Word: booker
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...beginning, Booker concedes, mod England made a pleasant enough dream, set to music by the Beatles and costumed by Mary Quant. It all seemed a carnival of wit and style. At moments the carnival even appeared to have direction. Plays like John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, novels like Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, revues like Beyond the Fringe seemed to be acts of ruddy good health against a moribund Establishment. Old England was dead. Long live new England...
Even swinging London, that myth invented by journalists, was harmless enough fun-pink frosting for a cultural revolution. Or was it? Booker does not think so. Behind the charming impudence of miniskirts and rock music, behind the justified indignation of Angry Young Men, he detects a less presentable motive: the "thrill that may be derived from sensing a sudden violation of tranquillity or order...
...Booker's conclusion is that fantasists ultimately pay. For every dream there must be a nightmare. Grimly he records how the good times began to go away. The theater of anger turned into the theater of cruelty. Satire declined into a kind of invective. Britain's suicide rate soared. So did crime. From 1956 to 1965, illegitimate births doubled. The money spent on gambling increased fourfold. Hard-drug usage-heroin, cocaine-multiplied ten times over. Gradually the plot of history and the quirks of society grew nastier-Suez, Profumo, the 1966 Moors murder trial. Today, Booker judges...
What was best in the dream-the idealism of the Ban the Bomb movement, a general exuberant impulse toward freedom-finally went mad. For this, perhaps too conveniently, Booker mainly blames the communicators-the fad-conscious journalists, the telly talkers, the trendy film makers-who turned Neophilia into an industry...
Part of the time he was writing his survey, Booker shared quarters with another ex-Neophiliac-and Christianity's prickliest recent convert-Malcolm Muggeridge. The spirit may have been catching. For Booker ends up, rather to his own surprise, preaching a sort of Jungian Christianity. Sitting amid the double rubble-first of the Establishment and now of the anti-Establishment -he looks at all the broken pieces and vainly yearns for some master myth to help put everything together again...