We’ve noticed before that Stephen Glover is not the brightest light in the columnists’ galaxy: his printed matter is mostly dark matter. He never gives up being dim, and it does encourage the laughter of all of us down at the Café Coup de Poing.
Latest is his defence of Paul Dacre in the Indy last Monday (17 November) – and see M. Apache below, who has to admit that he holds what Stephen calls the “liberal default” position on the Max Mosley success story. (Implication: I think, but my opponents have their opinions wired in.)
His argument is that “liberals” like to support Mr Justice Eady on privacy, but they don’t know that Eady is illiberal on other matters. He comes up with two cases in which Eady has come out for “wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen” to the detriment of investigative stories by Rachel Ehrenfeld (2005), and the Wall Street Journal (2003, judgement overturned).
Two simple points here, Steve.
1. If Eady was wrong on those two cases (and he probably was), it doesn’t follow, in logic or emotion, that he was wrong about Max Mosley. He can be right about one, and wrong about the other two, without affecting our view of the Mosley judgement. Nor does this information make Dacre right about the supposedly “arrogant and amoral judgements” that he believes Eady is making. Default liberals need not be bothered by Glover’s new info about Eady’s past activities.
2. Glover’s conclusion is pure Dacre: Eady is “developing a privacy law off his own bat” and “develop[ing] a privacy law single-handedly”. In keeping with his dimbo status, Glover hasn’t noticed that his argument about Eady’s two “bad” judgements undermines the argument that Eady has an agenda that he is pursuing single-mindedly. Dacre, who is probably a bit brighter than Dimbo Stevo, has noticed the difficulty, and is careful to say that Eady has “again and again” found against newspapers under the Human Rights Act. This means he doesn’t have to think about differently-based cases in which Eady has come out against a newspaper and a publisher. Dacre’s case that Eady is an obsessed monomaniac is undermined by Glover’s brilliant research into these cases!
Come on, Stephen – sharpen up!
Monday, November 24, 2008
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Where now for poetry and political culture?
Mmmm! The old public poetry chestnut raises its head again via a meeting held at the Poetry Society, led by John Walsh and Blake Morrison. Walsh post-publicised his activities with a piece in the Independent on Tuesday, 28 October, entitled Why shouldn’t newspapers print odes to Obama or about the banking crisis? M. Apache couldn’t be there, unfortunately, but he would have had something to say about these two stars’ assertion that there is no worthwhile public poetry at the moment. As for not putting it in newspapers, what about Tom Paulin and Andrew Motion? – they’ve had plenty of stuff on the newsprint in recent years.
The crux of the matter seems to be that Walsh and Morrison don’t see much political poetry around, and what there is isn’t epic enough to take on the big issues – war, the economy, etc – and certainly won’t be given space in newspaper columns.
The truth is that they don’t know what’s going on.
Walsh refers to the sixties as a golden age of political protest, and by definition political poetry, and he wonders where the big hitters are now. Let’s pause for a second and consider how long it’s been since poetry took centre stage in the arena of political debate and protest. Tony Harrison’s magnificent V was published in the Independent in 1985, and dealt with “the state of the nation” through the author’s view of the miners’ strike. He followed this up in the early 90s with two much shorter polemics dealing with the first Gulf War. Adrian Mitchell also had two poems on this issue published in newsprint, the most notable of which, “Blood and Oil”, was more agit-prop than epic – but it was an effective protest.
Then, I guess, there was Heathcote Williams, with his powerful, majestic crusades in favour of the natural world – Whale Nation, Sacred Elephant and Autogeddon – which were big-selling books whose profits were largely donated to Greenpeace, at great personal sacrifice to the author, it needs to be said. Surely that was an effective intervention on a grand scale?
In more recent times political protest has shifted away from poetry and into the arenas of film and stand-up comedy. But there’s still a lot of poetry being written and published which responds, analyses, and protests – and is related to the big issues of the day. Let’s get real and name some names. Michael Horovitz may be another renegade from the sixties but his recent book – A New Waste Land: Timeship Earth at Nillennium– is a huge rant against the misdemeanours of Blair and Bush, and the reader is left in no doubt about where Horovitz stands. For all its faults, this is an impassioned intervention in public debate. Andy Croft, a traditionalist in formal terms and closely allied to Tony Harrison in stance, has written reams of political poetry, ranging from anguished reflections on the ‘failure’ of socialism in practice, to more hilarious and jaunty pieces – “Comrade Laughter Tries Stand-up” - for example. His “rewriting” of Shelley’s “The Mask of Anarchy” is a classic of contemporary political literature and should be widely anthologised. Perhaps the reason the Independent wouldn’t publish such a poem is that it was too critical of the west’s military intervention in other countries post-Second World War, and – unlike Harrison –didn’t aim at some sense of unity or healing. This is controlled anger at its most fruitful.
Gordon Wardman is a fine, largely unrecognised, poet of the left who has a canny knack for dialogue and is hilariously funny as well as being sharply satirical and direct. His trilogy of chapbooks dealing with the life and times of two post-Thatcher “English Cowboys” (Tam and Hank) should be republished in one volume and distributed widely. That this isn’t happening may have something to do with the failure of “the left” to get a grip on current poetical culture; but we live in interesting times and there is surely some turbulence ahead.
Then there are those poets who inhabit academia and who attempt to document the changes in education after the adoption of a business ethos during the closing years of the last Tory administration. People like Tony Lopez, whose montage techniques (see False Memory, published by Salt) give us the feel and texture of political and social change, while expressing unease and critical distance. Lopez’s work proves that it’s possible to mix social concern with an aesthetic sense, something which poetry, at its best, often manages to do. Finally (the list is too long to be inclusive here), there’s Robert Sheppard, another academic who has written on poetry and politics for magazines such as the New Statesman, and whose poetry – in Tin Pan Arcadia, for example – is both savage and hilarious, dark and political, in all the best ways.
What Walsh and Morrison seem to be missing is that there is a wealth of what we might call Political or Public Poetry out there, being written and published and commented on. It’s just that they don’t know about it. It’s various, from the political ranting (and we should be pleased that Horovitz is still out there, doing his thing), to the more subtle investigations of power and its (often) unaccountable nature. Walsh and Morrison are both Establishment figures – Walsh once edited the Sunday Times books section, and so helped to keep John Carey active, itself a crime against humanity. Very recently, he devoted part of his column to speculation about Edith Sitwell’s underwear.
Morrison is ex-TLS, and was literary editor of The Observer at a time when further crimes were committed – oh, and literary editor of the Independent on Sunday too. Didn’t notice too many leftist poems being published by him when he had that opportunity.
That the serious newspapers and journals don’t very often pick up on actually-existing political poetry is perhaps as much to do with the question of politics (note the little ‘p’) as the poetry. Think about it, John.
The crux of the matter seems to be that Walsh and Morrison don’t see much political poetry around, and what there is isn’t epic enough to take on the big issues – war, the economy, etc – and certainly won’t be given space in newspaper columns.
The truth is that they don’t know what’s going on.
Walsh refers to the sixties as a golden age of political protest, and by definition political poetry, and he wonders where the big hitters are now. Let’s pause for a second and consider how long it’s been since poetry took centre stage in the arena of political debate and protest. Tony Harrison’s magnificent V was published in the Independent in 1985, and dealt with “the state of the nation” through the author’s view of the miners’ strike. He followed this up in the early 90s with two much shorter polemics dealing with the first Gulf War. Adrian Mitchell also had two poems on this issue published in newsprint, the most notable of which, “Blood and Oil”, was more agit-prop than epic – but it was an effective protest.
Then, I guess, there was Heathcote Williams, with his powerful, majestic crusades in favour of the natural world – Whale Nation, Sacred Elephant and Autogeddon – which were big-selling books whose profits were largely donated to Greenpeace, at great personal sacrifice to the author, it needs to be said. Surely that was an effective intervention on a grand scale?
In more recent times political protest has shifted away from poetry and into the arenas of film and stand-up comedy. But there’s still a lot of poetry being written and published which responds, analyses, and protests – and is related to the big issues of the day. Let’s get real and name some names. Michael Horovitz may be another renegade from the sixties but his recent book – A New Waste Land: Timeship Earth at Nillennium– is a huge rant against the misdemeanours of Blair and Bush, and the reader is left in no doubt about where Horovitz stands. For all its faults, this is an impassioned intervention in public debate. Andy Croft, a traditionalist in formal terms and closely allied to Tony Harrison in stance, has written reams of political poetry, ranging from anguished reflections on the ‘failure’ of socialism in practice, to more hilarious and jaunty pieces – “Comrade Laughter Tries Stand-up” - for example. His “rewriting” of Shelley’s “The Mask of Anarchy” is a classic of contemporary political literature and should be widely anthologised. Perhaps the reason the Independent wouldn’t publish such a poem is that it was too critical of the west’s military intervention in other countries post-Second World War, and – unlike Harrison –didn’t aim at some sense of unity or healing. This is controlled anger at its most fruitful.
Gordon Wardman is a fine, largely unrecognised, poet of the left who has a canny knack for dialogue and is hilariously funny as well as being sharply satirical and direct. His trilogy of chapbooks dealing with the life and times of two post-Thatcher “English Cowboys” (Tam and Hank) should be republished in one volume and distributed widely. That this isn’t happening may have something to do with the failure of “the left” to get a grip on current poetical culture; but we live in interesting times and there is surely some turbulence ahead.
Then there are those poets who inhabit academia and who attempt to document the changes in education after the adoption of a business ethos during the closing years of the last Tory administration. People like Tony Lopez, whose montage techniques (see False Memory, published by Salt) give us the feel and texture of political and social change, while expressing unease and critical distance. Lopez’s work proves that it’s possible to mix social concern with an aesthetic sense, something which poetry, at its best, often manages to do. Finally (the list is too long to be inclusive here), there’s Robert Sheppard, another academic who has written on poetry and politics for magazines such as the New Statesman, and whose poetry – in Tin Pan Arcadia, for example – is both savage and hilarious, dark and political, in all the best ways.
What Walsh and Morrison seem to be missing is that there is a wealth of what we might call Political or Public Poetry out there, being written and published and commented on. It’s just that they don’t know about it. It’s various, from the political ranting (and we should be pleased that Horovitz is still out there, doing his thing), to the more subtle investigations of power and its (often) unaccountable nature. Walsh and Morrison are both Establishment figures – Walsh once edited the Sunday Times books section, and so helped to keep John Carey active, itself a crime against humanity. Very recently, he devoted part of his column to speculation about Edith Sitwell’s underwear.
Morrison is ex-TLS, and was literary editor of The Observer at a time when further crimes were committed – oh, and literary editor of the Independent on Sunday too. Didn’t notice too many leftist poems being published by him when he had that opportunity.
That the serious newspapers and journals don’t very often pick up on actually-existing political poetry is perhaps as much to do with the question of politics (note the little ‘p’) as the poetry. Think about it, John.
Red-tops and red bottoms
Max Mosley has a spanked bottom, but Paul Dacre is a monster of moralism. Who wins? Mosley, of course. Dacre’s self-commending speech to the Society of Editors on 9 November 2008 may actually have done him harm. His departure from the Daily Mail may not be imminent, but when it comes it may be related to competence rather than to those supposed “illnesses” he’s recently been suffering from.
His critics were able to show quite easily that he doesn’t understand how the law works in this country, and that personal attacks – his speciality – don’t work when it’s obvious that Parliament, and not simply Justice Eady, were behind the privacy legislation he attacked with such “corkscrew logic” (Polly Toynbee).
Max Mosley has now gone on the record twice about the case he won against the News of the World. He has a shrewd understanding of the possibilities offered by legal action, as his success in court showed. And his main point has been that if a newspaper thinks public interest is really involved, they can appeal against a lower court’s decision. Dacre wants to be able to investigate people’s private lives – he calls it “good journalism”, but everybody else calls it triviality and invasion of privacy. Eady is the “arrogant and amoral” judge who has facilitated this
.
Well, it’s not true. Listen to Mosley in the Guardian, 20 October:
Exactly: and it was this that Dacre was defending, with more than a hint that his friend Gordon Brown had been spoken to, and had showed much sympathy for the press’s need to get hold of people’s “gas bills or medical records”. (Yes, Dacre said that.)
If Mosley’s remarks are enough to deal with the red-tops – and how useful his red bottom has been! – what about the more serious papers?
There’s a problem here, because Dacre wasn’t the first to complain about Eady’s judgement. First out were the liberal press, and it was upright figures like Peter Wilby (ex-New Statesman and Observer) and Donald Trelford (ex-Observer) who were complaining about the likely effect of Eady’s judgement on the ability of the serious press to conduct investigative journalism.
There is a difficult question to be asked here. What investigative journalism? The Sunday Times's Insight column is dead – has been dead for thirty years. David Leitch is dead. Phillip Knightley, once a fine reporter, is today reduced to making resentful-old-age (he’s 78) remarks about the probity of the great photographer Robert Capa. Today’s Sunday Times is committed to articles that make its readers anxious – part of its right-wing strategy – not to ones that make them exult over the revelation of financial wrong-doing or political chicanery.
When did David Leigh last have a scoop that mattered? Even nice David Hencke used to have good stories. What happened to the Guardian? Richard Norton-Taylor has good contacts, but there’s been nothing big recently. It’s a good “basic news” newspaper, not an investigating paper. The BBC does better in getting strong stories (don’t fail to give Andrew Gilligan credit for the David Kelly story, just because Gilligan has turned out to be a frightful person). The Times isn’t even trying, for obvious reasons. The Indy is mostly concerned with large-issue revelations, like Monsanto or some aspect of global warming. A lot of recent “exclusives” are of the “who cares” variety.
The bitter truth is that the heavy papers can’t afford investigative journalism any more. So there’s something disingenuous about their claims that investigative journalism is going to be impeded by Eady’s judgment .
The playwright David Hare remarked on Radio 4’s “Broadcasting House” back in January, when brought in to discuss the Sunday papers, that there was nothing in them. Presenter Paddy O’Connell was panicked– there has to be something in the papers, or we’re lost! Well, perhaps we are lost, because Hare was right. Skim through, and what do you find that really matters? Saturday’s papers will have picked up anything of interest from the previous week, as Peter Wilby has admitted. What you get in the Sundays is a bit more depth, and a whole lot of comment. But no real investigations.
So let’s hear less criticism of Mosley’s success from the liberal left until the liberal papers can get their act together.
What the red-tops do is made more difficult by Eady’s judgement, and that’s all to the good. Now let’s see if the liberal Sundays and dailies can come up with the necessary funds. With the Independent heading for financial difficulties, that’s not going to be easy.
Meanwhile, Max Mosley can have some satisfaction. His battered bottom has prevented a lot of unhappiness for a lot of people.
His critics were able to show quite easily that he doesn’t understand how the law works in this country, and that personal attacks – his speciality – don’t work when it’s obvious that Parliament, and not simply Justice Eady, were behind the privacy legislation he attacked with such “corkscrew logic” (Polly Toynbee).
Max Mosley has now gone on the record twice about the case he won against the News of the World. He has a shrewd understanding of the possibilities offered by legal action, as his success in court showed. And his main point has been that if a newspaper thinks public interest is really involved, they can appeal against a lower court’s decision. Dacre wants to be able to investigate people’s private lives – he calls it “good journalism”, but everybody else calls it triviality and invasion of privacy. Eady is the “arrogant and amoral” judge who has facilitated this
.
Well, it’s not true. Listen to Mosley in the Guardian, 20 October:
To live in a society where the rules are made by the [tabloid] editors, I think, would horrify most people. Particularly as it’s very one-sided. They never hesitate, for example, to use completely illegal means to get information, such as bribing people with access to the police computer. So they can’t talk about morality, they are immoral themselves.
Exactly: and it was this that Dacre was defending, with more than a hint that his friend Gordon Brown had been spoken to, and had showed much sympathy for the press’s need to get hold of people’s “gas bills or medical records”. (Yes, Dacre said that.)
If Mosley’s remarks are enough to deal with the red-tops – and how useful his red bottom has been! – what about the more serious papers?
There’s a problem here, because Dacre wasn’t the first to complain about Eady’s judgement. First out were the liberal press, and it was upright figures like Peter Wilby (ex-New Statesman and Observer) and Donald Trelford (ex-Observer) who were complaining about the likely effect of Eady’s judgement on the ability of the serious press to conduct investigative journalism.
There is a difficult question to be asked here. What investigative journalism? The Sunday Times's Insight column is dead – has been dead for thirty years. David Leitch is dead. Phillip Knightley, once a fine reporter, is today reduced to making resentful-old-age (he’s 78) remarks about the probity of the great photographer Robert Capa. Today’s Sunday Times is committed to articles that make its readers anxious – part of its right-wing strategy – not to ones that make them exult over the revelation of financial wrong-doing or political chicanery.
When did David Leigh last have a scoop that mattered? Even nice David Hencke used to have good stories. What happened to the Guardian? Richard Norton-Taylor has good contacts, but there’s been nothing big recently. It’s a good “basic news” newspaper, not an investigating paper. The BBC does better in getting strong stories (don’t fail to give Andrew Gilligan credit for the David Kelly story, just because Gilligan has turned out to be a frightful person). The Times isn’t even trying, for obvious reasons. The Indy is mostly concerned with large-issue revelations, like Monsanto or some aspect of global warming. A lot of recent “exclusives” are of the “who cares” variety.
The bitter truth is that the heavy papers can’t afford investigative journalism any more. So there’s something disingenuous about their claims that investigative journalism is going to be impeded by Eady’s judgment .
The playwright David Hare remarked on Radio 4’s “Broadcasting House” back in January, when brought in to discuss the Sunday papers, that there was nothing in them. Presenter Paddy O’Connell was panicked– there has to be something in the papers, or we’re lost! Well, perhaps we are lost, because Hare was right. Skim through, and what do you find that really matters? Saturday’s papers will have picked up anything of interest from the previous week, as Peter Wilby has admitted. What you get in the Sundays is a bit more depth, and a whole lot of comment. But no real investigations.
So let’s hear less criticism of Mosley’s success from the liberal left until the liberal papers can get their act together.
What the red-tops do is made more difficult by Eady’s judgement, and that’s all to the good. Now let’s see if the liberal Sundays and dailies can come up with the necessary funds. With the Independent heading for financial difficulties, that’s not going to be easy.
Meanwhile, Max Mosley can have some satisfaction. His battered bottom has prevented a lot of unhappiness for a lot of people.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Ross and Brand: Why they did it
A phone interview was planned, but “due to unforeseen circumstances” (BBC website news), Andrew Sachs couldn’t be there. So they phoned him anyway, and talked to the answerphone.
Sachs was insulted because he wasn’t there to answer the phone call. He spoiled the programme. It was his business to be there.
It was pure media arrogance.
Notice how excited Brand was about the technology. “I’m so sorry about the last message”, he says. “Put the phone down”.
He speaks to the technology: “All right, Andrew Sachs’s answerphone?” Then: “I’m ever so sorry for what I said about Andrew Sachs”.
Sachs himself has been replaced by the technology.
Ross talks about the photographs of grandchildren he imagines would be next to the phone, as Sachs supposedly listens. Because it was Sachs’s business to be there, to hear Jonathan Ross speak.
Ross speaks, you listen.
Notice how excited Ross is about Brand having sex. It’s the first thing he says. And the second: “She was bent over the couch…”. (Been watching Straw Dogs, have we?)
And then the idea of death.
Brand says to the technologised Sachs: “I’ll kill you”. And then talks about his victim hanging himself because of his revelation about Georgina Baillie.
Brand speaks, others die.
Sachs was insulted because he wasn’t there to answer the phone call. He spoiled the programme. It was his business to be there.
It was pure media arrogance.
Notice how excited Brand was about the technology. “I’m so sorry about the last message”, he says. “Put the phone down”.
He speaks to the technology: “All right, Andrew Sachs’s answerphone?” Then: “I’m ever so sorry for what I said about Andrew Sachs”.
Sachs himself has been replaced by the technology.
Ross talks about the photographs of grandchildren he imagines would be next to the phone, as Sachs supposedly listens. Because it was Sachs’s business to be there, to hear Jonathan Ross speak.
Ross speaks, you listen.
Notice how excited Ross is about Brand having sex. It’s the first thing he says. And the second: “She was bent over the couch…”. (Been watching Straw Dogs, have we?)
And then the idea of death.
Brand says to the technologised Sachs: “I’ll kill you”. And then talks about his victim hanging himself because of his revelation about Georgina Baillie.
Brand speaks, others die.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Mlle Apache, bienvenue!
We welcome Jane O’Grady as Mademoiselle Apache, evidently an enthusiast for headbutting violence. Writing in The Observer in May 2008, she describes some of the things she likes to do:
This detachment has indeed been M. Apache’s experience in these circumstances, head down on the Boulevard Raspail. We hope Mlle Apache will become a true headbutter, in every sense of the word. Our only fear is that she may turn out to be too intelligent for the pages of The Observer.
Feeling yourself observed, concentrating on your headache, using your head as a weapon with which to butt someone, transforms it into a thing or a tool separate from you, the agent and observer.
This detachment has indeed been M. Apache’s experience in these circumstances, head down on the Boulevard Raspail. We hope Mlle Apache will become a true headbutter, in every sense of the word. Our only fear is that she may turn out to be too intelligent for the pages of The Observer.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Elitism
Although they essentially agree on the 2nd Amendment, Senator McCain capitalized on the Supreme Court ruling yesterday (June 26) to label Senator Obama once more as an “elitist.” Just how that connects to gun ownership rights remains unclear, but we are getting a reminder of the campaign to come. At every opportunity detractors will seek to brand Senator Obama as an “elitist,” implying that he somehow opposes equality.
Only in the nasty and upside-down world of campaign politics could such a champion of the middle class and working poor be identified as representing and advocating inequality. Obama is thoroughly committed to policies that would lessen the greatest inequality in America today, the vast distance in access to social goods between the privileged haves and the have-nots. And Obama’s biography couldn’t show less privilege. Obama’s father, for instance, was neither President (like George H. W. Bush) nor an admiral (like John S. McCain, Jr.), but a Kenyan farmer.
To aspire to join the genuine elite is not, in fact, to advocate or justify inequality. It is part of the American dream. Students want to be accepted into elite schools; soldiers want to qualify for elite forces. In its core sense, to be elite means to have earned something, to have merited recognition of excellence. This is what that most egalitarian President, Thomas Jefferson, meant by “natural aristocracy.” Unlike those born into wealth and privilege, “natural aristocrats” succeed because they have natural abilities, work hard and rise to excellence. So what’s the problem?
Perhaps what’s being confused here is the border between democracy and meritocracy on which the political and ethical value of equality is poised. The American philosopher Michael Walzer helpfully distinguishes between what he calls “simple” equality (everybody gets the same) and “complex” equality, where social goods are distributed according to relevant criteria. For instance, medical care ought to be distributed through the criterion of need (you need it, you get it), access to higher education through ability (you can go if you pass the tests, even if you can’t pay), luxuries through the marketplace (you can have them if you have the money), and respect and honors through desert, or merit (you’ve earned it). As a value, equality is not confounded when a publisher rejects a manuscript as not good enough nor when the race goes to the swift. Barack Obama’s magna cum laude J.D. degree from Harvard and his election as president of the Harvard Law Review place him among the elite, but they do not make him undemocratic unless he makes too much of them.
The connotation of elite confers positive approval, but what of elitism and elitist? Here the waters are murkier, for an unequal distribution of social goods according to inappropriate criteria is being defended. An elitist in this sense may suggest that her superior learning and vocabulary means her
values are therefore superior or that his social class and family ought to get him into Yale.
Obama’s opponents hope for some traction by tying him to snobbery, the elitism in which education, taste, and language are used to assert a more general superiority. “My tastes—in wine or sport or cuisine—are informed, and yours are ignorant.” “I know better than you, and you should defer to me because I’m better educated and speak more properly.”
No Americans like being patronized, so when their speech is mocked or their hobbies (like hunting and fishing and football) are ridiculed, they get angry. Many on the Left don’t fully understand this phenomenon, though Bill Clinton certainly did and does. As “Bubba” Clinton, chewing the fat and eating barbeque and chasing girls, he won over that segment of the working class that Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy and John Kerry never could. The Left has delighted in George Bush’s malapropisms, but it erred in making too much of his use of language. W’s late-in-life southern accent and simple talk appeals to those whose self-interest lies precisely and properly in policies directly opposite to his. Traditionally and ideologically, class issues may belong on the Left, but in recent American politics the Right has successfully reversed the field by decrying liberal elitism. Never mind the elitism that confers upon the wealthy all manner of virtue. Anyone can hope to get rich (consider the popularity of the state lotteries), but the intellectual snob’s elevated status is beyond reach and therefore perceived as unfair.
My counsel to the Obama campaign? Condemn elitism, including the form that confers power and respect upon the wealthy. Defend the genuinely and pertinently elite. Stand for excellence and achievement but not the elevation of the culturally relative.
And do not confuse the two. Consider Senator Hruska’s argument in 1970 in favor of the nomination of Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. Carswell was assuredly not among the elite. He had, most senators agreed, a mediocre record. Hruska declared, "So what if he is mediocre? There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they?”
No, they aren’t, not on the Supreme Court any more than in the White House. What Americans want is the best, and the 2008 Presidential election ought to concern sorting out who fits that bill. Let’s stick to the topic.
Only in the nasty and upside-down world of campaign politics could such a champion of the middle class and working poor be identified as representing and advocating inequality. Obama is thoroughly committed to policies that would lessen the greatest inequality in America today, the vast distance in access to social goods between the privileged haves and the have-nots. And Obama’s biography couldn’t show less privilege. Obama’s father, for instance, was neither President (like George H. W. Bush) nor an admiral (like John S. McCain, Jr.), but a Kenyan farmer.
To aspire to join the genuine elite is not, in fact, to advocate or justify inequality. It is part of the American dream. Students want to be accepted into elite schools; soldiers want to qualify for elite forces. In its core sense, to be elite means to have earned something, to have merited recognition of excellence. This is what that most egalitarian President, Thomas Jefferson, meant by “natural aristocracy.” Unlike those born into wealth and privilege, “natural aristocrats” succeed because they have natural abilities, work hard and rise to excellence. So what’s the problem?
Perhaps what’s being confused here is the border between democracy and meritocracy on which the political and ethical value of equality is poised. The American philosopher Michael Walzer helpfully distinguishes between what he calls “simple” equality (everybody gets the same) and “complex” equality, where social goods are distributed according to relevant criteria. For instance, medical care ought to be distributed through the criterion of need (you need it, you get it), access to higher education through ability (you can go if you pass the tests, even if you can’t pay), luxuries through the marketplace (you can have them if you have the money), and respect and honors through desert, or merit (you’ve earned it). As a value, equality is not confounded when a publisher rejects a manuscript as not good enough nor when the race goes to the swift. Barack Obama’s magna cum laude J.D. degree from Harvard and his election as president of the Harvard Law Review place him among the elite, but they do not make him undemocratic unless he makes too much of them.
The connotation of elite confers positive approval, but what of elitism and elitist? Here the waters are murkier, for an unequal distribution of social goods according to inappropriate criteria is being defended. An elitist in this sense may suggest that her superior learning and vocabulary means her
values are therefore superior or that his social class and family ought to get him into Yale.
Obama’s opponents hope for some traction by tying him to snobbery, the elitism in which education, taste, and language are used to assert a more general superiority. “My tastes—in wine or sport or cuisine—are informed, and yours are ignorant.” “I know better than you, and you should defer to me because I’m better educated and speak more properly.”
No Americans like being patronized, so when their speech is mocked or their hobbies (like hunting and fishing and football) are ridiculed, they get angry. Many on the Left don’t fully understand this phenomenon, though Bill Clinton certainly did and does. As “Bubba” Clinton, chewing the fat and eating barbeque and chasing girls, he won over that segment of the working class that Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy and John Kerry never could. The Left has delighted in George Bush’s malapropisms, but it erred in making too much of his use of language. W’s late-in-life southern accent and simple talk appeals to those whose self-interest lies precisely and properly in policies directly opposite to his. Traditionally and ideologically, class issues may belong on the Left, but in recent American politics the Right has successfully reversed the field by decrying liberal elitism. Never mind the elitism that confers upon the wealthy all manner of virtue. Anyone can hope to get rich (consider the popularity of the state lotteries), but the intellectual snob’s elevated status is beyond reach and therefore perceived as unfair.
My counsel to the Obama campaign? Condemn elitism, including the form that confers power and respect upon the wealthy. Defend the genuinely and pertinently elite. Stand for excellence and achievement but not the elevation of the culturally relative.
And do not confuse the two. Consider Senator Hruska’s argument in 1970 in favor of the nomination of Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. Carswell was assuredly not among the elite. He had, most senators agreed, a mediocre record. Hruska declared, "So what if he is mediocre? There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they?”
No, they aren’t, not on the Supreme Court any more than in the White House. What Americans want is the best, and the 2008 Presidential election ought to concern sorting out who fits that bill. Let’s stick to the topic.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Matthew wins a prize!
We forget what for, exactly, but the good guys should always get prizes. Down at the Café Coup de Poing we gathered round to look at the photo of the award, Jon Snow handing it over, etc.
Our friend Andrés, admittedly spliffed up at the time, thought it was a photo of Pavarotti, and we had to point out that Luciano recently passed away, and that this really was our journalist friend.
In the flesh, you might say.
Keep singing, Matthew!
Our friend Andrés, admittedly spliffed up at the time, thought it was a photo of Pavarotti, and we had to point out that Luciano recently passed away, and that this really was our journalist friend.
In the flesh, you might say.
Keep singing, Matthew!
Stephen Glover – still can’t think
Poor Stephen Glover. Writing about the right of proprietors to intervene in the newspapers they own, he manages to be both agitated and confused. (Indy Media, 21 April. Compare his smooth nastiness about Prescott’s bulimia in the Mail on the same day – comfortable and at home there, of course).
Evidently bothered by a solicitor’s letter from Withers, representing the Barclay Brothers – owners of the Telegraph – he makes a public apology. He didn’t mean to suggest that the Brothers had caused either the Telegraph or the Spectator to spike / alter pieces on Lord Deedes, Bill Deedes having said, apparently, that the Barclays regime was “a stinking mob”. (First question: how can two people be a mob? If it wasn’t the Brothers specifically, how can Withers make a case?)
Stephen plunges on, finding an instance of “legitimate editorial intervention” which “Oddly…concerns me”.
Me again!
Sir David Barclay wrote to then-Spectator editor Boris Johnson in 2004, complaining about something that Glover had written about the Telegraph. Boris – sorry, that should be Mr Boris Johnson – wrote back to say a) ignore the guy, and b) “I will ensure that nothing of the kind is repeated”. Stephen thinks that this is an example of “a gentle guiding hand”, exercised by “the guardians of venerable publications”.
For us out here it looks rather different. It looks like an owner protecting himself against criticism by bringing pressure to bear. Boris Johnson is entirely compliant, and another opportunity for reasonable comment is lost.
Glover doesn’t seem to realise how much these two stories show him as a weakling and a loser.
Come on Stephen – there’s a difference between a guiding hand and a hand at your throat!
Evidently bothered by a solicitor’s letter from Withers, representing the Barclay Brothers – owners of the Telegraph – he makes a public apology. He didn’t mean to suggest that the Brothers had caused either the Telegraph or the Spectator to spike / alter pieces on Lord Deedes, Bill Deedes having said, apparently, that the Barclays regime was “a stinking mob”. (First question: how can two people be a mob? If it wasn’t the Brothers specifically, how can Withers make a case?)
Stephen plunges on, finding an instance of “legitimate editorial intervention” which “Oddly…concerns me”.
Me again!
Sir David Barclay wrote to then-Spectator editor Boris Johnson in 2004, complaining about something that Glover had written about the Telegraph. Boris – sorry, that should be Mr Boris Johnson – wrote back to say a) ignore the guy, and b) “I will ensure that nothing of the kind is repeated”. Stephen thinks that this is an example of “a gentle guiding hand”, exercised by “the guardians of venerable publications”.
For us out here it looks rather different. It looks like an owner protecting himself against criticism by bringing pressure to bear. Boris Johnson is entirely compliant, and another opportunity for reasonable comment is lost.
Glover doesn’t seem to realise how much these two stories show him as a weakling and a loser.
Come on Stephen – there’s a difference between a guiding hand and a hand at your throat!
Monday, April 14, 2008
Martin Amis nailed by NYT
Martin Amis’s The Second Plane has been nailed in the New York Times (8 April) in terms that should bring shame to reviewers in the UK. Their reviewer pulls no punches, and says what should have been said over here in January when this book first appeared. Michiko Kakutani starts out by calling the book of essays “chuckleheaded”. Whatever that means, she’s not giving a compliment.
Then Kakutani goes for Amis’s objections to the “9/11” shorthand we all now use, calling it a “pretentious and formalistic argument” that shows Amis trying to deal with a tragedy by means of “preening, self-consciously literary musings”. It should be 11/9, you see.
Kakutani points to Amis’s “nonsensical analogy between terrorism and boredom”. Try telling the families affected “that their relatives and friends died in the opening chapter of the ‘age of boredom’ or ‘the global confrontation with the dependent mind’” she writes.
Where boredom is concerned, notice that the publishers of the US edition changed the book’s subtitle to September 11: Terror and Boredom. The UK edition has September 11: 2001 – 2007, to suggest the enduring significance of the absurd little essays Amis began to write just after the event. The American subtitle seems designed to be insulting.
Kakutani reminds us about Amis’s remarks in the London Times about making the Muslim community “suffer” until they get their children to behave. Amis said: “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say ‘The Muslim community must suffer until it gets its house in order’”. He later defended himself by saying this was speculative, thinking out loud. But it wasn’t – as any good fiction writer knows, the phrase “don’t you have it?” is complicit, not opening out to truth. And it doesn’t care if you don’t have it, either.
Then there is Amis falling for a Canadian right-wing nutter called Mark Steyn. Steyn is into birthrates, and Amis goes along with him. Western Europe isn’t fertile enough, but Somalia, Afghanistan and Yemen (Yemen?) are. The culture is threatened. (Weirdly, Stein began his journalism career with our old friends at the Indy, back in 1986 when it was set up – appointed by founding editor Stephen Glover, maybe?)
This criticism by Kakutani is more decisive than anything written on the European side – look at how nice and polite Christopher Tayler was in the Guardian Review. Who knows what links of friendship there are in that corrupt little world – come on Chris, you know Amis is wrong, but it’s time to be a bit more coup de poing.
The negative review of Amis in London Review of Books was by Marjorie Perloff – another American, another perceptive woman.
Kakutani also does well something Brit reviewers shy away from – intellectual indebtedness. She spots Amis’s reliance on conservative academic Bernard Lewis, “the Middle East scholar who influenced the thinking of some members of the Bush administration”. She doesn’t miss the influence of our good friend ex-Trot (but still a Trot), Christopher Hitchens, the authoritarian man of the left who supports the Iraq war. And she spots a name new to M. Apache, Sam Harris, an religious-culture author who has been interviewed for a “Jesus never existed” docu called The God Who Wasn’t There – never mind that you may agree, just keep clear of such junk.
Kingsley Amis, Martin’s novelist father, lost his political common sense over the Vietnam War. From 1968 onwards, he was barking mad about it. The idea that he had once been a Communist – which was not well-known at that time – now seems barely credible. Vietnam sent Kingsley off his political rocker (and the young Apache did have a chat with him at the time – you could feel the danger).
9/11 has done the same for his son Martin.
Come on Martin – get back in touch with the rest of us. There may still be time.
Simon Hoggart, ageing slacker at the Guardian, wrote a kind of defence of Amis against the Kakutani assault in Saturday’s paper (12 April). “I suppose the only way to handle such a review is to regard it as a badge of honour. You can’t be a real writer until you’ve been demolished by Ms Kakutani.” Yes, and ha ha, Simon.
Can you not recognise that the NYT review raised serious questions about Amis and the British literary culture that he is part of? This shrugging-off is not the right response. Nor is the “I made that bit up” suggestion that Ms Kakutani might, in some imaginary past, “have made an idiot of herself by loathing, say, Great Expectations”.
Your father, Richard Hoggart, believed in something. What do you believe in, beyond feeble jokes about nothing much?
Then Kakutani goes for Amis’s objections to the “9/11” shorthand we all now use, calling it a “pretentious and formalistic argument” that shows Amis trying to deal with a tragedy by means of “preening, self-consciously literary musings”. It should be 11/9, you see.
Kakutani points to Amis’s “nonsensical analogy between terrorism and boredom”. Try telling the families affected “that their relatives and friends died in the opening chapter of the ‘age of boredom’ or ‘the global confrontation with the dependent mind’” she writes.
Where boredom is concerned, notice that the publishers of the US edition changed the book’s subtitle to September 11: Terror and Boredom. The UK edition has September 11: 2001 – 2007, to suggest the enduring significance of the absurd little essays Amis began to write just after the event. The American subtitle seems designed to be insulting.
Kakutani reminds us about Amis’s remarks in the London Times about making the Muslim community “suffer” until they get their children to behave. Amis said: “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say ‘The Muslim community must suffer until it gets its house in order’”. He later defended himself by saying this was speculative, thinking out loud. But it wasn’t – as any good fiction writer knows, the phrase “don’t you have it?” is complicit, not opening out to truth. And it doesn’t care if you don’t have it, either.
Then there is Amis falling for a Canadian right-wing nutter called Mark Steyn. Steyn is into birthrates, and Amis goes along with him. Western Europe isn’t fertile enough, but Somalia, Afghanistan and Yemen (Yemen?) are. The culture is threatened. (Weirdly, Stein began his journalism career with our old friends at the Indy, back in 1986 when it was set up – appointed by founding editor Stephen Glover, maybe?)
This criticism by Kakutani is more decisive than anything written on the European side – look at how nice and polite Christopher Tayler was in the Guardian Review. Who knows what links of friendship there are in that corrupt little world – come on Chris, you know Amis is wrong, but it’s time to be a bit more coup de poing.
The negative review of Amis in London Review of Books was by Marjorie Perloff – another American, another perceptive woman.
Kakutani also does well something Brit reviewers shy away from – intellectual indebtedness. She spots Amis’s reliance on conservative academic Bernard Lewis, “the Middle East scholar who influenced the thinking of some members of the Bush administration”. She doesn’t miss the influence of our good friend ex-Trot (but still a Trot), Christopher Hitchens, the authoritarian man of the left who supports the Iraq war. And she spots a name new to M. Apache, Sam Harris, an religious-culture author who has been interviewed for a “Jesus never existed” docu called The God Who Wasn’t There – never mind that you may agree, just keep clear of such junk.
Kingsley Amis, Martin’s novelist father, lost his political common sense over the Vietnam War. From 1968 onwards, he was barking mad about it. The idea that he had once been a Communist – which was not well-known at that time – now seems barely credible. Vietnam sent Kingsley off his political rocker (and the young Apache did have a chat with him at the time – you could feel the danger).
9/11 has done the same for his son Martin.
Come on Martin – get back in touch with the rest of us. There may still be time.
Simon Hoggart, ageing slacker at the Guardian, wrote a kind of defence of Amis against the Kakutani assault in Saturday’s paper (12 April). “I suppose the only way to handle such a review is to regard it as a badge of honour. You can’t be a real writer until you’ve been demolished by Ms Kakutani.” Yes, and ha ha, Simon.
Can you not recognise that the NYT review raised serious questions about Amis and the British literary culture that he is part of? This shrugging-off is not the right response. Nor is the “I made that bit up” suggestion that Ms Kakutani might, in some imaginary past, “have made an idiot of herself by loathing, say, Great Expectations”.
Your father, Richard Hoggart, believed in something. What do you believe in, beyond feeble jokes about nothing much?
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Spitzer
Lucy Mangan writes in Saturday’s Guardian about Eliot Spitzer, and takes the line that New York is a hard town – one moment you’re cleaning up corruption, the next you are Client 9, Wall Street is dancing with delight, and all your friends have deserted you. But ‘tough New York’ is a story from the 20s of the last century, perhaps from the 80s of the century before. Despite Mangan’s pseudo-lively prose, it’s a dud idea.
Compare commentator Antonio Caño, writing in El Pais last Thursday. He asks how it is that the Governor of New York state can lose his job for using the services of a prostitute, whilst nobody is trying to impeach a President who has caused the deaths of nearly 4000 US soldiers in Iraq.
It’s a case of American puritanism. Americans want heroes, and if you fail as a hero, down you go, Caño says. Look at all those heroes – John McCain, Vietnam hero – Obama, heroically overcoming poverty and prejudice – Hillary Clinton bravely overcoming the abuse of the American right – and so on. None of them is allowed to have weaknesses. But if they do screw up, woe betide (I am translating loosely).
In Europe we elect people we know are weak, and who will be corrupt, or fail. It’s no surprise when they do. Spitzer was effective (if not very nice), and had the voters’ support. But the peculiar moralism of America puts an end to him.
La Manga’s cliché about New York being a ‘hard town’ prevents such points as these getting into the debate. It’s a very American line of thinking – and one that has been unthinkingly followed right across the British press.
Come on Lucy – don’t be so American!
Compare commentator Antonio Caño, writing in El Pais last Thursday. He asks how it is that the Governor of New York state can lose his job for using the services of a prostitute, whilst nobody is trying to impeach a President who has caused the deaths of nearly 4000 US soldiers in Iraq.
It’s a case of American puritanism. Americans want heroes, and if you fail as a hero, down you go, Caño says. Look at all those heroes – John McCain, Vietnam hero – Obama, heroically overcoming poverty and prejudice – Hillary Clinton bravely overcoming the abuse of the American right – and so on. None of them is allowed to have weaknesses. But if they do screw up, woe betide (I am translating loosely).
In Europe we elect people we know are weak, and who will be corrupt, or fail. It’s no surprise when they do. Spitzer was effective (if not very nice), and had the voters’ support. But the peculiar moralism of America puts an end to him.
La Manga’s cliché about New York being a ‘hard town’ prevents such points as these getting into the debate. It’s a very American line of thinking – and one that has been unthinkingly followed right across the British press.
Come on Lucy – don’t be so American!
Monday, March 10, 2008
Al-Jazeera – or, what’s up in Lebanon?
In today’s Guardian Media, Yvonne Ridley writes, with notable tolerance, that al-Jazeera has brought a “heroic brand of journalism” to the Arab world. The tolerance is striking because she has just won a four-year battle for compensation after being sacked by al-Jazeera English. Her praise is justified because al-Jazeera’s reporting of the Middle East is reliable, yet quite unlike what we get from local (western) sources.
Take this story about Saudis being warned to leave Lebanon.
There are intimations of war here: the USS Philippine Sea has arrived off the coast of Lebanon. Back in 2003, the day after the start of the Iraq war, a picture of the night-launch of this warship’s first Tomahawk missile filled the front pages of the world’s press. Today, it is in the company of the USS Ross. The two boats carry a total of 212 cruise missiles. Last week Saudi Arabia contacted all its citizens in Lebanon by SMS (texts), and told them to leave as soon as possible. Bahrain and Kuwait were said to have quickly followed suit.
This is significant, but it won’t be on R4 news, and M. Apache’s quick flick through the Guardian and Times doesn’t find it there either.
But suppose we take the move as seriously as it is taken in the Middle East. Israeli news and propaganda sites say that the ships are there to discourage Hizbollah in Lebanon from intervening on the side of the Palestinians in Gaza during the present upsurge of violence. However, intervention by a radical Shia force (Hizbollah) on behalf of a radical Sunni movement (in Gaza) seems unlikely, and would in any case not pose a threat to Saudis.
The other suggestion is that Hizbollah is about to move to take over the Lebanese government from President Fouad Siniora – who is backed by the Saudis. However, remembering the lack of support given to the Siniora government by its Western “friends” as Israel took the country apart two years ago, it is unlikely that the US would make 212 Tomahawk missiles suddenly available to support Siniora’s government. Richard Murphy, former US ambassador to Syria and an old State Department hand, has suggested the deployment is a sign that the US government is short of ideas for action in the area, so has just sent a gunboat (or three).
A report by Prof Paul Rogers to the Oxford Research Group dated February 2006 suggests that one way Iran would hit back if it was attacked over its nuclear enrichment activities would be to mobilize Hizbollah to cause trouble for Israel. It is just possible that the Israeli “over reaction” to the border incursion and kidnapping of its soldiers in 2006 was an opportunistic attempt to damage Hizbollah sufficiently to reduce any threat from them if Iran was attacked by either Israel or the US in the next year or two.
Israel’s move seems to have had the reverse effect, and Hizbollah may be stronger and more confident as a consequence of the invasion – although the recent (12 February) killing of Hizbollah’s deputy leader Imad Al Mughaniya in Syria will have been a timely blow if he was as important to the organisation as has been rumoured.
Another reaction of Hizbollah might be to act as an Iranian proxy and attack allies of the US, especially if they are Sunni allies such as Saudi Arabians.
US ships off Lebanon could oppose any Hizbollah attack on Israel as well as participate in any moves against Iran, since many sites in northern Iran are within the 900 km range of cruise missiles carrying conventional unitary warheads. They could supplement those fired from the Arabian Gulf and Arabian Sea. It is believed that the key Iranian facilities are so well protected below ground that nuclear weapons would be needed by any enemy wishing to destroy them. Nuclear warhead cruise missiles have a range of 1350 miles.
George Bush has only 10 months left. He is showing increasing signs of mental instability, as he sings to the tune of the ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’ the words
For there’s Condi
And Dick, my old compadre,
Talking to me about some oil-rich Saudi –
Does he really not know what to do with his cruise missiles, or shall we shortly taste a cup of horror and desolation? Well, if it happens, it’ll take place in the next three weeks.
Whoever wins gets first chance with those nice horsemen in uniform from Shoa and Pekod. (See Ezekiel 23, verses 22-23.) This has happened before….
All right, M. Apache is speculating. But how different this English al-Jazeera line of thinking is from the kind of thing we get daily from our own media.
Keep it up George (and Dick)!
Take this story about Saudis being warned to leave Lebanon.
There are intimations of war here: the USS Philippine Sea has arrived off the coast of Lebanon. Back in 2003, the day after the start of the Iraq war, a picture of the night-launch of this warship’s first Tomahawk missile filled the front pages of the world’s press. Today, it is in the company of the USS Ross. The two boats carry a total of 212 cruise missiles. Last week Saudi Arabia contacted all its citizens in Lebanon by SMS (texts), and told them to leave as soon as possible. Bahrain and Kuwait were said to have quickly followed suit.
This is significant, but it won’t be on R4 news, and M. Apache’s quick flick through the Guardian and Times doesn’t find it there either.
But suppose we take the move as seriously as it is taken in the Middle East. Israeli news and propaganda sites say that the ships are there to discourage Hizbollah in Lebanon from intervening on the side of the Palestinians in Gaza during the present upsurge of violence. However, intervention by a radical Shia force (Hizbollah) on behalf of a radical Sunni movement (in Gaza) seems unlikely, and would in any case not pose a threat to Saudis.
The other suggestion is that Hizbollah is about to move to take over the Lebanese government from President Fouad Siniora – who is backed by the Saudis. However, remembering the lack of support given to the Siniora government by its Western “friends” as Israel took the country apart two years ago, it is unlikely that the US would make 212 Tomahawk missiles suddenly available to support Siniora’s government. Richard Murphy, former US ambassador to Syria and an old State Department hand, has suggested the deployment is a sign that the US government is short of ideas for action in the area, so has just sent a gunboat (or three).
A report by Prof Paul Rogers to the Oxford Research Group dated February 2006 suggests that one way Iran would hit back if it was attacked over its nuclear enrichment activities would be to mobilize Hizbollah to cause trouble for Israel. It is just possible that the Israeli “over reaction” to the border incursion and kidnapping of its soldiers in 2006 was an opportunistic attempt to damage Hizbollah sufficiently to reduce any threat from them if Iran was attacked by either Israel or the US in the next year or two.
Israel’s move seems to have had the reverse effect, and Hizbollah may be stronger and more confident as a consequence of the invasion – although the recent (12 February) killing of Hizbollah’s deputy leader Imad Al Mughaniya in Syria will have been a timely blow if he was as important to the organisation as has been rumoured.
Another reaction of Hizbollah might be to act as an Iranian proxy and attack allies of the US, especially if they are Sunni allies such as Saudi Arabians.
US ships off Lebanon could oppose any Hizbollah attack on Israel as well as participate in any moves against Iran, since many sites in northern Iran are within the 900 km range of cruise missiles carrying conventional unitary warheads. They could supplement those fired from the Arabian Gulf and Arabian Sea. It is believed that the key Iranian facilities are so well protected below ground that nuclear weapons would be needed by any enemy wishing to destroy them. Nuclear warhead cruise missiles have a range of 1350 miles.
George Bush has only 10 months left. He is showing increasing signs of mental instability, as he sings to the tune of the ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’ the words
For there’s Condi
And Dick, my old compadre,
Talking to me about some oil-rich Saudi –
Does he really not know what to do with his cruise missiles, or shall we shortly taste a cup of horror and desolation? Well, if it happens, it’ll take place in the next three weeks.
Whoever wins gets first chance with those nice horsemen in uniform from Shoa and Pekod. (See Ezekiel 23, verses 22-23.) This has happened before….
All right, M. Apache is speculating. But how different this English al-Jazeera line of thinking is from the kind of thing we get daily from our own media.
Keep it up George (and Dick)!
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
La Bête de Belleville
Author ‘Petite anglaise’ has been busy this week selling her book entitled, very sharply, Petite anglaise. It’s a sentimentalization of the once-tough district of Paris known as Belleville.
Catherine Sanderson has been blogging about her life in Paris since 2004, and the story she tells is how much she loved France, was determined to live there, and lived with a Frenchman for seven years (he was Mr Frog, the offspring is Tadpole – not bad, eh?). Then there was an Englishman from Rennes, then there wasn’t. She worked as a secretary, blogged from work, lost her job, won the legal case, and got the money. As a Top Blogger, she gets a £500,000 two-book advance. Now she sits writing her second book, a novel, when she can drag herself away from ‘curling up’ in a café with the morning’s Libé.
The London Sunday papers have been full of extracts and PR, which in the Observer meant Cathy selling her bourgeoise-bohémienne lifestyle by directing us to all the acceptable local cafés and restaurants. Cue photos of ‘petite’ (as she coyly blogsigns herself – it should be La petite anglaise, but when charm is your thing, who cares about the French language?), reading a book about ‘secret’ Paris, with a French ‘character’ in the background – he looked more interesting than her, frankly, and the photographer seemed to think so too, so the blogsite has a pic of him also.
The trouble with all this bo-bo stuff – “and I am one”, Cathy sweetly says – is that Belleville has an interesting history that has got lost here. At war with central Paris, it was for centuries a working-class district, tough, left-wing, and difficult. Walking down rue de Belleville was, even twenty or thirty years ago, an edgy experience. M. Apache recalls a different kind of café – full of les beurs, the local Arab-descended ex-North African population. There is not much sign of such people in la petite’s blogworld, though when Tadpole goes to school, she has friends with Arab names.
La petite seems to be more interested in the local Chinese population – passive, manageable, charming, and not political at all.
In her launch-party video-blog (by “Frog with a blog” – can’t we get away from this joke?) we see the militant middle classes pleased to have a rising star of their own to cling to.
Circa 1900, M. Apache’s forebears would retreat to Belleville after a trip down to the grands boulevards for a little biffing and thieving. In the early 1920s the Surrealists Louis Aragon and André Breton wandered the streets of Paris, transforming it in their imaginations into something rich and strange. Particularly significant was the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, the park in the dix-neuvième with its square lake, central rock and unexpected Belvedere, its waterfall and bridges. For Aragon it was “This great oasis in a popular district, a shady zone where the prevailing atmosphere is distinctly murderous”, as he wrote in 1924’s Paris Peasant.
(He and his friends pass by rue Fessart – which reminds me of Béatriz’s sexy pun, recommending l’art des fesses – [Vivienne and Béatriz, where are you now? – long gone from rue des Ânnelets.])
For Aragon, Buttes-Chaumont was “a volcano of appearances”, but in the reduced sensibility of la petite it has lost its past and is simply a place from which you get a lovely view of Paris. It is her favourite Paris park, she says, and “everything about it is artificial”. True, but that seems to be all she has to say.
Petite anglaise is Cath’s blog rewritten as autobiography, as an amatory drama in which she loses Mr Frog because she loves her blog more. That (again) seems to be all she has to say. The book has been shamelessly fixed, in a downwards direction.
Both blog and book are bonk-free, though ‘the Boy’ is said to be useful in bed. It’s a common writing trick – exaggerating the minor crises of daily life, with lots of little cliff-hangers along the way.
On page one the child Tadpole starts crying on a “hairpin crescendo”. Do they have copyeditors at Michael Joseph? (Yes – see blog for 17.08.07.) On the final page, “Sometimes I feel I own this city”. This is the same Brit modesty about France that gave us Peter Mayle’s ghastly books on the Luberon. (La petite is nice, not ghastly.)
To Cath’s credit, she reminds us that in the 1871 Commune, the last barricades to fall were in Belleville. But it’s not enough.
Her taste in music and films shows she’s not nearly as dim as the autobiography makes her out to be. (See MySpace for the sparky cultural profile.)
M. Apache is sure she knows Cocteau’s film La Belle et la bête. Well….
Come on, Cath – let’s have less Belle and more Bête!
Catherine Sanderson has been blogging about her life in Paris since 2004, and the story she tells is how much she loved France, was determined to live there, and lived with a Frenchman for seven years (he was Mr Frog, the offspring is Tadpole – not bad, eh?). Then there was an Englishman from Rennes, then there wasn’t. She worked as a secretary, blogged from work, lost her job, won the legal case, and got the money. As a Top Blogger, she gets a £500,000 two-book advance. Now she sits writing her second book, a novel, when she can drag herself away from ‘curling up’ in a café with the morning’s Libé.
The London Sunday papers have been full of extracts and PR, which in the Observer meant Cathy selling her bourgeoise-bohémienne lifestyle by directing us to all the acceptable local cafés and restaurants. Cue photos of ‘petite’ (as she coyly blogsigns herself – it should be La petite anglaise, but when charm is your thing, who cares about the French language?), reading a book about ‘secret’ Paris, with a French ‘character’ in the background – he looked more interesting than her, frankly, and the photographer seemed to think so too, so the blogsite has a pic of him also.
The trouble with all this bo-bo stuff – “and I am one”, Cathy sweetly says – is that Belleville has an interesting history that has got lost here. At war with central Paris, it was for centuries a working-class district, tough, left-wing, and difficult. Walking down rue de Belleville was, even twenty or thirty years ago, an edgy experience. M. Apache recalls a different kind of café – full of les beurs, the local Arab-descended ex-North African population. There is not much sign of such people in la petite’s blogworld, though when Tadpole goes to school, she has friends with Arab names.
La petite seems to be more interested in the local Chinese population – passive, manageable, charming, and not political at all.
In her launch-party video-blog (by “Frog with a blog” – can’t we get away from this joke?) we see the militant middle classes pleased to have a rising star of their own to cling to.
Circa 1900, M. Apache’s forebears would retreat to Belleville after a trip down to the grands boulevards for a little biffing and thieving. In the early 1920s the Surrealists Louis Aragon and André Breton wandered the streets of Paris, transforming it in their imaginations into something rich and strange. Particularly significant was the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, the park in the dix-neuvième with its square lake, central rock and unexpected Belvedere, its waterfall and bridges. For Aragon it was “This great oasis in a popular district, a shady zone where the prevailing atmosphere is distinctly murderous”, as he wrote in 1924’s Paris Peasant.
(He and his friends pass by rue Fessart – which reminds me of Béatriz’s sexy pun, recommending l’art des fesses – [Vivienne and Béatriz, where are you now? – long gone from rue des Ânnelets.])
For Aragon, Buttes-Chaumont was “a volcano of appearances”, but in the reduced sensibility of la petite it has lost its past and is simply a place from which you get a lovely view of Paris. It is her favourite Paris park, she says, and “everything about it is artificial”. True, but that seems to be all she has to say.
Petite anglaise is Cath’s blog rewritten as autobiography, as an amatory drama in which she loses Mr Frog because she loves her blog more. That (again) seems to be all she has to say. The book has been shamelessly fixed, in a downwards direction.
Both blog and book are bonk-free, though ‘the Boy’ is said to be useful in bed. It’s a common writing trick – exaggerating the minor crises of daily life, with lots of little cliff-hangers along the way.
On page one the child Tadpole starts crying on a “hairpin crescendo”. Do they have copyeditors at Michael Joseph? (Yes – see blog for 17.08.07.) On the final page, “Sometimes I feel I own this city”. This is the same Brit modesty about France that gave us Peter Mayle’s ghastly books on the Luberon. (La petite is nice, not ghastly.)
To Cath’s credit, she reminds us that in the 1871 Commune, the last barricades to fall were in Belleville. But it’s not enough.
Her taste in music and films shows she’s not nearly as dim as the autobiography makes her out to be. (See MySpace for the sparky cultural profile.)
M. Apache is sure she knows Cocteau’s film La Belle et la bête. Well….
Come on, Cath – let’s have less Belle and more Bête!
Monday, February 25, 2008
Who was Howard Kirk?
Malcolm Bradbury’s university novel The History Man was published in 1975, and ever since literary academics have been wondering who the main character, Howard Kirk, was based on.
On January 12, Guardian Review published, for no apparent reason, a page of praise for the novel by Bradbury’s good friend David Lodge – who also writes university English department comedies, and is quick to tell us that his Changing Places also appeared in 1975.
Kirk is interesting because he is sexually rapacious and politically significant.
As Lodge puts it: “We see Kirk presiding over his party like a Lord of Misrule, beginning his exploitative affair with Felicity Phee while continuing to sleep with his colleague Flora Beniform and endeavouring to bed Miss Callendar, plotting a totally factitious protest movement on campus and discriminating outrageously against a student of conservative views”.
Lodge is careful to repeat that the novel is set at the University of Watermouth, in a fictitious town on the south coast of England – so Sussex might be meant. But Bradbury was writing about his own university, the University of East Anglia, where he worked from 1966 until his retirement in 1995. He was knighted in 2000, the year of his death, though he has now no reputation as a critic – only The History Man survives.
Howard Kirk was based on three academics at UEA. One was Jonathan Raban, now a travel writer and novelist. Another was an academic nonentity called Pete Mercer, whose Lothario-like activities come as a surprise to anybody who ever met him. And the third was Howard Temperley, a historian of America who had the misfortune to work with Bradbury – whose specialism was American literature.
The great talking point is the way in which feminist academic Annie Callendar falls dramatically for Raban – sorry, Howard Kirk – for how can she do that? As Lodge puts it, Kirk “tracks her down in her old-fashioned flat, and seduces her in her old-fashioned bed”. This caused debate: “Feminists and traditional moralists were equally disappointed or outraged by it….Couples quarrelled about it”.
As everybody at UEA would have known, Annie Callender was based on English professor and feminist Lorna Sage.
She is best remembered for her autobiographical Bad Blood (2000), the story of an agonised childhood and adolescence. She wrote feminist book reviews for the Observer for many years, and for LRB and TLS. A lifelong smoker, she died of emphysema in 2001.
In the novel, the seduction takes place after a party at the Mangolds, who were Bradbury himself and his wife Elizabeth. Kirk’s other main sexual victim is Felicity Phee, in real life a put-upon art history MA, who was known to Bradbury (unnamed here because never famous).
An unhappily-married character called Beamish was based on the well-known Professor of Linguistics, Roger Fowler.
Bradbury’s satire is directed cruelly against women. Kirk, repulsive as he is, is allowed to get away with his sexual and political campaigns. The women are uniformly defeated.
If you know the real story – and there is more – Bradbury comes out of it all as a writer willing to exploit vulnerable women, and to satirise feminists by imagining their humiliating seduction.
Politically, The History Man was a disaster for the reputation of universities. The novel didn’t make much impact in 1975, but when it was adapted as a television series in 1981, it gave support to the prejudices of the Conservative government (elected in 1979), one that Thatcher’s ministers were only too willing to exploit.
Kirk persecutes a conservative-minded student in a way that no left-academic was ever known to do. Bradbury never got the point. It was impossible to explain to him that there might be something wrong about his characterisation of the political left in the early 1970s. Despite the genial, put-upon, almost bumbling and inoffensive persona that he tried to project as “himself” in the novel, and in the late-night-talking, pipe-smoking, party-giving professor of real life, he was politically paranoid about the changes of the 1960s.
He saw the liberalism that he practised under threat. It pushed him to the right politically, but he believed he was still defending liberal values.
He wasn’t. He was a Trojan horse for the political right, and the universities have not recovered yet from the consequences of the policies that he helped Thatcherism to impose.
On January 12, Guardian Review published, for no apparent reason, a page of praise for the novel by Bradbury’s good friend David Lodge – who also writes university English department comedies, and is quick to tell us that his Changing Places also appeared in 1975.
Kirk is interesting because he is sexually rapacious and politically significant.
As Lodge puts it: “We see Kirk presiding over his party like a Lord of Misrule, beginning his exploitative affair with Felicity Phee while continuing to sleep with his colleague Flora Beniform and endeavouring to bed Miss Callendar, plotting a totally factitious protest movement on campus and discriminating outrageously against a student of conservative views”.
Lodge is careful to repeat that the novel is set at the University of Watermouth, in a fictitious town on the south coast of England – so Sussex might be meant. But Bradbury was writing about his own university, the University of East Anglia, where he worked from 1966 until his retirement in 1995. He was knighted in 2000, the year of his death, though he has now no reputation as a critic – only The History Man survives.
Howard Kirk was based on three academics at UEA. One was Jonathan Raban, now a travel writer and novelist. Another was an academic nonentity called Pete Mercer, whose Lothario-like activities come as a surprise to anybody who ever met him. And the third was Howard Temperley, a historian of America who had the misfortune to work with Bradbury – whose specialism was American literature.
The great talking point is the way in which feminist academic Annie Callendar falls dramatically for Raban – sorry, Howard Kirk – for how can she do that? As Lodge puts it, Kirk “tracks her down in her old-fashioned flat, and seduces her in her old-fashioned bed”. This caused debate: “Feminists and traditional moralists were equally disappointed or outraged by it….Couples quarrelled about it”.
As everybody at UEA would have known, Annie Callender was based on English professor and feminist Lorna Sage.
She is best remembered for her autobiographical Bad Blood (2000), the story of an agonised childhood and adolescence. She wrote feminist book reviews for the Observer for many years, and for LRB and TLS. A lifelong smoker, she died of emphysema in 2001.
In the novel, the seduction takes place after a party at the Mangolds, who were Bradbury himself and his wife Elizabeth. Kirk’s other main sexual victim is Felicity Phee, in real life a put-upon art history MA, who was known to Bradbury (unnamed here because never famous).
An unhappily-married character called Beamish was based on the well-known Professor of Linguistics, Roger Fowler.
Bradbury’s satire is directed cruelly against women. Kirk, repulsive as he is, is allowed to get away with his sexual and political campaigns. The women are uniformly defeated.
If you know the real story – and there is more – Bradbury comes out of it all as a writer willing to exploit vulnerable women, and to satirise feminists by imagining their humiliating seduction.
Politically, The History Man was a disaster for the reputation of universities. The novel didn’t make much impact in 1975, but when it was adapted as a television series in 1981, it gave support to the prejudices of the Conservative government (elected in 1979), one that Thatcher’s ministers were only too willing to exploit.
Kirk persecutes a conservative-minded student in a way that no left-academic was ever known to do. Bradbury never got the point. It was impossible to explain to him that there might be something wrong about his characterisation of the political left in the early 1970s. Despite the genial, put-upon, almost bumbling and inoffensive persona that he tried to project as “himself” in the novel, and in the late-night-talking, pipe-smoking, party-giving professor of real life, he was politically paranoid about the changes of the 1960s.
He saw the liberalism that he practised under threat. It pushed him to the right politically, but he believed he was still defending liberal values.
He wasn’t. He was a Trojan horse for the political right, and the universities have not recovered yet from the consequences of the policies that he helped Thatcherism to impose.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Stephen Glover v. Nick Davies (again)
The Indy’s obsession with Nick Davies continues, and Stephen Glover is back with a sermon, advising Nick and nice Sunday Times investigative journalist David Leppard to settle their differences over a drink rather than in the courts. (Leppard is threatening action through libel solicitors Carter Ruck.)
Stephen is careful to say that he has never met Davies (or Leppard): so we know he’s been reading M. Apache, who thought – see 12 February below – that his criticism of Nick was based on personal animus. It’s just that when Glover writes, it sounds like that….
Then Oliver Duff turns up doing the Media Diary (not for too long, we hope), with a story explaining the animus behind Peter Preston’s Guardian review of Davies’s book. This goes back to an unpleasantness in 1984, involving Davies sending a solicitor’s letter – followed by a twenty-three year mutual freeze-out. (Young Apache, learning his trade within sight of Preston all those years ago, rather admired him; not any more.)
And finally Nick Davies himself turns up on the Indy’s letters page, rubbishing Kamal Ahmed’s complaints that Davies hadn’t done proper research into Kamal’s ‘Campbell Ahmad’ years at the Observer. Those complaints were made in an interview with Michael Savage whose effect was to undermine Glover’s earlier attack on Davies. (See Indy, 11 February, and M. Apache, 12 February.)
Nick Davies now reveals it was Kamal himself who spoke into Davies’s tape-recorder, and admitted that Ali Campbell let him have a private view of the “dodgy dossier”. The rest of his case against Kamal was equally carefully researched.
Glover “suspects” that Davies is “mostly wrong” in his criticisms of Leppard. Just as he “suspected” that Davies was wrong about Kamal Ahmed? At the same time he praises Davies and Leppard as among the “depleted guild of investigative reporters”. So which is it, Stephen? Guesswork and suspicion, a tone of animus – or a little bit of investigative work on your own account?
In this tangle, not meeting Nick Davies is not so bright.
What do we have so far?
Stephen Glover is a demented moralist and lefty-baiter incapable of picking up the phone.
Nick Davies supported the Iraq war: ‘for better or worse, I was pro-war’. Worse, Nick, worse.
Peter Preston writes a review skewed by a 23-year feud.
Kamal Ahmed gives a feeble-minded interview that was bound to be found out.
Oliver Duff has a story, but is a grinning prat who can’t quite write a payoff line.
Does all this matter? Yes, because it is these journalists who brought us the Iraq war, cash for honours – and Leppard’s story that Michael Foot was a KGB agent.
And where now is Matthew Norman?
Come back, Matt – we need your plumpness and wit!
Stephen is careful to say that he has never met Davies (or Leppard): so we know he’s been reading M. Apache, who thought – see 12 February below – that his criticism of Nick was based on personal animus. It’s just that when Glover writes, it sounds like that….
Then Oliver Duff turns up doing the Media Diary (not for too long, we hope), with a story explaining the animus behind Peter Preston’s Guardian review of Davies’s book. This goes back to an unpleasantness in 1984, involving Davies sending a solicitor’s letter – followed by a twenty-three year mutual freeze-out. (Young Apache, learning his trade within sight of Preston all those years ago, rather admired him; not any more.)
And finally Nick Davies himself turns up on the Indy’s letters page, rubbishing Kamal Ahmed’s complaints that Davies hadn’t done proper research into Kamal’s ‘Campbell Ahmad’ years at the Observer. Those complaints were made in an interview with Michael Savage whose effect was to undermine Glover’s earlier attack on Davies. (See Indy, 11 February, and M. Apache, 12 February.)
Nick Davies now reveals it was Kamal himself who spoke into Davies’s tape-recorder, and admitted that Ali Campbell let him have a private view of the “dodgy dossier”. The rest of his case against Kamal was equally carefully researched.
Glover “suspects” that Davies is “mostly wrong” in his criticisms of Leppard. Just as he “suspected” that Davies was wrong about Kamal Ahmed? At the same time he praises Davies and Leppard as among the “depleted guild of investigative reporters”. So which is it, Stephen? Guesswork and suspicion, a tone of animus – or a little bit of investigative work on your own account?
In this tangle, not meeting Nick Davies is not so bright.
What do we have so far?
Stephen Glover is a demented moralist and lefty-baiter incapable of picking up the phone.
Nick Davies supported the Iraq war: ‘for better or worse, I was pro-war’. Worse, Nick, worse.
Peter Preston writes a review skewed by a 23-year feud.
Kamal Ahmed gives a feeble-minded interview that was bound to be found out.
Oliver Duff has a story, but is a grinning prat who can’t quite write a payoff line.
Does all this matter? Yes, because it is these journalists who brought us the Iraq war, cash for honours – and Leppard’s story that Michael Foot was a KGB agent.
And where now is Matthew Norman?
Come back, Matt – we need your plumpness and wit!
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Rejecting History – or why Barack Obama will win
Why are so many Americans voting for Barack Obama? The short answer has to do with Obama’s campaign themes – the future, hope, change – each nicely affirmative and innocent. The longer answer is a bit more fraught. All the January candidates, including Mitt Romney and John Edwards, copped the theme of change, but none could so embody the rejection of history, key to understanding this election, as Barack Obama. He sounds like Martin Luther King, but as a young black man, he also looks like a repudiation of the past.
Walt Whitman knew and approved the American principle of the upstart new. In his first bardic pronouncement in 1855, Whitman declared, “America does not the repel the past. . .,” but of course he knew it does. Later in that same sentence the past is “the corpse. . . slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house.” Oh, the past, history, might reside still in the drawing room, where the books are and guests are entertained, but not where people actually live.
Is this anti-intellectual? Yes, it can take that form. Is it risky for America? Again, yes. But so is fear, even fear grounded in history and its precedents, both of which can be misunderstood.
What history is it that informs the war in Iraq—Munich in 1938? Vietnam? And which Vietnam – the one I remember of an ill-conceived imperial interference in somebody else’s civil war, or the one Ronald Reagan described, of an American army betrayed by sissy civilians unwilling to win?
If Whitman has an opposite in American literary history, it is William Faulkner – dark, haunted by the past that “is never dead. It’s not even past.” Yet Faulkner recognized that sometimes the past requires the exercise of conscience to reject it utterly, as does Isaac in Faulkner’s 1942 story “The Bear,” who conceives of America as refuge from “the old world’s worthless evening.”
Alas, the new world has gotten so old and so guilty.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has erred from the start. Her trumpeted “experience” – albeit much of it as someone’s wife – has hit precisely the wrong notes. Experience equals the past. The Clintons have had their turn, and many Americans no more want a continuation of that past than they do the immediate past of the Bush years.
The decisive mood of the American people this year is driven less by a specific set of hopes than by exhaustion, and a consequent desire to escape a history that has become altogether too burdensome for an impatient people. We want to turn from the history book to science fiction. Science, we think, will save us and the planet.
In less general terms, many of us simply want to blot out the last seven years in as dramatic a way as we can. We want to “repel” a recent history marked by a President’s arrogance and willful ignorance. We want to redefine ourselves anew. We want to light out for a new territory.
Walt Whitman knew and approved the American principle of the upstart new. In his first bardic pronouncement in 1855, Whitman declared, “America does not the repel the past. . .,” but of course he knew it does. Later in that same sentence the past is “the corpse. . . slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house.” Oh, the past, history, might reside still in the drawing room, where the books are and guests are entertained, but not where people actually live.
Is this anti-intellectual? Yes, it can take that form. Is it risky for America? Again, yes. But so is fear, even fear grounded in history and its precedents, both of which can be misunderstood.
What history is it that informs the war in Iraq—Munich in 1938? Vietnam? And which Vietnam – the one I remember of an ill-conceived imperial interference in somebody else’s civil war, or the one Ronald Reagan described, of an American army betrayed by sissy civilians unwilling to win?
If Whitman has an opposite in American literary history, it is William Faulkner – dark, haunted by the past that “is never dead. It’s not even past.” Yet Faulkner recognized that sometimes the past requires the exercise of conscience to reject it utterly, as does Isaac in Faulkner’s 1942 story “The Bear,” who conceives of America as refuge from “the old world’s worthless evening.”
Alas, the new world has gotten so old and so guilty.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has erred from the start. Her trumpeted “experience” – albeit much of it as someone’s wife – has hit precisely the wrong notes. Experience equals the past. The Clintons have had their turn, and many Americans no more want a continuation of that past than they do the immediate past of the Bush years.
The decisive mood of the American people this year is driven less by a specific set of hopes than by exhaustion, and a consequent desire to escape a history that has become altogether too burdensome for an impatient people. We want to turn from the history book to science fiction. Science, we think, will save us and the planet.
In less general terms, many of us simply want to blot out the last seven years in as dramatic a way as we can. We want to “repel” a recent history marked by a President’s arrogance and willful ignorance. We want to redefine ourselves anew. We want to light out for a new territory.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Nick Davies bitten – but not very hard…
Down at the Café Coup de Poing there is agreement along the zinc that M. Apache was right to move in on Stephen Glover’s attack on Nick Davies a week ago. In this Monday’s Independent Media there’s more, so someone is obsessing.
Davies’s prime target was Observer political editor Kamal Ahmed.
Under the headline “‘Nick is a Coward’. Ahmed bites back”, Michael Savage allows Ahmad to reply, but it’s a soft bite.
Nick was “a coward” because he didn’t ask Observer editor Roger Alton about the allegations against Ahmed before publishing. Unprofessional. Roger would have put him right.
Reminder: Glover attacked Davies last week for suggesting in Flat Earth News that Kamal Ahmed, recently retired (unh, sorry, moved on to duller things) political editor of The Observer was too close to Ali Campbell, and did his bidding in moving the Obs to a pro-war position on the Iraq war, thereby softening up potentially discontented Labour MPs.
M. Apache wrote last time that Davies made it clear on a Today interview – about as conspicuous as you can get – that his sources were informed but unhappy lower-order journalists who (Apache pointed out) couldn’t be named because they’d lose their jobs. The peasants, Davies called them. He didn’t expect the lords and ladies to answer his questions.
Again close reading is required. Ahmed is quoted as saying that over the pro-Iraq war issue it was editor Roger Alton who made the decision, and it wasn’t he who did the pushing. Then he says: “Of course, there were tensions. And some people, a tiny minority, may have misconstrued that as being because I was too close to Number Ten”. That was indeed the allegation.
Then Savage sinks Ahmed’s boat, writing:
In fact, senior staff at The Observer did approach Ahmed with their concerns. One says he did believe Ahmed had become too close to Campbell, and told him so. “Kamal would go around calling himself ‘Campbell Ahmad’,” he recalls. “A joke’s a joke, but at the same time, never a truer word was said.” And according to one political reporter, Ahmed’s one-to-one with Campbell on that flight [to Washington DC, when Ahmed was talked to and shown a copy of the “dodgy dossier” ahead of anyone else] and his two trips to Chequers to interview the Prime Minister were more unusual than he would like to admit. (Indy Media, 11 February 2008)
Notice anything here? Savage names no sources! “Senior staff…one says…one political reporter.” Nobody thinks this is invalid because there are no names. But the essence of Kamal’s case against Davies is – that he doesn’t name his sources! (“There’s…not one person on the record.”) Savage’s reporting both confirms the truth of what Davies was saying, and repeats the methods he used to say it.
If the Indy can do it, why not Davies?
Ahmed complains that Davies did not ask editor Roger Alton about his allegations. (Alton and Ahmed are close friends, Savage says.) But Davies did “run them all past” Alton’s deputy Paul Webster in a two-hour meeting. What, Apache wonders, is the difference? Did Webster not know how the paper’s Iraq decision was made?
Davies is consistent here – in his probably justified belief that talking to Alton would have got him nowhere. Particularly as Ahmad was Alton’s protégé.
Deliberately or not, Savage’s interview with Ahmad undermines Glover’s view, expressed a week before, that Nick Davies is a journalistic villain. Perhaps there is some tension at Indy Media these days? Just the person to enlighten us would be Good Guy media diarist Matthew Norman, surely? Never mind Gaunty, let’s hear about Glover.
Come on, Matthew – tell us what you know!
12 February
Davies’s prime target was Observer political editor Kamal Ahmed.
Under the headline “‘Nick is a Coward’. Ahmed bites back”, Michael Savage allows Ahmad to reply, but it’s a soft bite.
Nick was “a coward” because he didn’t ask Observer editor Roger Alton about the allegations against Ahmed before publishing. Unprofessional. Roger would have put him right.
Reminder: Glover attacked Davies last week for suggesting in Flat Earth News that Kamal Ahmed, recently retired (unh, sorry, moved on to duller things) political editor of The Observer was too close to Ali Campbell, and did his bidding in moving the Obs to a pro-war position on the Iraq war, thereby softening up potentially discontented Labour MPs.
M. Apache wrote last time that Davies made it clear on a Today interview – about as conspicuous as you can get – that his sources were informed but unhappy lower-order journalists who (Apache pointed out) couldn’t be named because they’d lose their jobs. The peasants, Davies called them. He didn’t expect the lords and ladies to answer his questions.
Again close reading is required. Ahmed is quoted as saying that over the pro-Iraq war issue it was editor Roger Alton who made the decision, and it wasn’t he who did the pushing. Then he says: “Of course, there were tensions. And some people, a tiny minority, may have misconstrued that as being because I was too close to Number Ten”. That was indeed the allegation.
Then Savage sinks Ahmed’s boat, writing:
In fact, senior staff at The Observer did approach Ahmed with their concerns. One says he did believe Ahmed had become too close to Campbell, and told him so. “Kamal would go around calling himself ‘Campbell Ahmad’,” he recalls. “A joke’s a joke, but at the same time, never a truer word was said.” And according to one political reporter, Ahmed’s one-to-one with Campbell on that flight [to Washington DC, when Ahmed was talked to and shown a copy of the “dodgy dossier” ahead of anyone else] and his two trips to Chequers to interview the Prime Minister were more unusual than he would like to admit. (Indy Media, 11 February 2008)
Notice anything here? Savage names no sources! “Senior staff…one says…one political reporter.” Nobody thinks this is invalid because there are no names. But the essence of Kamal’s case against Davies is – that he doesn’t name his sources! (“There’s…not one person on the record.”) Savage’s reporting both confirms the truth of what Davies was saying, and repeats the methods he used to say it.
If the Indy can do it, why not Davies?
Ahmed complains that Davies did not ask editor Roger Alton about his allegations. (Alton and Ahmed are close friends, Savage says.) But Davies did “run them all past” Alton’s deputy Paul Webster in a two-hour meeting. What, Apache wonders, is the difference? Did Webster not know how the paper’s Iraq decision was made?
Davies is consistent here – in his probably justified belief that talking to Alton would have got him nowhere. Particularly as Ahmad was Alton’s protégé.
Deliberately or not, Savage’s interview with Ahmad undermines Glover’s view, expressed a week before, that Nick Davies is a journalistic villain. Perhaps there is some tension at Indy Media these days? Just the person to enlighten us would be Good Guy media diarist Matthew Norman, surely? Never mind Gaunty, let’s hear about Glover.
Come on, Matthew – tell us what you know!
12 February
Kate Nash – fad, or just bad?
Actually, both will suit Apache just fine.
As the countdown to the BRIT awards begins, there are some interesting nominations, the most offensive of which is Kate Nash in the British Female Solo Artist category.
Kate Nash’s route to stardom is a quaint little tale of rejection and injury (not just for the people unlucky enough to hear her sing). Young Kate was an aspiring actor, who applied to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School – sadly she was rejected (she has not been forthcoming as to why), and went to watch Ang Lee’s masterpiece Brokeback Mountain to quell her sadness. Whilst there she fell down a flight of stairs and broke her – no, not back – but foot.
It was during her healing time that Miss Nash decided to pursue a career in music and uploaded songs onto social networking site MySpace. Fast-forward to her asking Lily Allen to champion her on the web, and recording a dire first single “Caroline’s a Victim” (YouTube video here…if you dare) that somehow got her signed.
Then came her second single, the so-called smash hit, “Foundations”.
It was while Monsieur Apache was sitting at a piano one day that the illusion of Kate Nash came crumbling down. He struck a C chord, and this triggered something – this was the first chord of “Foundations”, which was getting inescapable airplay at the time. Referring to the Youtube video, Monsieur Apache soon unravelled the secrets of Miss Nash’s songwriting…or rather the simplicity of it.
It was just C, F and G-major chords!
All the way through. The solitary modulation was an A-minor in the chorus (possibly forced by the record label?) . No complexity.
(Explainer: C is the middle note of the piano, and gives the easiest key and scale because there are no accidentals [black notes on the keyboard]). This is the first thing you learn on the piano; young Apache learned it at the age of seven.
Such musical simple-mindedness is astounding in a nominated artist, especially as Nash is so proud of being a “singer/songwriter”. If musicality were valued, then she’d be dismissed for lack of anything approaching the originality of other piano-based singer/songwriters such as Regina Spektor or Ben Folds.
What is the difference between Kate Nash and these others? It would seem to be her “excruciatingly crispy clear vocals” (NME, June 18, 2007). That’s one way to describe her voice; another would be to say that it’s an irritating cockney drawl from the Skinner/Allen school of enunciation. Apache’s friend _______ went to school with Nash, and told me one evening that it’s all deliberate – a clever ruse to jump on the regional accent bandwagon.
It’s not just the accent though; it’s the lack of imagery, metaphor, and wordplay in her lyrics. See fellow BRIT nominee Bat for Lashes or PJ Harvey for the real thing.
All is not lost however. Apache discovers that her supposed smash hit “Foundations” made it to number one only in Croatia (the hub of all good music, surely?), but regrettably the media-receptive British did buy enough copies of Nash’s album Made of Bricks for it to reach number one, despite several bad reviews. But it dropped very quickly, and is not even in the top 40 at the moment. Perhaps the public are beginning to hear those simple chords.
Monsieur Apache hopes that the regional accent trend will pass, and that the “Skins”-watching generation will realise they’re being spoon-fed fad after fad. Let’s hope that on February 20th either Natasha Khan (Bat for Lashes) or the memorable PJ Harvey will take the BRIT award for solo female singer.
Come on, music fans – look for talent!
As the countdown to the BRIT awards begins, there are some interesting nominations, the most offensive of which is Kate Nash in the British Female Solo Artist category.
Kate Nash’s route to stardom is a quaint little tale of rejection and injury (not just for the people unlucky enough to hear her sing). Young Kate was an aspiring actor, who applied to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School – sadly she was rejected (she has not been forthcoming as to why), and went to watch Ang Lee’s masterpiece Brokeback Mountain to quell her sadness. Whilst there she fell down a flight of stairs and broke her – no, not back – but foot.
It was during her healing time that Miss Nash decided to pursue a career in music and uploaded songs onto social networking site MySpace. Fast-forward to her asking Lily Allen to champion her on the web, and recording a dire first single “Caroline’s a Victim” (YouTube video here…if you dare) that somehow got her signed.
Then came her second single, the so-called smash hit, “Foundations”.
It was while Monsieur Apache was sitting at a piano one day that the illusion of Kate Nash came crumbling down. He struck a C chord, and this triggered something – this was the first chord of “Foundations”, which was getting inescapable airplay at the time. Referring to the Youtube video, Monsieur Apache soon unravelled the secrets of Miss Nash’s songwriting…or rather the simplicity of it.
It was just C, F and G-major chords!
All the way through. The solitary modulation was an A-minor in the chorus (possibly forced by the record label?) . No complexity.
(Explainer: C is the middle note of the piano, and gives the easiest key and scale because there are no accidentals [black notes on the keyboard]). This is the first thing you learn on the piano; young Apache learned it at the age of seven.
Such musical simple-mindedness is astounding in a nominated artist, especially as Nash is so proud of being a “singer/songwriter”. If musicality were valued, then she’d be dismissed for lack of anything approaching the originality of other piano-based singer/songwriters such as Regina Spektor or Ben Folds.
What is the difference between Kate Nash and these others? It would seem to be her “excruciatingly crispy clear vocals” (NME, June 18, 2007). That’s one way to describe her voice; another would be to say that it’s an irritating cockney drawl from the Skinner/Allen school of enunciation. Apache’s friend _______ went to school with Nash, and told me one evening that it’s all deliberate – a clever ruse to jump on the regional accent bandwagon.
It’s not just the accent though; it’s the lack of imagery, metaphor, and wordplay in her lyrics. See fellow BRIT nominee Bat for Lashes or PJ Harvey for the real thing.
All is not lost however. Apache discovers that her supposed smash hit “Foundations” made it to number one only in Croatia (the hub of all good music, surely?), but regrettably the media-receptive British did buy enough copies of Nash’s album Made of Bricks for it to reach number one, despite several bad reviews. But it dropped very quickly, and is not even in the top 40 at the moment. Perhaps the public are beginning to hear those simple chords.
Monsieur Apache hopes that the regional accent trend will pass, and that the “Skins”-watching generation will realise they’re being spoon-fed fad after fad. Let’s hope that on February 20th either Natasha Khan (Bat for Lashes) or the memorable PJ Harvey will take the BRIT award for solo female singer.
Come on, music fans – look for talent!
Monday, February 11, 2008
Archbishop’s incredible feat: he unites the British
Archbishop Rowan Williams has united the nation for the first time since the end of World War Two. The UK has changed so rapidly and become so diverse in its peoples and cultures that it was thought no longer possible to decide which common characteristics define “Britishness”. Politicians tried, but it was beyond them. In one cunning move the Spiritual Leader of this sceptered isle has united us all.
All he had to do was to be fair to Muslims by presenting a carefully-reasoned argument – that certain elements of sharia be incorporated into the British legal system in much the same way that Orthodox Jews have some decisions of their own legal bodies so incorporated. The British rose up as one – the politicians, churchmen, and lawyers, the media and even the man on the Shepherd’s Bush Omnibus (himself one third Muslim), to proclaim what they were, but more especially, what they were not. The furore shows the British have three negative and two positive preferences:
Negative:
1. We are a nation that dislikes reasoned argument. The more closely-reasoned the argument, and the more erudite the exponent, the more they are despised.
2. Instead the British much prefer rhetoric and abuse, especially as used by the Sun, which implied that the Archbishop was not only a goat, but a dangerous goat. Does the Sun believe that Rowan has horns? Nope: Sun journalists just hate beards (now known as facial hair), with which the Archbishop is rather obviously well-endowed.
3. The British know they are allergic to sharia law.
Positive:
4. The British love the rule of their own law, since amputation is not allowed, and no-one is stoned to death (literally as opposed to figuratively). Furthermore, women have equal rights with men (and no beards). Surprisingly, this view is shared by a large number of British Muslims who clearly value the absence of sharia law-enforcement in their daily lives in Britain, and have taken to saying how wonderful British law is.
5. The British have been reminded of how much they hate religion, because over the past 1000 years it has been the basis for hatred. And used to justify unjustifiable acts by people of one persuasion against others.
So if you love God but are British, keep it to yourself.
Well done Archbishop, keep it up!
Seriously though…
Secular society has recently been characterised by some religious thinkers as equivalent to a religious group, but a group lacking the God who decrees law and conduct. Such a group, it is argued, has no right to impose its views on other belief groups, to which it is equivalent.
This ingenious anti-secularism is a desperate argument. But it is one of the contexts in which Williams, a sensitive theologian, has to work.
So was the sharia speech an attempt to bring religious considerations of any kind – Muslim, Christian, Jewish – back into secular life?
The storm created by the Archbishop demonstrates that secular society is not just a godless religious group but instead provides the ground upon which all individuals, whether members of a religious group or not, are given equality, are legitimised, and supported. This legitimisation and support is limited only by a series of rights and obligations applicable to all individuals within civil society. A secular society may be the only type of society that can support multiple ethnic and religious groups on a basis of equality. Secular society limits the special claims characteristic of some religious groups that they alone have access to the One Truth which others would benefit from adopting too, from which they argue their right to dominate and impose their beliefs.
It is secularism that guarantees the survival of religious activity.
11 February
All he had to do was to be fair to Muslims by presenting a carefully-reasoned argument – that certain elements of sharia be incorporated into the British legal system in much the same way that Orthodox Jews have some decisions of their own legal bodies so incorporated. The British rose up as one – the politicians, churchmen, and lawyers, the media and even the man on the Shepherd’s Bush Omnibus (himself one third Muslim), to proclaim what they were, but more especially, what they were not. The furore shows the British have three negative and two positive preferences:
Negative:
1. We are a nation that dislikes reasoned argument. The more closely-reasoned the argument, and the more erudite the exponent, the more they are despised.
2. Instead the British much prefer rhetoric and abuse, especially as used by the Sun, which implied that the Archbishop was not only a goat, but a dangerous goat. Does the Sun believe that Rowan has horns? Nope: Sun journalists just hate beards (now known as facial hair), with which the Archbishop is rather obviously well-endowed.
3. The British know they are allergic to sharia law.
Positive:
4. The British love the rule of their own law, since amputation is not allowed, and no-one is stoned to death (literally as opposed to figuratively). Furthermore, women have equal rights with men (and no beards). Surprisingly, this view is shared by a large number of British Muslims who clearly value the absence of sharia law-enforcement in their daily lives in Britain, and have taken to saying how wonderful British law is.
5. The British have been reminded of how much they hate religion, because over the past 1000 years it has been the basis for hatred. And used to justify unjustifiable acts by people of one persuasion against others.
So if you love God but are British, keep it to yourself.
Well done Archbishop, keep it up!
Seriously though…
Secular society has recently been characterised by some religious thinkers as equivalent to a religious group, but a group lacking the God who decrees law and conduct. Such a group, it is argued, has no right to impose its views on other belief groups, to which it is equivalent.
This ingenious anti-secularism is a desperate argument. But it is one of the contexts in which Williams, a sensitive theologian, has to work.
So was the sharia speech an attempt to bring religious considerations of any kind – Muslim, Christian, Jewish – back into secular life?
The storm created by the Archbishop demonstrates that secular society is not just a godless religious group but instead provides the ground upon which all individuals, whether members of a religious group or not, are given equality, are legitimised, and supported. This legitimisation and support is limited only by a series of rights and obligations applicable to all individuals within civil society. A secular society may be the only type of society that can support multiple ethnic and religious groups on a basis of equality. Secular society limits the special claims characteristic of some religious groups that they alone have access to the One Truth which others would benefit from adopting too, from which they argue their right to dominate and impose their beliefs.
It is secularism that guarantees the survival of religious activity.
11 February
Friday, February 8, 2008
Capa unrolled
Best cultural news of the week: Capa’s negatives from the Spanish Civil War are being scanned from the nitrate originals. The work is being done by the international Centre of Photography in New York, There’s a page of contact prints here.
Radio 4’s Today interviewer raised the question of whether the new discovery would show whether or not Capa’s famous Falling Soldier of 1936 “had been staged”. Since nobody except one or two right-wing historians now believes it was, this was a step too far. The interviewee tactfully kept clear.
Come on Today, keep up!
Radio 4’s Today interviewer raised the question of whether the new discovery would show whether or not Capa’s famous Falling Soldier of 1936 “had been staged”. Since nobody except one or two right-wing historians now believes it was, this was a step too far. The interviewee tactfully kept clear.
Come on Today, keep up!
BV – M?
Why was Brian Vickers given a K in the New Year honours list? It was for “services to literary scholarship”, but while he is heard of in university literary studies, he is hardly a star, like Sir Frank Kermode. Kermode has a long history of writing important criticism across a vast range (Bible, Shakespeare, modernism…), editing texts, and getting out there into radio, tv and journalism.
Vickers is a Renaissance specialist, has done several books on Shakespeare, and taken up the dull topic of Rhetoric. He has edited texts, and written criticism, including lots of reviews for the TLS, but he is neither admired, nor known to the public.
He is a vigorous controversialist, of the pedantic-aggressive kind (which doesn’t appeal to Monsieur Apache). Sometimes his scholarly aggression gets out of hand – a PhD candidate once biffed him during a viva, his questioning was so aggressive.
There are a dozen critics who have done as much as Vickers has done. So why choose him for a K?
Down at the Café Coup de Poing, my anarchist copain Andrés sips his américan and hints that recruitment for the secret services must still go on somehow, with reliable academics pointing suitable recruits in the right direction.
Come on Brian, is M your friend?
Vickers is a Renaissance specialist, has done several books on Shakespeare, and taken up the dull topic of Rhetoric. He has edited texts, and written criticism, including lots of reviews for the TLS, but he is neither admired, nor known to the public.
He is a vigorous controversialist, of the pedantic-aggressive kind (which doesn’t appeal to Monsieur Apache). Sometimes his scholarly aggression gets out of hand – a PhD candidate once biffed him during a viva, his questioning was so aggressive.
There are a dozen critics who have done as much as Vickers has done. So why choose him for a K?
Down at the Café Coup de Poing, my anarchist copain Andrés sips his américan and hints that recruitment for the secret services must still go on somehow, with reliable academics pointing suitable recruits in the right direction.
Come on Brian, is M your friend?
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Stephen Glover: can’t think, can’t argue
What’s the matter with Stephen Glover of the Independent? Nasty attack on Nick Davies (one of the Good Guys), whose Flat Earth News about the laziness and corruption of the British press is just out. “Damning allegations that, if true, bring disgrace upon ‘The Observer’” is the headline over a piece (Independent Media, 4 February) so badly argued it must have personal animus behind it.
Glover tells us Davies’s criticism of The Observer, and then writes as though what he’s just written isn’t the case.
His summary of Davies says that Number 10 and Alistair Campbell wanted the Observer on side over support for the Iraq war, because skeptical Labour MPs might be persuaded by this liberal newspaper. So political editor Kamal Ahmed was given a “sneak preview” of the lying “dodgy dossier” of February 2002. Glover then goes berserk, and says Davies is claiming that “the editor and political editor of a great liberal newspaper were suborned by Number 10, and so manipulated that The Observer became a government mouthpiece”. This is “amazing stuff”, apparently.
Then, writes Glover, “One also notices that when two newspapers wrote about Mr Davies’s book last October [Apache missed this], he responded in terms that were virtually misleading: ‘The hacks who have said that the book accuses Kamal Ahmed of helping to write or edit the dodgy dossier are simply wrong’, he [Davies] remarked.” Glover goes on: “Well, no, he does not precisely say that, but what he does say is almost as combustible”.
I get it: Davies was “virtually misleading” about something that Glover admits he didn’t say.
And what was so combustible? That Kamal Ahmed was softened up by being given a “sneak preview” of the dossier. Which is Glover’s own account of the allegation.
Unable to set up a straight argument, Glover turns to innuendo. More than once he remarks that Davies “provides no evidence” for (eg) the suggestion that chunks of Alistair Campbell’s emails were lifted and inserted into The Observer’s “pro-war editorials”. (So Number 10’s policy worked.)
But Glover must know – and he would certainly have known after Davies’s spirited interview on R4’s Today on 5 February – that Davies’s sources were not the lords of journalism, but “the peasants” – working journalists who knew what was really going on, and told him.
Does Glover seriously think that these journalists would allow themselves to be identified, and lose their jobs? And why is Glover pretending he doesn’t know this?
That is why Apache thinks there’s personal animus here.
And just look at what Alistair Campbell in his Diary has to say about Stephen Glover: “a deeply unpleasant man”. Suppose Ali was right for once, and this is true? It would explain a lot.
First question: is The Observer still a “great liberal newspaper”?
Come on Stephen, think straight and be nicer!
Glover tells us Davies’s criticism of The Observer, and then writes as though what he’s just written isn’t the case.
His summary of Davies says that Number 10 and Alistair Campbell wanted the Observer on side over support for the Iraq war, because skeptical Labour MPs might be persuaded by this liberal newspaper. So political editor Kamal Ahmed was given a “sneak preview” of the lying “dodgy dossier” of February 2002. Glover then goes berserk, and says Davies is claiming that “the editor and political editor of a great liberal newspaper were suborned by Number 10, and so manipulated that The Observer became a government mouthpiece”. This is “amazing stuff”, apparently.
Then, writes Glover, “One also notices that when two newspapers wrote about Mr Davies’s book last October [Apache missed this], he responded in terms that were virtually misleading: ‘The hacks who have said that the book accuses Kamal Ahmed of helping to write or edit the dodgy dossier are simply wrong’, he [Davies] remarked.” Glover goes on: “Well, no, he does not precisely say that, but what he does say is almost as combustible”.
I get it: Davies was “virtually misleading” about something that Glover admits he didn’t say.
And what was so combustible? That Kamal Ahmed was softened up by being given a “sneak preview” of the dossier. Which is Glover’s own account of the allegation.
Unable to set up a straight argument, Glover turns to innuendo. More than once he remarks that Davies “provides no evidence” for (eg) the suggestion that chunks of Alistair Campbell’s emails were lifted and inserted into The Observer’s “pro-war editorials”. (So Number 10’s policy worked.)
But Glover must know – and he would certainly have known after Davies’s spirited interview on R4’s Today on 5 February – that Davies’s sources were not the lords of journalism, but “the peasants” – working journalists who knew what was really going on, and told him.
Does Glover seriously think that these journalists would allow themselves to be identified, and lose their jobs? And why is Glover pretending he doesn’t know this?
That is why Apache thinks there’s personal animus here.
And just look at what Alistair Campbell in his Diary has to say about Stephen Glover: “a deeply unpleasant man”. Suppose Ali was right for once, and this is true? It would explain a lot.
First question: is The Observer still a “great liberal newspaper”?
Come on Stephen, think straight and be nicer!
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