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SamSmithBooks
Sam Smith books
Category:
Essays
Publisher: Amazon
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 84
Copyright: November 2022
ISBN-13: 9798363729256
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
The full title should be, Anti pretty much everything.' And how I came to own that attitude.
Inevitably personal, and with autobiographical aspects, but as much a general view of the period I have spent almost 80 years living through.
'Anti' is the taking of a critical, questioning viewpoint, the very opposite of accepting, regardless of the subject or person.
Excerpt
5) Anti-respectability
Respectability is a wholly imaginary construct: “What will the neighbours, what will people think?”
This projection of our own thoughts was what led parents to kick pregnant unmarried daughters out of house and home, rendering them reliant on the 'welfare' of a punishment-loving church. So many crosses to bear.
Ruled by gossip, by the fear of gossip, “What will people think?” was what led fathers to kick out homosexual sons. And this in the Devon of my growing up, where people had no real regard for one another. Except to despise their closest neighbours.
Respectability has for me, as far back as I can remember, been synonymous with hypocrisy, with double standards, associated with lies – the lies lying miasma-like over a breeding swamp of malicious gossip. Easy therefore to be anti-respectability.
Respectability is the snobby sister of orthodoxy and the bullying brother of conformity. Respectability is the serial killer of originality. To be anti-respectable is therefore essential to creativity, to original thought; with apparent, and excusable, eccentricity almost a prerequisite. Imagine our loss if Nietsche or The Maquis de Sade had considered themselves respectable.
Respectability has to be creative death for any artist, any thinker. To be told by society's internalised critic, “You can't say that,” will still straightaway have me saying, “Yes I fuckin' can.”
So determined did I become not to be numbered among the respectable that I welcomed the company of the awkward and the unconventional, regardless of the direction they might be coming from.
A puzzle for me has been who it is in these multi-cultural, sexually permissive times who decides what is respectable, what isn't? Who now, churchless, are the arbiters of our public lives? The tabloids? They can change their mind two days apart, what behaviour is or isn't acceptable.
I suppose that for the unambitious respectability is a construct the timid can hide their shames behind, say, “I'm just...” Nothing much, nothing to see here, to mark me different. “I'm a respectable person,” they say.
I was so determined never to join the respectable that I have pretended to be gay in macho circles, have readily admitted in polite, in conventional company to having injected substances, have recalled the times I have woken in police cells... just to outrage, to distance myself and, on infuriated occasion, I have deliberately sought to offend.
That last has niggled at my conscience. Because not everyone who called themselves respectable, who thought of themselves as respectable, was a hypocrite. Nor had they double standards. They had lives and characters beyond the facade of respectability, as individuals were sometimes thoughtful, compassionate, humane and tolerant of others' beliefs and ways of life. They had not deserved my outlandish behaviour, nor the glib accusations that I had thrust at them.
This caught me in confusion for years, because I still did not want to join them in their respectability. Until the painter Derek Southall presented me with a term that allowed me to accept the conventional for what they were, decent people. Previously when I labelled someone ordinary had been to suppose that they were, if not actively malicious, passively orthodox, accepting all of society's double standards, when they weren't. Decent was what they were. Suburban too, maybe, and with small outlooks. Possibly enthusiastic consumers. But not wishing harm on anyone. Decent.
Finding and applying 'decent'' came as such a relief. A decent person wouldn't have become a concentration camp guard. A decent person wouldn't stand by and let someone be racially abused.
I still had no time for 'respectable' and the damage it can cause. And while I may have been concerned that my defiance of some social norms may have inadvertently caused hurt I nonetheless look back very pleased with myself for those times when I did dare be eccentric if not outrageous.
I never want to be respectable. Just look at what wanting to be respectable has done to the Labour Party. I can see the same now happening to Plaid Cymru. Rather than celebrate and broadcast their difference they have put on suit and tie, twin set, and they too are trying to be respectable. They have sworn oaths to English royalty and, like the Labour Party, have enlisted in the class system that their supposed principles would have them reform. Given the present trajectory of most party politicians they will all grab at the chance to don ermine and go sit next to Lord Mandelspew in the oh so respectable rip-off House of Lords.
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