An ex-boyfriend once told me (paraphrasing Churchill, he said), “If you’re not liberal when you’re young, you have no heart. If you’re not conservative when you’re old, you have no brain.” At the time (I was in college),he was mocking my leftist leanings, many of which I was sure he shared. But when I wanted to, for example, boycott Nestlé products because the company fostered a culture of dependency on their baby formulas in underdeveloped countries, he said, “I’m sure that huge multinational corporation is devastated that you won’t eat their Crunch bar.” Then we broke up, and then he became a stockbroker, so maybe he did follow the path he had predicted. (As it turns out, that isn’t a Churchill quote, but comes instead from 19th century French jurist Anselme Polycarpe Batbie.)
Or maybe I took umbrage more at the fact that I suspected that he was correct; that in my middle-class and middle-aged lifestyle, I’ve lost much of the radical fervor that marked my younger days. In college, I once volunteered to work defense at an abortion clinic, serving as a shield to the incoming patients, blocking the view of protestors holding gruesome signs and chanting in mock baby voices. Now, I call it a victory if I talk myself out of taking a nap.
Nonetheless, in The Ruling Class, this is also the path the 14th Earl of Gurney, played by Peter O’Toole, takes. From peace-and-love-spouting hippie Jesus to a starched and collared House of Lords representative. From “the God of Love” to Jack the Ripper. And the genesis of this change wasn’t age, but rather some ersatz electroshock therapy from another person who believed himself “the Electric Messiah… the AC/DC God.”
That was a quote I knew long before I ever saw the film. It was used as a sample in My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult’s song “Kooler Than Jesus.” I still have a t-shirt with the song title emblazoned on the back. Once, while I was wearing it, an older African-American lady stopped me and asked me what those words meant. She was challenging me, perhaps as much as my ex- had, but in a gentle, non-confrontational way. I explained that it wasn’t as much an attack on Christianity as much as it was an attack on the cult of personality build around Jesus. I’m not sure I made myself intelligible, because, in truth, I didn’t wear the shirt because of my strong atheist ideals—I wore it because the song had a good beat and I liked dancing to it.
Maybe my convictions were never that strong.
I still refuse to eat a Crunch bar, however. Not because I’m trying to stick it to Nestlé—but only because it’s waxy chocolate.