of an underclass struggling for justice against a wicked, austerity driven world, have given future rioters the veneer of political respectability by reclassifying the rioters as protesters and in the background the silent majority says one thing, thinks another,  dreams of relocating, and carries on.

Yes people are carrying on, but are increasingly nervous, as all the while the red lights keep flashing. Unemployment is rising, crime is rising, production and manufacturing are falling, banks could go bust, Europe is imploding, interest rates will rise soon as and as they rise so will mortgage repayments, and credit, once the driving force behind our reinvented ‘never-had-it-so-good’ culture, is now too in short supply. Nothing, in fact, is as it was, and nothing seemingly, is as it seems. There is a sense as well, that on top of all this the government and the natural cohesion of the people that has held the country together is falling apart. That we are, in fact, nolonger one people and one nation. Indeed, thanks to the wonders of multiculturalism we are now many peoples and many beliefs who have little in common and even more differences.

This frightens the middle classes whose world order is now under real threat. What for them is the purpose of all that cultural diversity and the tolerating and defending of multiple faiths and religious rights if the environment in which they live could be torn apart by the very people they have been supporting? They could, of course, run away to the suburbs or the countryside and relocate like the Daily Telegraph’s Graham Archer thereby escaping the ‘repellent antisocial behaviour’ that is so rampant on the streets of our inner cities, and many, many will.

They may also stay put and continue lying to themselves and each other and pretend that everything is fine and that there is nothing to worry about, or they can heed the warning signs for what they are and take a leaf out of Emma West’s book and say what they mean for once. For multiculturalism has failed totally and rather than relocating and running away the middle classes and the establishment they support needs to say enough is enough and bring an end to this ghastly social experiment before it destroys the country. The time for staying calm and carrying on is over, now is the time for speaking the truth.

© Nigel Wingrove 2011

EUROPE: SCREAMING ON THE OUTSIDE, DYING ON THE INSIDE

A few months ago the UK suffered one of the worst and most vicious spates of rioting the country has ever experienced. The level of ferocity and destruction displayed should have been a wake up call to us that things in our green and pleasant land were far from right. Instead there was much rejoicing in the columns of the Guardian and in the corridors of the BBC that the riots in Tottenham, which involved predominantly black youths, were replaced in part by white, multicultural rioters on the following Monday and Tuesday. Phew, thank goodness for that, and within a few weeks, once the shock of seeing ‘normal’ people burnt out of their homes or beaten up and robbed in the street had worn off, the mainstream media was morphing the riots into spontaneous ‘protests’ against cutbacks and the government’s austerity programs with any other causes that might hint or point to flaws in our multicultural wonderland seemingly ignored or denounced as soon as they were aired.

Then in October it was announced that the UK was now one of the most densely populated countries on earth thanks to two decades of unchecked and utterly reckless immigration which has brought the UK population up to some 62 million with a density of 246 people per square kilometer. The latest forecasts are for a population of 71 million by 2031 and 90 million by 2050. This influx of immigrants, aside from putting a catastrophic strain on our health service, the welfare state, our education system and available housing is also adding to the slow erosion of the countries culture, religious base, core values and is threatening its environment. Yet our politicians continue to do nothing, say nothing and hear nothing. Even the riots, a real scream of a warning not just of things to come but of things wrong now, have been ignored.

Instead the government announces the deregulation of our planning rules so that the rape of our countryside can continue even faster than it is already, and more cheap, concrete dwellings can be built to accommodate ever greater numbers of immigrants. The State further fudges the issues of immigration numbers by playing lip service to people’s concerns either by toying with entry requirements or tinkering with the deportation of immigrants living here illegally. While all the while our legislators nurture and feed a growing sense of entitlement among immigrants and their dependents by championing the laws of discrimination backed up by a bureaucracy that grows relentlessly.

Every week the invidious effects of our failing, post war utopian multiracial experiment can be seen in falling education standards, rising crime rates and a general decline in any sense of a national cohesion beyond the furtherance of the self. Further, our moral decline has been accompanied by the slow, inextricable and now all but inevitable transition from a predominantly white, anglo-saxon, Judeo-Christian society with pagan roots and a sense of history and culture that bound us to the land upon which we live, to a society bound together by self interest, consumerism, debt, vacuous egotism and the religion of celebrity.

Now by necessity we live cheek by jowl with people who have no interest in us, have no or little knowledge of our country, its history, culture or beliefs. Part of the state’s multicultural agenda is to denigrate and besmirch our history and culture and to embark on symbolic acts of self flagellation whenever events like the slave trade, colonialism or our Empire are mentioned so that any sense of pride in our heritage is gradually crushed. It should be no surprise that many immigrants not only fail to ‘integrate’ but have no ‘respect’ for the country in which they find themselves.

In Europe fewer and fewer people understand the causes of the last world war, or even of how Nazi Germany arose, in fact Ad Busters, the magazine that championed and created the Occupy Wall Street movement and is pushing for a radical overthrowing of the capitalist system in favour of some sort of collectivist Facebookian utopia, wrote in their August issue that the Nazis had ‘conquered’ Germany. Making the Nazis sound as if they were an invading force as opposed to a revolutionary political party elected by, and made up of, German people who happened also to follow a new, anti-semitic, violent and radical ideology.

Nationalism and a belief in the nation state has in fact been reduced to a few crass slogans and corse chants, and national pride is now an erroneous concept to be mocked or discredited by Europe’s leaders rather than championed and promoted. So too is the belief in ones race, or rather it is unacceptable to believe or champion that race if that race is white or follows a Christian religion. However if ones race or religion is indian, Jamaican, Pakistani or Islamic, Hindu, in fact any other race or religion other than white or Christian then our leaders will defend that right in law absolutely and resolutely. European indigenous culture and the races whose blood is in its very soil is being destroyed by the very people who should be defending it.

Evidence of this realignment from the indigenous to the disingenuous can be seen in everything from the stripping of national war memorials and the stealing of statues so that they can be melted down for money, to the annexation of sections of our cities by peoples and religions that are not just alien to our way of life but openly hostile to it. Such civic barbarism can only happen when a nation or nations have lost not only their self esteem but their soul. When over decades a nation mocks its customs, its values, its religion and denies and decries its history, violates its land and even sets about breeding its own people out of existence it is no wonder that those same people, along with the governments new carpetbagging friends, see no issues with desecrating our memorials.

Now as the euro teeters on the verge of becoming the 21st Century equivalent of Midas’s gold we will see banks collapse and countries default and with them the slow but inevitable re-emergence of old hatreds, political, religious, class and ethnic and in their wake, violence. Europe’s elites may then finally begin to understand the terrible seeds that they have sown by encouraging unchecked immigration and the placid usurping of nation states by alien cultures whose religions are inseparable from politics and whose followers aim is global dominance over all either by conversion or the vanquishing of those who oppose it. Even now Europe’s bureaucrats and politicians are seeking to save their currency and the european super state it feeds rather than taking steps to salvage what they can by admitting their mistakes.

Nature though, either by design or inevitability, has ways of bringing or forcing matters to a head. In the UK our indigenous creatures along with the countryside on which they live are facing extinction or extermination either, as in the case of the red squirrel, by being colonized and killed by an alien invader, namely the grey squirrel; or in the case of the hedgehog and the weasel, two quintessentially English creatures, by the loss of their environment. The luckless fox or the other hand, once championed by shrill hordes of animal liberators intent on banning its hunting by groups of horse riding aristocrats, is being systematically exterminated by armed executioners for having the temerity to survive in our cities as its own habitats are concreted over. Strangely there is not a word of protest from those who previously opposed fox hunting, perhaps mechanized killing is to their liking or now that the killing is being done by workers in the public sector defending the luckless fox has lost its cachet.

If the demise of England’s four-legged creatures is symbolic of Europe’s two-legged populations future then coming events herald not just the collapse of the Euro but of the utopian experiment that created it and which has, in one guise or another, driven Europe’s political will since 1945. Now events, good, bad and catastrophic could create the scenarios in which governments and the old order simply cannot rule and which will, inevitably, produce new orders, new politics and new powers. What they are like, and whether of the left, the right, in the middle, religious, anarchic or capitalist it is unlikely that things will ever be as they were though I hope that whatever fate decides that there is still room in the new Europe for a some of our struggling four legged friends.