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.
Monday, June 30, 2008
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!
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