Social Conditioning Is So Strong That Many People Here Seem So Honored That A White Man Cared Enough

In one ep she talks about emailing Philip Norman for info and he refused, so now we have the amazing meta possibility (beautiful possibility!) that he is having an argument with himself

Funniest thing for me about the Beautiful Possibility podcast is that someone can wank on for so long and so pretentiously about whether or not John and Paul touched dicks.

everytime I read this story I'm so disturbed by yoko's manic participation, like she was 38 at this point. girl what are you doing with this mean girl baby nonsense you're nearly forty.

Hate that sneaky spotify tag bro I did not tag you

The Quarry Men’s banjo player, Rod Davis, recalls, “I had bought the banjo from my uncle and if he’d sold me his guitar, I might have been a decent enough guitarist to keep McCartney out of the band. I might have learnt guitar chords, I might not, and that was the big limitation really. McCartney could play the guitar like a guitar and we couldn’t, and let’s face it, a banjo doesn’t look good in a rock’n’ roll group. I only met Paul on one other occasion after the Woolton fête and it was at auntie Mimi’s a week or two later. He dropped in to hear us practising. From my point of view, I was the person he was replacing – it’s like Pete Best – you’re the guy who doesn’t know. Some things had gone on that I was unaware of.”

(Best of the Beatles: The sacking of Pete Best by Spencer Leigh, 2015)

Gotta work it out

An interesting report in Saturday’s Irish Times examined the phenomenon of Irish graduates’ unwillingness to work at low-skilled jobs, and how the gap is being plugged by foreign workers. The overall impression was that many in Ireland would prefer not to work at low-skilled jobs when they receive the equivalent money from the dole, as many of the foreign interviewees noted. The information  was presented neutrally, and could be interpreted in any way, but the response of one of the interviewees indicated what response is expected from the public. Andrew, a postgraduate economics student, commented ‘Personally, I didn’t study for five years to work in McDonald’s’, and at the interview’s end requested that his last name not be printed. When asked why, he said: ‘I don’t want to be portrayed as a student stereotype who’d prefer to bum around rather than work.’ A later interviewee stated: ‘I’d rather be cleaning toilets than on the dole,’ indicating what is likely to be the commonest media and public reaction to the piece – that people should always work, in whatever jobs are available, rather than take social welfare.

The problem with this reaction is that it assumes that work – any kind of work – has intrinsic moral value. It can be argued that a job keeps people focused and helps maintain a healthy timetable – but it’s a bit of a jump from that to assert that cleaning toilets and flipping burgers is morally superior to staring at the wall. It seems strange that educated graduates should feel guilty for admitting that they think themselves too good for certain jobs. From an educational and experience point of view, they are too good – yet that is not the assessment they are perceived to be making. Instead, it’s seen as a moral question – do you think yourself too good for work, which in all its forms is inherently good? Such moralising seems to lose sight of the real issue – that a First World economy with a small population such as Ireland cannot provide jobs for its graduates.

It’s over 70 years old, but Bertrand Russell’s In Praise Of Idleness still has highly relevant things to say on this matter. The social rigidity of his England has loosened up somewhat, so it’s not the case anymore that the idle landowners preach the validity of ‘the Slave State’, but his statement that ‘….the necessity of keeping the poor contented…..has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labour, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect’ still rings true. Opinion makers and business people (and it’s not just the usual-suspect loudmouths like Bill Cullen and Michael O’Leary that pass judgement based on their own experience) may have spent the requisite years waiting tables and cleaning toilets, but nobody with aspirations to influence is prepared to make an unskilled job his or her career. The work experience of the currently well-employed does not validate their arguments in favour of the morality of work, because for them, low-skilled work was always a means to an end, while in the current climate it is the only option for the foreseeable future for too many people.

The argument that we are ‘palming off’ our menial jobs on foreigners because we’re too lazy and immoral to do them ourselves doesn’t carry any great weight outside of simplistic moralising. It avoids the key, difficult question – why do we still live in a world where there a yawning chasm between skilled and unskilled work, between the professions and the trades? Carpenters and painters often made big money during the Celtic Tiger, but without the advantages of higher education and connections many of them have come crashing back to square one. Foreign workers from poorer countries tolerate working in monotonous, uninspiring and difficult jobs here because they’ll make more money and enjoy a better quality of life than they do back home. Much is said about certain groups’ unwillingness to go on the dole and it’s implied that this makes them morally better than other groups. Yet surely the fact that trained accountants and lawyers from abroad work in Irish hotels and shops should be seen as a worldwide injustice, rather than a reason to celebrate moral worth?

Too many humans all over the world, even in 2010, still labour endlessly just to survive. Thousands flee the Indian countryside every year to live in the hellish atmosphere of city slums, just for a chance to escape the grind of subsistence living. Those people would consider western fetishising of work insane. Of course, the plight of Indian slum-dwellers and that of European graduates facing into a career making coffee are not the same at all; the latter is still infinitely more fortunate, but it’s objectionable to dismiss today’s graduates’ unhappiness with the current lack of work as expressions of their ‘pampered’ nature. Supposedly ‘pampered’ students often work two or more part-time jobs to put themselves through college, and university in Ireland and England has broadened immensely over the last couple of decades to include a wider cross-section of society than at any time in history. Graduates today are not the Daddy-fleecing sybaritic stereotypes of old.

The budget will probably see a cut in social welfare, which many comfortably employed people will welcome as an ‘incentive’ to get people back to work. The delusion that depriving people of welfare leads to a magic upsurge in employment shows no sign of dying out since the days of Norman ‘Get on your bikes’ Tebbitt. The dole needs some overhaul and savings could certainly be made by limiting the amount given to single people under 25, for example. But debate on unemployment and welfare, in the media and the public echo chamber at least, seems to be short on sense, compassion and practicality, and high on moralising. The government is frantically drawing up a budget which will improve the country’s standing in the eyes of the unelected speculators that control the international financial market, whose morality is rarely questioned, while on the ground easy answers are sought by passing judgement on what isn’t,. nor should ever be, a moral matter.

Ask anyone who works in a menial or low-skilled job, and they will not tell you that they think their work has moral worth. The foreign people interviewed in the Irish Times article had varying opinions on the issue of the Irish and work, but none indicated that they enjoyed the work they have to do to survive. Perhaps Russell summed it up best when he described how a menial worker should describe their work according to the morality of the rich, and added his own response:“’I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man’s noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.’ I have never heard working men say this sort of thing. They consider work, as it should be considered, a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.”

melody maker letters as the burn book from mean girls

So you think 'Imagine' ain't political? It's 'Working Class Hero' with sugar on it for conservatives like yourself!! You obviously didn't dig the words. Imagine! You took 'How Do You Sleep' so literally (read my own review of the album in Crawdaddy.) Your politics are very similar to Mary Whitehouse's -- 'Saying nothing is as loud as saying something.' Listen, my obsessive old pal, it was George's press conference -- not 'dat ole debbil Klein' -- He said what you said: 'I'd love to come but...' Anyway, we basically did it for the same reasons -- the Beatle bit -- they still called it a Beatle show, with just two of them! Join the Rock Liberation Front before it gets you. Wanna put your photo on the label like uncool John and Yoko, do ya? (Aint ya got no shame!) If we're not cool, WHAT DOES THAT MAKE YOU? No hard feelings to you either. I know basically we want the same, and as I said on the phone and in this letter, whenever you want to meet, all you have to do is call.

John Lennon's letter responding to Paul, published in its entirety in Melody Maker

literally the ramblings of an insane person I am GAGGED

Chapter 3: Rulers make bad lovers

New fic: Under his carpet

Under his carpet: Linda Eastman McCartney reflects on the ups and downs her marriage to Paul in a series of snapshots between 1968 and 1990. Chapter 1 of 5 posted.

Plinda fans/Paul superfans dni (JOKING! No sugarcoating, but not a hatchet job on either. Most of it is based on fact, but plenty is invented - speculative fiction an' all that.)

While not shying away from the darker sides of the marriage, this story is primarily intended as a character study about flawed individuals, none of whom are villains. It also explores the tension between visually appearing liberated, as many Boomer women did, and the reality of their domestic lives. A tension which is still relevant today.