writes.casaFingering
As a small boy in the early 1970s, I read ‘Warlord’ comic. It was a glorification/sanitisation of the carnage of WW2 where all Germans were “schweinhunds”. The game was to have English boys want to be like their heroic Allied dads. For me, the counterpoint was my dad screaming out every night from the torture he had received as a POW. And the ‘appeal’ waned. Nonetheless, the symbol of this era was a cigar-wielding Churchill sticking up 2 fingers in a ‘V’ for Victory.
Punk came along and inverted the ‘V’: with palm facing towards the signaller. And then maybe a decade after it was made, I watched Ken Loach’s ‘Kes’, cementing the flicking of the ‘V’s in my teenage head.
Post millennium, degrowing my life has run in parallel with a growing cynicism towards authority. The 2 fingers have mentally become one.
And now in my dotage I’ll get to watch the authoritarianism that my dad fought against rise again, on its stupid mission to achieve a big fat net zero of any fingers at all.
Punk came along and inverted the ‘V’: with palm facing towards the signaller. And then maybe a decade after it was made, I watched Ken Loach’s ‘Kes’, cementing the flicking of the ‘V’s in my teenage head.
Post millennium, degrowing my life has run in parallel with a growing cynicism towards authority. The 2 fingers have mentally become one.
And now in my dotage I’ll get to watch the authoritarianism that my dad fought against rise again, on its stupid mission to achieve a big fat net zero of any fingers at all.
— urlyman