Aspiration vs Desperation revisited…

Back in March, I reflected briefly on the lamentable poverty of aspiration, and indeed hostility towards same, in modern Britain.

Today, over at Devil’s Kitchen, there’s a superb piece called The Tyranny of the Ignorant, which I implore you to read. DK starts by referring to his own source in the tangled web of Blogojobbies…

Behind Blue Eyes has written a superb post about the problems in this country—and he maintains that the biggest problem is that people are, in general, disinterested, ill-educated, ignorant fuckwits.

Go read that… then catch DK’s incisive commentary. A snippet from same:

Only an arrogant idiot would think that they have nothing to learn from the writings of others—no matter how rich said idiot was.

As a lifelong autodidact who came up from the dirt, this is an important subject to me. Continuous self-development has put me way ahead of most of my cohort who went to university (unlike me, who realised what a complete waste of time it was after 6 months and packed it in).

And back to my original article:

There was a line in the West Wing, which if I could be bothered to trawl through 6 seasons of scripts I could find for you [it was S3-E3]. It was spoken by the (Democrat) President Bartlett, and went something like this:

The trouble with the American Dream is that no-one likes taxes on millionaires, because they’re all dreaming of the day they’ll be millionaires.

Although this is obviously a fictional line, from a fictional president, it beautifully demonstrates the difference between the aspirational Yanks and the bitter, hopeless Brits.

It also demonstrates one of the reasons why I don’t fit into the defeatist pussified shithole this country is becoming & despair of its feckless and coddled inhabitants.

No improvement to report in the 6 month timeframe.

AJ

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