OPINION
Harry Palmer
I’ve long been a fan of Alistair Cooke (1908–2004), right back from the days in the early 1950s in post-war Britain when I heard his Letter from America on the wireless for the first time. That was well before I even knew what a television was, and when our sole source of in-home entertainment was that wireless.
He was born in Salford about 10 miles from me, although I would never have guessed from his accent; he went to America on a scholarship in 1932 well before I arrived on the scene.
After 58 years, Letter from America ended, a month before Cooke’s death. He did other things as well as that weekly broadcast and the one he claimed he was most proud of was a 13-part TV series called America: A Personal History of the United States (1972), which was first broadcast in both the UK and the US in 1973.
I have given up on terrestrial TV and local radio: I didn’t watch live TV much before, but the outright lies and propaganda before, during and after the Covid debacle were the final straw. I recently thought I’d check through the DVDs I’ve accumulated over the years and I discovered Alistair Cooke’s series, which, for some reason, I hadn’t previously watched.
The history starts at the very beginning, even from before Columbus made his discovery, and over the 13 episodes brings the viewer right up to 1972.
In summing up the series at the end, Cooke, and bearing in mind that he was an ‘Americanophile’, says:
Is America in its ascendance or decline? I myself think I recognize several of the symptoms that Edward Gibbon saw so acutely in the fall of Rome, which arrived not from external enemies but from inside the country itself. Shows of luxury, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor, the exercise of military might at places remote from the centers of power, obsession with sex, freakishness in the arts masquerading as originality and enthusiasm pretending to creativeness and a general desire to live off the state, whether it’s a junkie on welfare or a state-subsidised airline. In a word, that ‘Big Daddy’, Washington, will provide.
As a very wise Frenchman once said ‘Liberty is the luxury of self discipline.’ Historically, those peoples that did not discipline themselves had discipline thrust on them from the outside. That is why the normal cycle in the life and death of great nations has been first a powerful tyranny broken by revolt, the enjoyment of liberty, the abuse of liberty – and back to tyranny again. As I see it, in this country – a land of the most persistent idealism and the blandest cynicism – the race is on between its decadence and its vitality.
Those of us who have travelled a long enough timeline, and managed to remain grounded despite the increasingly Disneyland-like world around us, know very well that, in the race between decadence and vitality, the former now has the unassailable lead. We also know that as the political leaders of most Western countries are willing to do almost anything to hang onto the power they’ve been lent by a grievously deceived electorate, their encouraging of ‘do what thou wilt’ among favoured (including invader) populations and the fundamental agreement between supposedly opposing political parties of the need for a “new world order” is, to say the least, working against both our vital interests and those of the nation.
The ‘play fighting’ between opposing parties as currently staged is a charade and is in lieu of the exhaustive investigation of proposed new laws for which the parliaments and congresses were originally set up. The process has degenerated to become ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’ because the real power lies elsewhere. Sorry, but there’s now no hope to be found anywhere for a return to a well-run and fair-to-all society. Over the 50 years that have elapsed since he made them, Alistair Cooke’s prognostications have become hard fact and they have grown and progressed to the point where there is now no turning back. We’re on our own.
“Ozymandias”
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)
Who said – “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.