PERHAPS you think things are not so bad? If you still harbour a few cherished thoughts about Britain as a respectable country with standards of public decency and good taste, just look at the sort of barbarism which has been going on this week.

Eminem, the so-called "rapper", appeared on stage dressed in a hideous mask and wielding a chainsaw in front of 15,000 teenagers. When he began his "entertainment" this, after he had consumed Ecstasy pills, is what he said: "My friend Xibit gave me some Es and I say pop the pill. I told you that yous were a bunch of f***ing drug addicts. I hope these Es are good S**t - if they're not, you'll be carrying my sorry ass home tonight. In the house are some good-ass Manchester drugs. Make some f***ing noise for good ass Manchester drugs".

Then he boasted about his trial for criminal assault, promised to drink himself to death on vodka and urged his young audience to do the same. In a later performance, he pretended to execute himself in an electric chair. All this in front of an audience in which some were as young as seven.

Well, do you still doubt that Satan is in charge of entertainment in our land? The truly bizarre aspect to all this filth is that the police were powerless to stop his evil performance unless - as it was put by a chief superintendent, no less - "he was to encourage a homophobic or racist attack".

This confirms all my suspicions: that the only criminal offences still on the statute book involve being unpleasant to homosexuals and members of ethnic minorities.

Of course, we are told "y'know" by the PM with the banana-split smile that the cure for social exclusion and underprivilege, ie yobbishness, violence and the drug culture, is education, education, education. But what sort of education is it going to be? The Government is preparing to accept the recommendations of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority that Shakespeare and other classical writers be ditched in favour of teaching "media studies, the moving image and the study of web pages and e-mail". There is also to be "a new stress on drama in the form of contemporary films and videos".

What can anyone possibly say about this disgrace except that it amounts to depriving our youngsters of their birthright? No words of mine can adequately criticise this cruelty and vandalism, so I'll quote some of TS Eliot's instead:

"We are told now that the highest achievements of the past in art, in wisdom, in holiness were but 'stages in development' which we can teach our youngsters to improve upon. We are told we must not impose traditional culture upon the young, though we may impose upon them whatever political and social philosophy is in vogue. There is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everyone we are lowering standards, destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian hordes will encamp in their mechanised caravans."

In view of such horror, you wonder even whether it's permissible to end on a lighter note. But I'm sure you saw the reports of the surgeon who, trying to cure a woman patient of back pain, accidentally caused her to have an orgasm. The lady in question had the grace - and I am bound to admire her presence of mind - to say to the doc: "You'll have to teach my husband to do that!" Now the doctor says that a small gadget might easily be implanted into every woman who wants to guarantee sexual ecstasy on demand.

Great. But husbands are wanted not just as erotic machines, surely. I wonder, for instance, when they will be able to implant a microchip in a bloke which, after sex, makes him go downstairs and brew a nice cup of tea - instead of, as we have been known to do, rolling over and falling into a snoring sleep.

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