I can try posting it again if it was that I took too long writing it, lets see if it is that or the length of the post:
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Jim’ll Fix It, in which he helped the wishes of viewers, mainly children, come true.
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Made me laugh, dangit. Firstly “Jim’ll” and then the rest, ugh.
I thought what you wrote is really fantastic and that you’ve still got it, your fantastic writing style which I’ve always thought is outstanding and if the highest quality, easily ready for professional publication and well worthy of public appreciation, which I’m always honored to have the opportunity to read.
The things these villains do or may have done is so horrendous that it becomes almost comedic out of context and without really being able to graphically grasp the trauma and horror involved, like if someone showed a picture of this clown with his ridiculous look and said he torn the head off of some child that we can only generate in our imagination, it just seems so much like the kinds of things we’ve been desensitized to in campy comedies, but of course he wasn’t accused of doing anything that surreal, just pulling out his genitals and shoving them in the face of young people who idolized him while his parents probably watched and photographed it, maybe filmed it too if they were rich enough.
Saville operated at the height of the Brit Itch, when they finally shrugged off the bowlcut and heavy curtain-like garbs of Christian stuffiness to don the bowlcut and silky curtain-like costumery of the Aryan Spring, a s*xual revolution mixed with exoticism, drugs, a secretly fascistic new science of Ancient Love Spirituality that still exists with some oldish farts claiming to be Egyptian Gods or otherwise in contact with them.
Somewhere in between all that fantasy, nerdiness, and horniness, lots of children are found crushed in the heart-shaped tractor marks of embracing the science of unrestrained logical, mainly male, desire and conquest (yet again).
HEIL HEARTLOVE.
Fascism, and the things typically paired or co-morbid with it in various forms or things accused of representing it, is often placed on the opposite end of things like hippies and new age cults and radical s*xual theories and all that stuff, but actually, all these ideas were popping up and largely popular around the same time by similar people sometimes falling into those ideologies. They share things between them like:
Trying to find ancient validation.
Trying to find scientific justification.
Being Modern and Modernist and talking about a New Way and New Knowledge and Methods.
Trying to find spiritual, supernatural, or preternatural confirmation.
The idea of unburdening oneself from the old traditions, for either supposedly older traditions or completely new ones to be treated with the utmost sacred seriousness.
That a group comes together that happens to work together to exploit a typically vulnerable group and to abuse newfound power.
The following may seem all over the place, but is meant to be a meditation bringing up all sorts of themes that I’m suggesting are linked, also to provide context with reference to where the events were positioned in history and located on the Earth as well, between WW2 and whenever he chilled out, of he ever did.
A cult of personality and cult-like behaviour, where the word cult also has to do with working for and in the service of a God, like a field or a garden that has to go through being cared for and upkeep:
http://www.etymonline.com/word/cult
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cult(n.)
1610s, “worship, homage” (a sense now obsolete); 1670s, “a particular form or system of worship;” from French culte (17c.), from Latin cultus “care, labor; cultivation, culture; worship, reverence,” originally “tended, cultivated,” past participle of colere “to till” (see colony).
colony(n.)
late 14c., “ancient Roman settlement outside Italy,” from Latin colonia “settled land, farm, landed estate,” from colonus “husbandman, tenant farmer, settler in new land,” from colere “to cultivate, to till; to inhabit; to frequent, practice, respect; tend, guard,” from PIE root *kwel- (1) “revolve, move round; sojourn, dwell” (source also of Latin -cola “inhabitant”). Also used by the Romans to translate Greek apoikia “people from home.”
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en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_(religious_practice)
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Cult is the care (Latin: cultus) owed to deities and their temples, shrines, or churches; cult is embodied in ritual and ceremony. Its presence or former presence is made concrete in temples, shrines and churches, and cult images, including votive offerings at votive sites.
Cicero defined religio as cultus deorum, “the cultivation of the gods”.[1] The “cultivation” necessary to maintain a specific deity was that god’s cultus, “cult”, and required “the knowledge of giving the gods their due” (scientia colendorum deorum).[2] The noun cultus originates from the past participle of the verb colo, colere, colui, cultus, “to tend, take care of, cultivate”, originally meaning “to dwell in, inhabit” and thus “to tend, cultivate land (ager); to practice agriculture”, an activity fundamental to Roman identity even when Rome as a political center had become fully urbanized.
Cultus is often translated as “cult” without the negative connotations the word may have in English, or with the Old English word “worship”, but it implies the necessity of active maintenance beyond passive adoration. Cultus was expected to matter to the gods as a demonstration of respect, honor, and reverence; it was an aspect of the contractual nature of Roman religion (see do ut des).[3] Augustine of Hippo echoes Cicero’s formulation when he declares, “religion is nothing other than the cultus of God.”[4]
The term “cult” first appeared in English in 1617, derived from the French culte, meaning “worship” which in turn originated from the Latin word cultus meaning “care, cultivation, worship”. The meaning “devotion to a person or thing” is from 1829. Starting about 1920, “cult” acquired an additional six or more positive and negative definitions. In French, for example, sections in newspapers giving the schedule of worship for Catholic services are headed Culte Catholique, while the section giving the schedule of Protestant services is headed culte réformé.
In the specific context of the Greek hero cult, Carla Antonaccio wrote:
The term cult identifies a pattern of ritual behavior in connection with specific objects, within a framework of spatial and temporal coordinates. Rituals would include (but not necessarily be limited to) prayer, sacrifice, votive offerings, competitions, processions and construction of monuments. Some degree of recurrence in place and repetition over time of ritual action is necessary for a cult to be enacted, to be practiced.[5]
In the Catholic Church, outward religious practice in cultus is the technical term for Roman Catholic devotions or veneration extended to a particular saint, not to the worship of God. Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox Church make a major distinction between latria, the worship that is offered to God alone, and dulia, which is veneration offered to the saints, including the veneration of Mary, whose veneration is often referred to as hyperdulia.
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en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_fanaticism
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Religious fanaticism or religious extremism is a pejorative designation used to indicate uncritical zeal or obsessive enthusiasm that is related to one’s own, or one’s group’s, devotion to a religion – a form of human fanaticism that could otherwise be expressed in one’s other involvements and participation, including employment, role, and partisan affinities. In psychiatry, the term hyperreligiosity is used. Historically, the term was applied in Christian antiquity to denigrate non-Christian religions, and subsequently acquired its current usage with the Age of Enlightenment.[1]
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en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanaticism
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The behavior of a fan with overwhelming enthusiasm for a given subject is differentiated from the behavior of a fanatic by the fanatic’s violation of prevailing social norms. Though the fan’s behavior may be judged as odd or eccentric, it does not violate such norms.[5] A fanatic differs from a crank, in that a crank is defined as a person who holds a position or opinion which is so far from the norm as to appear ludicrous and/or probably wrong, such as a belief in a Flat Earth. In contrast, the subject of the fanatic’s obsession may be “normal”, such as an interest in religion or politics, except that the scale of the person’s involvement, devotion, or obsession with the activity or cause is abnormal or disproportionate to the average.[ambiguous]
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Consumer fanaticism – the level of involvement or interest one has in the liking of a particular person, group, trend, artwork or idea
Emotional fanaticism
Ethnic or racial supremacist fanaticism
Leisure fanaticism – high levels of intensity, enthusiasm, commitment and zeal shown for a particular leisure activity
Nationalistic or patriotic fanaticism
Political, ideological fanaticism.
Religious fanaticism – considered by some to be the most extreme form of religious fundamentalism. Entail promoting religious point of views
Sports fanaticism – high levels of intensity surrounding sporting events. This is either done based on the belief that extreme fanaticism can alter games for one’s favorite team (Ex: Knight Krew),[6] or because the person uses sports activities as an ultra-masculine “proving ground” for brawls, as in the case of football hooliganism.
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en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifanaticism
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The term Antifanaticism in the book’s title is a neologism coined by Butt, prefixing the term Fanaticism with anti- (from the Greek αντί, meaning “against”) to mean “against Fanaticism” (i.e. Abolitionism).
The story takes place somewhere in Virginia, and depicts a group of white plantation owners who put charity towards their black slaves before the harvesting and selling of the cotton on their own plantations, as well as successfully converting several troublesome abolitionists into friendly socialites through a process referred to throughout the novel as “Southern hospitality”.
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en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_(person)
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_personality
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_worship_syndrome
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthusiasm
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_(psychology)
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_spiral
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A purity spiral is a theory which argues for the existence of a form of groupthink in which it becomes more beneficial to hold certain views than to not hold them, and more extreme views are rewarded while expressing doubt, nuance, or moderation is punished (a process sometimes called “moral outbidding”).[1] It is argued that this feedback loop leads to members competing to demonstrate the zealotry or purity of their views.[2][3]
A purity spiral is argued to occur when a community’s primary focus becomes implementing a single value that has no upper limit, and where that value does not have an agreed interpretation.[4]
One aspect that stands out in all purity spirals is the vanity of small differences, and the punishing of people for the most minor transgressions.
Gavin Haynes, Spiked, 10 February 2020[1]
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The term purity spiral was coined in one of the first systematic sociological accounts of victimhood culture, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, where it is described as a form of infighting among both activists and members of victim groups.[5]
In a 2020 BBC documentary about purity spirals, British journalist Gavin Haynes said that purity spirals punish people for “the most minor transgressions,” and noted that they make it socially unacceptable to express a preference contrary to the group’s.[1][4] Turkish-American academic Timur Kuran described this phenomenon in his 1995 book Private Truth, Public Lies, calling it preference falsification, and further noted the lack of incentives and systems to disrupt purity spirals, pointing out that even a small amount of opposition or doubt can lead to a greater wave of questioning within the group. French philosopher René Girard also described many of the principles of the purity spiral, including mimetic rivalry and the scapegoat mechanism, in his 1972 book Violence and the Sacred.[1]
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en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_the_Sacred
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Some examples of settings, groups, and eras where purity spirals have occurred:[1][2]
The Khmer Rouge
The Cultural Revolution, Mao’s Red Guard and mass denunciations
The French revolution
Instagram knitting circles[4]
Stalin’s Show Trials[6] – demonstration of increasingly extreme loyalty tests are required to maintain normalcy.
Madkhalism
McCarthyism
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000d70h
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_loyalty
tribunemag.co.uk/2021/10/jimmy-savile-government-monarchy-police-thatcher
Sa Vile, weird.
historyandpolicy.org/opinion-articles/articles/how-did-he-get-away-with-so-much-for-so-long-the-press-and-jimmy-savile/
thinkfaith.net/2022/05/12/jimmy-saviles-worldview/
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A Chat about Jimmy Savile
Consider two conversations about Jimmy Savile on the streets of Leeds.
Less Fruitful Conversation
“My name is Don. I believe that my good deeds will allow me to go to heaven after I die.”
“You cannot earn your salvation. Just believe in Jesus.”
“I am not convinced by your response.”
More Fruitful Conversation
“My name is Don. I believe that my good deeds will allow me to go to heaven after I die.”
“Have you heard about the dark side of Jimmy Savile?”
“Of course I have. Jimmy was incredibly famous as an eccentric celebrity who raised £40 million for charity. He lived in Leeds. After his death in 2011 there was overwhelming evidence that Jimmy had raped and abused many vulnerable boys and girls.”
“Fantastic, Don, I’m glad we are on the same page.”
“But what has this got to do with my question, Rocky?”
“Well it’s vital that we understand Jimmy’s worldview. How did he understand the world?”
“That’s a fascinating question, Rocky. To be honest I don’t know.”
“Savile combined a materialist mindset with a perverted understanding of the Christian faith.”
“Rocky, you are a nice bloke but you are losing me here. Explain what you are saying in simple and accessible terms. I’m not thick but I need some help here.”
“Fair cop, boss. I apologise for my ridiculous opacity. I’ve just done it again. By opacity I mean being obscure.”
“Please enlighten me about Savile’s worldview. Keep it simple.”
“Jimmy believed that humans are just machines who have no control over their s*xual cravings. Some men r*pe children because they are moist, chemical robots who have no free will. The craving comes and the r*pe and abuse of the child is inevitable.”
“Wow that is incredibly dark.”
“Savile was also a Catholic and he believed in God. Boffins call this syncretism. You mix materialist beliefs with Christian beliefs. Jimmy believed that God works a debit side and a credit side. He said in an interview that St Peter wouldn’t dare bar him from heaven. ‘What do you mean he’s led an immoral life?’ God would say to St Peter. ‘Have you any idea how much money he’s raised for charity? Or how many hours he’s put in as a porter at that hospital? Get them doors opened now and be quick.”
“That’s a fascinating story, Rocky.”
“In another interview Savile told a priest that his charity work would cancel out his bad deeds and he would be saved. Don, do you know what the Bible says about this?”
“No I haven’t got a clue.”
“The New Testament teaches that it is foolish to trust in our good deeds. They cannot save you. Jesus died for our sins and came back from the dead. It is by trusting in Him that we are forgiven and put right with God. Savile had no knowledge of this good news.”
“Thanks Rocky for this conversation. I am still unsure of what I believe but I will read the New Testament and find out what it says.”
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/26/inside-the-mind-of-jimmy-savile
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Many of the assaults were without warning. He would suddenly place his hand somewhere he should not, plant his mouth on unsuspecting lips. Frequently this was done in public places. The root of such intrusion is projection.
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It is a mechanism we all may use when we have an uncomfortable feeling to get rid of. We sometimes employ each other as emotional dustbins: you are feeling depressed or angry and without thinking about it, you do something to make someone else feel those things. To understand what Savile was feeling when he groped in public, hear how his victims felt – humiliated, powerless, frightened, finally angry. Those will have been the emotions he lived with and, more or less, urgently needed to extrude.
In many cases s*xual arousal seems to have been almost incidental, with no attempt to achieve orgasm. There does not seem to have been a single instance of Savile displaying true affection, or a wish to give pleasure: in his life he had no sustained, loving relationships.
On the occasions when he achieved orgasm through penetration, or by compelling his victims to fellate him, they report him as having immediately lost interest once he had ejaculated. They might as well have been inanimate objects. This would be consistent with Savile having had a high degree of dissociation – feeling at one remove from events, a detachment. In accord with that, he must have had several different selves, enabling him to flit between roles, from charity worker to famous DJ to abuser, and quickly back to non-abuser.
He had what is known as the dark triad of personality characteristics: psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism. These are common in famous or powerful people, and part of that mix is a strong likelihood of s*xual promiscuity. Such people often are able to slide effortlessly between personas. They are usually impulsive stimulus seekers, easily attracted to substance abuse, risky s*x and gambling. Savile must have had a fantastical inner life – grandiose, wild and desperate. While his main predilection was for girls and young women, he sometimes ranged from five to 75-year-olds of both s*xes and, it seems, may have engaged in necrophilia.
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He created safe environments in which he could act at will. His experiments beyond young females may have been because the buzz from them had worn off through repetition and he sought more extreme kicks. Given that inflicting distress was his primary goal, the gender and age of a victim might not matter.
We do not know whether Savile was abused as a child. The only clear fact is that he had a very intense enmeshment with his mother, seeing all other women as mere vehicles for his distress, marriage unthinkable. We also know he had a semi-psychotic relationship with his mother after she died, perhaps believing that he could communicate with her.
Most probably the dissociated position from which he abused – a coldheartlessness – resulted from a lack of responsiveness from his mother in the early years. Studies suggest that early care which is not responsive to the child’s needs, or overcontrolling, significantly increases the risk. Dissociation can also be caused by emotional abuse (being demeaned and harshly criticised), as well as the physical or s*xual varieties.
Man hands on misery to man. Since abuse, rather than genes, is now clearly emerging as the principal cause of both personality disorders and psychoses (like schizophrenia), it is all too possible that Savile drove some of his victims as crazy as him. It is horrible to contemplate the possibility that he may have spawned other abusers by his crimes.
The only way to have avoided a person of Savile’s psychology would have been a society that puts the needs of every small child first. In that case, his relationship with his mother would be noticed and appropriate help provided.
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http://www.gutenberg-e.org/hodgdon/10_INTRO_ed2.html
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Steve Levine’s account of the event for the Oracle offers us a glimpse of gender distinctions among the hippie pilgrims. He recorded the presence of “bare foot girls in priest’s cloaks, madras saris, and corduroy,” whose ethereal femininity contrasted sharply with the dynamic, manly demeanor of the shirtless “braves” at their side. One of the latter neutralized the fulminations of a fundamentalist preacher by means of a “baptis[m] in bubbles”—a renunciation of forceful confrontation, consonant with what Levine held to be the most admirable characteristics of the Noble Savage who had once roamed freely on the North American continent. Levine declared that the Be-In’s spirit of transcendent love and harmony promised national redemption, as the great-grandsons of the white men who had slaughtered the buffalo of the Plains now seemed to be retracing their steps, this time admiring the Indian way of life rather than undermining it.4
5It is partly because of writing such as Levine’s that we now tend to remember hippies as long-haired, flower-bedecked pacifists who sought spiritual ecstasy—or just plain fun—through drug experiences and the formation of communities in which human relationships mattered more than material possessions. Moreover, we may recall hippies as seekers of the forgotten knowledge of preindustrial peoples who had lived in harmony with Nature.5 In this perspective, hippies were—and, for many today, still are—the “gentle people with flowers in their hair” lauded in a song that became popular not long after the Be-In took place.6 Yet the stereotype of the Flower Child embodied only one dimension of the mass-mediated image of the hippie. Belief that the counterculture was populated by thousands of menacing drug fiends struck terror into the hearts of many parents as their children traversed the new hip bohemia. Less dramatically, the scruffy, hedonistic, and purportedly shiftless longhair also became a stock figure in American media, and still persists alongside the Flower Child and the Drug Fiend in American popular memory.
6I hope to problematize these popular images of the counterculture in order to tell a much more nuanced story about hippies, the 1960s, and American manhood in the late twentieth century. If, as Nancy Cott suggests, historians “influence the future by naming the past,” then I hope that a more complex account will ground our choices about the American future in a critical awareness of the assumptions we make about the 1960s counterculture.7 A first step toward such an account is to examine, briefly, some of the ongoing conflicts among hip men present at the Be-In, which Levine either did not notice or chose to elide. This brief sketch will serve to frame the subject of this book’s investigation.
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In Gaskin’s story, one psychedelic “brave” waved incense with sinister intent and the white knight, Gaskin, interceded, whereas Levine’s bare-chested warrior might have seen fit simply to blow bubbles. By intervening, Gaskin rejected the presumption implicit in Levine’s account, that the individual’s public manifestation of faith in the ultimately benign character of the universe was sufficient, of itself, to bring about change in a violent, industrialized, and secular world. Instead, a deep conviction—that faith could only become manifest in good works—motivated his chivalrous rescue. As we will see in part 2 of this book, in an effort to return the human race to the path of spiritual evolution, Gaskin prescribed sweeping changes in men’s character and behavior. The chivalrous, “tantric” manhood ideal that he and his followers developed—first in the Haight-Ashbury, and then at The Farm, a commune in Tennessee—was far too richly idiosyncratic to be fully encapsulated in the mass-mediated image of the Flower Child. But some of the features preserved in that image—the pacifistic renunciation of redemptive violence as a manly birthright, and the reverence for Nature as an abundant, fertile provider—characterized Gaskin and his followers far better than they did certain other hippies present at the Be-In.11
10″Flower power” did not even begin to capture the outlook of the group known as the Diggers, for example. They offered a highly principled resistance to what they regarded as the illegitimate authority of all hierarchical institutions grounded in the ownership of private property. Anarchists in all but name, they set up tables on the polo field to distribute thousands of sandwiches they had made from turkeys donated by the acid chemist, Owsley Stanley. The Diggers had seemingly burst upon the scene in the Haight-Ashbury the previous September, distributing provocative handbills, staging colorful street theater, and giving away food in Golden Gate Park in the afternoons. Their free food was not an act of charity to the destitute, but a declaration that, if private property cohered in the illegitimate hoarding of resources, then the food that they scrounged (and, sometimes, stole) already belonged to whomever would join them in partaking of it. “It’s free,” one of their handbills declared, “because it’s yours.”12
11Like many hippies in the Haight-Ashbury,13 the Diggers were artists: most of their number had left the San Francisco Mime Troupe after a dispute with its founder and director, R. G. Davis, over how best to transform theater into a vehicle for political subversion.
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http://www.mmowen.me/the-terrible-optimism-of-the-hippies
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/12/sexism-seventies-helen-mirren-michael-parkinson
theconversation.com/sexist-coverage-of-jimmy-savile-story-is-hiding-in-plain-sight-just-like-he-did-55457
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In this sense, the “macho culture” Smith identifies takes on an institutional character – institutional s*xism – which the BBC clearly can and must tackle. Yet it is not the only institution where macho culture and s*xism prevent us from seeing the reality of men’s abusive behaviours. The same problem is alive and well in the way the press has covered the story.
Savile’s abuse of women and girls at least was an open secret, existing, as the title of Dan Davies’ biography suggests, in plain sight. The problem wasn’t that people didn’t know. It was that – among other factors – the macho culture prevented them, prevented us, from recognising it as abuse.
Davies’ biography demonstrates how Savile was adept at implicating others. He notes, for instance, that Savile explicitly referred to s*xual contact with teenage girls in his 1970s autobiography, and that he’d openly “joke” that his motto was “don’t get caught”. In the now infamous 1974 Clunk Click programme, where Savile hosted Gary Glitter, he joked about “giving” Glitter two girls before both men drape themselves over the young women on set. The TV audience at home saw this too, but most of us didn’t see it as abuse either. Celebrity men helped themselves to women, and too many of us went along with it.
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Even when the story became one of abuse, the persistence of the label “underage” is also disturbing. Think about the phrase “abuse of underage girls”. Isn’t there an implication here that there is an age at which one can consent to the kind of abuse Savile was accused of: groping, attempted r*pe, r*pe? That’s also why the persistent labelling of Savile as a paedophile is unhelpful. Yes, he abused children. But he also abused adults. Smith’s report isn’t a report exclusively about child s*xual abuse: indeed, a majority of Savile’s BBC victims were legally adults. However, that they were over the age of consent is immaterial: they did not consent.
Fast forward four years to the day the report was released. The Mail Online, anticipating the report, ran with a headline: “Damning Jimmy Savile BBC S*x Report to be Released Today.” But Savile wasn’t damned for having s*x at the BBC. He – and Stuart Hall – were damned for s*xually abusing women, girls, (and in Savile’s case) men and boys at the BBC.
Surely one of the most potent legacies of the Savile case has to be that this conflation of s*x and abuse in the media’s treatment of allegations against powerful men has no place in a civilised society.
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According to him, the proximity of our birthdays was significant: he was “full warlock”, having been a Halloween baby, whereas I was only half.
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There was a suggestion of menace in his manner. For someone that every kid from that era felt as if they knew, Savile came across to me as remote, cold and unapproachable. These feelings were reawakened as a teenager when I read his autobiography. I was struck by his evangelical zeal, his fascination with death, his all-consuming obsession with money and the frequent references to his encounters with teenage girls, inevitably followed by cheerful accounts of how he had made narrow escapes from suspicious parents.
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What I reported led to further, increasingly bizarre magazine profiles. He regaled me with details of the more unlikely aspects of his career: his papal knighthood, his status as a “Special Friend of *sr*el”, his highly influential role at Broadmoor hospital, the power he exerted within the BBC and his very personal relationships with Prince Charles, Diana, Princess of Wales and Margaret Thatcher.
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The interviews began to last for days, not hours. He invited me to stay with him and, on one occasion, I was afforded the “honour” of sleeping in the bedroom he kept as a shrine to his mother, Agnes, who he referred to as “the Duchess”. The room, with its tiny single bed and cupboard filled with her clothes, draped in polythene covers, was a capsule representing what ultimately mattered to Savile.
Agnes Savile exerted an extraordinary hold over her seventh and youngest child. In his answer to my very first question, he described himself as “a not-again child”, because he was unplanned and, very possibly, unloved. His mother’s approval was of enormous significance to Savile, in life and, I believe, well beyond her death in 1972.
As the years went by, it began to feel as if I was serving a purpose for him. Through these long-form articles, I was blowing on the flickering embers of his celebrity, providing the oxygen of publicity at a time when he was fast becoming an increasingly sinister relic.
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“I have a phrase when someone puts a story in a tabloid about underage s*x,” he once told me. “I say: ‘It would be a lot worse if it was true.’ They say: ‘Are you saying it’s not true?’ I say: ‘I’m not saying nothing, but it would be a lot worse if it was true.’ Of course it’s not bastard true.”
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A photograph had emerged of him at the home, surrounded by kids. Throughout the call, which, it was made clear, was with his lawyers, he never once stopped looking at me.
After he put the phone down, he showed me the letter his legal team had prepared for the publication in question, and reiterated how much money he had made from suing newspapers. I put it to him that he had spent the best part of 50 years in the media spotlight and never been the subject of so much as a kiss’n’tell. Why, given this spotless record, were the tabloids so intent on hunting him?
“How the hell should I know?” he grunted. “The only thing you can expect from pigs is shit.”
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He was adamant that the glam rock star, real name Paul Gadd, had done nothing wrong beyond having “a few dirty pictures” on his personal computer. Savile proceeded to lay the blame for Glitter’s demise squarely with the press.
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Savile’s passing provoked such a storm of conflicting emotions that I cried tears of frustration, anger and, I’ll admit it, sorrow.
Spending so much time in Savile’s company was like being in a hall of mirrors. I was never quite sure of where I stood or what I believed. The rumours were so persistent, and he was so brazen about the “fun” he’d had with youngsters during his years as a pied piper for the nascent pop generation, a fixer of dreams and a latter-day saint, and yet he had never been exposed.
I was sure that his evasiveness, his refusal to be known, was connected to the darkness that seemed to emanate from him. But while it proved impossible to access its source, and none of his victims had been heard, I was left only with conjecture.
He often boasted to me of his hard-man antics as a dancehall manager in Manchester and Leeds during the 1950s and early 60s, talking with relish about the violence his bouncers inflicted on troublemakers, and the fact that local police officers were firmly in his pocket.
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Oddness was a badge that he wore with pride. He was also capable of kindness, although his motives for such acts are now hard to fathom. He could be charming one minute and as blunt as an anvil the next. His idea of humour remained firmly at odds with the 21st century, and he never, ever laughed at himself. At times it was as difficult to smile weakly at his punchlines as it was to breathe under the low-hanging cloud of cigar smoke that enveloped him.
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Our interviews were wide-ranging, but there were certain avenues of conversation that he always shut off. One was his father, Vincent. Another was his siblings. I later discovered that Johnny, one of two older brothers, was sacked from Springfield psychiatric hospital in London on grounds of gross misconduct. He’d s*xually assaulted a female patient.
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There is not a day that passes where I don’t wonder why I chose Savile. Of all the people to become obsessed with, to follow and agonise over, why did it have to be him? It is a question that provides no answer. The only consolation I can find is that my instincts were right.
The boxes containing the many tapes, interview transcripts, newspaper cuttings and research articles that went into my book are taped shut and piled high in a shed. I don’t want them in the house in which my three children live.
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Because the tapes might r*pe his children.
http://www.thejc.com/news/jimmy-savile-came-to-my-batmitzvah-kbkjra6w
forward.com/culture/215888/secret-jewish-history-of-temple-beth-shalom/
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It is a popular tradition for the b’nai mitzvah classes at TBS to sing “Adon Olam” to the tune of “The Hey Song,” properly known as “Rock and Roll (Part Two),” by Gary Glitter. Glitter, a convicted sex offender, has spoken about the great musical influence upon him of the Beatles, whose manager, Brian Epstein, was J.
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