A lot of that original series, and even more of Going Forward, is rooted in the abject bleakness of real life.
Hip-hop's roots in the abject, drug-ruined poverty of New York's South Bronx in the late 1970s aren't just a historical fact, they have shaped its aspirational worldview.
What makes this German Jewish philosopher even more compelling is that he also found the opposite in cities – flashes of the utopian in the abject – and realised they could provide solutions to, as well be the causes of, alienation.
Its walls had been painted often enough since then, in the abject pastels fashionable among nursing homes, but sometimes in the late afternoon on one wall of my office I could still see, emulsified by years of Los Angeles sunlight, the shadow of a crucifix imprinted in the dust.
Our society today is in the abject state it is because of the weakness of Liberalism as a political force over decades which has permitted Labour and Conservative governments to undermine communities, to destroy local self-government and to promote economic over human values.
As a result, they must look to foreigners for the transformation of their richly endowed nation (of which oil is merely a part) in order for it to take its rightful place in the world, instead of which it continues to wallow in the abject poverty that so distresses the author of this book.
