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LETTER from LONDON |
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NEW AGE of SCUM |
 cited by www.chavscum.co as the "quintessential celebrity chavscum" and England's top "media whores" |
Great Britain is breeding
a disturbing 'underclass'
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
of TheColumnists.com
Response to a recent column I wrote advising Americans to shape up when visiting Britain this spring triggered 35 e-mails, one-third of which came from Englishmen and women unhappy with my comments.
One reader said the only classy, well-behaved Brits were bigwig execs, or members of gentlemen’s clubs on Pall Mall. “Some of these old men sink into leather armchairs at the club after lunch and are dead for several days before anyone notices.” A different Britain, considerably more crude, is right there in plain sight, he said.
Maybe my experience in London over 20 years has been too confined to the privileged elite. That’s what life as a business reporter does to you.
If pressed, though, I sadly acknowledge that an underclass is slowly making the cities and towns of Britain less agreeable. It’s just that I hate seeing it happen and I retreat into denial.
Provincial Britain today has a crime scene that would curl your toes, not so much for its murder rate as for what it says about dysfunction in once-tranquil communities. At night, frustrations erupt into random vandalism and violence, caused by boredom and long-term confusion--how the 1980s Thatcher revolution is supposed to have worked for everyone but didn’t.
A prominent London psychiatrist wrote in the conservative Sunday Telegraph a few weeks ago that we should not be surprised at the lurid details of the murder of two small girls in the village of Soham recently. The convicted murderer and his girlfriend, said the doctor, are typical of a new breed of disaffected Brit: the boys are stupid and violent and the girls, are vile, unwashed and slutty.
What defines the new class of young people is a low forehead, lack of taste, too much beer, no work ethic and no concern for others. They have dropped out because they can't compete. They do not marry and they have no competence to offer.
One emerging type is the “chavs,” composed mostly of the marginalized boys and young men. The British press is just discovering them and a website will tell you more than you want to know. Go to www.chavscum.co.uk. These disturbing creatures are sometimes known as Kevs, steeks, spides, ratboys, skangers, stigs and scallies, among other names.
One of their slogans is: “I’m a nobody. Nobody’s perfect. Therefore I’m perfect!!!” (Three exclamation points required.)
A typical male chavster may be identified in a shopping mall in Scunthorpe by his idea of fashionable clothes--a branded baseball cap, white sneakers, Burberry’s socks, cheap gold-plate jewellery and a T-Shirt with the slogan such as ‘Friendly when drunk' or at least branded by some fashion house. They live their lives through soap operas, soccer matches or reality TV. One admits in a web forum: “I’ll watch the telly from 9 a.m. till the electricity runs out.”
There are variations on this theme. Celebrity chavs, for example, include the dim-witted soccer star David Beckham, his wife “Posh” and numerous hangers-on in the pop music scene.
The chavs are television addicts, and communicate with each other by text messages on their cellphones. It costs about 15 cents to send one of these, and the network providers have accidentally created a giant new revenue stream for themselves. Billions of these goofy messages are being sent among the young. Yes, billions.
The chavs use a new written form of English, known as 'fuckwit,' limited by the 160 functions of the keypad. They write in this abbreviated lower-case form even when they are not sending messages. They cannot or will not pronounce “th,” so it becomes “f.” With a small leap of logic, then, “3dom” equals “freedom” and “1sty” equals “thirsty.”
“Would you like to step out with me tonight?” becomes “fancy a d8?”
The chavscum site offers a “Name your chav baby” function, selecting the weird false-classy combinations. You enter your real name and it generates a baby’s name for your newborn. I entered it and got “Elvis Gary Johnson” as a boy’s name. When I asked for a girl’s name I was offered the equally offensive “Sapphire Jodie Johnson”.
After 15 minutes browsing, I was feeling uneasy and slightly afraid.
What has happened to the England we knew and loved? Who stole Shakespeare, the Monarchy, proper elocution, the Rolls, the quaint thatched roofs of the Costwolds, the intelligent satire of John Cleese, the costume dramas of the BBC? Perhaps it was only a foreigner’s limited perception?
A psychologist friend of mine, Paul Thorne, traces the decline of good behavior from Margaret Thatcher’s transformation of Britain in the 1980s. She helped blur class distinctions so that the old underclass, which knew its place, came out of the woodwork seeking its just rewards from society.
“We used to have a proud working class that looked after itself and its neighbours,” says Paul. “Yes, there were aspirations--but only to rise from lower working class to upper working class. Mrs. Thatcher changed all that. She said buy property and shares and you can be just as rich as anyone else--without actually working.”
Now the barriers are down, and consequences that are not fully understood are making themselves felt.
Another reaction to the column focused on nuances among the educated classes. British society is tilting too far and too fast in favor of women, a few observers wrote. “Now the ascendant culture is female, devoted to conspicuous expenditure,” my friend Paul explains. “The boys are buried. Not needed. That’s why they’re so frustrated and uninspired. Something like 80 percent of British medical students are female. Young lawyers and accountants are mostly women.” (Paul is a man.)
Of course the following will never happen but the trend line is arresting: if you look at university enrollment from 1945 to 2000 and project them forward, by 2030 all British graduates would be women.
I had to wince as I watched a graphic television documentary on sex-change surgery recently that seemed to back this up. A man wanted to become a woman, and had passed all the hurdles to get himself carved up. The female surgeon was eager to get cracking. She gleefully put him to sleep, then snapping her rubber gloves she demanded her scalpel from the attending nurse. With three or four bold strokes, she slashed open the man’s scrotum and whacked off his testicles, literally tossing them into a stainless steel bowl. I heard a sickening “plop-plop” as they hit the steel.
She then handed the bowl to a male assistant and cackled: “I bet that made your eyes water. Ha-ha-ha.” Doctor humor? Sort of. She then went after the penis.
I grabbed the remote.
©2004 by Michael Johnson. The photo is courtesy of www.chavscum.co.uk
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