Television
Sixties fall-out
Martyn Harris
When the Sixties exploded in our faces the fragments were picked up by some oddly contrasting people. The surly, rent-a-mob tradition became the property of the Left: the crackpot anarchism was taken up by the Right; the instinctual, irrational GandaIfs Garden aspect was inherited by the humourless half-wits who now march under the banner of New Ageism.
The New Age (Channel 4, 8.30 p.m., Saturday) tried to explain its scope, which includes astrology, Bach flower remedies, acupuncture, crystals, organic vegetables and all stops to Cockfosters. When you cease to believe in God, as Chesterton said, you do not start to believe in nothing, you start to believe in everything, and the deity which New Agers have abandoned is rationality itself.
This was the first of six programmes edited down from a two-day forum with 40 guests. So there is something to recom- mend the New Age, I suppose, which is that it is cheap. To be a New Ager, judging by the guests, it is necessary to be a writer, consultant or healer (or any permutation of the three). It is helpful to have a name like a Seventies saloon car (Avila, Allegra, Natale), and to wear a sweater like a television test pattern. It is also necessary to speak with a light smile playing tolerant- ly about the lips, in a low-pitched, soothing voice guaranteed to make any normal, contentious human being bubble with rage.
For New Ageism is not just nonsense; it is wicked nonsense, when, as I can testify, it takes the form of 'alternative' practition- ers making money by selling false hopes to the terminally ill. Worse still is the urging of patients to take up 'responsibility' and hence guilt for their own disease, when those diseases are, more often than not, simply random and cruel.
Presenter Kay Avila raised this criticism only hesitantly, when she asked if there were not dangers associated with 'hyping' alternative machines. A little Indian man asked promptly where we had got with the hyping of 'conventional' medicine, and even as my mind began to run through the list of drugs, from steroids to warfarin to antibiotics, which currently keep my par- ents alive, thought was extinguished again in the giggle of facile agreement.
More Sixties survivors turned up in Hell No, We Won't Go (Channel 4, 11 p.m., Sunday) — an American-made collage of images protesting against US involvement in the Gulf. These ranged from the deeply embarrassing, like the protest 'rap' per- formed by a silly fat girl dressed in a Mao T-shirt and Palestinian scarf, to moving contributions from Vietnam Veterans Against War.
The Sixties talent for punchy slogans was on display — 'How did "our" oil get under their soil?' — as was the prim self- satisfaction of the Sixties liberal. Journalist Molly Ivins, in heavy irony mode, read out State Department evasions to a sniggering crowd. Former State Department official Daniel Ellsberg sententiously proclaimed the Gulf conflict to be: `The first battle of the North-South war'.
My own disgust with the war was almost wavering until Ron Kovic of VVAW was wheeled on — quite literally wheeled on, because of course Kovic is the paraplegic Vietnam casualty played by Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July. 'Twenty-three years ago tomorrow', he said, 'I was paralysed in Vietnam. I know what war is. I live it every day of my life, because I haven't been able to move anything from mid-chest down for 23 years.' It was a simple emotional statement, not an argu- ment against war, but it did represent that leap of the imagination and sympathy which you hope our leaders made every day. Hope they make, but fear they do not.
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