The British nation took a dislike to Trenton Oldfield earlier in the year, we don’t take kindly to Australian nutters messing with our institutions, especially the public school  kind who claim to speak for our disenfranchised .

I blogged about him when he disrupted the boat race.

Our opinion of him has not improved since his 7 week confinement in Wormwood Scrubs. Certainly not if the “vox pop” following Nicky Campbell’s Radio 5 interview with him is anything to go by. A lot of water’s flown under Barnes Bridge since the spring and the tide’s not been in Oldfield’s direction of travel.

Campbell did a good job, not  allowing  Oldfield to rabbit on about the lack  of British civil liberties but isnsisting he provide an alternative value system to beat the best of British.

Oldfield managed to spit out something about “indigenous cultures” between the odd swear word and a bout of tactical silence but we were left none the wiser. The thing about this man and his like is that they do not know what “good” is.

The tactics of Oldfield and his like is to make noise. Setting off fire alarms, disrupting conferences and generally making a nuisance of himself, he regards the noise as the means to create change. But change is not galvanised by random acts of terrorism.

And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice (1 Kings 19 :12 KJV)

The great acts of dissent are those that “aspire to the fixity of silence”. Dylan’s answers were not shouted from the rooftop but blew in the wind.

The Sex Pistols made a lot of noise but God Save the Queen, Anarchy and Pretty Vacant were great pop songs (listen to Pretty Vacant then Dancing Queen). The same can be said of what counts for mindless anarchy in the Damned’s “smash it up”. The song’s the thing… and the joke’s on those who can’t see that all these songs are great uplifting anthems of youth (well they certainly were to me!). Following  that extended feedback that follows the last line of Anarchy ~(“get pissed-destroy”) there’s a moment before the arm lifts off the single that Elijah would have recognised!

That’s why we still listen to the Pistols and don’t listen to Crass.

Nihilism, as espoused by Lydon, Sensible and Andrew Marvell is a creative thing of genius.  In his  poem “the Garden” Marvell tries to define the imaginative process so

The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find ;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas ;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

It is this failure to engage with the nothingness of silence , to listen to answers blowing in the wind or the moment when the feedback ends, that makes Oldfield such a loser.

You might think that one blog on the man was enough and two a definite over-promotion of his views. Not a bit of it. Oldfield has done us all a favour in helping us to connect with the “negative capability” inherent in what he is not.

If it wasn’t for this Australian idiot with his puerile negativity, I would not have reconnected with those sources of nihilism that so enthuse me, inspire me and like the still small voice, speak to me.

Related articles

• Oldfield gets six-month jail sentence (bigpondnews.com)
• Is boat race protester Trenton Oldfield the ‘British Pussy Riot’? (theweek.co.uk)
• You: Boat Race protester Trenton Oldfield jailed for six months (guardian.co.uk)
• Thames Boat Race disrupter Trenton Oldfield jailed (thesun.co.uk)
• The criminalisation of protest is part of the elite’s class war | Nina Power (guardian.co.uk)
• Boat race protester Trenton Oldfield jailed for six months over Oxford-Cambridge disruption (independent.co.uk)
• Parallels between Trenton Oldfield trial and Pussy Riot… wife of Boat Race protester speaks out (standard.co.uk)
• That’ll wipe the smile off your boat race: Trenton Oldfield jailed for six months for “dangerous” Thames protest (mirror.co.uk)
• [link] The criminalisation of protest is part of the elite’s class war (slendermeans.wordpress.com)