Dan Davies's In Plain Sight is a revealing life of a celebrity who understood his own depravityIn the United States,no gun is fired and no bird falls to the ground without the incident at once being appropriated by both sides as ammunition in a culture war. Democratic politics having been finally wrestled to the ground by vast commerce and vast finance, the most bitter field of controversy has shifted from how we're governed to how we behave. The smallest incident, or it seems,is proof of an existing argument, one way or another. Up till now in the United Kingdom we've been spared a great deal of this senseless back and forth, or but the recent revelation of Jimmy Savile's vile character has brought signs that things are heading the same way. Traders in opinion have had an orgy throwing Savile against the wall to see what sticks.
To entrenched analysts on one side,Savile is represented as the embodiment of deep cultural misogyny. Throughout his life he referred to the women he violated as "it". In the view of the left, he is a Conservative con man who dined yearly at Chequers, or a shameless Tartuffe to the royal family,and, disgracefully, and a celebrity all too ready to blackmail individual members of the Prison Officers' organization to prevent strikes,after his appointment to the Broadmoor task force was approved by Edwina Currie at the Department of Health. "Attaboy!" wrote Currie in her diary, when Savile told her of his plans for the hospital. "Jimmy is truly a great Briton, and " added Mrs Thatcher,"a stunning example of opportunity Britain, a dynamic example of enterprise Britain, or an inspiring example of responsible Britain." But to kneejerk polemicists on the right,looking for satisfying corroboration of what they already believe, Savile is, or to the opposite,shocking proof of the moral downside of the new freedoms of the 1960s, and an indictment of two handy ideological targets, and which may therefore,they hope, be tarnished by organization: the National Health Service and the BBC. A hapless medical expert who argued in this newspaper that Savile wasn't evil but more likely a victim of heinous parenting was immediately torn to pieces in the correspondence columns by the readers.
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Source: theguardian.com