Big Breadwinner Hog

‘Big Breadwinner Hog’ was a controversial TV series broadcast in 1969 and a part of the 1960s revolution in morality which displaced Christian morals with relativism. It featured a violent gangster protagonist as ‘anti-hero’. In such series, the police gradually came to be portrayed as ill-motived, incompetent and often corrupt. Hence, the values of traditional police/crime series, such as ‘Gideon’s Way,’ which reflected those of the wider society, were completely upturned.
   The career villain, Mark Duggan, was shot by police in August 2011 in possession of a handgun. The left-wing media and elite attempted to exonerate him as a lovable rascal and to defame the police.
   The Kray Twins, still with a faded notoriety to this day, were arrested in May 1968, found guilty of murder and jailed for life.
   The Great Train Robbery, similarly feted by leftish commentators as more an act of social rebellion than a violent crime, occurred in August 1963.
   And now into this swamp of moral relativism comes mass, and rapidly-growing, Islam, perhaps to impose a further moral revolution?

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“For nothing it availeth us to have been born, save that we were born to be redeemed.” (Exsultet, Holy Saturday liturgy).

Gruff though genial, Gideon of the Yard,

Trimly suited, raps orders from his desk;
Villains are villains, to be dealt with hard
That decent folk might walk the streets
In peace and earn their rusk:
All share a code, stern as a knife,
That’s rule born, disdaining all thugs and cheats,
Expressed in Gideon’s blameless family life.

And then ‘Hog’ Hogarth sneered onto the scene,

Brute-eyed, his morals acid in the face;
With 60s chic and long-nosed guns, a sheen
Of glamour disbowelled public sense –
Rogues became heroes, base
The police; citizens gave laud
To the flagrant flash of dishonest pence
And Hogarth’s violence of bed and bawd.

Fifty years on, the jakes are midden-full:

A villain, Duggan, is shot fleeing arrest
And officers are pilloried as cruel
Assassins; puce, the thought-elite
Declare the gangster blessed;
Self-dupes of moral lazy-eye,
They trample common good with two left feet
Like beasts bullying others in a sty.

All’s rotted by that still-revolving storm

Which flung the Sixties beam-end into wreck,
Which smashed to shards its birth-taught Christian norm,
Replaced it with autonomy
And broke decorum’s neck.
Now public institutions are
A butt, and scoundrels wielding rights make free
To cosh the social realm and spit at law.

Recall the Kray Twins, porcine, Sixties throbs,

Killers who shone in swell society;
The Great Train gang, inauspicious types though thugs,
Who cracked a driver’s skull for gain;
Jailed, yes, though privily
Respected by a rule-shy age;
But who guards private goods and public fane
If civil force may not fling down its gage?

Choked, miners fight to save a fire-damp pit;

Might Hogarth, shamed, stiffen and lend his arm?
Such selfless acts, like pearl around the grit,
At depth are God-induced, but now
The Cross is a dead psalm
What might remould morality?
Looms Islam chanting suras from its dhow – 
Hog, Gideon, both, will surely bend the knee.
 
July 2014

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© July 2014