I'm posting complete a poem by Philip Larkin. Later I'll talk about why this is one of the essential poems of the twentieth century, and why Larkin is among the finest voices in our language.
An aubade is a piece of music that is sung or played at dawn.
Aubade
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse - the good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness forever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision, A small unfocused blur, a standing chill That slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen: this one will, And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than with stood.
Slowly light stengthens, and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can't escape, Yet can't accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
It's not a series of thoughts, more a rapid shift into a visceral sense of the precariousness, the futility, the risk, and the dread of living. I immediately get out of bed, get dressed, and leave the house by the back door. Practice has demonstrated that a brisk walk can dissipate these states.
It's 4:15 in the morning. I walk along a wide boulevard that leads out of the city, lined with trees and closed shops. I'm heading for an all-night supermarket about a mile up the road. I don't want to buy anything, but the destination provides some notion of purpose in a meaningless universe. If my mental state hasn't improved by the time I get to the supermarket I can continue along the road and out into the countryside.
It's freezing cold and spitting icy rain, I zip up, pull tight and stud the hood of my anorak. Hardly any traffic and no one about. A solitary jam sandwich splashes slowly past me down the middle of the road. Of course, I'm aware of the possibility of being stopped by the scuffers at this hour. I carry no weapons, and I have an explanation ready: toothache, I'm on my way to the supermarket for ibruprofen.
The jam sandwich comes towards me from the other direction. I'm not surprised when it makes a sudden turn and mounts the pavement in front of me. A plain clothed scuffer flings open the door and jumps out. He's holding a big rubber torch, agitated. He strides towards me, the torch ready to batter me over the head. He's a small feller. Which way yer come from? Av got toothache. Put yer hood down.
Just as I'm exposing my head a lemon-curd sandwich pulls up behind me. A uniformed scuffer, an inspector, no less, puts his head out of the door, calls out, Not that one, then screeches off. The little feller lowers his torch and makes off. As he's getting into his car, he turns to me and says, Do us a favour pal, don't wear your hood up along here. You fucking what, I answer incredulously, it's freezing cold and pissing it down. He drives off.
Because this country bristles with spy cameras, and the population is aware of being the most watched people on the planet, cameras following every move we make, the most popular form of dress is the hooded garment. This seems reasonable. There are times when it's convenient not to reveal your identity. The hood is a simple and effective answer to this need. But some people, and these are mostly young people, young men, wear their hoods up all the time. Unwilling to be watched. This inspires suspicion and fear. Hoodies.
So as not to inspire alarm, and as a favour to the police force, I continue up the road bareheaded, the cold rain beating at my face and the chill wind causing acute pain in my ears.
Of course you can answer your own door, sir, that's how we know we live in a democracy. Joe Orton, Loot.
As for the horrors, they faded on the way back from the supermarket.
This is a photograph I took of my daughter. She was sitting on the chair in the corner by herself in protest at my refusal to buy her a snake from the petshop I'd taken her to see earlier.
I tried to explained to her that the snake in the shop was just a baby python. He'd have to be fed live mouses for dinner, and when he got bigger he'd want to eat rabbits, cats, or even Hercule, the doggy. Soon, we'd have to move out of the house, because the python's head would be on the kitchen table, while his tail would be upstairs sleeping in her bed.
She didn't believe me, said snakes weren't as big as that, and we could get a snakearium with lights and a little house for him to sleep in. She'd been crayoning pictures of snakes since we got back from the shop, and she took her best one and tore it up, crumpling the pieces and chucking them on the floor.
She said she was going to sit on her own on the chair because she couldn't have a snake, and I was telling lies about pythons. He wouldn't eat Hercule for dinner.
You could have a turtle in a turtlearium, I told her, or a cheese lizard, which is a vegetarian.. But she only wanted that python called Jeremy in the petshop.
When I called for a smile for the photograph she made herself look sadder.
We know that philosophy began as a vast discussion with tragedy, with the theatre, with the impurity of the visible and performing arts. The essential interlocutors of Plato were on the stage, and included in this broader rhetorical visibility are the public stage, the democratic assembly, the performance of the sophists. We should not be surprised today that philosophy is, for an increasing part of its activity, a vast discussion with cinema. Because cinema and its derivatives, including television, represent on a human scale, after Tragedy and Religion, the third historical attempt at the spiritual subjugation of the visible, available to all, without exception or measure. Also present at the meeting, the democratic politicians and their sophist advisors, renamed "public relations consultants." The screen has become their supreme test. The question has changed in destination only. It goes: "if there exists a sovereign technique of semblance, and if this technique, when it is cinema, is also capable of producing a mass art, what torsion, what metamorphosis does this art impose on that by which philosophy supports itself, and which has the name 'truth'"? - Alain Badiou, Cinema as a Democratic Emblem
True. I'm not a philosopher, but, as many of these blog posts will confirm, much of my intellectual life has been an engagement with what I've seen at the cinema.
Badiou is supposedly a fan of The Matrix - just the first one, surely. Zizek often uses 'Welcome to the desert of the real' as a Lacanian catchphrase. I had an immediate problem with that film. Having an engineer's mind I couldn't fathom why the hyper-intelligent machines would choose to use human bodies as an energy source, rather than another less problematic species, pigs for instance, which can, among other benefits, breed more profusely and develop much quicker. And anyway, surely these intelligent entities would have solved the problems of nuclear fission, thereby realising an infinite energy source. Using living meat as batteries is frankly preposterous, as is the notion of generating billions, nay trillions, of lines of computer code for the sole purpose of deceiving human beings. Why not just off the lot of them and have done with it?
No doubt a Matrixian will offer to enlighten me about these quibbles. I remember seeing a 'making of The Matrix' documentary, where it was claimed that the Warchovsky brothers were inspired by a close reading of European philosophy, citing Baudrillard, among others. The film was intended to ask searching questions about the nature of reality. Bollocks. Thought experiments can't be constructed on such flawed foundations.
This is why most science fiction on film is little more than overblown space opera, or like The Matrix an extended shoot 'em up. I can only think two good ones - the original Solaris, and Tarkovsky's Stalker. Tell me I'm wrong.
Speaking of pigs. In a recent post I spoke sceptically about the prospective outcome of psychoanalysis. Here's an interesting paper by the Lacanian analyst Anne Shane that uses the film Babe to describe the outcome of analysis. This curious film I know really well, having watched it perhaps a dozen times with one of my children. It's superb piece of cinema, not least because of its soundrack, which includes three mice squeaking a beautiful refrain from Saint Saen's Symphony Number Three.
While I'm no pacifist I'm not in favour of judicial killing under any circumstances. Since early childhood, scenes of execution in films have remained among the most vividly recalled - from Lesley Howard's guillotining in A Tale of Two Cities, Cagney's screaming appointment with the chair in Angels With Dirty Faces, to the most harrowing of all in Krystof Kieslowski's masterpiece, A Short Film About Killing.
A person's views on capital punishment are for me a touchstone, determining all other assessments of that person's opinions or personal qualities. In the spirit of Sartre's statement that 'all anti-communists are swine', I make the same sweeping gesture concerning apologists for the death penalty.
I've heard all the arguments about vital revolutionary necessities, heard the tales about Spanish anarchists of the 1930s, choosing the most magnificent vistas and exquisite sunsets when dispatching fascists, and listened to the intricately constructed logic of thought experiments that point inexorably to the firing-squad, but I remain unmovable.
Which is why, despite the man's odious crimes and unrepentant responsibility for the deaths of many thousands of civilians, I would not condone Tony Blair being put against a wall and shot.
Guardian readers who have not, through relentless exposure, become finally deaf to irony will have noted with the flicker of an eyebrow the small headline on page 6 of today's paper:
Materialism a threat to planet and human identity, says Blair
It may have been Donald Rumsfeld who rightly pointed out that being a hypocrite is better than having no values at all. The piece goes on to report that Blair delivered a speech at the 'prestigious' Communion and Liberation conference in Rimini. The adjective is superfluous, since had the event not been prestigious Blair would not have been there. The speech was made during a stopover Blair made on his way to a holiday aboard a five-deck luxury yatch as the guest of an American billionaire.
I'll quote a little of what he's alleged to have said - I use that qualifier because I'm not entirely convinced that some cunning devil isn't making all this stuff up. The language seems too thoroughly unctious, too evocative of the sermons of Rev. J.C. Flannel, to be authentic:
This is surely the role of faith in modern times...To represent God's truth, not limited by human frailty, or by the interests of the state or by the transient mores of a community, however well intentioned, but to let that truth bestow on us humility, love of neighbour, and the true knowledge that indeed passes all understanding.
Of course, since leaving office and becoming a multi-millionaire, Blair has entered into the Roman Catholic communion. I'll be frank about my prejudiced view of Roman Catholicism. This is not a religion but a conspiracy against the human spirit. Of all the main religious movements centered around the person of the rabbinical carpenter's son from Nazereth, it is the furthest removed from its source. I'll not speculate on what attractions it held for Blair.
I was once listening to Radio 4 interview with Blair's missis, Cherie. Her aquisitiveness is well known, and she's openly caricatured in the press as a greedy scouser, elbowing her way to piles of designer freebies like a footballer's wag, and stuffing her face at prestigious charity banquets. At one point the interviewer, a bit impertinently but with the customary delicacy, asked her about the vast sums of money she and Tony were raking in. She talked of the deprivations of her working class upbringing, touching upon her feckless piss artist father, and wondered whether the experience might have caused her to need millions in the bank in order to feel secure. Oh, the relentless vulgarity of the times we live in.
I had a dream last night of the type that Burroughs calls a 'Land of the Dead' dream. These are characterised by being set in a region of permanent starless night, in an oddly familiar landscape of paradoxical topographies, where there is no discernable difference between the inside and the outside of structures.
Such dreams are uncommon, and though they're distinctly unsettling and call for attempts at interpretation, it's difficult to reassemble much of them on awakening, since the action is usually fitful and disordered. But last night's dream was remarkably different from other examples of the genre my unconscious has screened for me. All the other Land of the Dead features were present, including narrative incoherence, but this one was distinguished by the fact that it was, for the most part, pleasing, rather than being disturbing or ominous, and I'm able to clearly recall some scenes from it.
The dream concerned a former girlfriend I haven't seen in some forty years, (distinct personalities are unusual in LoD dreams). Perhaps for the sake of the narrative coherence of this tale, and for readers of a certain sensibility, I should say that I was in love with her, though this would be misleading.
She was the first posh girl I'd ever had what people now call a 'relationship' with, being from a part of society with which I'd previously never had any direct contact. In a tangible sense she was a different species, and this was utterly fascinating. Her parents were academics, and she was reading French Literature at Cambridge. At the time I was working, when I could force myself to turn in, at a concrete mouldings factory, and reading the labels on stolen pharmaceutical products.
I used to love, and that's the word, to stretch out on the couch at her flat and simply watch her - for she was beautiful - doing the things that other people did, but that she could perform with an air of such radical alterity. For instance, the elegant disdain with which she pushed a vacuum cleaner over the carpet, or the way she could sit at her kitchen table reading, while at the same time unerringly transferring her delicate underwear from the washbasket into the washer with the tip of her shoe. Such sights were a marvel.
Before meeting her I'd only dimly considered the notion that her species had sex. When I mentioned this to her she chuckled, and placing two fingers lightly on my lips quoted St Teresa of Avila, 'Nous ne sommes pas des anges, nous avons un corps.'
It was an initiation into a fragrant mystery. In contrast, the girl I was living with then was a farmer's daughter, for whom sex had no mystique. Following the example of the farmyard animals, with particular attention paid to the donkeys, she proudly claimed to have been having sex of one kind or another since the age of six. (Which would would explain her fondness for coitus a tergo, during which she often liked to noisily eat her fish supper from a small trough, without benefit of cutlery - if she's now reading this I hope it induces a face-searing jolt of recognition. Serves her right for the breadknife incident.)
The message the dream might have been carrying, I sense, was occluded by the the pleasure I felt of having this girl brought to mind. As often in LoD dreams there was a general air of dereliction and decay. In the opening scene the girl and I were ascending, side-by-side, a steep, rickety wooden staircase:
[S]taircases and ladders in dreams [are] unquestionably symbols of copulation. It is not hard to discover the basis of the comparison: we come to the top in a series of rhythmical movements and with increasing breathlessness and then, with a few rapid leaps, we can get to the bottom again. (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams)
Yet the dream oddly lacked any erotic charge at all. At the top of the stairs we went into a room, dark, cluttered with indistinct objects, and of course without a roof. We laid down together on a bed made from thick lengths of wood (sleepers!), so arranged as to make a sleeping posture impossible. We were fully clothed in thick overcoats made heavy by rain. She lay on her side curled up with her back to me, I was on my back, feeling discomfort from pieces of the wood pressing against my spine.
At one point I noticed in the darkness that there was another bed opposite us. On it sat, expressionless, silent, a heavy set man, bald, barechested - possibly Far Eastern in appearance - who was watching us.
I think the sequence where we ascended the staircase was repeated.
Here's a rare treat - a French television show made in 1973 with Jacques Lacan, (see my last post), in 1973. Lacan's son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, is asking Lacan questions on psychoanalysis. It seems that Lacan's replies were delivered in a style that the master thinker thought appropriate for a televisual performance. Surely, his celebrated seminars, delivered before large audiences of the leading French and continental intellectuals of the period, cannot have looked like this.
Yes, it's ludicrous. British viewers familiar with the now almost forgotten wartime films of Will Hay, or with the lectures of the sublime Professor Stanley Unwin, will be struck with the similarity of Lacan's delivery.
This gem was discovered on the superb Ubuweb, a wonderful resource for film, video, music and poetry. It was on Ubuweb I found a full and subtitled version of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, along with all of his other films.
I was anticipating a flurry of emails from readers asking for an explanation of the protracted silence on this blog, the last post being nearly a month ago. Surprisingly, I find that this has not happened. So to anxious readers who have perhaps composed a message and for one reason or another not sent it, to those who are merely reticent because of past experience, and to others who have been enduring patiently, I offer my apologies.
The reason for my silence is that I've been re-reading Heidegger, renewing an aquaintance with that most difficult of philosophers who I abandoned in frustration over a quarter of a century ago. Now I'm no longer burdened with the distractions of being young, and while I'm reluctant to claim to be any wiser, I have picked up along the way a few mental dispositions that seem to be making this second encounter less fraught and more fruitful. The chief among these is undoubtably persistence. Heidegger himself frequently reminds his readers of this - persist in this endeavour, he declares, and then step back a moment.
And why do I think that studying Heidegger is worth the all perplexity and prolonged effort it entails? Because I persist, that's why.
My initial project, begun some time ago, was to make a survey of the state of contemporary Western philosophy. I might have added 'since Marx', because the truth of the matter is that what I set out to look for was some inkling of a renewal of Marxism, or at least an opening for a politics of emancipation for these times. Because in an emotional respect the past three decades or so have been marked by an accumulating sense of loss.
I came upon Marxism as a barely educated teenager. My ancestors were industrial workers, miners, steelworkers, soldiers and sailors. I learned nothing at school. If I later became one of that vanished tribe, the working class intellectual, it was because I was chivvied off the streets, while serving an apprenticeship in shoplifting and petty theft, by Trotskyists from the Labour Party Young Socialists, who put into my hands pamphlets by Lenin and Trotsky, introduced me to the habits of reading and discourse, opening up the world and its history. It was from these sources that I first experienced the soaring exhilaration that can be had from ideas. Something similar might befall a young man today, but his recruiters and mentors would more likely be fascists.
The emotional charge from all this remains. As Ginsburg says, 'I get sentimental about the Wobblies'. Hearing the Internationale can bring about a searing rush in the breast. Watching the scene from Bertoluci's Novecento, where the workers and peasants raise above them the impossibly gigantic red banner is almost unbearably intense. Before long there will be no one left able to access these emotions.
A vivid memory comes to mind: around the mid 1970s I was leaving a dole office, having signed on for unemployment benefits, as I very often did at the time. I was carrying a copy of Rilke's Duino Elegies. Outside the dreary building there was as usual a parade of sellers of various revolutionary newspapers, each calling out their title and a brief positional slogan - 'Socialist Vanguard. Supports the Irish Worker's Struggle.' One of them spotted my Rilke, and he pointed to it and said to me, 'Bout the only decent thing to come out of fucking Germany in the thirties, that was.'
In that moment the longhaired Workers Fist seller and I shared a unique solidarity, a kinship, possible only in an singular epoch perhaps, a time when another Europe was being glimpsed. I can see him now, his grin sending static through his beard, my own smile reflected in his mirror shades. Never saw him again. The Workers Fist feller would've been able to call this from memory:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic Orders? And if one were to suddenly take me to its heart, I would vanish into its stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because serenely disdains to destroy us. Every Angel is terrible.
...
So, a lot of attention has been expended on difficult texts. For a little light relief I'll DJ a few riffs that might serve as a jingle or ringtone on the theme of the current condition of Western philosophy.
You can't barge far in philosophy today without coming upon the slippery Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek. Not only is he a conspicuous presence, quoted and referenced on an array of political and cultural topics in prestigious journals like the NLR, the LRB, and the NYRB, while he's less than 60 years old there's already an institute founded for the study of his work and times - the lively and entertaining International Journal of Zizek Studies
He's startlingly erodite and an engaging performer. You can see him in action on YouTube, for instance in the clip of his closing remanks to the 2006 'Future of Communism' conference at Birbeck. He looks every bit the engaged intellectual, an exotic species rarely found in this country outside of the psychiatric facility. Hirstute, of course, as he delivers he pokes and mauls the air in front of him, welshcombs his grey mane and tugs furiously on his misshapen teeshirt. I took to him immediately.
There's a rumour he's done a beer advert in Slovenia, and I wouldn't be taken aback were he to appear on Jonathan Ross's couch, but it would be a mistake to take him for a nouvelle philosophe type wanker. His origins are in the Slovenian stalinist era punk movement, and he remains active in an agitprop (does that word still exist?) arts collective, NSK (Neue Slowenischer Kunst).
Zizek says he's a dialectical materialist, which is alright with me, though Hegel is clearly his main man. Odd juxtapositions are a speciality. Reading Zizek is exhilarating, he writes much as he speaks, and if you imediately get the sense you're being unmercifully provoked, it seldom gets tiresome. Some chapter headings from The Parallax View (2006) will do for now:
The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Divine Shit. The Solar Parallax: The Unbearable Lightness of Being No One. The Obscene Knot of Ideology, and How to Untie it.
His other main man is Jacques Lacan. It seems that Zizek's avid promotion of Lacan is responsibe for a major ongoing revision of the view, formerly held in Britain and the US, that psychoanalysis is as dead as Marxism. Zizek's efforts have paid off particularly in America, where Lacan now figures prominently in culture and film studies. See for instance Lacan in America
I wasn't familiar with Lacan, so I read some popular short introductions - Looking Awry, an Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, How to Read Lacan, and Lacan for Dummies - all by Zizek.
Again, what immediately strikes the anglophone sensibility is Lacan's repeated declaration that he is primarily a clinician, and his intention is to set the practice of psychoanalysis on a firm scientific basis. We assume that by this he means that he wants to make psychoanalysis more effective in alleviating human suffering. Given Freud's less than inspiring summary of the objective of psychoanalysis - that of turning profound despair into ordinary misery - Lacan's refoundational project appears to amount to creating a psychoanalysis that really works.
Lacanian psychoanalysis has been now practiced for the past forty years, particularly in France, and in Argentina, where apparently it reigns supreme. But I've yet to come across news from those countries of the emergence of a new and effective cure for despair. There's an interesting acrticle HERE by Dylan Evans, a former Lacanian psychoanalyst, and author the widely read Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, that deals with this point.
But you see, as Zizek would quickly remind me, this way of looking at Lacan misses the mark, being merely an instance of what Heidegger calls 'technological framing'. Another reason to read Heidegger...
(Incidentally, all the books mentioned, and many more, can be had on Scribd in pdf format. This is a sort of YouTube for documents, and excellent resource for those who don't mind reading books on computer terminals.)
This post is presented in solidarity with Gary McKinnon, the British UFO enthusiast who the Americans want to punish, probably to death, in one of their murderous hellholes. Gary's hopes of escaping extradition are, alas, in the hands of a particularly spineless running-dog - Justice Minister Jack Straw.
I well remember Straw from his days as president of Leeds University Student's Union. At the time the union was a hugely popular meeting place for drug dealers stoners and freaks from all over the country. Then newly built, it seemed that it could have been designed for that very purpose. There were lots of intimate nooks and crannies, where dealers would set up their scales on the low tables, hacking up with Zippo blackened flick-knives great kilo slabs of Red Lebanese, Afghani, or Nepalese Temple Balls, for the queues of customers clutching wads of notes. From midday onwards there was a permanent sweet blue haze hanging in the air.
At this time LSD had become so cheap and abundant that it was more often given away than bought and sold. Glassy eyed trippers milled bewildered from nook to nook, groups of them sat in crosslegged rings on the floor debating the universe, couples writhed on the upholstery exploring polymorphous perversity.
The odd nook might be loud with a mob of engineering students or ruggerbuggers, chucking beer around, setting fire to piles of beermats, spewing up, or trying to pull each others jeans off.
Everyone knew who Jack Straw was. Now and then you'd catch a glimpse of him striding purposefully through the blue fugged mayhem, taking care not to look too closely at what was going on in the nooks. No one gave much of a toss about him, but there was a sense that he might be quietly plotting to put an end to the party.
I have this vivid memory of him walking up to where perhaps a dozen of us were sitting around a table, skinning up and passing joints. He just stood there with what might've been a smile on his face until the table went quiet and everyone was gazing up at him, then he turned and went. As he walked away this Scots voice called after him with exquisitely poised sarcasm, 'Away now then Jack, yer doss wee twat.'
I flashbacked on this scene when I saw Straw, as Blair's Foreign Secretary, striding towards the speakers podium at the UN General Assembly - chin up, chest out, looking in his stiff double-breasted pinstripe suit like some lad allowed out in his old fellers regimental blazer.
(Incidentally, you can get the measure of the likes of Straw, Blair, Mandelson and rest of the New Labour entity, by reading Alain Badiou's superb The Meaning of Sarkosy. {Verso, London 2006. Translated by David Fernbach} The finest piece of polemics written this century)
The fuss over the resignation of Ruth Padel as Oxford's professor of poetry isanother example of cultural enfeeblement. As I understand it, Ruth Padel is claiming to have passed on to journalists her concerns about Derek Walcott so as to spare Oxford University the embarrassment of a possible headline in the press such as Sex Beast Poet Gets Chair.
This seems reasonable enough under the circumstances, and it could be argued that a Roderick Padel would not have been called upon to resign for doing the same thing. What bothers me though is the way that the world of poetry is exposed and presented as the faintly ludicrous concern of a close circle of privileged academics and touchy downbeat intellectuals. 'One is left with no enthusiasm for the whole thing', a disappointed literary chap pronounced. Queyt.
Surely, Fellow Creatures, poetic productivity is a crucial indicator of social wellbeing. Without poetry and song we have no bearings in the universe. I guess the current problem is that poetry often deals with notions such as death and despair, futility, ecstatic union with the divine, intense emotion, madness, the nature of love, emptiness, pain and loss, beholding the signs of Allah, heralding a newly made world to the toiling masses, considering toads or my cat Geoffrey, howling at folly and injustice, sailing to Byzantium, rotting corpses, the exquisite properties of soap, drunken boats, visions and portents. People are too busy now, and simply have no time for this kind of thing. And anyway, it could be upsetting, and send you a bit funny.
Which newsclip would you rather hear when you turn on your radio in the morning? :
Salford now has a burgeoning finacial services sector that has become an engine of growth and development for the whole region.
or
Salford has now been overrun by poets and artists, and performance venues are struggling to meet an ever increasing demand. The pressure on accommodation has become so acute that the City Council is appealing to the government for funds to relocate the overflow to the Lake District.
Seriously. Which?
.....................
I can't raise much enthusiasm for the furore over MPs expenses. It seems people are saying they're angry about it, but it's just boring and almost routine. My former comrade Peter Hitchens, who many years ago used to share with me a pitch outside Belsize Park tube station, where we flogged copies of the much missed Worker's Fist, made a good point in his piece in the Mail on Sunday. You have to marvel, he points out, at the sheer chutzpah of David Cameron, and the skill of the Tory spinners. Cameron and his fragrant wife share a personal fortune of around £40 million, yet see fit to claim £30 thousand expenses to have servants clear the wisteria from the garden of one of their extensive properties. Luckily, some other Tories had made claims for daft extravagances, like moats and duck condominions, so Cameron's claim seems reasonable and fair.
Bill Moyers, one of the very few mainstream US journalists with anything interesting to say, recently interviewed David Simon, creator and co-producer of The Wire. It's in two parts, and I urge you to watch it HERE
Moyers says in his introduction:
'When television history is written', one critic says, 'Little else will rival The Wire. 'And when historians come to tell the story of America in our time, I'll wager they will not be able to ignore this remarkable and compelling portrayal of life in our cities.'
I agree. He goes on to compare The Wire to Gibbon, for its portrayal of the decadence of an empire, and to Dickens, for that writer's description of the dark undercurrents of Victorian London. These comparisons are apt enough, though I'd prefer a comparison to Mayhew, less sentimental and voyeuristic than Dickens, and to Engels, for its comprehensive and incisive depiction of contemporary working class life. (Something that, incidentally, The Wire shares with the sadly neglected recent film The Wrestler.)
Simon has plenty of useful things to say in the interview about the US elite's 'War on Drugs' strategy, though he doesn't venture beyond the current discourse of American liberalism, and so a sense of frustration, pessimism, and disappointment is evident - but he can hardly be blamed for that, since in America, as elsewhere, this is the only oppositional discourse with any hope of getting a hearing.
Simon sees the WoD in structural economic terms, being a consquence of the fact that in the modern economic system some 10-15% of the population, for various reasons, is entirely superfluous to requirements. This is true, but in Britain at least I'd opt for a much higher figure of 20-25%.
You could present this in crude diagramatic terms. The social structure of late capitalism might be represented by a diamond shape - vast wealth at the top apex, (as Simon points out with some outrage, one percent of elite Americans own over 20% of the wealth, and counting), broad contentment in the middle, and in the bottom sector a range of relative to abject deprivation. Simon, as a liberal, implies that he'd settle for a society that looked more like an equilateral triangle. We 21st Century communists are working towards a model that might resemble a circle, or a sphere.
But don't let me distract you from watching an excellent interview.
I read a recent SF story by Dave Lee, called Code, that fiercely describes groups of future youths who tool around with genetics to become the animals of their choice - an entirely feasible possibility, given our current grasp of quantum mechanics. The curious reader may be able to find the tale here.
Don't know whether it was coincidence, but in the few hours after reading it for the first time I caught sight of an unusual proliferation of animals and birds. From the window here in the dog's room I saw a big she-fox snuffling around the front garden garden. It was half an hour before dusk, and I'd only ever glimpsed her before in the dead of night. Moments later a familiar squirrel shot up an elder full of skittering bluetits. Then a young hedgehog appeared on the pathway. I watched him for a while as he snorted about, looking for his dinner. The notion occurred to me that these creatures were delivering a message to me. From somewhere or other. A warning maybe I guessed.
The hedgehog suddenly made for the front gate, and I pictured him the moment before being squashed under black car tyres on the main road at the top of the street. I can't think of an animal that could defeat a hedgehog's superb defensive technique. The spines are an engineering masterpiece, sharp as needles and pointing in every direction. ('The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.') Without motor vehicles, and allegedly Diddycoits, who some claim roast them in clay balls, hedgehogs could expect to live long and purposeful lives.
I went to fetch some gloves to shift him into the back garden. It's walled, and there's a compost heap where he'd find a very productive worm mine. Even with gloves it was tricky picking him up.
Bearing him carefully along the path I suddenly felt this enormous sense of privileged kinship and responsibility for the little spiked feller - and I thought, this is what Blake meant when he spoke to the worm. Here was the message being delivered.
Enchantment. Remarkable, don't you think?
Here's a song about foxes and snow by the excellent Seattle band,Fleet Foxes. It's currently 165 in the UK charts.
My friend who lives at the top of the street is a Recreational Services manager with the council, and I sometimes arrange with him the loan of pieces of equipment. Yesterday I was fancying one of the minature JCBs I'd admired earlier in the park, to help me build a frog sanctuary in my back garden. When he let me in they were having a meeting.
My friend the park keeper is also General Secretary of the Peoples and Workers Party (GB), a Pyongyang inspired microgroup. He and the other two local members were preparing for the G20 demonstration on Wednesday, tacking huge pictures of Kim Ill Sung and Kim Jong Ill onto placards, and emptying boxes of great piles of glossy leaflets in Korean. They wore crisp new matching cerise polo shirts, and had been to the barbers.
The story goes that some years ago my friend and neighbour won an open plane ticket from inside a confectionary wrapper. He chose to fly to North Korea because during the 1966 World Cup the national team had played their group matches in our city, and he'd been immensely impressed by them. They had battled courageously, and went on to lift the group Fair Play Trophy.
He was in Pyongyang for over a week, and when he got back he was telling everybody about the worker's paradise he'd discovered in North Korea: beer at 35 pence a pint, massive fishing clubs, sports and social, magnificent parks. After a few pints in the Hangman he'd become particularly enthusiastic, bringing himself to tears recalling the kindness of his friends in the Pulgunbyol District Police. Then he joined, and later became Gen. Sec. of the PWP(GB). His wife would have nothing to do with his 'thing', as she called it. As usual she was sitting in the middle of the couch, smoking cannabis and watching daytime TV.
I paid him £2.50 for a translation of a Kim Jong Ill speech on Human Rights abuses in the USA, and told him I was on my way to make my own arrangements for the G20 demo. As I closed his front door he called out, 'American journalists. Chinese border. Israeli spies'. I didn't mention of course that I was on my way to attempt to retrieve Nestor Makhno's flag.
This was the huge battle stained black flag that Makhno had galloped under when he rode with the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, fighting the Austrians, Denniken, Petlura, and later the Red Army. It had flown above the Gulyai Polya Autonimous Workers and Peasants Council.
Defeated by the Bolsheviks in 1921, Makhno managed to take the flag with him to exile in Paris. After he died the flag changed hands a few times, eventually crossing the channel in the late fifties with the British anarchist and Spanish Civil War veteran, Albert Meltzer. It was now on the top of a wardrobe in my friend's bedroom.
My friend is now semi retired, but was formerly a prominent member of a local anarchist group much influenced by the Norse tradition. The ranks of the once vigourous group have now been decimated by drink, drugs, motorbike accidents and infirmity, but a handful survive, most of them working for the council in one capacity or another.
Makhno's banner came into my friend's keeping, he says, after a 1969 conversation with Albert Meltzer in a pub near Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, where an international anarchist conference was taking place. He agrees that both he and Meltzer were two gallon drunk when he gave him the flag, but he decided to keep it because of the great honour its custody bestowed, and because of the flag's undoubted magikal properties.
Since then Makhno's flag has been raised at many of the biggest actions and demonstrations in Britain, though it saw its last outing at the Orgreave coal depot, during the miner's strike, where the flagpole gained further distinction by being rammed into a police inspector's earhole.
I was going to propose to my friend that I borrow Nestor Makhno's flag to take to the G20 demo. I'd asked him on a number of similar ocasions in the past to make use of the flag, but he'd refused outright. He suspected I might be a Trotskyist. Other political flotsam like me had tried to get their hands on the flag, he said, but he'd fucked them all off.
Before I'd touched his brass raven doorknocker he yanked open his door, saw my face and said, 'No', then he shoved the door shut. It was on a thick chain latch.
'On yer fuckin bike', he growled through the door.
'We should talk about this in a respectful manner, comrade.' I had to shout.
'Told yer, on yer way. Trotskyist cunt.'
'Do I need to remind you that that flag belongs to the entire workers movement?', I appealed.
I heard him angrily undoing the chains to get the door open, then he stuck his beard through the crack, and I saw a pair of lips appear from among the grey and orange scrub.
'Aye, comrade, but not to the butchers of Kronstadt.'
Then he slammed the door shut again, rattling the raven's beak against the wood. I'm planning a final cunning attempt to get my hands on Makhno's banner before the G20 demo. My friend is a notorious old goat, and I'm arranging for a local sex worker to visit him posing as an admirer of Emma Goldman. If this ruse works, prepare to be awed by the flag at the G20.
This piece by Michael Hudson is short and to the point enough to reproduce entirely.
The free market at work, financial style.
March 27, 2009 "Counterpunch" -- Newspaper reports seem surprised at how high banks are bidding for the junk mortgages that Treasury Secretary Geithner is now bidding for, having mobilized the FDIC and Fed to transfer yet more public funds to the banks. Bank stocks are soaring – thereby bidding up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, as if the “financial industry” really were part of the industrial economy.
Why are the very worst offenders – Bank of America (now owner of the Countrywide crooks) and Citibank the largest buyers? As the worst abusers and packagers of CDOs, shouldn’t they be in the best position to see how worthless their junk mortgages are?
That turns out to be the key! Obviously, the government has failed to protect itself – deliberately, intentionally failed to do so – in order to let the banks pull off the following scam.
Suppose a bank is sitting on a $10 million package of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that was put together by, say, Countrywide out of junk mortgages. Given the high proportion of fraud (and a recent Fitch study found that every package it examined was rife with financial fraud), this package may be worth at most only $2 million as defaults loom on Alt-A “liars’ loan” mortgages and subprime mortgages where the mortgage brokers also have lied in filling out the forms for hapless borrowers or witting operators taking out mortgages at far more than properties were worth and pocketing the excess.
The bank now offers $3 million to buy back this mortgage. What the hell, the more they bid, the more they get from the government. So why not bid $5 million. (In practice, friendly banks may bid for each other’s junk CDOs.) The government – that is, the hapless FDIC – puts up 85 per cent of $5 million to buy this – namely, $4,250,000. The bank only needs to put up 15 per cent – namely, $750,000.
Here’s the rip-off as I see it. For an outlay of $750,000, the bank rids its books of a mortgage worth $2 million, for which it receives $4,250,000. It gets twice as much as the junk is worth.
The more the banks holding junk mortgages pay for this toxic waste, the more the government will pay as part of its 85 per cent. So the strategy is to overpay, overpay, and overpay. Paying 15 per cent is a small price to pay for getting the government to put in 85 per cent to take the most toxic waste off your books.
Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) He can be reached at mh@michael-hudson.com
I can't work up any enthusiasm for the invitation to get indignant over Sir Fred Goodwin's modest £16 million payoff. Over the last couple of decades I've noticed few complaints about undeserving people with vast pallet loads of money. As I recall it we've celebrated the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and not bothered much about where all the cash came from. Relaxed about people getting filthy rich. A cultural aristocracy has emerged, broadly called celebrities, that includes people rich beyond the dreams of avarice. The numbers are as difficult to grasp as the billions and trillions being bandied about in the current banking panic.
Take David Beckham, undoubtably a graceful footballer and a nice lad with a hansome jib. He has a fortune worth well over £200 million, and palaces on two continents. Then there's Elton John, unfairly called by some an irascible wee fat old puff, though in my view a fine lyricist and spectacular performer, who's amassed more than twice as much, and has double the palaces. Damien Hirst, performance artist, construction manager, and canny bilker of billionaires, was telling us recently that the proceeds from his recent car boot sale had made him a dollar billionaire. Damien has outdone Saddam in palaces.
And what does it say when Bono, bandy legged anthem botherer and stuff strutter on the global stage, owns a big chunk of Forbes Magazine, publisher of the eponymous Global Rich List, and vulgarly known as the millionaire's bible. Someone tried to tell me it sells for $200 a pop. Bono has fine reception rooms in each of his estates in Dublin, London, Paris, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and Pago Pago, to which the world's movers and shakers await invitations.
When things were going well, Broon would've put old Fred Goodwin's £16 million earner down to that dull old mule 'hard work'. For Broon marches under the banner of 'hard work'.
Speaking of which, last week I saw former funnyman and management consultant, John Cleese, with a $24 million real estate portfolio, publicly moaning that he'd have to 'work dammned hard' for two months every year to pay for his ex-wife's palace refurbishment.
We could afford to enjoy the spectacle of the millionaire lifestyle because debonaire spivs of Goodwins kidney, with Broon's encouragement, had been able amass huge amounts of surplus wealth to pay for it. Gazing into the celebrity bubble allowed us a glimpse of what increasing prosperity and free markets might bring us. If we worked hard.
Now someone is going to have to pay for all the treasure that's been shovelled into oblivion to keep the markets going. A shaken Ant and Dec, pictured today on the cover of the Mirror, have already sacrificed £6 million from their £30 wad. There are signs of hope though. Secondrate 80s one-hit popsters, Spandau Ballet, have reformed and will tour again. One of the band reported, 'We've had a few rehearsals now, and we sound like a million dollars.'
Here's piece of history for readers who like the 'degrees of Kevin Bacon' type diversions.
Edward Carpenter (1844 - 1929), the celebrated visionary reformer, socialist, poet, and what we would now call gay rights activist, lived for most of his life in my home city in the North of England. (Wikipedia has it that he lived in a 'gay community' here, which would be spendid, but it's not true. His remote cottage is pictured above.) There are council buildings bearing his name, and a statue in one of our parks. While his pose on the plinth may not exactly resemble a teapot, it seems camper the more you look at it.
During the brief period three decades ago when the red flag fluttered over our Town Hall, a revival of interest in Carpenter was encouraged by the city council, which celebrated his contributions to socialism, trades unionism, and the emancipation women, while neglecting his pioneering and immensely brave gay rights activism. I doubt that many in people this city familiar with Carpenter would be aware that he was a shirt-lifter.
He lived as an openly gay man at a time when to do so could bring upon you the fate of Wilde or Parnell. Carpenter got away with it because of his innate discretion, his personal magnetism, and the great respect he commanded among educated workers, and progressive circles in Victorian and Edwardian England and abroad. He was very well connected, much admired, and something of a guru.
In the 1890s he published, at his own expense, a widely circulated pamphlet on homosexuality, Homogenic Love. A quote from it gives a flavour of Carpenter,
I have said that the Urning men in their own lives put love before money-making, business success, fame and other motives which rule the normal man. I am sure that it is also true of them that they put love before lust . . . I believe it is true that Uranian men are superior to the normal man in this respect – in respect of their love-feeling – which is gentler, more sympathetic, more considerate, more a matter of the heart and less of mere physical satisfaction than that of ordinary men. All this flows naturally from the presence of the feminine element in them, and its blending with the rest of their nature.
When the sage was in his eighties, he was paid homage in my home town by a wealthy young American admirer, Chester Alan Arthur III, who was at the time collecting material for a work on homosexuality among the Fenian Brotherhood. Carpenter was of course a massive fan of Walt Whitman, as was his visitor. Carpenter had visited Whitman in 1877, and he mentioned to Chester Alan Arthur III that while there he had enjoyed some sack action with the great American poet and visionary. The octagenerian Carpenter then gave the much impressed Chester Alan Arthur III the best blowjob of his life, which he recalled forty years later to the poet Allen Ginsburg.
At last his hand was moving between my legs and his tongue was in my belly-button. And then when he was tickling my fundament just behind the balls and I could not hold it any longer, his mouth closed just over the head of my penis and I could feel my young vitality flowing into his old age.
Now the links emerge. Chester Alan Arthur III in later life became the sometime lover and sugar daddy of Neal Cassady, model for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's On the Road, seminal novel of the Beat Generation. So there's only two degrees of separation between Carpenter and the Beats.
There's more. Neal Cassady was also the driver of the Merry Pranksters schoolbus, (destination: 'Furthur'), which toured the US in the 60s distrubuting free LSD, and inciting what came to be called 'happenings'. A little history would be interesting here.
By the end of the 1960s the ranks of LSD enthusiasts had become divided into two camps. Both shared the notion that LSD might change the world for the better, but they were divided about how to do it. The positions could be identified with the names of Timothy Leary and Ken Keysey. Broadly speaking, the Leary strategy was to proceed by turing on and creating an enlightened elite of the best and brightest, whose influence would permeate society. Keysey and the Merry Pranksters wanted to give acid to an many people as possible, and see what happened.
On this side of the Atlantic at least the divisions were clearly discernable, Leary followers were Hippies, while the Keysey tribe called themselves Freaks. Freaks took The Fugs version of Leary's 'Turn on, Tune in, Drop out' seriously, were full-time unemployed drug fiends, lived in chaotic affinity groups, and favoured the overthrow and non-replacement of the State. Hippies were much more media friendly.
I was an early admirer of Keysey and the Merry Pranksters, and soon took up freakery. There was an abrupt change of syle, I cut my hair short, abandoning bright flowing finery, bangles beads and bells, in favour of a look that suggested I might be on my way to work - both as a cunning camoflage and to distance myself from hippies. Because my local circle of freaks included people who had blown their crusts long before taking LSD, or were just plain weird, the ranks were predominantly working class. Some even managed a few days tripping in the steelworks, or down the pit.
The purpose of this digression is to show the global threads running through this city that link Carpenter, Walt Whitman, Kerouac, Cassady, the Merry Pranksters, and a small but significant working class heresy that flourished here some forty years ago. A chain over a century long. Edward Carpenter was the best known and most popular hippie of his time.
I've taken much from Colm TóibÃn's excellent review of Sheia Rowbotham's 2006 biography of Carpenter in the London Review of Books. Read it HERE.
We all relish being apalled now and then. My own taste involves ocasionally exposing my raw nerves to the rantings of selected rightwing nut-the-bricks, and other irritants. If you look to your right you'll see that I include in my Blogwatch the loathsome Atlas Shrugs, placed there so readers can share in my perversions.
In the privacy of my own livingroom I'll shut the curtains and tune in Top Gear for the mildly offensive, punch-him-in-the-face, Jeremy Clarkson - intensifying the frisson by reminding myself that I'm watching the most popular windbag in the country, who my compatriots would vote in as Prime Minister if they had the chance.
For stronger meat I'll turn to Youtube, rubbing my sweaty palms together in anticipation of watching clips of the noxious little squit Bono, leader of the Greatest Rock Band on the Planet. I might even play an illegally downloaded track from his shite new album as accompaniment. (Fellow self-sickeners with a Bono habit can get a decent fix here)
Americans who 'enjoy' such unnatural pleasures are much better served, they have the wildly popular Rush Limbaugh,(catchphrase:'He can talk faster than he can think'). British perverts accustomed to the likes of Sir Jeremy, St Bono, Lord Geldof, Sir Alan Sugar and the like require a health warning. I tell you man, hearing Limbaugh, it's like your dealer forgot to step on your wrap.
Here's a taster. This is some of Limbaugh's plan to save the economy.
1. Every man and woman between 18 and 60 who signs up for unemployment benefits is automatically registered for the military draft...
2. A U.S.-led coalition of the at-least-semi-docile will invade selected oil-producing countries, including Venezuela and Iran... all the other English-speaking provinces whom we subsidize (England, Canada, Australia) – will share in the (sp)oil(s).
3. Disband the United Nations. Liberals, their allies in underdeveloped countries and various Euro-smarties have for decades accused the United States of trying to be the world’s policeman. Unfortunately they were wrong and the world has suffered for it...
4. Deport all undesirables. Not just the wetbacks, anyone who fails a basic English test. If they can’t learn the common tongue that unites our great nation, they need to leave...Our beefed-up military will protect our southern border with orders to shoot to kill. No more amnesty. No more sending people back in busses. You cross illegally, you die. End of story...
5. Legalize all drugs. In times of crisis, necessity trumps morality... By legalizing and taxing marijuana, heroin, methedrine, cocaine, etc. we can turn the dreadful losses of ineffectual enforcement into mega-profits...
Appalling enough for yer? You can get some more of Rush's Economy Plan here
After doing some casual Mass Observation, such as nebbing on conversations in pubs, on buses and trams, or sidling up behind people in queques, it seems to me that we're experiencing a period similar to the Phoney War at the end of the 1930s. We're told that the economy is in the process of plunging over the edge of a cliff, and that catastrophic climate change is now inevitable, yet it seems no one really believes any of it. You could get the impression that the middle classes are for the most part quietly confident that eating organic, recycling their newspapers, buying a bike or taking the odd bus, and growing a few vegetables is the way forward. The rest, the majority still in work and with adequate incomes, hope that by ignoring such inconvenient concerns they'll eventually go away. After all, as the government says, once the stimulus packages kick in, we'll begin to see an upturn by about the middle of next year.
Meanwhile, it's only March and our next door neighbours, the French, have been out on the streets in their millions twice this year. This baffles and bemuses the British when they see the 10 second clips on the nightly news, and the media make no attempt to explain what's happening. But you hear, repeated like a mantra, that demonstrating is useless - look at the Iraq war demo they say. Of course, I knew that at the time, as I trudged through London wearing an awkward smirk under a Hizbullah banner, beside a bunch of joyful Lebanese teenagers. It had all been decided already. If ever there was a chance for us to stop being so English, brick in some shop windows and torch some cars, that was it. And we missed it. Thousands of human lives were at stake, fer fucks sake.
The long consumer boom has dulled out wits. We don't really know how to believe in very much at all anymore. On both sides of the Atlantic the blather is all about undeserved bonuses for fat cats, the bastards at HBOS, and in the US the greedy fuckers at AIG. As Michael Hudson has pointed out, the bonus shock horror has served the financial elite nicely, deflecting attention from the governments as they shovel unimaginable sums down a fiery bottomless pit, in the hope of maintaining a system that keeps half the world's population in abject poverty while it trashes the planet. The biggest transfer of wealth in history.
And don't you think it's a bit rich, as it were, that all of a sudden we've begun to express a little distaste at undeserved wealth, when as a culture we've created a religion based around the worship of money, celebrity and prestige?
I'm a Baby Boomer, and some of my generation briefly entertained vastly audacious and unfounded hopes. My friends and I were among the halfwits who believed that LSD plus revolutionary marxism might change the world. Bliss it was to be alive in that dawn, and heaven itself to be young. I mention this to point out that the 'pre revolutionary situation', as I would have grandly called it at the time, could not have happened without a generalised mood of crisis. These things don't happen very often. Could this sense of phoney war presage another wave of outrageous audacity - just when such a thing has, finally, become absolutely vital for survival?
As a would-be revolutionary and disaffected troublemaker, I've become case hardened by defeat. I watched as the wave that rose in the 1960s - from After Bathing at Baxters to Volunteers -(you'll know what I mean), gurgled down the tubes. I've watched as the British working class had its arse kicked by little men in suits. One defeat after another. You'd think such hopeful fools would've cleaned their act up long ago. Wait and see though, eh.
At the website of John Mearsheimer, who, along with Stephen Walt, wrote the controversial The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, I noted that he was preparing a new work on the subject of lying in international politics. I look forward to reading it.
This brought to mind a recent TV interview I watched with Jacob Zuma, likely to be the next president of South Africa. The interviewer asked Zuma about the increasing levels of violence in South African society. Murder, robbery, rape and bloody mayhem are rife in that country. Johannesburg has more murders than any capital in the world. Zuma brushed the question aside with a swish of the hand. It was not so, he said, South Africa was no more violent nor crime ridden than anywhere else. He explained that the cause of this mistaken impression was the unique openess of the South African media, which was more diligent in its reporting of crime than the media of other countries. South Africa was daily becoming less violent and more law abiding. Wait and see, he blithely informed the interviewer, by 2010 South Africa will have a crime rate of zero.
Hearing this sort of barefaced baloney from politicians is hardly uncommon, we even expect it of them. In another recent interview I saw Shimon Peres angrily thump the arm of his chair and declare, 'Israel has never attacked anyone. Never!'
The purpose of this kind of lie, and the most commonly deployed, is to curtail discussion. South Africa is experiencing unprecedented levels of violence and crime because it is a grotesquely unequal society, and the ANC has failed miserably to do anything about it. Bigshots like Zuma have no immediate plans other than to line their own pockets. Israel has not decided who to attack next, Lebanon or Iran.
Other types of fanny serve other purposes. Gordon Brown's cringe inducing panegyric delivered before the US Congress might lead you believe him entirely ignorant of American history, other than the fairy tale version dreamed up by Hollywood. Sadly, this is true. The last Labour leader to have read a book not bought on a rail station platform was Michael Foot, who was doomed for that very reason. Blair, who was appointed a Middle East envoy as malicious joke, once cheerfully admitted he had never heard of Mohammad Mossadegh.
"When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind,as to suscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe;he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."~Thomas Paine"The Age of Reason" 1793
Years ago I had a mate, a mid level cannabis dealer, who used to amuse himself writing letters to local and national newspapers describing in ludicrous detail the deleterious effects of dope smoking - grotesque enlargements of the genitals, pathological consumption of jelly babies, monsterous bearded growths on buttock cheeks. One or two letters were published by gullible editors and it was a good laugh. But my friend claimed his letters had a serious purpose. He was opposed to the idea of decriminalisation on economic grounds, since the illegality of cannabis was the only factor that allowed him to make a meagre profit from what was basically a common or garden weed.
My dealer friend had no real grounds for concern, because there is no realistic prospect of progressive legislation on drugs. Nor is there any hope for a rational objective debate on the issue taking place in the mainstream. In the words of the memorable speech by the Baltimore police major in the excellent The Wire, there has never been, nor ever will be, a 'paper bag for drugs'.
There are simply too many players for whom prohibition is both convenient and highly profitable. The global recreational drugs industry is vast, ranking just behind the motor industry in economic terms. The US and Europe spend more on cocaine than they do on education and overseas aid combined.
As better informed legislators are aware, it's clear that no amount of prohibitionist legislation can make any significant impact on demand for recreational drugs. The UN declaration of creating a 'drug free world' is obviously absurd. If the further repressive measures that some politicians are itching to get on the statue books were effective, then Iran, with some of the harshest punishments for drugs use on the planet, might be the model. But that country has the largest population of drug users in the world. The abject failure of prohibitive legislation has prompted some self-appointed drugs experts to pin their hopes on research to come up with vaccines to immunise the next generations against the effects of selected drugs, but that prospect thankfully remains science fiction.
The main beneficiary of prohibition is organised crime. Prohibition magically transforms easy to cultivate weeds and kitchen sink chemical processes into hugely profitable commodities. No other commodities come close to offering the profit margins available to cocaine and heroin traders. Once the basic agricultural product has been processed, using cheap easily available chemicals, the value of the product doubles every time it moves down the chain to the consumer. Factor in adulteration at the wholesale stage and margins go through the roof. A lot of people make a lot of money, is there any wonder that some are prepared to kill to protect and promoted this trade?
States also benefit from the prohibition status quo in less obvious ways. There's the basic principle that the state has the right to legislate on the chemical composition of the brains of its citizens, including the notion that there is an officially sanctioned range of states of consciousness, ('working, asleep, drunk', as Timothy Leary put it), outside of which lies only subversion. This is why the 1960s counterculture caused such alarm among the American elites.
Prohibition is also useful to the police, providing them with easy access to search warrants, and enabling them to keep a high profile among whole swathes of otherwise law abiding citizens. Traditionally, drugs squads have enjoyed low status in the police force because, at street level, busting users is easy danger free work.
State intelligence services have been known to use the huge profits of the drugs trade to fund 'off the books' covert operations. The well documented links between some state intelligence services and organised crime, inevitable given the nature of their operations, have made this possible. Elements of the CIA and the Pakistani ISI for example have a long history of involvement in the South American and Asian drugs business, as documented by various ex CIA agents, and academics such as Professor Peter Dale Scott. The Kosovo Liberation Army, which has morphed into the Kosovo civilian administration, was largely funded by heroin, a blind eye having been turned by the various intelligence agencies involved in the region. Kosovo remains a major transit point for the trade.
The medical establishment played a key part in the early years of prohibitive legislation, lobbying against the availability of opium, an effective remedy for a whole range of ailments, and much cheaper at the time than visiting a physician. Prohibition provided doctors with a much enhanced fee paying patient base. The medical profession continues to provide the state with research that justifies continued prohibition. People continue to ignore medical advice, which annoys many doctors intensely.
This is the merest sketch of the range of forces and interests lined up against those who hope for any meaningful change in the drugs laws, absurd and futile as they are. So there's no forseeable paper bag.
It seems that on the eve of the release of the new U2 Limited album, No Line on the Horizon, some of the band's protesting Irish compatriots are saying that Bono and his business partners are robbing the world's poor.
When the Irish government revised its generous tax exemption scheme for artists, U2 Ltd shifted its assets to a finance company in Holland. Considerable sums are involved, the U2 Ltd wage bill alone for 2007 was £21 million, and the new album is expected to sell millions worldwide.
Aside from depriving the exchequer of a small and struggling nation of millions in revenue, the campaign group Debt and Development Coalition Ireland (DDCI), says that the U2 Ltd decision will also adversely effect the Irish government overseas aid budget. A DDCI spokesperson said: We wanted to raise our concern that while Bono has championed the cause of fighting poverty and injustice in the impoverished world, the fact is that his band has moved part of its business to a tax shelter in the Netherlands...Tax avoidance and tax evasion costs the impoverished world at least $160 million (£142.5m) every year. This is money urgently required to bring people out of poverty.
I've heard some people say that Bono is a squit who has become a byword for inflated self-importance. I've never met him, but I can't say I like the cut of his jib. I've listened to U2 Ltd albums and seen a couple of shows, and these certainly are pompous and self-important, replete with bombast and empty posturings, and in the end bereft of any import. But that's just my view.
Ponder for a moment the vacuity of the title of the new album. I haven't heard it, but Jim Carroll, the Irish Times blogger has had a preview, this is what he says.
[It's a]blustery, burpy, over-cooked melodrama...an album to fill stadiums, newspapers, radio stations, web sites, quarterly target spreadsheets, bank balances, pension funds and investment opportunities in the tech sector.
During the celebrated Gdansk shipyard dispute, the negotiations between the Solidarnosc union delegates and the shipyard management were relayed by loudspeaker from the meeting room to the crowds of shipyard workers surrounding the building. This is what's known as transparency and democracy in action. There are no good reasons why all such discussions should not be conducted in this way.
Now listen to the weasle Jack Straw, explaining his refusal to publish the minutes of ministerial discussions about the 2003 Iraq invasion.
{1}Confidentiality serves to promote thorough decision-making.
{2}There is a balance to be struck between openess and maintaining aspects of our structure of democratic government.
{3}Disclosure of the Cabinet minutes in this case jeopardises that space for thought and debate at precisely the point where it has its greatest utility.
Read them again.
Straw already sounds Prime Ministerial.
Bearing in mind that the deliberations concerned were about undertaking an act of aggression, involving widespread death and destruction, which was opposed by the majority of British and World opinion, in what way did secrecy serve thorough decision-making?
There was nothing thorough about the cabinet's Iraq war deliberations. Clearly, Blair already had the date for the invasion from the Cheney/Bush cabal, and it was going to go ahead - 'legal' or otherwise. There was no point in any discussions.
What's needed, since no Public Inquiry worth shite will ever be forthcoming from New Labour or the Tories, is an independent war crimes commission along the lines of the Sartre - Russell hearings after the Vietnam war. It would be a start.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States plans to pledge more than $900 million (621 million pounds) to help rebuild Gaza after Israel's invasion and strengthen the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, a U.S. official said on Monday.
So the US administration, having connived with Israel in the massacre and destruction in Gaza, is now propsing to share the tab with Saudia Arabia. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. As I've remarked before, Hillary Clinton is a shameless opportunist. The Saudi tripehounds needed to voice objections to the slaughter for domestic purposes, but the US was involved in every stage of the planning and carrying out of this crime.
Obviously, the gesture is intended to reassure moderate Palestinians, along with Arabs and Muslims, that when decent Americans launch missiles at your house, killing your women and children, they do the right thing and pay for the damage. S
HERE is what Bisher al-Rawi, a British resident released from Guantanamo 2007, said about Binyam Mohamed, another British resident himself released after six years of detention and torture in Gitmo earlier this week. He is speaking about Binyam Mohamed's concern for justice,
He is so British -- I mean so British! The way he stands, the way he talks, his painstaking use of logic. He's such a gentleman. And he is knowledgeable and he stands up for his rights in a really British way. Like with S.O.P. This is something the guards have. It is called Standard Operating Procedure -- S.O.P. And the funny thing about this Standard Operating Procedure is that it changes every day. Every day you have new Standard Operating Procedure. And Binyam, he draws attention to this and insists on his entitlement to be treated the same way as the Standard Operating Procedure dictated the day before. And they hate him for this. But he's just being British. Touching that Bisher al-Rawi should associate the British with standing up for justice and human rights, particularly given his own and Binyam's experience. I fear the perception is more a matter of style than substance. The British ruling class has been lying and plundering with a deferential smile for centuries. I watched an interview with my friend Harold Pinter last night, where he described how charming 'these people' could be at dinner parties, or with their families and friends. Then in their working lives they would be involved in the most brutal and apalling mayhem. What he was interested in, Pinter said, was observing them when they were alone. He tried to imagine Henry Kissinger sitting alone in a room on a wooden stool.
With me it's Blair. The Pipsqueak Bombadier. Here is a trully British monster. I try to imagine him standing before a war crimes commission. He's an ignorant and vaid man, who I'll concede was led up the garden path by far more devious minds, so I would be disappointed to see him shot. I submit to the forthcoming commission that Blair be exiled and confined to Sark, in perpetuity. There he might reflect on his bloody hands, and perhaps compare himself with Napoleon.
An excellent resource for the story of the British residents abandoned by our government in Guantanamo, and other sites of America's Secret Gulag, can be found at the site of British historian and journalistAndy Worthington
Rather than being proud of being British, I'm wary of so much as carrying a British passport. With some technicalities smoothed out I could get and Irish one, though my main hopes lie in Scottish or Welsh independance. There are at present only distant aspirations for Cornwall and the Isle of Man. I'll be first in the queue at the Scottish Consulate in Manchester for the new dark blue saltaire emblazoned passport, though I suspect I might be trampled in the stampede.
It's really very simple
-
[Note: I am pushing this article live two days early because ZeroHedge
somehow managed to get a hold of it and post it before I did. Needless to
say, I do...
The Years Of Writing Dangerously
-
Thirteen years ago, as I was starting to experiment with this blogging
thing, I wrote the following: [T]he speed with which an idea in your head
reaches th...
The fuss over the resignation of Ruth Padel as Oxford's professor of poetry isanother example of cultural enfeeblement. As I understand it, Ruth Padel is claiming to have passed on to journalists her concerns about Derek Walcott so as to spare Oxford University the embarrassment of a possible headline in the press such as Sex Beast Poet Gets Chair. 
I can't work up any enthusiasm for the invitation to get indignant over Sir Fred Goodwin's modest £16 million payoff. Over the last couple of decades I've noticed few complaints about undeserving people with vast pallet loads of money. As I recall it we've celebrated the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and not bothered much about where all the cash came from. Relaxed about people getting filthy rich. A cultural aristocracy has emerged, broadly called celebrities, that includes people rich beyond the dreams of avarice. The numbers are as difficult to grasp as the billions and trillions being bandied about in the current banking panic.
It seems that on the eve of the release of the new U2 Limited album, No Line on the Horizon, some of the band's protesting Irish compatriots are saying that Bono and his business partners are robbing the world's poor.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - 
