Hypocrites Are Us

 'I thought 'Why not Swaledale? Or medieval churches?
Or even, with all its shortcomings, The National Trust?
But what I think we are best it in England, I do not say Britain.
What I think we are best at in England, better than all the rest, is hypocrisy.

Take London. we extole its beauty and its dignity
while at the  same time we are happy to sell it off to the highest bidder.
Or the highest builder. 

We glory in Shakespeare yet we close our public libraries.

A substantial minority of our children
receive a better education than the rest
because of the social situation of the parents.

Then we wonder why things at the top do not change, or society improves.

But we know why. It is because we are hypocrites. 

Our policemen are wonderful, providing you are white,
and middle class, and don't take to the streets.

And dying in custody is what happens in South America. It doesn't happen here. 

And it gets into the language.
We think irony rather English
and are rather proud of it.

But in literary terms it is how we have it both ways. A refined hypocrisy. 

And in language these days, words that start off as good
and meaningful, terms like 'environment' and 'energy saving',
rapidly lose any credence, because converted in political,
or P.R., slogans ending up the cliched slogans
of an estate agent's brochure. A manual for hypocrisy.

In England what we do best is lip service,
and before you stampede for the Basildon Bond
or skitter for twitter I would say that I don't exempt myself
from these strictures. How should I? I am English: I am a hypocrite.'.

Alan Bennett, on being asked what England was best at in 2015.   

Pushing Ninety

I don't watch television. It repeatedly redefines
misinformation, and with each repeat defines idleness.
There is already too little thought in the speculations
of the speech-based radio that I sometimes listen to.

But recently I enjoyed one programme, where the pleasure
lay in the editing of the visuals as much as the subject, Alan Bennett.
The title 'Alan Bennett At Ninety' said it all in a world
where leaders much younger than that age go insane
every time they to take to the media, in stage managed events
where the leaders ill chosen words are as natural as his staff
taking the blame for every error of judgement he makes,
to make the leader seem all the more immaculate.

Mr Bennett, playwright, actor, author, diarist, memoirist,
had over the years mined a well lived life for anecdotes
that would outlive their time, once more gave the BBC
an hour of his most composed self, allowing himself
to be shown as a two fingered typist, typing new writings.   

The dryness of what he said, and stillness of his room
were odd at first. It took some time to reflect on how well
he depicted, without declaring it, how asexual he was.

To be that still, that reflective, and yet so evidently alive 
is something I will be aspiring to in my old age.