ANOTHER VOICE
Two voices heard in a Suffolk health farm
AUBERON WAUGH
Ihad intended — and still intend — to address myself this week to a cosy domestic issue: should working-class or 'classless' (as we must now learn to call them) children be forced to study the arts and music or drama up to the age of 16 — or might we (the elite, the chattering classes) safely leave them to choose their own subjects? But all this week, at a health farm in Suf- folk where I am forced to watch television as I quietly shrink, I have been bombarded by the same information and the same pro- paganda about Bosnia. No remotely intelli- gent programme has been concerned with anything else, except for a few token ges- tures towards the starving in Somalia. The message has always been the same: Britain has a clear moral duty to go and fight the Serbs in Bosnia and put a stop to the forced movement of population under its new name of 'ethnic cleansing'.
Why? Why Britain? Why not Spain or Finland or Ecuador or, better still, the Saudis or Iranians? There seems to be a madness in Britain. What business is it of ours if the Serbs decide to persecute the Bosnians? Stalin forcibly shifted whole Populations within the Soviet Union throughout the 1930s, and right up to his death in 1953. Nobody in the outside world complained. Many applauded. And why must this monomaniac media bombard- ment be so relentless? Think of all the peo- ple suffering from toothache in India. Is that a moral issue?
The question of education in the arts for `classless' British children was raised by Mr `Tony' Arbour, who has announced that he Will take his daughter, Catriona, 14, away from Teddington comprehensive school, Richmond, because he objects to arts sub- jects for 16-year-olds. There seems to be a contradiction between government policy and something called the Parents' Charter. He says, The Government's reforms are all about choice, yet here we are being told what to do.'
So there we are. There is the example of the Good Samaritan who chanced upon a traveller who had been ethnically cleansed, but at least he chanced upon him. He did not learn about him on television, or from the Independent newspaper, and decide his government had a moral obligation to send troops.
One's natural inclination is to say of course children must be instructed in the arts• Generations of idealists have striven for a hundred years to lift working-class snouts out of the feeding trough, and show them the wonders and glories of the world. Is this to be undone in a decade of the pro- letarian free-market culture, imported from America? Don't our children deserve bet- ter than that, I mean, don't they?
On the subject of children, there was a particularly fetching Bosnian girl on televi- sion a few days ago. The suggestion was Nearly made that if we don't send British troops to kill the Serbs and be killed by them, this girl will probably be shot, or blown up, or possibly starved to death. It is most distressing. It is unbearably distress- ing and very wicked. There is so much suf- fering and wickedness in the world at any given time, and Bosnia is only a tiny corner of it. At least they refrain from showing us pictures of elderly Indian gentlemen suffer- ing from toothache, or Africans dying from dysentery and other forms of diarrhoea. That is, they refrain this week. If ever Indi- an toothache or African diarrhoea comes into fashion — blamed on global warming perhaps — they will deluge us with exam- ples. One difference is that the Indian toothache and African diarrhoea can be solved only by sending money. Nobody is very keen on• that. What we really want to do is send troops or at least arms — which might prolong the war but could not affect its outcome, merely ensuring that we could neither send relief nor influence the even- tual settlement.
But perhaps I have not done justice to Tony Arbour's case against the Surrey Edu- cation Authority. 'If you have a child of GCSE course age,' he explains, 'you are locked into the creative arts.' I did not realise the idea was to turn these people, en masse, into creative and performing artists. I thought merely that they would be taught
to contemplate the Parthenon, the paint- ings and buildings of the Italian Renais- sance, of our own country's artistic flower- ing in the 19th century . . . But, no, it appears the idea is to encourage our young- sters to splodge around with paint and plas- ticine and call it 'art'. That, I agree, is almost certainly a waste of time. Far better let them study electronics on the American model, and spend their lives in comparative affluence, watching trashy, low-budget American television films provided by Mr Murdoch in the proletarian free-market culture of the future.
Contemporary Americans were criticised by John Simpson in this magazine recently for their brutish lack of interest in anything outside their own immediate neighbour- hood. American television carries virtually no foreign news, what little there is tacked on at the end of domestic trivialities. After a week's battery by this Bosnian propagan- da, I am beginning to think the Americans are right and we are wrong. The impact of global news coverage is too immediate and too disturbing. Under analysis, the urge to go in and punish the Serbs and rescue the Bosnians has no basis in anything beyond the convulsive jerks one sees coming from spectators at a boxing match as they imag- ine they are throwing punches, too. There is nothing chivalrous in urging that other people be sent to do the dirty work — poor old Tommy Atkins in his Union Jack underpants with his copy of the Sun and his pack of condoms in his kit-bag, going out to die for one group of murderous bandits against another. The only way the Balkans can produce another world war will be if other nations join in, so let us switch off our television sets. There will be plenty more horrors of ethnic cleansing when the former Soviet Union starts sorting itself out. The whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of one Catering Corps orderly from Liverpool. Let us concentrate on the issue of Catriona Arbour's education.
Of course it is absurd that she should have the arts thrust down her throat. Such ideas were the product of an outdated ide- alism which held human society to be per- fectible. I feel the Americans are right and so is Murdoch. The only thing to do with these people, since the educated, humane bourgeois intelligentsia has thrown in the towel, is to let them stay in their homes, watching the trashy, bland programmes they want.
Previous page
