Just ahead of Episode Twelve of The Man Who Was Thursday, thank you again for your kind comments about this caper and all our other Tales for Our Time. Over three years ago now, we launched this series of audio adventures on a whim, threw it together somewhat hastily, and learned on the job. So I'm enormously grateful for your appreciation of it.
Our current tale is G K Chesterton's metaphysical thriller of 1908 - which somehow manages to have eerie resonances with our own deformed world of 2020. In tonight's episode, for example, a policeman being pursued by anarchists makes an interesting observation:
"We must get down through the town of Lancy to the sea," he said. "I think that part of the country is least likely to be with them."
"What can you mean by all this?" cried Syme. "They can't be running the real world in that way. Surely not many working men are anarchists, and surely if they were, mere mobs could not beat modern armies and police."
"Mere mobs!" repeated his new friend with a snort of scorn. "So you talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists..."
And so it is in our time: Bored varsity trust-funders, Hollywood celebrities whose nearest acquaintance with ordinary life is playing a middle-class guy in a sitcom, tech billionaires grown rich by persuading the masses to reduce the minutiae of their lives into someone else's lucrative "content", chief executives virtue-signaling about black and white so you won't notice their products are made not by either but by slave labor in a sweatshop behind the Wuhan Institute of Virology... All can, if necessary, "go away to New Guinea in a yacht". Notwithstanding the looting and pillaging in the downtown streets, this revolution is the elites rising up against the masses.
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Please join me tomorrow for Part Thirteen of The Man Who Was Thursday.