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‘It’s’ high time men ceased to regard women as second-call citizens’


This is supposed to be an enlightened age, but you wouldn’t think so if you could hear what the average man thinks of the average woman. Women won their independence years ago. After a long, bitter struggle, they now enjoy the same educational opportunities as men in most parts of the world. They have proved repeatedly that they are equal and often superior to men in almost very field. The hard-fought battle for recognition has been won, but it is by no means over. It is men, mot women who still carry on the sex war because their attitude remains basically hostile. Even in the most progressive societies, women continue to be regarded as second-rate citizens. To hear some men talk, you’d think that women belonged to a different species!


On the surface, the comments made by men about women’s abilities seem light-hearted. The same tried jokes about women drivers are repeated day in, day out. This apparent lightheartedness does not conceal the real contempt that men feel for women. However much men sneer at women, their claims to superiority are not borne out by statistics. Let’s consider the matter of driving, for instance. We all know that women cause far fewer accidents than men. They are too conscientious and responsible to drive like maniacs. But this is a minor quibble. Women have succeeded in any job you care to name. As politicians, soldiers, doctors, factory-hands, university professors, farmers, company directors, lawyers, bus-conductors, scientists and presidents of countries they have often put men to shame. And we must remember that they frequently succeed brilliantly in all these fields in addition to bearing and rearing children.


Yet men go on maintaining the fiction that there are many jobs women can’t do. Top-level political negotiation between countries, business and banking are almost entirely controlled by men, who jealously guard their so-called ‘rights’. Even in otherwise enlightened places like Switzerland women haven’t even been given the vote. This situation is preposterous! The arguments that men put forward to exclude women from these fields are all to familiar. Women, they say,, are unreliable and irrational. They depend too little on cool reasoning and too much on intuition and instinct to arrive at decisions. They are not even capable of thinking vlearly. Yet when women prove their abilities, men refuse to acknowledge them and give them their due. So much for a man’s ability to think clearly!


The truth is that men cling to their supremacy because of their basic inferiority complex. They shun real competition. They know in their hearts that women are superior and they are afraid of being beaten at their own game. One of the most important takes in the world is to achieve peace between the nations. You can be sure that if women were allowed to sit round the conference table, they would succeed brilliantly, as they always do, where men have failed for centuries. Some things are too important to be left to men!


‘World governments should conduct serious campaigns against smoking’


If you smoke and you still don’t believe that there’s a definite link between smoking and bronchial troubles, heart disease and lung cancer, then you are certainly deceiving yourself. No one will accuse you of hypocrisy. Let us just say that you are suffering from a bad case of wishful thinking. This needdn’t make you too uncomfortable because you are in good company. Whenever the subject of smoking and health is raised, the governments of most countries hear no evil, see no evil and smell no evil. Admittedly, a few governments have taken timid measures. In Britain, for instance, cigarette advertising has been banned on television. The conscience of the nation is appeased, while the population continues to puff its way to smoky, cancerous death.


You don’t have to look very far to find out why the official reactions to medical findings have been so lukewarm. The answer is simply money. Tobacco is wonderful commodity to tax. It’s almost like a tax on our daily bread. In tax revenue alone, the government of Britain collects enough from smokers to pay for its entire educational facilities. So while the authorities point out ever so discreetly that smoking may, conceivably, be harmful, it doesn’t do to shout too loudly about it.


This is surely the most short-sighted policy you could imagine. While mony is eagerly collected in vast sums with on hand, it is paid out in increasingly vaster sums with the other. Enmomous amounts are spent on cancer research and on efforts to cure people suffering from the disease. Countless valuable lives are lost. In the long run, there is no doubt that everybody would be much better-off if smoking were banned altogether.


Of course, we are not ready for such drastic action. But if the governments of the world were honestly concerned about the welfare of their peoples, you’d think they’d conduct aggressive anti-smoking campaigns. Far from it! The tobacco industry is allowed to spend staggering sums on advertising. Its advertising is as insidious as it is dishonest. We are never shown pictures of real smokers coughing up their lungs early in the morning. That would never do. The advertisemtns always depict virile, clean-shaven young men. They suggest it is manly to smoke,even positively healthy! Smoking is associated with the great open-air life, with beautiful girls, true love and togetherness, what utter nonsense!


For a start, governments could begin by banning all cigarette and tobacco advertising and should then conduct anti-smoking advertising campaigns of their own. Smoking should be banned in all public places like theatres, cinemas and restaurants. Great efforts should be made to inform young people especially of dire consequences of taking up the habit. A horrific in every packet of cigarettes that is sold. As individuals we are certainly weak, but if governments acted honestly and courageously, they could protect us from ourselves.

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‘Television is doing irreparable harm’


‘Yes, but what did we use to do before there was television?’ How often we hear statements like this! Television hasn’t been with us all that long, but we are already beginning to forget what the world was like without it. Before we admitted the one-eyed monster into our homes, we never found it difficult to occupy our spare time. We used to enjoy civilized pleasures. For instance, we used to have hobbies, we used to entertain our friends and be entertained by them, we used to go outside for our amusements to theatres, cinemas, restaurants and sporting events. We eve used to read books and listen to music and broadcast talks occasionally. All the belongs to the past. Now all our free time is regulated by the ‘goggle box’. We rush home or gulp down our meals to be in time for this or that programme. We have even given up sitting at table and having a leisurely evening meal, exchanging the news of the day. A sandwich and a glass of beer will do-anything, providing it doesn’t interfere with the programme. The monster demands and obtains absolute silence and attention. If any member of the family dares to open his mouth during a programme, he is quickly silenced.


Whole generations are growing up addicted to the telly. Food is left uneaten, homework undone and sleep is lost. The telly is a universal pacifier. It is now standard practice for mother to keep the children quiet by putting them in the living-room and turning on the set. It doesn’t matter that the children will watch rubbishy commercials or spectacles of sadism and violence—so long as the y are quiet.


There is a limit to amount of creative talent available in the world. Every day television consumes vast quantities of creative work. That is why most of the programmers are so bad: it is impossible to keep pace with the demand and maintain high sandards as well. When millions watch the same programmers, the whole world becomes a village, and society is reduced to the conditions which obtain in pre-literate communities. We become utterly dependent on the two most primitive media of communication: pictures and the spoken word.


Television encourages passive enjoykment. We become content with second-hand experiences. It is so easy to sit in our arm-chairs watching others working. Little by little, television cuts us off from the real world. We get so lazy, we choose to spend a fine day in semi-darkness, glued to our sets, rather than go out into the world itself. Television may be a splendid medium of communication, but it prevents us from communicating with each other. We only become aware how totally irrelevant television is to real living when we spend a holiday by the sea or in the mountains, far away from civilization. In quiet, natural surroundings, we quickly discover how little we miss the hypnotic tyranny of King Tell.





‘Any form of education other than co-education is simply unthinkable’

Imagine being asked to spend twelve or so years of your life in a society which consisted only of members of your own sex. How would you react? Unless there was something definitely wrong with you, you wouldn’t be too happy about it, to say the least. It is all the more surprising therefore that so many parents in the world choose to impose such abnormal conditions on their children—conditions which they themselves wouldn’t put up with for one minute!


Any discussion of this topic is bound to question the aims of education. Stuffing children’s heads full of knowledge is far from being foremost among them. One of the chief aims of education is to equip future citizens with all they require to take their place in adult society. Now adult society is made up of men and women, so how can a segregated school possibly offer the right sort of preparation for it? Anyone entering adult society after years of segregation for it? Any one entering adult society after years of segregation can only be in for a shock.


A co-educational school offers children nothing less than a true version of society in miniature. Boys and girls are given the opportunity to get to know each other, to learn to live together from their earliest years. They are put in a position where they can compare themselves with each other in terms of academic ability, athletic achievement and many of the extra-curricular activities which are part of school life. What a practical advantage it is (to give just a small example) to be able to put on a school play in which the male parts will be taken by boys and the female parts by girls! What nonsense co-education makes of the argument that boys are cleverer than girls or vice versa. When segregated, boys and girls are made to feel that they are a race apart. Rivalry between the sexes is fostered. In a co-educational school, everything fall into its proper place.


But perhaps the greatest contribution of co-education is the healthy attitude to life it encourages. Boys don’t grow up believing that women are mysterious creatures-airy goddesses, more like book-illustrations to a fairy-tale, than human beings. Girls don’t grow up imagining that men are romantic heros. Girls don’t grow up imagining that men are romantic heroes. Years of living together at school dispel illusions of this kind. There are no goddesses with freckles, pigtails, piercing voices and inky fingers. There are no romantic heroes with knobbly knees, dirty fingernails and unkempt hair. The awkward stage of adolescence brings into sharp focus some of the physical and emotional problems involved in growing up. These can better be overcome in a co-educational environment. Segregated schools sometimes provide the right conditions for sexual deviation. This is hardly possible under a co-educational system. When the time comes for the pupils to leave school, they are fully prepared to enter society as well-adjusted adults. They have already had years of experience in coping with many of the problems that face men and women.

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‘ Camping is the ideal way of spending a holiday’

There was a time when camping was considered to be a poor way of spending a holiday; OK for boy scouts and hard-up students, but hardly the thing for sophisticated, comfort-loving adults.The adults have at last discovered that the boy scouts have really been on to a good thing all these years. If you go camping, it no longer means that you will be bitten to death by mosquitoes; have to drink brackish coffee; live on corned beef; suffocate or freeze in a sleeping-bag; hump gargantuan weights on your back. Camping has become the great pursuit of motorists the world over. All the discomforts associated with it have been miraculously whisked away. For a modest outlay, you can have an elaborate affair which resembles a portable bungalow, complete with three bedrooms, a living-room, a kitchen and a porch. The portable furniture is light and comfortable; the gas stove brews excellent coffee or grills a tender steak; the refrigerator keeps the beer  and ice-cream cold; and as for a good night’s rest, well, you literally sleep on air. What more could you want?


No noder the great rush is on. You see, camping has so much to foffer. You enjoy absolute freedom. You have none of the headaches of advance hotel booking or driving round and round a city at midnight looking for a room. There are no cold hotel breakfasts, no surely staff to tip. For a ludicrously small sum, you can enjoy comforts which few hotels could provide.


Modern camping sites are well equipped with hot and cold running water and even shops and dance floors! Low-cost holidays make camping an attractive proposition. But above all, you enjoy tremendous mobility. If you don’t like a place, or if it is too crowded, you can simply get up and go. Conversely, you can stay as long as you like. You’re the boss.


And then there’s the sheer fun of it—especially if you have a family. Moping around a stuffy hotel room wondering what they are going to give you for dinner is a tedious business. By comparison, it’s so exciting to arrive at a camp site, put up your tent and start getting a meal ready. You are active all the time and you are always close to nature. Imagine yourself beside some clear streamwith mountains in the background. Night is falling, everything is peaceful-except for the delightful sound of chops sizzling in the pan! Camping provides you with a real change for everyday living. You get up earlier, go to bed earlier, develop a hearty appetite. You have enormous opportunity to meet people of various nationalities and to share your pleasures with them. People are so friendly when they are relaxed. How remote the strained world of hotels seems when you are camping! How cold and unfriendly the formal grettings that are exchanged each day between the residents! For a few precious weeks in the year, you really adopt a completely different way of life. And that’s the essence of true recreation and real enjoyment.




‘New fashions in clothing are created solely for the commercial exploitation of women’


Whenever you see an old film, even one made as little as ten years ago, you cannot help being struck by the appearance of the women taking part. Their hair-styles and make-up look dated; their skirts look either too long or too short; their general appearance is, in face, slightly ludicrous. The men taking part in the film, on the other hand, are clearly recognizable. There is nothing about their appearance to suggest that they belong to an entirely different age.


This illusion is created by changing fashions. Over the years the great majority of men have successfully resisted all attempts to make them change their style of dress. The same cannot be said for women. Each year a few so-called ‘ top designers’ in Paris or Longdon lay down the lawy and women the whole world over rush to obey. The decrees of the designers are unpredictable and dictatorial. This year, they decide in their arbitrary fashion, skirts will be short and waists will be hight; zips are in and buttons are out. Next year the law is reversed and far from taking exception, no one is even mildly surprised.


If women are mercilessly exploited year after year, they have only themselves to blame. Because they shudder at the thought of being seen in public in clothes that are out of fashion, they are annually blackmailed by the designers and the big stores. Clothes which have been worn only a few times have to be discarded because of the dictates of fashion. When you come to think of it, only a woman is capable of standing in front of a wardrobe packed full of clothes and announcing sadly that she has nothing to wear.


Changing fashions are nothing more than the deliberate creation of waste. Mayb women squander vast sums of money each year to replace clothes that have hardly been worn. Women who can not afford to discard clothing in this way, waste hours of their time altering the dresses they have. Hem-lines are taken up or let down; waist-lines are taken in or let out; neck-lines are lowered or raised, and so on.


No one can claim that the fashion industry contributes anything really important to society. Fashion designers are really important to society. Fashion designers are rarely  concerned with vital things like warmth, comfort and durability. They are only interested in outward appearance and they take advantage of the face that women will put up with any amount of discomfort, providing they look right. There can hardly be a man who hasn’t at some time in his life smiled at the sight of a woman shivering in a flimsy dress on a wintry day, or delicately picking her way through deep snow in dainty shoes.


When comparing men and women in the matter of fashion, the conclusions to be drawn are obvious. Do the constantly changing fashions of women’s clothes, one wonders, reflect basic qualities of fickleness and instability? Men are too sensible to let themselves be bullied by fashion designers. Do their unchanging styles of dress reflect basic qualities of stability and reliability? That is for you decide.








We should all grow fat and be happy”


Here’s a familiar version of the boy-meets-girl situation. A young man has at last plucked up courage to invite a dazzling young lady out to dinner. She has accepted his invitation and he is overjoyed. He is determined to take her to the best restaurant in town, even if it means that he will have to live on memories and hopes during the month to come. When they get to the restaurant, he discovers that this ethereal creature is on a diet. She mustn’t eat this and she mustn’t drink that. Oh, but of course, she doesn’t want to spoil his enjoyment. Let him by all means eat as much fattening food as he wants: it’s the surest way to an early grave. They spend a truly memorable evening together and never see each other again.


What a miserable lot dieters are! You can always recognize them from the sour expression on their faces. Thy spend most of their time turning their noses up at food. They spend most of their time turning their nose up at food. They are forever consulting calorie charts; gazing at themselves in mirrors; and leaping on to weighing-machines in the bathroom. They spend a lifetime fighting a losing battle against spreading hips, protruding tummies and double chins. Some wage all-out war on FAT. Mere dieting is not enough. They exhaust themselves doing exercises, sweating in sauna baths, being pummeled and massaged by weird machines. The really wealthy diet-mongers pay vast sums for ‘healthcures’. For two weeks they can enter a ‘nature clinic’ and be starved to death for a hundred guiness a week. Don’t think it’s only the middle-aged who go in for these fads either. Many of these bright young things you see are suffering from chronic malnutrition: they are living on nothing but air, water and the goodwill of God.


Dieters undertake to starve themselves of their own free will so why are they so miserable? Well, for one thing, they’re always hungry. You can’t be hungry and happy at the same time. All the horrible concoctions they eat instead of food leave them permanently dissatisfied. ‘Wonderfood is a complete food,’ the advertisement says. ‘Just dissolve a teaspoonful in water…’ a complete food it may be, but not quite as complete as a juicy steak. And, of course, they’re always miserable because feel so guilty. Hunger just proves too much for them and in the end they lash out and devour five huge guilt inducing cream cakes at a sitting. And who can blame them? At least three times a day they are exposed to temptation. What utter torture it is always watching others tucking into piles of mouth-watering food while you munch a water biscuit and sip unsweetened lemon juice!


What’s all this self-inflicted torture for? Saintly people deprive them selves of food to attain a state of grace. Unsaintly people do so to attain a state of misery. It will be a great day when all the dieters in the world abandon their slimming courses; when they hold out their plates and demand second helpings!



‘The younger generation knows best’


Old people are always saying that the young are not what they were. The same comment is made from generation to generation and it is always true. It has never been truer than it is today. The young are better educated. They have a lot more money to spend and enjoy more freedom. They grow up more quickly and are not so dependent on their parents. They think more for themselves and do not blindly accept the ideals of their elders. Events which the older generation remembers vividly are nothing more than past history. This is as it should be. Every new generation is different from the one that preceded it. Today the difference is very marked indeed.


The old always assume the they know best for the simple reason that they have been around a bit longer. They don’t like to feel that their values are being questioned or threatened. And this is precisely what the young are doing. They are questioning the assumptions of their elders and disturbing their complacency. They take leave to doubt that the older generation has created the best of all possible worlds. What they reject more than anything is conformity. Office hours, for instance, are nothing more than enforced slavery. Wouldn’t people work best if they were given complete freedom and responsibility? And what about clothing? Who said that all the men in the world should wear drab gray suits and convict haircuts? If we turn our minds to more serious matters, who said that human differences can best be solved through conventional politics or by violent means? Why have the older generation so often used violence to solve their problems? Why are they so unhappy and guilt-ridden in their personal lives, so obsessed with mean ambitions and the desire to amass more and more material possessions? Can anything be right with the rat race? Haven’t the old lost touch with all that is important in life?


These are not questions the older generation can shrug off lightly. Their record over the past forty years or so hasn’t been exactly spotless. Traditionally, the young have turned to their elders for guidance. Today, the situation might be reversed. The old-if they are prepared to admit it-could learn a thing or two from their children. One of the biggest lessons they could learn is that enjoyment is not ‘sinful’. Enjoyment is a principle one could apply to all aspects of life. It is surely not wrong to enjoy your work and enjoy your leisure; to shed restricting inhibitions. It is surely not wrong to live in the present rather than in the past or future. This emphasis on the present is only to be expected because the young have grown up under the shadow of the bomb; the constant threat of complete annihilation. This is their glorious heritage. Can we be surprised that they should so often question the sanity of the generation that bequeathed it?



‘Only stricter traffic laws can prevent accidents’


From the health point of view we are living in a marvelous age. We are immunized from birth against many of the most dangerous diseases. A large number of once fatal illnesses can now be cured by modern drugs and surgery. It is almost certain that one day remedies will be found for the most stubborn remaining diseases. The expectation of life has increased enormously. But though the possibility of living a long and happy life is greater than ever before, every day we witness the incredible slaughter of men, women and children on the roads. Man versus the motor-car! It is a never-ending battle which man is losing. Thousands of people the world over are killed or horribly mutilated each year and we are quietly sitting back and letting it happen.


It has been rightly said that when a man is sitting behind a steering wheel, his car becomes the extension of his personality. There is no doubt that the motor-car often brings out a man’s very worst qualities. People who are normally quiet and pleasant may become unrecognizable when they are behind a steering-wheel. They swear, they are ill-mannered and aggressive, willful as two-year-olds and utterly selfish. All their hidden frustrations, disappointments and jealousies seem to be brought to the surface by the act of driving.


The surprising thing is that society smiles so benignly on the motorist and seems to condone his behavior. Everything is done for his convenience. Cities are allowed to become almost uninhabitable because of heavy traffic; towns are made ugly by huge car parks; the countryside is desecrated by road networks; and the mass annual slaughter becomes nothing more than a statistic, to be conveniently forgotten.


It is high time a world code were created to reduce this senseless waste of human life. With regard to driving, the laws of some countries are notoriously lax and even the strictest are not strict enough. A code which was universally accepted could on have a dramatically beneficial effect on the accident rate. Here are a few examples of some of the things that might be done. The driving test should be standardized and made far more difficult than it is; all drivers should be made to take a test every three years or so; the age at which young people are allowed to drive any vehicle should be raised to at least 21; all vehicles should be put through stringent annual tests for safety. Even the smallest amount of alcohol in the blood can impair a person’s driving ability. Present drinking and driving laws( where they exist) should be made much stricter. Maximum and minimum speed limits should be imposed on all roads. Governments should lay down safety specifications for manufactures, as has been done in the USA. All advertising stressing power and performance should be banned. These measures may sound inordinately harsh, but surely nothing should be considered as too severe if it results in reducing the annual tool of human life. After all, the world is for human beings, not motor-cars.




‘Parents are too permissive with their children nowadays’


Few people would defend the Victorian attitude to children, but if you were a parent in those days, at least you knew where you you stood: children were to be seen and not heard. Freud and company did away with all that and parents have been bewildered ever since. The child’s happiness is all-important, the psychologists say, but what about the parents’ happiness? Parents suffer constantly from fear and guilt while their children gaily romp about pulling the place apart. A good old-fashioned spanking is out of the question: No modern child-rearing manual would permit such barbarity. The trouble is you are not allowed even to shout. Who knows what deep psychological wounds you might inflict? The poor child may never recover from the dreadful traumatic experience. So it is that parents bend over backwards to avoid giving their children complexes which hundred years ago hadn’t even been heard of. Certainly a child needs love, and a lot of it. But the excessive permissiveness of modern parents is surely doing more harm than good.


Psychologists have succeeded in undermining parents’ confidence in their own authority. And it hasn’t taken children long to get wind of the face. In addition to the great modern classics on child care, there are countless articles in magazines and newspapers. With so much unsolicited advice flying about, mum and dad just don’t know what to do any more. In the end, they do nothing at all. So, from early childhood, the kids are in charge and parents’ lives are regulated according to the needs of their offspring. When the little dears develop into teenagers, they take complete control. Lax authority over the years makes adolescent rebellion against parents all the more violent. If the young people are going to have a party, for instance, parents are asked to leave the house. Their presence merely spoils the fun. What else can the poor parents do but obey?


Children are hardy creatures(far hardier than the psychologists would have us believe) and most of them survive the harmful influence of extreme permissiveness which is the normal condition in the modern household. But a great many do not. The spread of juvenile delinquency in our own age is largely due to parental laxity. Mother, believing that little Johnny can look after himself, is not at home when he returns from school, so little Johnny roams the streets. The dividing-line between permissiveness and sheer negligence is very fine indeed.


The psychologists have much to answer for. They should keep their mouths shut and let parents get on with the job. And if children are knocked about a little bit in the process, it may not really matter too much. At least this will help them to develop vigorous views of their own and give them something positive to react against. Perhaps there’s some truth in the idea that children who’ve had a surfeit of happiness in their childhood emerge like stodgy puddings and fail to make a success of life.

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‘Advertisers perform a useful service to the community’


Advertisers tend to think big and perhaps this is why they’re always coming in for criticism. Their critice seem to resent them because they have a flari for self-promotion and because they have so much money to throw around. ‘It’s iniquitous,’ they say,’that this entirely unproductive industry (if we can call it that) should absorb millions of pounds each year. It only goes to show how much profit the big companies are making. Why don’t they stop advertising and reduce the price of their goods? After all, it’s the consumer who pays…’


The poor old consumer! He’s have to pay a great deal more if advertising didn’t create mass markets for products. It is precisely because of the heavy advertising that consumer goods are so cheap. But we get the wrong idea if we think the only purpose of advertising is to sell goods. Another equally important function is to inform. A great deal of the knowledge we have about household goods derives largely from the advertisements we read. Advertisements introduce us to new products or remind us of the existence of ones we already know about. Supposing you wanted to buy a washing-machine, it is more that likely you would obtain details regarding performance, price, etc., from an advertisement.


Lots of people pretend that they never read advertisements, but this claim may be seriously doubted. It is hardly possible not to read advertisements these days. And what fun they often are, too! Just think what a railway station or a newspaper would be like without advertisements. Would you enjoy gazing at a blank wall r reading railway bye-laws while waiting for a train? Would you like to read only closely-printed columns of news in your daily paper? A cheerful, witty advertisement makes such a difference to a drab wall or a newspaper full of the dairly ration of calamities.


We must not forget, either, that advertising makes a positive contribution to our pockets. Newspapers, commercial radio and television companies could not subsist without this source of revenue. The fact that we pay so little for our daily paper, or can enjoy so many broadcast programmers is due entirely to the money spent by advertisers. Just think what a newspaper would cost if we had to pay its full price!


Another thing we mustn’t forget is the ‘small ads.’ Which are in virtually every newspaper and magazine. What a tremendously useful service they perform for the community! Just about anything can be accomplished through these columns. For instance, you can find a job, buy or sell a house, announce a birth, marriage or death in what used to be called the’ hatch,match and dispatch’ columns; but by far the most fascinating section is the personal or ‘agnoy’ column. No other item in a newspaper provides such entertaining reading or offers such a deep insight into human nature. It’s the best advertisement for advertising there is!



‘Pop stars certainly earn their money’


Pop stars today enjoy a style of living which was once the prerogative only of Royalty. Wherever they go, people turn out in their thousands to greet them. The crowds go wild trying to catch a brief glimpse of their smiling, colourfully-dressed idols. The stars are transported in their chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces, private helicopters or executive aeroplanes. They are surrounded by a permanent entourage of managers, press-agents and body-guards. Photographs of them appear regularly in the press and all their comings and goings are reported, for, like Royalty, pop stars are news. If they enjoy many of the privileges of Royalty, they certainly share many of the inconveniences as well. It is dangerous for them to make unscheduled appearances in public. They must be constantly shielded from the adoring crowds which idolize them. They are no longer private individuals, but public property. The financial rewards they receive for this sacrifice cannot be calculated, for their rates of pay are astronomical.


And why not? Society has always rewarded its top entertainers lavishly. The great days of Hollywood have become legendary: famous stars enjoyed fame, wealth and adulation on an unprecedented scale. By today’s standards, the excesses of Hollywood do not seem quite so spectacular. A single gramophone record nowadays may earn much more in royalties than the films of the past ever did. The competition for the title ‘Top of the Pops’ is fierce, but the rewards are truly colossal.


It is only right that the stars should be paid in this way. Don’t the top men in industry earn enormous salaries for the services they perform to their companies and their countries? Pop stars earn vast sums in foreign currency-often more than large industrial concerns-and the taxman can only be grateful for their massive annual contributions to the exchequer. So who would begrudge them their rewards?


It’s all very well for people in humdrum jobs to moan about the successes and rewards of others. People who make envious remarks should remember that the most famous stars represent only the tip of the iceberg. For every famous star, there are hundreds of others struggling to earn a living. A man working in a steady job and looking forward to a pension at the end of it has no right to expect very high rewards. He has chosen security and peace of mind, so there will always be a limit to what he can earn. But a man who attempts to become a star is taking enormous risks. He knows at the outset that only a handful of competitors ever get to the very top. He knows that years of concentrated effort may be rewarded with complete failure. But he knows, too, that the rewards for success are very high indeed: they are the recompense for the huge risks involved and if he achieves them, he has certainly earned them. That’s the essence of private enterprise.



‘Vicious and dangerous sports should be banned by law’


When you think of the tremendous technological progress we have made, it’s amazing how little we have developed in other respects. We may speak contemptuously of the poor old Romans because they relished the orgies of slaughter that went on in their arenas. We may despise them because they mistook these goings on for entertainment. We may forgive them condescendingly because they lived 2000 years ago and obviously knew no better. But are our feelings of superiority really justified? Are we any less blood-thirsty? Why do boxing matches, for instance, attract such universal interest? Don’t the spectators who attend them hope thy will see some violence? Human beings remain as blood-thirsty as ever they were. The only difference between ourselves and the Romans is that while they were honest enough to admit that they enjoyed watching hungry lions tearing people apart and eating them alive, we find all sorts of sophisticated arguments to defend sports which should have been banned long ago ; sports which are quite as barbarous as, say, public hangings or bear-baiting.


It really is incredible that in this day and age we should still allow hunting or bull-fighting, that we should be prepared to sit back and watch two men batter each other to pulp in a boxing ring, that we should be relatively unmoved by the sight of one or a number of racing cars crashing and bursting into flames. Let us not deceive ourselves. Any talk of ‘the sporting spirit’ is sheer hypocrisy. People take part in violent sports because of the high rewards they bring. Spectartors are willing to pay vast sums of money to see violence. A world heavyweight championship match, for instance, is front page news. Millions of people are disappointed if a big fight is over in twon rounds instead of fifteen. They feel disappointment because they have been deprived of the exquisite pleasure of witnessing prolonged torture and violence.


Why should we ban violent sports if people enjoy them so much? You may well ask. The answer is simple: they are uncivilized. For centuries man has been trying to improve himself spiritually emotionally—admittedly with little success. But at least we no longer tolerate the sight madmen cooped up in cages, or public floggings or any of the countless other barbaric practices which were common in the past. Prisons are no longer the grim forbidding places they used to be. Social welfare systems are in operation in many parts of the world. Big efforts are being made to distribute wealth fairly. These changes have come about not because human beings have suddenly and unaccountably improved, but because positive steps were taken to change the law. The law is the biggest instrument of social change that we have and it may exert great civilizing influence. If we banned dangerous and violent sports, we would be moving one step further to improving mankind. We would recognize that violence is degrading and unworthy of human beings.

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