Utterly Surreal

Remember when your Mom would try to coerce you into cleaning your room with threats of no dinner or early bed time? How about this: BE A TIDY DRONE OF THE STATE OR WE’LL ALL DIE IN A NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST!!!!

One gets the strange sense of oddly inverted values in this wondrously surreal little relic of Cold War social engineering. The strange fascism that invades the home and tries to dictate how you should put plastic on the furniture and not leave the paper on the table–on pain of being incinerated when Eurasia launches a strike against our glorious Oceania forces–is one of the weirdest pieces of government agitprop I’ve ever seen. It reminds me of those weird Soviet films about how to micromanage your family unit in order to make it a model hatchery for the New Soviet Man. Chesterton would puke:

For the truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only place of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. Everywhere else he goes he must accept the strict rules of the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to enter. He can eat his meals on the floor in his own house if he likes. I often do it myself; it gives a curious, childish, poetic, picnic feeling. There would be considerable trouble if I tried to do it in an A.B.C. tea-shop. A man can wear a dressing gown and slippers in his house; while I am sure that this would not be permitted at the Savoy, though I never actually tested the point. If you go to a restaurant you must drink some of the wines on the wine list, all of them if you insist, but certainly some of them. But if you have a house and garden you can try to make hollyhock tea or convolvulus wine if you like. For a plain, hard-working man the home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks. The home is the one place where he can put the carpet on the ceiling or the slates on the floor if he wants to. When a man spends every night staggering from bar to bar or from music-hall to music-hall, we say that he is living an irregular life. But he is not; he is living a highly regular life, under the dull, and often oppressive, laws of such places. Some times he is not allowed even to sit down in the bars; and frequently he is not allowed to sing in the music-halls. Hotels may be defined as places where you are forced to dress; and theaters may be defined as places where you are forbidden to smoke. A man can only picnic at home.

The mentality behind this little film was every bit the enemy of domestic liberty as some Soviet bureaucrat. It is mentality awake and alive today to the threat of free people and their children today. The Nanny State always knows what’s best and always wants to frighten you into doing as you are told.