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Weekly Review - 15 July 2017

Paris, Being Crass

And so President Trump has arrived in Paris, at President Macron’s invitation, and immediately hit the ground running.

“You’re in such good shape”, he is reported to have said to Mdme Macron. “Beautiful.” What he didn’t say, but I heard in my head, was, “...under the circumstances”.

One of the great joys of our age is waiting for Mr Trump’s next social faux pas and there is never long to wait. In a British context Mr Trump has taken over from the now retired Duke of Edinburgh as the leading exponent of this form of entertainment. Of course there are many people only too willing to take offence at Mr Trump’s clumsiness and here’s an example from Friday’s Guardian newspaper.

‘ “Trump telling France’s First Lady ‘you’re in such good shape’ epitomizes men toeing the line between compliment & sexual harassment,” wrote Twitter user Alex Berg, a freelance video producer and writer who works on feminist and gender issues.’

But if they are not careful, these people will start to have real trouble finding time for anything else in their lives.

My grandfather once told me that unless I had anything sensible to say it was better to say nothing. Obviously Mr Trump did not receive this advice and he seems to be one of those people who get nervous during breaks in conversation, silence is a space to be filled. But is this a hanging offence, even for the President of the United States? We will return to the modern preoccupation with being offended, later.

Paris, the Capital of Contrasts

Mr Trump’s visit to France is interesting and highlight a few things about how M. Macron operates. I think that having Mr Trump in France makes M. Macron, a leader working hard to establish his credentials, look pretty good. I imagine M. Macron telling people, “You might not like me yet but look at this guy. You see, things could have been a lot worse”.

Presidents Trump and Macron offer two important insights into their respective country’s politics. Many voters in the US elect their presidents based on the principle that he or she is just like them, that their president understands them and their problems and knows how to fix them. That is why Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush got elected, they worked very hard on the empathy side of their campaigns. Donald Trump did the same. Tellingly, Hillary Clinton found it impossible not to seem too clever and remote and so she became the most prepared and intelligent president the US never had.

This is also why Mr Trump’s supporters out in the country, in the ‘fly-over’ states, generally don’t care about his links with Russia or any other Washington scandal. They care that he won and that they now have their man in the White House. Incidentally, if his opponents move towards impeachment of Mr Trump, I think there will be real trouble.

French voters, by contrast, look for an exceptional leader, a person greater and smarter than them. They don’t want a folksy man-in-the-street, they want Napoleon or De Gaulle, they want exceptional. That is M. Macron’s challenge and that is why his speech to congress was so theatrical and why the Bastille Day production in Paris was so extravagant.

Mr Trump being in Paris is another humiliation for Britain, as if there was any room for more British humiliation. M. Macron issued his invitation when it became clear that Mrs May was unsure how a Trump visit would play in her very troubled country. Now France looks more mature by seeking a stronger relationship with the ‘leader of the free world’ while her neighbours across the Channel flounder in their own mess. And M. Macron gets to show off hugely on the world stage.

Trump and Macron have important things to talk about, and bilateral discussions in comfortable surroundings make real talking much easier, away from the stress of the recent G20 summit. Trade, the Paris climate deal, NATO and how to handle Putin’s Russia are a few agenda items. I also think that M. Macron may wish to hear what Mr Trump has to say about deal-making because he will soon have to make deals with the French syndicates over his changes to France’s labour laws and social benefits system. M. Macron is a technocrat not a businessman.

President Trump’s visit to France will not be a waste of time.

London, the Suicide of a Language.

Conservative MP Anne Marie Morris became famous this week when she used the outdated phrase ‘nigger in the woodpile’ to describe an aspect of the Brexit negotiations. The phrase is outdated because its origins lie in the period when slavery was acceptable, it is considered racist in context and because the word ‘nigger’ is regarded as the most offensive way to describe a black person. In my personal opinion the word and the phrase are both disgusting and I have, to the best of my knowledge, never used them.

Having unfortunately publicly deployed the phrase, Ms Morris immediately found herself at the centre of a tornado of outrage by a large number of people who declared themselves offended. Even though her statement had not been directed at any other human being but at a political and legal process, she had the Conservative whip removed and now sits as a shamed independent in the House of Commons.

I am old enough to remember when the nursery rhyme ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ was expunged from national culture to be replaced by ‘Baa Baa Woolly Sheep’, because the word ‘black’ was deemed offensive. Who, I wondered, would go out into the fields in Springtime to paint all of those offensive black lambs white? Was a special section of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries created for the purpose?

The hounding of Ms Morris follows the recent public flogging of Mr Tim Farron, an apparently nice man who dared to think that being a devout Christian is still compatible with leading a political party in the United Kingdom. It isn’t as many people declared themselves offended by his private, generally orthodox Christian  views on gender issues despite his never attempting to change Liberal Democrat policy in line with his own beliefs. Mr Farron resigned and his case effectively ended any adherence to the concept of freedom of conscience in Britain.

Britain and, as we have seen above in the case of Donald Trump, the US today are experiencing the creation of an intolerant dictatorship of the offended who, simply by declaring themselves offended, seek to prevent others from thinking, writing and saying what they like. The offended are trying to change the English language and to replace it with a robotic, administrative, formulation that murders free thinking and free expression. They want to create an English that is inoffensive, harmless and without passion, character or humanity.

They, the offended, must be stopped.

Trump in Middle Earth.

The funniest thing I saw this week is this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOqKnInZovI

Enjoy, God knows we need a laugh.

[rfrew]

Vapour Trail

A sunlit tear in the silken fabric of the fading sky.

Slicing silently north.

Comfortably home for some. Growing apprehension for others.

[rfrew]

My Review of Week-Ending 30 July 2017

Pezenas, France - Europe’s Tornado Alley

On Wednesday evening Pezenas joined the people of the great state of Oklahoma in hosting its very own tornado.

I watched the storm building as I drove home from a darkening Agde. The lightning became more intense in the area to the north of Pezenas and the mountains completely disappeared behind the black sheets of rain. I got to my front door just in time to watch the cloud swirling into a vortex, perhaps only one or two hundred feet above. I couldn’t actually believe that, within the space of a minute the storm would become so focused in such a small area with an extraordinarily powerful wind and a deluge of Hollywood proportions. It was genuinely awesome.

I didn’t see it happen but a few minutes later I realised that a huge, ancient, tree had been ripped from the garden of my neighbour and thrown on the the channel of the river Peyne, smashing a hole in the stone retaining wall in the process. For hours afterwards, people came in their cars to witness the spectacle and take selfies. The birds settled on all the surviving trees and bushes, gossiping among themselves, “Wow! I was perched right there only this afternoon…”.

And now it’s gone, cleared away. Something so lasting, so grand, simply no longer there.

London, the Corbyn Revolution.

One of Theresa May’s more outlandish achievements in her barnstorming progress to become the worst Prime Minister in British history, is to make Mr Jeremy Corbyn not only look good but seem credible.

By saying very little about anything during the general election campaign she left the airwaves free to carry whatever Mr Corbyn had to say. By refusing to engage with the survivors of the Grenfell fire she assigned the provision of human leadership to him. By plunging determinedly into one avoidable political crisis after another, she has encouraged a surprising number of people to think that Mr Corbyn carries a strong and stable vision of Britain at this time of most desperate need. It is not too outrageous to say that Mrs May’s olympian ineptitude has created the confident and generally respected Mr Corbyn that we now see before us.

He has become a prospective leader, lauded to a chorus at Glastonbury no less, feted on the very streets that Mrs May fears to tread, calmly providing apparently reasonable answers to questions on TV in a way that none of his opponents can emulate. In general, he would like to take the British back to the period before Ted Heath was Prime Minister. A time when Britain’s great nationalised industries offered stability and certainty to the people. A time when Britain was not a member of the then European Economic Community. And there rests the fly in many people’s Corbyn ointment. Why does the new, popular, strong and stable Jeremy Corbyn continue to support Brexit?

I believe that there are two fundamental answers to that question.

Mr Corbyn has always been a member of what older readers will remember as the Bennite Left of the Labour party. This powerful faction was led by Mr Tony Benn himself, Mr Peter Shore, Mr Michael Foot and Mrs Barbara Castle. Mr Foot led the party in the general election of 1983 and campaigned to leave EEC, which the Left considered to be nothing but a club for rich continental businessmen. The Labour party was heavily defeated by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives but Mr Corbyn was elected to the House of Commons for the first time and has consistently opposed Britain’s membership of the EEC/EU ever since.

Many core Labour voters supported the leave campaign in last year’s referendum and, over the past few years many of them voted for UKIP candidates in local elections and parliamentary byelections. Far from being fanatical believers in the international socialist revolution, traditional Labour voters look to the party to provide and protect their jobs, to ensure food on the table and access to decent education for their children. Having got the Brexit result that they wanted they abandoned UKIP and went back to voting Labour at the recent general election, aware that Mr Corbyn agrees with them.

That is why Mr Corbyn risked a split in his parliamentary party this week by instructing its members to abstain on an amendment brought by one of their own, Mr Chuka Umunna, seeking a government commitment to continued membership of the Single Market. That is why he sacked three members of his shadow cabinet who defied his instructions. Mr Corbyn calculates that defeating the Conservatives at a future general election demands the retention of those Labour voters who have only recently returned to the fold and who are pro Brexit.

This week’s events have shown how far he is prepared to go to achieve that political objective.

Washington, Trump Wins in Court

After months of arguing, the US Supreme Court has approved a much-revised version of President Trump’s ban on entry for citizens of those countries considered most likely to export islamist terror. This legislation was one of Mr Trump’s first Executive Orders, showing his supporters that he meant business in the matter of keeping Americans safe and avoiding the mistakes made by those over-tolerant softies in Europe.

The effectiveness of what has become known as the travel ban, although I prefer to call it the arrival ban, will be judged over time. However, statistics appear to confirm that Americans are at far greater daily risk from deranged fellow citizens bearing easily acquired assault rifles than from deranged islamists. However, Mr Trump appears very unwilling to sign an Executive Order deleting the Second Amendment to the US constitution. An action that would save a great many more American lives.

Toronto, Happy Birthday

July 1st is Canada Day, this year celebrating 150 years of the consolidated territory that we now recognise as Canada. This is surely of as much interest in France as it is in the UK and Canada itself since their war, ended in 1763 by the Treaty of Paris, helped to create the new country.

I think we must spare a thought for those citizens of Canada who are members of the indigenous people of the territory. Canada day celebrates the end of whatever their tribal lands were called before the Europeans came up with names like Banff, Nova Scotia and Montreal. I also think it worth remembering that many of the early British settlers in Canada, including some of my ancestors, were forcibly removed from their own homes in the Scottish highlands (the infamous Highland Clearances) and deported to north America to make way for more viable sheep. There are as many Canadians of Scottish ancestry now living in Canada as there are people in Scotland.

Nonetheless, I wish all Canadians a very happy Canada day, including my many relatives happily living in that vast and wonderful country.

Ronnie Smith

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The case of The Crown v The British Economy

The British Economy immediately pleaded guilty at the opening of the trial and the judge, Lord Justice Long-Standing, accepting the plea in the spirit of the proceedings, allowed the defendant to address the court.

The British Economy spoke only briefly and, in line with her previous confession, said that she did not for one minute regret shooting the Conservative Party. She added only that planning the crime gave her tremendous pleasure in the knowledge that she was offering the people of the United Kingdom a public service great enough to rival that of the RAF during the Battle of Britain. Then she sat down.

Lord Justice Long-Standing ordered an adjournment of twenty minutes to consider the sentence.

Lord Justice Long-Standing said that this was the clearest case of premeditated murder that he had seen during many long years on the bench. However he also told the court that, having fully reviewed the evidence, the case carried the most significant and understandable level of mitigation in British legal history.

The Conservative Party had absolutely deserved everything that came to them and being shot was actually a merciful outcome, in the judge's opinion.

To resounding cheers, Lord Justice Long-Standing fined The British Economy the sum of 5 Pounds (3 Euro) and imposed a period of 2.5 hours of community service, "To clean up the blood". He then wished The British Economy, "His very best wishes for a brighter future".

Ronnie Smith

[rfrew]

Cutting out the middleman “The chief business of the American people is business” President Calvin Coolidge As I write this the 2016 US presidential election is one week away and many commentators seem to assume that Hilary Clinton will win. We shall shortly test the accuracy of their forecasting and perhaps the extent to which they indulged in simple projection, her opponent being profoundly unpopular among the mainstream media establishment. Mrs Clinton’s campaign has been generally Orthodox in conception and execution. To obtain her party’s nomination she had to win the increasingly divisive primary campaign and then take steps to reunite all Democrats and build a national electoral coalition with which to defeat the Republican enemy at the general election. This she has done to a greater or lesser extent, just as all presidential nominees have done throughout my lifetime. Mrs Clinton’s major problem is that she has become increasingly unpopular as her career in her husband's administration, in the Senate and in President Obama’s cabinet has become increasingly mired in political and financial scandal. Just as Mr Trump is far from the best candidate the Republicans could have chosen, Mrs Clinton is not the best of the Democratic party and her greatest fear must be a low turnout of her own natural constituency. The process of selecting a President is lengthy and noisy but has been generally stable since the end of world war two. However, during this electoral cycle things have changed and it remains to be seen whether this is a temporary glitch in the system or a more profound adjustment. Until now America’s elected officials, whether at county, state or federal level, have generally measured their effectiveness and success against their relationships with business. Although many Americans work for local, state or federal government, the national political and economic culture remains overwhelmingly private. Hence the continuing large scale opposition to what has become known as 'Obama Care’. It costs a lot of money to stand for public office in the USA and much of the necessary funding comes from business leaders who expect a return on their investment in candidates. Just as there are no free lunches, so there is no obligation-free funding from competitive business interests. That is why public policy conversion into legislation has changed surprisingly little, in principle and execution over the past 50 years and the system has not been effectively challenged. American business funds candidates, makes its priorities clear and expects its representatives to look after its interests when they are in power. Donald Trump, though, is not a politician he is a businessman and his campaign for the Presidency has been run as a corporate marketing operation. For the primaries, Mr Trump identified his market and devoted all of his resources to maximising the impact of his brand on the segment/demographic known as 'angry white folks’. These people feel that their vision of America has been destroyed by the liberal elites who tend to inhabit the east and west coasts. They live in the vast interior of the country in the 'flyover states’ and have seen their industrial and agricultural economy decimated by overseas trade deals and financial pressure from larger and larger federal banks. Mr Trump did the math, sold his brand entirely to his chosen market, became a mirror to their frustrations and anger and won the Republican nomination relatively easily. Along the way his aggressive personality and daily bluster won him more free airtime on US national TV than any other candidate in US history. The question for political commentators, not only in the US, was how could Mr Trump now build the customary broad electoral coalition to win the Presidency having just insulted everyone outwith his targeted primary segment of voters? How could he diversify his business once he had saturated his initial target market. The answer is that he didn’t even try. The standard narrative runs that, again, Mr Trump did the math and obviously calculated that he could secure enough angry white votes to gain victory through the Electoral College. Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s personal miracle worker, explained the strategy in an article a few months ago. Mr Trump never had any chance of winning the popular vote. But it was possible that he could accumulate votes in the flyover states and defeat the liberals in the larger coastal states through gaining just enough seats in the Electoral College. Mr Rove even set out a list of states that Mr Trump could win. The Electoral College is the mechanism through which States rights are protected during the election of a President. Let’s not forget that we are talking about the United States of America, a federation not a unitary monolith. No President can be elected without a majority in the College even if he or she has a popular majority in the country. However, new information has come to light which may change Mr Trump’s presidential narrative. In the United States a media institution has grown over the past twenty five years known as 'talk radio’. Various individual commentators set up their own private radio stations and assail the airwaves with their mostly conservative and religious opinions. The most famous of these commentators is Rush Limbaugh who has a huge following that he enlivens with his continuous attacks on liberal America, the coastal elites, the corruption in Washington, the Clintons, the Obama presidency and the general decline of the USA. Mr Limbaugh is a staunch supporter of Donald Trump and speaks to exactly the same market segment identified by Mr Trump for his campaign. Mr Limbaugh’s audience has made him a wealthy and very influential man, facts that have not gone unnoticed by Mr Trump. It seems that the Trump organisation are seriously exploring the creation of a nation-wide 'Trump TV’ station, taking talk radio to the next level. This raises one important question and two possibly disturbing possibilities. The question; has Donald Trump’s campaign for the White House been nothing more than a corporate business operation to build a market of subscribers for his proposed TV channel? If that is the case it raises the following scenarios. If Mr Trump becomes President it seems likely that he will have to work with a Congress that is hostile to him. With the power and influence generated by his TV channel, he would be in a position to continually appeal directly to his many angry white supporters across the nation and continue to inflame the divisions that his campaign has exacerbated. There would be no post election healing. This would be seen by many as a subversion of the constitutional process of government. If he loses the election, Mr Trump could continue to thrash away at the Clinton administration and all of the other enemies identified by his supporters. He could continue to challenge the legality of the election itself. In short, Mr Trump will simply not go away after the election. He and his followers will become a permanent and very active feature of America’s political landscape. As I said, Mr Trump is a businessman not a politician. He chose not to fund a candidate for President, instead he became the candidate himself and has vigorously pursued his own business objectives with the election reduced to the level of a viable marketplace, not a purely political event. In effect Mr Trump has  removed the middleman from American politics on this occasion. Now we must see if he has also changed western politics for good.

[rfrew]

In Scotland, Our Violent Tribalism Isn’t ‘Exuberance’

I have a visual memory which means that I recall things, people, places and events as if I had my own personal cinema running continuously in my head.

I remember being on a bus in Glasgow with my Gran, when I was very young, and seeing a man riding a large white horse coming towards me at the head of thousands of other men. I remember their uniforms, suits and their pride. I remember their flags, their strange hats and the orange that they all wore.

I remember walking in a group to school in Largs on a golden morning after the long summer holiday. Our scheme (local authority housing project) wasn’t far from the schools and I remember saying ‘see ye later’ to half my friends as they passed through the gates of St Mary’s primary and the rest of us carried on to continue our ‘non-denominational’ education.

I remember sitting with a smaller and more mature group of friends on the train, for two years, as we travelled between Largs and Ardrossan in our quest for required number of Highers for university. We, the Ardrossan Academy pupils sat in our blue blazers in one chattering, rattling carriage while the St Andrews Academy kids, in their black blazers, all sat in another. I remember us all bumping into each other at university, people we’d grown up with, endlessly played football with, climbed the hills with… Looking at each other with the nervous smiles that old friends share the moment they become firm acquaintances.

I remember, as a student, walking through Mount Florida in Glasgow in the warm early evening on 10 May, 1980 to catch the bus to my digs in Castlemilk. The streets were deserted, most of the shops were shut and there was a strange silence that not even the birds dared break. I had been travelling all afternoon and had no idea that the Scottish cup final had ended in the ‘battle of Hampden’. I discovered the seriousness of the situation when I got on the bus and the driver gave me a very stern look and asked me if I was ‘a straggler’.

When I was young I supported Largs Thistle, still do. I spent many happy winter afternoons and early summer evenings at Barrfields Park waiting for the boys to deliver glory to my town. In those days Thistle played in the North Ayrshire Junior League, playing the teams from all the other towns in what I considered to be God’s own country. Irvine Meadow, Saltcoats Victoria, Beith Juniors and, in the cup competitions, exotic visitors from south Ayrshire (Cumnock in particular) and the east and north of Scotland would visit bring large groups of supporters.

However the most special days were reserved for the visit of Kilbirnie Ladeside, our mortal enemies only eight miles away across the hills on the road to Paisley. There was an enmity between the two towns, Largs a genteel holiday resort and Kilbirnie an industrial town with a large steel works that we didn’t find hard to understand. So there was always an intimidating atmosphere, the promise of violence, when the teams met.

I remember standing in our crowd behind the ‘stand’ at Barrfields, yelling my head off at their crowd about twenty yards away. Yelling at the top of my voice as the bottles, cans and stones began to fly. And the only thought that ran through my head as I yelled was, ‘Yaaaaaaaaaaah! Let’s go!’

I was going to university and was therefore considered, in some circles, to be among the top five percent of the population. And there I was, yelling at a group of strangers from another town, ‘Yaaaaaaaaaaah! Let’s go!’ Inexplicable, irrational, completely spontaneous and utterly invigorating. Many people excuse it as being nothing other than Celtic exuberance, we are exuberant people and our exuberance occasionally gets out of hand at football matches.

I’m afraid that won’t do.

Football stadia are the most publicly available spaces where our young men can prove themselves. They are where our males meet to beat their chests. It needn’t be football, it could be any other activity that obsesses our male population to the same extent. The idea that violence taking at our football events is a purely football matter is a pretence, a refusal on the part of our authorities to take responsibility for solving a national cultural problem. We can no longer take our targs and claymores in hand and head out on the heather to take vengeance on the clan that, just last week, killed one of our cousins and stole some of our cattle. But we should not be blithely allowed to continue simulating that ancient experience every Saturday afternoon.  

The violent scenes at the end of last season’s cup final, thirty six years after the ‘Battle of Hampden’ and the online images of hangings in effigy and toilet-smashing at the recent old firm game brought it all flooding back to me. And it’s clear that we have not and will not overcome this problem because we refuse to acknowledge it for what it is and we are in denial about its extent.

We, all of us, are still tribal.

We see our tribalism evident everywhere throughout our small country. Yes at our football stadia. In our city centres, day and night where incidents of shouting, the tinkle of smashing glass and parting of crowds of shoppers to let the runners pass are common. In our law courts where tribalism of one kind or another is rife and goes a long way to explaining a number of ‘strange’ legal outcomes in Scotland over the years; most recently the Scottish legal establishment’s obvious compliance with the wishes of whatever political hegemony is in power. Here the Scottish Review stands as a very important witness to something that has actually been happening for hundreds of years.

We see a very clear tribal dynamic at play in our Scottish Parliament where the innovative electoral system was designed to ensure that a spirit of co-operation between parties would grow for the good of the people of Scotland. The word ‘inclusive’ was often heard in those heady days. I think we can agree that this did not happen and the hatred between the SNP and Labour has disfigured the original vision to a fatal extent. There is absolutely no possibility of any member of Clan Labour or Clan SNP ever acknowledging that the other has come forward with a good idea or proposal. Scotland’s politics and therefore system of government is paralysed, as it has been since the Union of the Crowns, by tribalism.

This is strongly reflected in our use of social media where non-physically violent encounters often take place and intelligent discussion of very real issues is seldom possible. Our education system remains blighted by the tribal certainty of party ideologues and by the segregation that appears indestructible. We split into tribes in our places of work, in those factories and building sites that are left and in our offices and corporate structures. We are fragmented and disunited at every level of our society. The word ‘clannish’ does not exist in a vacuum.

Now, I am certainly not saying that Scotland is the only country where this happens, diverse interests divide every society in every country on earth because it is normal human behavior. However, I have not been to any advanced western country where loyalty to the tribe remains as strong as it is in Scotland. I have not been in a western country that is not at war, where casual everyday violence between citizens is tolerated, even excused, to the extent it is in Scotland.

We embrace our differences, we bare our life-long grudges with pride, even within our families. We refuse to accept new ideas, or even simple reality, if they run counter to the beliefs of our tribe. We seem to need the vitality differences, the conflict, more than many others. We are encouraged to set ourselves apart from each other at a very young age through our school system and our heritage. It is, not surprisingly, who we are and it would be better for us if we stopped denying it, stopped blaming something or somebody else.

I remind you that Donald Trump’s mother was Scottish, from the Islands. As we well know Donald Trump’s run for the Presidency of the United States of America is based on sowing and exaggerating the divisions that already exist within the country. He identified his audience, successfully became their mirror as every populist must and has sought to exacerbate the swollen sense of primordial grievance that much of blue and white collar, white Americans have felt for a long time. He has not tried to heal any of the fault lines in American society, on the contrary. If nothing else, Donald Trump understands the strength of the tribe and the loyalty of the clan he has created in the past nine months may well carry him to the White House

I confess, while watching Donald Trump speak to ‘his people’, I find myself experiencing a strong sense of empathy because what he is saying and thinking much of the time is simply ‘Yaaaaaaaaaaah! Let’s go!’

The issue here is not religion or history or economics or personal and national slights. It’s not about Catholics and Protestants, Rangers and Celtic, Scotland and England, Labour and SNP. These conflict are only symptoms of the fundamental problem. Tribalism is difficult to explain to people who don’t feel it as strongly as we do and feeling it as we do makes it difficult for us to rationalize.

But I think it comes down to this; if there is no THEM, then there can’t be US.

[rfrew]

The Politics of Nothing

Apart from their comprehensive ideological differences, one of the major reasons why my grandfather despised Harold Wilson with an unusual passion was that the man was never off our T.V. screens.

Harold MacMillan is justifiably credited with being the British politician who pioneered the use of mass media in this country but Harold Wilson mastered it and quickly raised the political manipulation of the camera and microphone to almost current levels. His nightly appearances around 6 pm, wrapped in his famous rain coat with pipe in hand induced such a rage in my normally wise and peaceful grandfather that, at the age of eight, I was forced to become addicted to politics. ‘Basket!’ He would yell purple-faced at the screen, unwilling to openly swear in front of my gentle grandmother.

I miss him more than I can ever find the words to express but I am glad that he never lived to suffer the 24/7 coverage of politics that we now endure. With multi-channel T.V., on-line global coverage and the endless, inane buzz of social media and blogs, blogs, blogs, his sanity would have collapsed.

We have created an infinite space which must be filled with noise and we have allowed an army of ‘communications specialists’ to grow whose job is simply to find the necessary content to do so. Silence is the enemy now. Silence in the media, silence from the parties and silence from our celebrity politicians. Silence cannot be tolerated, it is weakness, it is refusal to engage, it is resistance to our demand that they fuel the fire of our craving for noise.

But silence is a thing of the past, we cannot now put the genie of continuous blah, blah, blah back in its bottle. We will have statement and counter statement, comment and rebuttal, blasting outrage and blasting response expressing the endless festival of offence that political has become; leaving no time for thinking or for constructing measured responses to important issues. In the political environment, where quiet space has been removed, we can only expect reactions in the form of photo opportunities, soundbites and, God help us, tweets. We have created and maintain a politics for effect, a day-by-day politics, a confusing politics without a long term narrative. Nothing else.

As a result pretty much everyone who has been involved in politics for, let’s say, at least ten years is utterly confused. They are confused because the political environment in which they grew up and became active has undergone considerable change during that period. There no longer exists the very firm stability that had been created by the ideological battles of the twentieth century. Left, Right and Centre made things easy to understand. You knew why you were fighting and who your enemies and potential allies were in the class war. There were goodies and baddies and victory or defeat were clearly defined.

Now with so much space to fill and with so many people striving to fill it with many more perspectives and agendas, everything has become blurred as ideology has, quicker than expected, been replaced by identity, victimhood, grievance, outrage and the vague sense that so many share of the need to take something back. For a period of time politics was ambitious, expansive and hopeful. Now, partly because there is no longer any structure or context to our political discourse, our politics has become mean, defensive, fearful and unreasonable.

In the United Kingdom as a whole, Brexit is the space-filler par excellence. It is a concept that no-one fully understands because no politician is willing to define it, to give it form, to provide a vision as a guide to what happens next. In this vacuum of form talking and writing, speculation and projection is all that is possible an apparently great issue is left hanging in the air, unresolved, despite all the damaging consequences that this grave instability will bring about. Neither the Prime Minister nor her Cabinet seem able or willing to heal this constipation of ideas at the highest level and so Mrs. May has moved on to fill space with a controversy over Grammar schools in England and Wales, always a crowd troubler and great source of anger, outrage etc.

Brexit? Well what of it…? My own feeling is that what Brexit supporters thought was Brexit will turn out to be new terms for Britain’s membership of the E.U., “because, you see, the referendum had no constitutional value and was merely advisory…”

In Scotland we have our own on-going space filler, ‘IndyRef2’. Indy Ref 2 doesn’t actually exist as anything other than a concept, a source of noise, designed to generate very strong feelings (anger, outrage etc.) among the general population. It’s only real purpose is to keep the vastly inflated and diverse membership of the SNP interested and loyal to the party’s current leadership. Without IndyRef2 what is the current SNP for? Governing a devolved Scotland appears to be of little interest to them these days. And, with the noise of IndyRef2 ringing in our ears, Ms. Sturgeon doesn’t have to travel to Bosnia to have her photo taken, Bosnia being a reserved matter.

Mao did the same thing during his time as head of the Chinese Communist Party, by creating huge and very noisy events to keep the unruly population in a state of continuous revolutionary turmoil. The great but pointless public health campaigns (shooting sparrows), the Hundred Flowers Movement, the various campaigns against Rightists and other gangs of counter revolutionaries, the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution all but destroyed the country, its economy, its education system and its developing system of government. However, these campaigns created an incredible amount of noise, most of it in loyal support of Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman.

We have always created a considerable amount of noise in Scotland. We are born feeling anger, outrage etc., it’s just who we are. The Jacobites in their cafes in Edinburgh made a lot of noise concerning their King ‘over the water’ and they tricked the highland clans into paying the price. This noisy king-over-the-water syndrome continues today, it’s called IndyRef2 and the row is made even louder by the effects of technology on our political discourse.

Filling the space with anger, outrage etc. has become more important to those active in politics than actually achieving their vaguely stated objectives. In Scotland, if the King actually landed, if IndyRef2 actually said Yes, the talking would have to stop.

  yy��R�

[rfrew]

Murder Cannot be Seen as Anything Else

On the 28th of June 1914 a young Serb named Gavrilo Princip shot and murdered the Austrian Grand Duke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sofie, on the streets of Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Franz and his much-loved Sofie left three children but history does not much concern itself with this human fact. History is interested in the violence of contemporary Balkan nationalism and in Franz being the heir to the thrones of Austria-Hungary, whose death led to the Great War in which millions more died and the continent of Europe destroyed itself at the very moment of its greatest economic achievements.

On the 16th of June 2016 the Member of Parliament for Batley and Spen, Jo Cox, was shot, stabbed and murdered outside the library in Birstall in Yorkshire. Thomas Mair, a 52 year old local man, has been charged. Jo Cox leaves a husband and two children but history will more likely focus on the circumstances around which the murder exemplified the growing fragmentation of British society at the moment when many British people seemed to turn their backs on Europe and much of the rest of the world. The murder of Jo Cox will be linked to the increase in Nationalism and the fear of foreigners prevalent across great swathes of Britain.

On the night of the 14thof July 2016 Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Tunisian national resident in France, drove a nineteen tonne truck at speed into a large crowd of mothers, fathers, children, husbands, wives, grandparents, aunts, uncles and friends who had gathered to watch the Bastille Day firework display on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. More than eighty people were murdered at the scene and hundreds more injured, some fatally. Many hundreds of families were destroyed by this act of murder but history will, instead, focus on it being one more attack on France by the global forces of Islamist extremism. Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a divorced father of three children was killed by police at the scene of his crime.

I remember the first time I came across our capacity for turning the act of murder into something more glorious, justifiable and even understandable. Her name was Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who, because of her beauty and her almost romantic involvement in two aircraft hijackings in 1969 and 1970, became a global icon. Despite being heavily armed, she didn’t actually murder anyone but her partner in the 1970 incident shot one of the crew. However, it is clear that hijacking a plane projects a very high degree of violence towards the passengers, the employees of the airline, all of their families and the wider world.

Leila Khaled was arrested by the British in September 1970 and was released in October of the same year when she was exchanged for hostages taken in another hijacking. She became what we now call a ‘celebrity’, an object of popular art and music and the subject of a film released in 2005. Would she have been so popular if she had murdered hundreds of people, as she came close to doing?

The answer seems to be yes, if we look at the global fame of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, hero of the Cuban revolution of 1959 and leader of the almost operatic world rebellion against something or other. Che personally murdered a large number of fathers, grandfathers brothers, sons and uncles who history describes as simply as opponents of Fidel Castro, before, during and in the post-revolution ‘cleaning-up’ and yet he stands as the posthumous CEO of the largest and most successful brand of T-shirts that the world has ever seen. He died alone, shot in a peasant’s hut in the middle of Bolivia having failed to bring revolution to that relatively settled country.

I could go on – Baader-Meinhof, Anders Behring Breivik  - but the point is made. When human society started allowing the apparent complexities of politics and tribal perspective to break murder down into different categories, we made it excusable, and even acceptable in many cases.

Politics is the process that we have created to resolve the many conflicts of interests that human society experiences. The resolution itself does not have to be peaceful although that is preferable. In politics resolution can be found through compromise, partnership, constitutional compulsion or violence. If it is to be violence then murder is often the result as a few, well reported, deaths seem to concentrate minds remarkably quickly, as we have just seen in Turkey.

In order to commit murder motivated by political belief one must first embrace that belief as being the most important thing in life. Extreme nationalism and fanatical tribal/religious loyalty fit the bill perfectly because they are childishly simple. They encapsulate right and wrong in the starkest of terms. Anyone who disagrees is either a traitor to the nation or a denier of God and these crimes can be ascribed to non-people who can then easily be dehumanized in the mind of the murderer.

For Gavrilo Princip, Franz Ferdinand could be dehumanized as an enemy of the nation. For Thomas Mair, Jo Cox was simply a self-hating traitor to Britain and could not therefore be human. For Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the people gathered on the Promenade des Anglais were inhuman infidels and oppressors, celebrating while God and the Uma suffered at the hands of Godless western imperialism. People whose humanity has been removed through a process of intensive propaganda and then further diminished by the murderer’s very narrow selective thought are not like the rest of ‘us’, they are less than ‘us’.

We see two dynamic processes at work among the general population. The first is our willingness to accept political violence, including murder, as being somehow different from more normal ‘normal’ kinds of murder. We are provided with and often try to understand the historic and political justifications that we are offered, by various protagonists, for the taking of life. We often hear and read about ‘politically motivated’ violence and tend to go along with that special status. This, in turn, validates the same special status that the political murderer has already assigned himself. He believes himself to be different, to be the instrument of the people, righting wrongs on their behalf for which they will celebrate him, perhaps through martyrdom. He is willing to take the police bullets for the nation, the cause, the Uma.

Well I think we need to put a stop to this as soon as possible. I think we need to start seeing murder as simply that, no matter who we are and whose side we are on. We should allow no special circumstances, no justification, no historical glory. We must take that responsibility on ourselves, as individuals.

That, I think, will help us overcome the mindset that makes us all seem to be victims of terrorism because terrorism is not the act itself, it is the collective state of mind induced as a result of single or mass murders. At the moment we are convinced by the governments and the media that we are under various forms of attack from a number of terrorist organisations with political/religious agendas. However, remember that governments and the media have their own agendas and a state of terror makes people more pliable.  

If we remove that special status from our thinking and simply accept that we are currently at the mercy of a number of disturbed people who simply want to kill innocent human beings, because it gives them a sense of validation or self-worth, then we may come to realise that it is not acceptable, it is not justifiable. There are no special circumstances.

Gavrilo Princip was a double murderer. The man who killed Jo Cox in cold blood in the street, is a murderer. Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was a mass murderer. Period.

[rfrew]

Fog in the Channel, Continent Cut Off

This is a headline from a London newspaper in the late Victorian era that I was told about at school. I can’t remember which newspaper, it may have been The Times, but I regard my source as impeccable being my much admired secondary History teacher.

It spoke to a nation in its absolute prime, leading a global empire comprising the most powerful economy the world had ever seen. It was a nation that ruled the world’s oceans with a navy created to protect the long commercial lines of communication to Africa, Asia and the America’s. A navy whose policy was to be twice as big as those of its two most powerful competitors combined and an army designed to be professional enough to deal with native uprisings but too small to compete with the huge but irrelevant land forces of Germany, France and Russia.

Britain did not have to care about Europe in the late 19th century because her economic interests, the markets for her manufactured goods and sources of raw materials, lay elsewhere. Britain was the trading nation supreme. With fog in the Channel, Europe really was cut off and thankfully unseen.

Today, after a brief affair, Britain has turned her rudder to continental Europe once more, currently the world’s largest trading block. We have our country back and from behind her newly controlled borders and at the behest of a majority who appear to have little understanding of economics, she will seek, so we are told, to re-establish direct trade agreements in the wider world. What are the prospects of this actually happening, what does Britain have to trade?

One of my clearest memories from the time of Harold Wilson’ government in the 1960s was the almost biblical credibility given to the monthly balance of trade figures. Breaths were held and cigarettes were nervously lit as the BBC News pronounced on the health of the economy using export/import results and the mysterious imponderable of ‘invisible earnings’. The information seemed quite simple to understand, did Britain earn more or less than she spent by trade with the rest of the world? Yes, good. No, bad.

The BBC stopped giving us the monthly balance of trade figures a long time ago. Instead we receive nightly bulletins from the City of London on the valuation of companies on the various stock markets in Britain and elsewhere. This information is meaningless to most people and only useful to shareholders, their brokers and investment bankers. The F.T.S.E. induces hysterical panic one evening and worshipful reassurance the next and holds the nation in its thrall as we watch the line on the graph rise and fall at the end of each day. It is a slice of drama for a largely ignorant audience.

The population are no longer shown Britain’s monthly balance of trade figures because, as www.tradingeconomics.com helpfully informs us, Britain has continuously run a massive trading deficit since 1998. Even with what are now called financial services and capital movement earnings, Britain runs at a trading loss. She is no longer the trading nation supreme.

Now, the factors that combine to create the monthly balance of trade snapshot of the economy are too varied and complex for me to attempt to explain here but let’s take a quick look at industrial manufacturing as an example.

The next time you are sitting in a jam on the M25 or on the M6 near Birmingham or on the Edinburgh ring road take a look around you and consider how many vehicles you see that are manufactured by British-owned companies. Next time you are close to a major British river try to find a shipyard. Next time you are at a British airport take some time to find a wholly British-made aircraft. When you go to buy your next phone see if you can find that world class British designed and assembled smart phone. We do not make never mind export mass market manufactured goods anymore and that is not the fault of the E.U.

The British economy is now structured around property, retail and financial services. We buy and sell houses to each other and care passionately about the property market. We buy vast amounts of food and other goods from supermarkets and malls but much of the produce is imported and the shops are owned by foreign shareholders. The City of London is the one economic constant remaining from the days of the British Empire, second only in power and influence to Wall Street. Without the profits made by The City, Britain’s trading position would be spectacularly worse. Yet how much of its total investment capital is used to benefit the UK economy?

The City uses its money to make money and its importance is reflected in its daily results being posted on the BBC. But to be honest the BBC has nothing else to show. Britain’s balance of trade results are so poor that they actually drag all of the country’s other economic indicators down with them. It might be better if Britain stopped engaging in trade altogether. But if we didn’t import on such a massive scale our shops would have very little to sell to us and the important retail sector, a major pillar of the economy, would collapse. Britain is certainly a large economy but it is fundamentally internal in nature and neither dynamic nor particularly stable, as we saw during the most recent ‘financial crisis’.

Britain is no longer a profitable exporter in the world market, we run at a loss and have done for almost 30 years with no sign of that trend being reversed. Britain, in terms of trade, is now a branch economy. My question therefore is simply this, what kind of beneficial trading deals can Britain make beyond the European Union?

Before I finish, a brief note on Scotland whose ‘government’ is very keen to remain in the E.U. at all costs. Statistics issued by the Scottish government show that in Scotland new business start-ups consistently lag behind the U.K. average by 15-20%. Even with oil and the export of specific products, the underlying trend in Scotland is fundamentally stagnant because fewer people in Scotland even consider starting a business. They prefer to wait for someone to employ them, including the state. Scotland remains a branch economy within what is now a branch economy.

Overall, the simplistic nationalist idea that countries can be ‘taken back’ depends entirely on the health of their economies and on who now owns them. Without taking that into consideration, all thoughts of independence are simply fog-bound political theatre.

Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the onrushing Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership treaty…

[rfrew]

Europe’s comfortable suicide

‘Submission’ by Michel Houellebecq, Heinemann 2015

Review by Ronnie Smith

‘A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today…Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.’ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from a speech delivered at Harvard in 1978.

In this speech and his associated writing, Solzhenitsyn delivered his verdict on the decadence and decline of the West and the West has hated him for it ever since. Without paying attention to what he was saying, our elites easily found Solzhenitsyn guilty of biting the hand that fed him during his years of exile in the United States. The Nobel Prize winner’s return to what became Putin’s Russia in 1994 remains an act of betrayal for those who imagine Russia’s cultural integration with Western secularism to be merely postponed. Our backs were turned on him and he was considered a strange figure, stuck in a Tolstoian fantasy.  

So it is with Michel Houellebecq whose most recent novel, ‘Submission’ (‘Soumission’ in French) portrays Europe’s intellectual laziness as clearly as any writer can in our age of comfortable denial. Houellebecq, inevitably labelled by many in the somnolent media and literary establishments on both sides of the English Channel, the ‘enfant terrible’ of French and European literature. Houllebecq the supposed bitter hater of women and of Islam. Houellebecq the nihilist who cares about nothing and who proposes nothing. Houellebecq the novelist who refuses to accept the orthodox and optimistic vision of our changing European home. Houellebecq who fails to afford interviews and interviewers the respect they crave. Houllebecq, whose observation of and contempt for European hypocrisy drips, without pleasure, from the pages of his work.

‘Submission’ was published in France on the day of the Charlie Hebdo atrocity in Paris, an event that immediately destroyed whatever promotional strategy had been devised by the publisher, Flammarion. Charlie Hebdo created an entirely uncontrolled environment for the book’s launch, one which facilitated a hysterical sensationalism around Houellebecq’s latest contribution to the perceived struggle with Islam and thus a general miss-reading of the author’s intentions became inevitable. Houellbecq cancelled all interviews and television appearances after the attack took place and left Paris for the country; not only for fear of the immediate effects on his book but, far more importantly, because one of his best friends was among those murdered at Charlie Hebdo. For Houellebecq, France’s painful post imperial, multi-cultural journey is very much his own.

Now, of course, we have the immigrant/refugee crisis that is destroying the European dream of free movement within the E.U.’s borders and will certainly increase cultural tension across the continent in the long term. The crisis provides a further filter through which to view ‘Submission’, a work that is intended to read unfiltered.

The book is shorter and considerably leaner than Houellebecq’s previous novels. It seems that, in this case, he gave up trying to discuss and prove progressive degradation through long passages of automatic monologue and discourse. Instead, he describes it through the reactions of his protagonist, Francoise, to an invented political and cultural crisis in France. In effect he creates a case study through which to study western intellectual disengagement from the real world.

Francoise is a tenured academic at the Sorbonne who remains closely attached to the subject of his PhD, Jorl-Karl Huysmans, a writer who travelled a path through decadence to spirituality in his own life and work. Through Francoise’ thoughts and experiences we are invited to silently live the consequences of France’s long retreat into secular materialism.

Francoise has lost his way in Paris and has become completely alone less than half-way through the story with the desertion of his girlfriend, the death of both his parents and an abject carelessness in his relationships with others. In short, his own crisis creates a heightened vulnerability that mirrors that of traditional but hollowed-out republican France. Generally ill-informed, he finds himself marginally involved in the transformation of France from being famed as the most ‘civilised’ of western societies to becoming the most developed in the Islamic world.

A moderate Islamic party has formed, the Muslim Brotherhood. In the face of the final degeneration of the county’s choreographed post De Gaulle party system of turn-about government, the Muslim Brotherhood, led by an astute and intelligent character that we never meet, quickly gains strong electoral support and forms a coalition with a weakened Socialist party to win the the Presidential election of 2022. There is no serious principled objection to the government of a Muslim party as the greater fear remains the Front National, still led by the tireless Marine Le Pen.

In Houellebecq’s scenario, the unengaged French majority will prefer a comfortable and elegant Islamisation rather than the harsh and divisive regime of the ‘extreme’ Right. For the people, materialism has long ago replaced ethnicity and religion as the country’s core value. The Front National represents only those who have been excluded from this cultural reality.

Important things change very quickly but without the anticipated degree of social unrest. The violence that does occur is quickly snuffed out and hushed-up by the perennially adaptable and utilitarian establishment. State spending on education beyond the age of 14 is drastically reduced, to be replaced by vocational training. Everything else, including the university sector, is privatised. High level secular education is available but it must be paid for. Francois is one of many who loses his job during the initial review of university provision.

The economy is restructured to ensure that small, family-run, business is supported while removing the state credits and tax breaks normally awarded to the corporate sector. This has a knock-on effect on social policy with social benefits being reduced thus moving resources and emphasis away from the individual and back to the family unit. The family is a core for the Muslim Brotherhood, it forms the basis for everything while the individual, the basic unit of modern secular society, is to have his/her sovereignty rescinded.

This in turn allows the Muslim Brotherhood to form a strong relationship with the Catholic Church which endorses a great deal of the Brotherhoods ideas and values. Let’s not forget that they have a considerable amount in common far beyond the mere sharing of God, if we exclude the right to take up to four wives. For the churches, non-belief is the enemy and differences over how to believe fade to insignificance when the separation of church and state is dissolved.

Houellebecq makes great play of the changing laws on and attitudes to clothing with the Burka being fully restored amid a general and voluntary imposition of what used to be termed ‘decency’ on the streets. Crime in the banlieues all but vanishes and the country becomes more peaceful than at any time during the post-war period. However Sharia law is not introduced, the coalition stops short of that. This is moderate Islam, not the fundamentalist variety that we have been educated to fear.

Strategically, the new government’s plan is to move the fulcrum of the European Union south, away from the finance-obsessed Protestants of Germany and central Europe towards the Mediterranean where a more humane and Godly alliance is possible. France will be established as the leader of a new power bloc that includes Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Turkey and eventually Egypt who would all join the European Union. This expanded and decidedly less Teutonic E.U. will provide an effective, less neurotic but independent partner for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States whose relationship with the ultra-materialist U.S.A. has failed.

This new France is presented by Houellebecq in such a simple and matter-of-fact way, by one of his intelligent and reasonable characters, that the reader while finding much of it unlikely, does not consider it impossible. More importantly, the generally straightforward and efficient acceptance of the transition by most of the population seems reasonably if not entirely credible. We simply have to look back to the Europe of the 1930s to understand that anything is possible. People will accept that which may previously have been considered unimaginable, if their material circumstances do not deteriorate or indeed improve, Hitler proved that to be the case.

The reader could easily be forgiven for thinking that Houellebecq’s purpose in writing ‘Submission’ is to show that a moderate Muslim revolution in the constitutional (republican) government of France would at least not be such a catastrophic event and at best could illuminate a brighter and more sustainable future for Europe as a whole. This interpretation would be a mistake.

‘Submission’s big idea is that French/European/Western secular materialism is simply too comfortable to provide the motivation and intellectual vigour to form and then activate a response to Islam. Francoise experiences the political and cultural upheaval in his country through a haze of introspection bordering on self-loathing. However, his standard of living is not threatened when he is fired by the university because a generous pension is immediately offered to him. He can still do what he wants, go where he pleases, eat and drink as he always has, afford the company of prostitutes and drive his Volkswagen Tuareg.

There are no material changes in Francoise’ personal life as an individual and even the emigration of his Jewish girlfriend to Israel cannot change the fundamentals of his life style and so he cannot conceive of circumstances in which he would offer any challenge to the Islamification of France. Nor, in Houellebecq’s estimation would millions of French people. So, if religion no longer motivates the French, and by extension the Europeans, to a defence of their fundamental culture what about patriotism? Surely a love of France, of French customs and traditions, the French language, the fabled cuisine or the French countryside would force people out of their seats?

Houellebecq thinks not, the many retreats and defeats suffered after Napoleon have seen a draining of national fervour among the general population. He doesn’t specifically mention it but one can imagine that the dreadful and pointless losses at Verdun in 1916 remains one of the great shocks to the French Psyche. So many died for nothing that it is impossible not to think that the general idea of dying for one’s country lost all credibility. We see the same thing throughout the rest of Europe. With the Germans’ lasting shame at what the Nazis did in their name, a universal perception of Italian incompetence and the loss of everything that the general population of the United Kingdom thought they owned.

It is true that a sense of genuine, spine-tingling collective pride among the masses is hard to find these days. It has now been replaced by consumerism and the almost manic purchasing of goods manufactured profitably in far-off places, making it harder for most people to find anything tangible to fight for. And let’s not forget that the great E.U. integrationist project is designed precisely to rid us of whatever sense of patriotism remains, without offering us anything meaningful in its place. Europe’s habit of fighting terrible wars has been cured but we are now seeing the price to be paid in our loss of motivation for and belief in the defence of what we once were.  

In an attempt to find some meaning in his life and to find some inspiration from his spiritual mentor, Huysmans, Francois travels to the Catholic shrine of Rocamadour in the Dordogne. He also spends some time at the monastery to which Huysmans retreated after his re-conversion to Catholicism. He is moved, his spirit is not completely dead, but only as a tourist might be affected in the presence of historical spirituality or by the authentic kindness shown by monks living beyond the modern world. Francois does not find any kind of Christian awakening profound enough to overcome his natural state of agnosticism.

In spite of the various distractions placed in its path and the serial misunderstanding thrown at it by Houellebecq’s critics, ‘Submission’ is a very easy book. There are signposts throughout the text and Houellebecq has done everything he can to be clear in his argument. This is not an anti-Islamic rant, there is not one disparaging word about Muslims to be found here. In fact, in an interview given to the BBC in 2006, Houellebecq said that he thought once about Islam ‘a while ago’ and hadn’t given it any thought since. No, this is a book about what might happen after the long, slow death of French, European and Western cultural passion, period.

Two questions remain.

Is ‘Submission’ a great book? Not yet. Too much is happening in the real world at this moment to make any kind of sensible assessment possible. Real people are drowning at sea, real families are marching across Europe in a reversal of the First Crusade, real bombs are being dropped on real targets within the borders that France and Britain decided to call Syria and Iraq and real Israelis are being stabbed by real Arabs in the streets of Jerusalem. Houellebecq’s book is completely lost in all this mayhem and ‘Submission’ may only become fully valued, for its moderation and clear vision, ten years from now.

Is Michel Houellebecq an important writer? Of course he is. His fiercest critics can’t wait for their free copy of his next book to drop through their letter boxes so that they can have another go at him. This is confirmation of his status. Possibly the most difficult task for a writer is to observe and interpret what is going on right now as there are so many contemporary witnesses only too happy to dispute any particular and subjective take on the world. Writers of historical and fantasy fiction don’t have the same problem. Jonathan Franzen and Douglas Coupland do the same thing in North America without challenging the fundamentals of their shared society and they are considered extremely important.

If anything Houellebecq is more important than any Western writer publishing today because he has the courage to confront and not just report our refusal both to think and to accept the consequences. His reduction of women in his work to a collection of body parts runs so counter to our present cultural mores as to be almost heroic. Political correctness dictates that we consider various reasons and excuses for Houellebecq’s contrary behaviour but the simple fact remains that he is entitled to write his truth, in fact it is his duty. If his experience is that men generally continue to see women as differentiated collections of body parts then he must include that fact in his analysis of our current condition. The self-censorship that Houellebecq opposes has become one of our most dangerous enemies and has greatly contributed to our cultural decline.

Solzhenitsyn’s comments on the West’s lack of courage do not refer to our willingness to bomb, strafe and otherwise engage militarily with Islamic extremism to defend our economic interests. He was talking about our fear of believing in something greater than our individual selves, something that cannot be bought at the mall. In ‘Submission’, Houellebecq calmly describes the results of clinging to that fear.

[rfrew]

The branding of everything

“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.” Jean Baudrillard

It took around five minutes after learning of the 13th November attacks in Paris for me to see my first image of Jean Jullien’s ‘iconic’ conflation of the ‘iconic’ Eiffel Tower and the ‘iconic’ ban-the-bomb logo. ‘Iconic’ is an over-used word but it seemed quite appropriate that two older icons should be combined to give birth to a third. Almost immediately I started to see people adopting the new icon as a changed profile picture on their endless and increasingly ill-informed comments across social media. It became clear that everyone had something, indeed many somethings to say, about this shocking event and yet and yet, ultimately it became clear that they had nothing of substance to contribute. How could they?

Commenting on social media satisfies our need to emit, for that is what ‘commenting’ and ‘sharing’ is. We fire signals out into the void, like the probes we send beyond the solar system containing coke cans telling the universe that we are imbeciles. We do it in order to feel that we are part of and connected to significant human events, to help us believe that we ourselves are significant.

Jean Jullien’s work, for example, is now firmly embedded in the events of November 13. He, or rather his simple drawing, has become part of millions of personal but very public responses to a murderous act of terrorism in a city that many of us know so well. With one simple click or tap, from the safety of our own keyboards or touchscreens, we can become ‘Charlie’ whenever we choose. It seems that a Jean Jullien or a Banksy will always be on hand to supply us with the logo around which we can gather online to emote and find security by emitting together.

However commendably social this may at first appear, Jean Jullien’s spontaneous and clever little icon immediately and significantly reduced the scope of our thinking about the event. He literally gave expression to the binary idea of ‘Ban the bomb in Paris’. It is a visual slogan designed, like every other slogan, to simplify and encapsulate a limited understanding of complex issues and events for the benefit of large numbers of people.

In effect, Jean Jullien branded the event and channelled all of our shock and outrage in a particular and almost gratifying direction. His logo presented us with an off-the-shelf response that huge numbers of us grasped with both hands and remember, in the virtual world there is no shortage of stock. The intellectual brand is only a click away. Supply will always match demand and just as the Apple, Nike and Mercedes logos are universally recognized and trigger a deliberate and narrow set of intellectual and emotional responses, so too will the Eiffel ban the bomb. We can expect to see T-shirts and fridge magnets in the shops on the Rue de Rivoli, as the grotesque dynamic of our all-important market takes hold, at a decent interval of course.

The reduction of our understanding of complex issues to simple formulae has become increasingly necessary for our shallow social media discourse. We also seem to depend more on what are referred to as ‘memes’, ‘tropes’ and ‘info-grams’ (note American spelling) in order to both transmit and receive digestible information. We have become so used to communicating through the use of branding symbols that it is becoming perfectly normal, over time, for our thinking to shrink to the same level. For example we are far more likely now to copy, paste and share a headline with an appropriate comment without ever stopping to think of it in terms other than those which the original editor intended. It just takes a few seconds. Actually it’s a bad habit that I have to stop.

It is often said that we now have far more information available to us than ever before. Those younger than me have grown up with this ‘advantage’ and so have not experienced the enforced periods of reflection between TV and radio bulletins that were only transmitted during lunch and dinner. They never got to see Panorama once each week. I know a number of people who spent all of 14 November connected to 24 hour news channels of one kind or another. They received, rapidly digested and breathlessly regurgitated information through social media all day long with almost everyone following the simple tone set by Jean Jullien.

The events in Paris consumed them and countless others and frankly, they collectively contributed to the vast ocean of hysteria that accumulated throughout the days that followed. The information they received was necessarily shallow because it was immediate. They could therefore not consider that information in any depth and so their subsequent emissions on social media were equally shallow, inaccurate, self-regarding and pointless. There was a deafening stampede of empty comment across the world, unified in loyalty to Jean Jullien’s brand logo.

But how many of those sharing and empathising possess a genuine understanding of the astoundingly complex matrix of interests, actions and reactions over many years leading to the Paris atrocity? Going back to the Charlie Hebdo attack, how many of those claiming membership of that cult of solidarity had any previous knowledge of Charlie Hebdo whatsoever? Furthermore, how many of them, had they known about it beforehand, would have condemned the magazine for being politically incorrect and ‘racist’?

The concepts of meaning and consequence are becoming confused. In TV studios, the pages of newspapers and the outpouring of bloggers the question, ‘but what do the Paris attacks mean…?’ was constantly asked. The answers usually included the phrases, ‘greater airport security, increased surveillance, closed borders and the de-facto suspension of the Schengen Treaty’. But these are consequences, not elements of meaning. Consequences that personally affect us, causing us greater inconvenience but not enhancing our understanding. For meaning, deep and substantial meaning in this case, you probably have to start with T.E. Lawrence. For example; The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. As it has turned out, he was guilty of gross understatement.

I suggest we hurry up as it seems that the corporate world, with its tightly structured discourse, is in the process of commandeering how we think about and communicate our ideas on politics, society and morality. Thus we will become unable to consider the meaning of our lives and events as anything other than an expression of interests, informing our perceived need to meet pre-set intellectual targets.

Logos, brands, icons and slogans are representations of ideas, concepts, responses and values. They are at best two dimensional and are not an indication of a deeper understanding of anything. They are mere sign posts intended to point followers and customers in a direction pre-ordained by their creators on behalf, in turn, of their sponsors. Executive summaries rather than comprehensive reports.

Brands.

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Drones - the end of legality in war

On the ninth of January this year we learned that almost three hundred British people had received letters from a body called the Iraq Historic Allegations Team regarding investigations into their conduct during military operations in Iraq. The investigations concern allegations of fundamental breeches in the ‘rules of war’ including torture and the murder of civilians. We have been told to expect prosecutions over the next three years.

The rules of war are of course governed by various international treaties and protocols and, apart from anything else, they exist to reassure most of us that those who kill and are killed in our name behave in a civilised manner. The ‘rules of war’ attempt to define the difference between the primeval desire to resolve threats and disagreements by killing and a form of organised and structured killing that we can feel comfortable with, as we watch variations of Shock and Awe on the TV news while eating dinner.

I suspect that designing and implementing the rules of war is far from easy because we, the human race, are always at it. The Battle of Solferino, the First and Second World Wars, Vietnam are only some of the most recent human conflicts that prompted attempts to restrain our baser instincts.  

Of course we must remember that, these days, many of those charged with drafting and administering the rules do not have direct personal experience of war; they’ve never actually been shot at, shelled, mined or bombed from the air. This, I think lends a certain surreal sense to the fundamental concept of the ‘rules of war’. Can such an activity have rules and do those rules make any sense amidst the immediate pandemonium of death and destruction?  

Looking at what’s left of Syria one has to ask if the rules have any relevance there. I am reminded of the rational informing Colonel Kurtz’s behaviour in Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’; war-fighting without hypocrisy. His methods were judged to have become ‘unsound’, for which his command was to be ‘terminated with extreme prejudice’.  

Since the end of the Second World War, western countries have managed to fight all their wars in other parts of the world, largely in defence of their individual and collective economic interests. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has become the collective agent of that strategy and so we, on whose behalf if operates, rely on official press briefings and edited footage for most of our information. I think it’s fair to say that Vietnam was the last war in which we received uncontrolled coverage of its conduct and we may consider the My Lai atrocity and the ‘napalm girl’ as notable examples.

There seems to be a complete absence of hypocrisy when we consider the use of armed drones today. The major powers are developing this technology as quickly as possible because, in tandem with their satellite infrastructures, it provides risk-free military capacity on a global scale. The violent pandemonium of manned warfare is being replaced by x-box as a growing number of youngsters twiddle their joy-sticks in silent bunkers in the U.S., U.K., France, Russia and China, remotely taking-out targets on the other side of the world.

The rules of war clearly don’t apply to drone operations as the U.S., for example, has been bombing targets inside Pakistan and a number of other countries without any formal declarations of hostility and often without informing the local authorities. Civilian casualties are generally unreported or misreported but some spectacular incidences of attacks on weddings and other non-military targets have come to light. These things appear to be beyond the responsibility of the administrators of the rules of war

Perhaps international law lags behind the use of armed drones because personnel are not actually involved in the operational zone. No troops cross borders, there is no manned penetration of airspace or territorial waters, there are no illegal ‘special incursions’ of the kind that saw Osama bin Laden executed in Pakistan. And that raises another question; at what point does a drone strike cease to be a military operation and become an execution by a state without legal sanction?

As nearly 300 British veterans experience the profound shock of the allegations against them, are the x-box kids in their bunkers, twiddling their joy-sticks and picking out targets on their computer screens, wondering if they will be receiving similar letters a few years from now?  

Or are we all just waiting for the major incident that will drive fundamental changes to our rules of war?

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The Trump phenomenon and what it says about us

Donald John Trump was born in the New York Borough of Queens in 1946. He grew up during the U.S.A.’s post-war boom and became a very successful business man, a billionaire at the head of The Trump Organisation with properties and resorts across America and around the world. He is a dominating character, a celebrity in the US - bold, brash and an accomplished master of self-publicity. Probably because of this, many people in the English speaking world do not like Mr Trump.

At the moment, Mr Trump is one of the leading contenders to win the Republican Party’s nomination for the Presidential election to be held in November this year. Mr Trump is not a politician. He has never held public office in the US; he has not been a Congressman, a state Governor or a city Mayor. He is financing his primary election campaign largely by himself and has raised and spent less money than any of his opponents so far. Mr Trump is an outsider in that he is neither a part of the Republican Party establishment, their Washington insider network or their corporate interest supporters. For this reason too, Mr Trump is disliked and distrusted within the party for whom he is striving to win the White House. Many voters see this as a strength and for the media it contributes to the kind of legend that boosts ratings and sells advertising.

In June last year Karl Rove, during a speech in Missouri in which he categorized the likely Republican candidates for the nomination, called Donald Trump an ‘idiot’ and a ‘moron’ with little chance of success in the primary elections now taking place. This is significant as Mr Rove is the man who performed the miracle of managing the politics that saw George W. Bush enjoy a two-term Presidency and remains a senior figure in the Republican Party’s political organization. He deserves to be listened to. Mr Rove is also a major provider of funding to Republican establishment candidates for Congressional and Presidential elections through his super PAC, ‘American Crossroads’.

A super PAC is a large scale foundation set up privately to channel donations from groups, companies and individuals to candidates and campaigns of both Republican and Democratic parties. They are a response to the political funding controversy that periodically raises its head in western democracies insofar as they must regularly publish accounts but neither their fund raising nor spending is capped. Incidentally, Hilary Clinton is shown to be the candidate who has raised and spent the most money in the Democratic primary campaign so far. Mr Jeb Bush has been the wealthiest of the Republicans although it hasn’t done him much good as he trails disastrously in the polls.

Mr Trump and Mr Rove do not like each other and while Mr Rove was insulting Mr Trump, Mr Trump was calling Mr Rove a ‘loser’ for wasting the hundreds of millions of dollars raised by his super PAC on weak candidates. Mr Trump, as far as I know, does not have or benefit from a super PAC. Mr Rove is the consummate political analyst and his political consultancy is based on a meticulous examination of demographics and psephology using data from virtually all of the counties in the US. Mr Trump, on the other hand, is an emotional campaigner using very different data sets to those employed by Mr Rove.

Mr Trump is a populist, a salesman consciously saying and doing the things that his market intelligence tells him to be appropriate in the search for votes across the states. He is inconsistent, uncontrollable and not very interested in Mr Rove’s general strategy for placing a safe and responsible Republican in the White House in November. However, when Mr Rove calls Mr Trump an ‘idiot’ it is not because he actually believes that, far from it. Mr Rove is simply trying to get as many other people as possible to believe it through speeches, media appearances and through his website. Mr Trump is the established Republican Party’s nightmare and Mr Rove is their guardian in this case.

Mr Trump’s campaign so far has been a masterclass in large scale segmental marketing. He has, over many years, established his product in a market that he has come to broadly understand. The product is himself and he has placed it in the strongest possible position. The fact that he is the product has made the project less expensive than other campaigns that seek to appeal to a wider audience through processing a set of relatively complex socio-economic concepts and policy positions. Mr Trump simply has to get himself around the country, constantly, and talk to as many members of his more narrowly-targeted audience as possible.

But what is Mr Trump’s message, what is he saying?

Mr Trump is really a traditional American populist. He is trying to win his party’s nomination through an election process in which there are perhaps three other serious opponents. A fourth opponent, the establishment’s initial front runner, appears to have already been eliminated. All Mr Trump had to do was label Jeb Bush as ‘low energy’ and Jeb did the rest of the damage, by being low energy. In order to build the all-important momentum, Mr Trump has focused on pushing hard enough to carry him past his remaining opponents. He needs around 30-35% support to begin with and he has calculated that the disgruntled Conservative right, including the notorious Tea Party, will provide a firm foundation for his campaign. If he can solidify that 30-35% some of the remaining, moderate, Conservatives may follow. That is Mr Trump’s strategy, rational rather than phenomenal.

Mr Trump’s message has, I believe, been carefully modulated to be heard by white, blue collar workers and their families across American who have already lost or who fear losing their jobs. People living in the vast less prosperous tracts of the country’s interior who feel that America is not what it once was, who feel betrayed by Washington and the wealthy coastal elites, who feel their security and their certainties - Barack Obama’s famous ‘guns and God’ - to be under threat. Mr Trump understands that the key is to address this sense of grievance that has either been ignored or never even seen by the more cosmopolitan parts of the country and the rest of the world.

Mr Trump has therefore proclaimed himself to be the man who will ‘Make America great’ again and reclaim her for the great repressed mass of ‘real’ Americans.  He is the man who will finally take on and banish the feeble compromising liberals in Washington. He will deal with the traitors who signed the free trade agreements that see millions of American jobs going overseas. He will sort out the traitors in Nike, Apple and all the other wealthy corporations who refuse to manufacture their products at home. He will confront the greed of the banks who continually destroy the economy and perpetuate real poverty among ordinary home owning citizens, the same banks who hijacked Ronald Reagan’s economic ‘miracle’. Mr Trump will restore the Constitution and halt the takeover of the nation’s institutions, including healthcare, by Obama’s communists.

In campaign narrative Mr Trump is that successful American who can use all his skills and experience to lift the entire country out of the mess that years of stupid leadership have placed it. America’s greatness is based on its economy. ‘America’s business is business’, as President Calvin Coolidge said and Mr Trump is here to show us how that is still very much the case. Mr Trump is seen as the real deal, not like those liberal ‘losers’ Mitt Romney and John McCain. And not like the flakey Sarah Palin who stole the Tea Party’s heart and then broke it.

Mr Trump hit the ground running with his notorious early speech attacking Mexico, Mexicans, the lack of a strong border with Mexico and, by implication, the much-hated North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In a few brief sentences he got straight to the core of what bothers most people in his chosen constituency; foreigners with poor English, compromising liberal traitors, American values swamped and a failure to defend the flag in its every aspect. Ever since that speech, Mr Trump has been leading the Republican primary polls, packing larger and larger halls with those wanting a piece of the Trump demagoguery and crusading around the country with most of the media at his tail. He hasn’t needed to pay much for air time as he’s pretty much on-air 24/7. His investment in celebrity is paying off.

He has spoken without a hint of political correctness to millions of Americans who are simply not politically correct and they love what they consider his arrogant and defiant plain speaking. ‘Yes we can take our country back with this guy.’ It’s the Conservative version of Obama’s audacity of hope.

At this point I have two political questions.

Every successful presidential candidate in my lifetime has won the White House by building a temporarily cohesive coalition across the diverse United States. To do this, various interests must be reconciled and promises made to often competing groups. In short, winning the Presidency requires a sophisticated level of compromise that not only secures the election but makes a working majority in Congress possible for most of the time. That is why post-primary Presidential elections can become quite dull because the candidates need to be cautious and guarded in what they are committing themselves to. Candidates seek to inspire without scaring the horses.

If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, how is he going to create a successful coalition around his candidacy after such a divisive and controversial primary campaign? Having offended and shunned many of the groups from whom he will need some level of support, how will he recover to avoid being soundly beaten by a comprehensive anti-Trump tidal wave in November?

Secondly, and this is related to the first question. Having watched Mr Trump’s body language on stage as Sarah Palin endorsed him, I actually wonder if he is serious about winning the nomination at all. He stood patiently, a few yards back, smiling guardedly as she rambled on in her customary garbled manner; praising him, exhorting the audience and taking the entire show further and further away from the generally electable mainstream.

I wondered what he was thinking at that moment; ‘Isn’t this great? Things are really rolling now!’ Or ‘Shit, this crazy idea will come back to bite me in the ass come November or even sooner.’

Sarah Palin’s endorsement carries uncertain benefits as she is no longer universally revered by Conservative America and is a figure of ridicule for everyone else. Such a theatrically close relationship with her brand seemed to me to be Mr Trump’s first tactical mistake. His smile on stage was indulgent, uncomfortable and unconvincing. I think she got more out of his endorsement than he got from hers’.

I can’t believe he was talked into this event but if he was then it was a moment of weakness. If it was his idea then I wonder if he is becoming bored with the whole thing and is positioning himself as the graceful loser, the guy who tried but failed to break the system.

Mr Trump is, after all, a salesman. He has been on national TV for months now in the largest market in the world, by value, selling himself, his businesses and his books. He has made a number of very clear statements about what he thinks is wrong with America and a significant number of people seem to agree with him. He has surely bought himself a place at the table of the American establishment. Perhaps that was his objective all along or perhaps he really does intend to go all the way.

I look at his lack of real spending so far, I look at what I will call the Palin incident and I look at his apparent lack of a hands-dirty political organization on the ground and I just wonder if he is serious. But we will see, enough speculation.

Our reaction to Donald Trump interests me greatly. He’s either John Wayne in a suit or a mixture of Professor Moriarty, Barnum and Bailey and Richard Nixon rolled into one. Hundreds of millions of people who’ve never met the guy profess to either love or hate him. None of them care that he wields no political power as yet and probably never will. Countless people fear Mr Trump’s finger on the nuclear button, on a par with their fear of Vladimir Putin of Kim Jong Un. The British House of Commons, even before the primary elections began, wasted time considering banning Mr Trump from the country because over 300,000 people signed a petition to that effect.

Have we all lost our minds?

Being charismatic and intemperate has placed Mr Trump at the center of a global system of projection. Being a wealthy businessman, being American, being married three times, daring to borrow one million dollars from his own father, being gaudy and having the audacity to stand for public office in spite of his many faults seems to be too much for many people in this age of mass, angry communication.

His detractors laugh at his hair, his clothes and his wealth, as if he were to be pitied and abhor his impertinence in writing airport lounge books on business success. On the other side his supporters genuinely believe that he is really going to challenge America’s exclusive system of power. They can hear knees knocking in Congress and on Wall Street and they can see corporate America shaking in its shoes.

Why are we so desperate to hate and love two-dimensional strangers so profoundly?

Every candidate who stands before us, for whatever reason, attempts to convince us of their virtue. They seek our trust and actually they need us more than we need them. We in turn need to believe that at least some of them are worth it. That they are honest and public-spirited and that they really care about those who support them. We strain every nerve to believe in those we support. Everyone upholds the idea that our system should be virtuous and led by virtuous people. Was Abraham Lincoln virtuous? It really depends on whose side you were on during ‘the war of northern aggression’.

Frankly, it’s extremely difficult to keep the idea of virtue alive in the face of the mounting corruption and weakness that we see in our governments and we are becoming tired of grasping at straws. Underhand deals with corrupt regimes, the banks, the mystery of Syria, Iran-contra, Watergate, pork-barrel politics, excuses rather than policies and so on.

Is Donald Trump more or less qualified than anyone else who has ever sought the nomination of either party in the United States? Neither, he’s just louder and more visible than many of the others and so perhaps the reflection he offers us of ourselves is more sharply focused. Let’s not forget that we, the audience and the customers, created Donald Trump.

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Aging and Losing One’s Historical Context

I confess that I am never too busy to take part in an argument on facebook. I join any number of what I perceive to be interesting fora, on many topics and then, as they say, I get ‘stuck in’. Recently an administrator of one of my currently favourite forums was reported to facebook by one of the other members. His crime was to post a photograph of a young naked girl running down a road. On the face of it you might think that is fair enough these days when even an un-gloved hand can give offence. However, in this case the photograph in question was Napalm Girl from Vietnam and the point of its use was to explain how important photographs remain in shaping public opinion by comparing Napalm Girl to the more recent Dead Infant on the beach. Both photos significantly changed government strategy by creating massive groundswells of public opposition to current policy. We are seeing the effects of Dead Infant right now across Europe. Of course Napalm Girl, in combination with the events at My Li, helped overturn the American public’s fragile support for the war in Vietnam and led inevitably to the footage of the last chopper leaving Saigon. I say ‘of course’ because I’m old enough to have seen the footage of Napalm Girl at the time it was originally broadcast. I have always assumed its timeless significance in western liberal culture. I was wrong. As discussion raged on the forum it became clear that most of the participants had no knowledge of Napalm Girl, My Li or the Vietnam War in general. Most of them simply did not understand that the girl was running down the road, naked, because the napalm jelly had burned away all her clothes and was searing its way into her skin. Most of them had never even heard of napalm and they didn’t recognise the nature and seriousness of the girl’s injuries. To them she was a naked girl on display in our age of political correctness, in the context of the endlessly publicised sexual exposure and abuse of children. At first I was astonished by my correspondents’ apparently extraordinary level of ignorance. How could they not know anything about such a core historical and cultural event? But I’ve come to realise that it’s my problem. Why should images and events that have stayed with me for decades hold any relevance for younger people for whom the Vietnam War and all its baggage holds no meaning? The fact is that my context, the lens through which I’ve witnessed and stored my life’s experiences, is different from theirs and I’m only now old enough to realise that this has always been the case. That is the simple answer to the question, ‘Why do we never learn from history?’ We don’t learn from history because the overwhelming majority of us do not care about things and events that have happened before our particular ‘time’ and beyond our personal experience. Napalm is now banned and is therefore rarely used, so people younger than I have never seen its effects. It is also clear that they have seen neither Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’ nor John Wayne’s  ‘The Green Berets’ but that is an issue for another essay. Commentators often complain about our having more information than ever and yet we are clearly becoming dumber and dumber. Actually, I don’t remember us all sitting quietly in our public libraries reading about the First Crusade or the English Civil War before the advent of smart phones, tablets and boundless internet. Professors Steven Runciman and Christopher Hill were never household names and their work is even less well-known than napalm. In fact, nothing has changed with regard to our being generally dumb. We simply know more about the little we always knew. I’m afraid that we do not learn from history, we learn from personal experience gained during the time that we are on earth. Sadly this seems to be true at all level of society. People continue to drink and smoke and break their legs on expeditions to the Alps or on the rugby field. Businessmen go bankrupt in large numbers and banks tend to repeatedly have no concept of risk. Politicians carry on as if there had never been crises and war until right now. The blankest of George W. Bush’s stares was reserved for the moment he when was asked if he thought that his invasion of Iraq would suffer the same fate as the USA’s involvement in Vietnam. My recent experience on facebook has forced a fundamental change in my perspective, probably for the better. So I have concluded that I can no longer consider myself to be living in a particular time. Rather, I now see that I am living simply in my time.

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The Pope and Mr Trump

The recent disagreement between Pope Francis and Mr Donald Trump raised a number of issues which I found both interesting, entertaining and in one case, fundamental.

As a member of the Jesuit order and being from Argentina, Pope Francis is considered to be among the most liberal men ever to have occupied the position. Indeed, he is one of the practitioners of what we came to call ‘liberation theology’ in the era of the notorious and brutal American-backed dictatorships in Latin America. With the exception of the Dali Lama and his friend Bishop Desmond Tutu, it is hard to think of a current religious leader more likely to oppose the direction of Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

Asked to consider Mr Trump’s campaign, comprising an apparent stream of illiberal outbursts and ideas designed to offend even the most balanced liberal, The Pope remarked that anyone wishing to build walls between people could not be considered Christian. It is not clear if the Pope was referring specifically to Mr Trump’s promise to build an imposing wall along the border between the USA and Mexico, to exclude the many criminal elements that he had previously identified. However, it is generally understood that Christ himself was primarily interested in bringing people, all people, together and it is reasonable to assume that he would not have approved of Mr Trump’s plan.

The Pope said that he didn’t want to become involved in the GOP’s quest for a presidential candidate and spoke only in general theological terms. However, in today’s world where the hysteria of our fevered media sets the tone for debate, he could not avoid being dragged into the Trump vortex as soon as he opened his mouth.

Mr Trump is the greatest exponent of the religion of ‘no publicity is bad publicity’ that I have seen in my lifetime. There is seemingly nothing and no-one that can escape assisting Mr Trump in whatever endeavor is currently engaging his attention. His singular focus on his own needs simply sucks everyone else into the drama and the Pope fell victim just like everyone else.

Mr Trump’s written response to the Pope’s comment was both amusing and telling. Reading it reminded me of Croft and Perry’s wonderful ‘Hi De Hi” and the letters written by the owner of Maplin’s holiday camp to his staff, tortuously read out by the manager, Mr Fairbrother. Those opposed to Mr Trump had a fabulous time making fun of his poor grammar and disconnected thinking; conflating his wall along the border with defeating IS at the gates of the Vatican, for which the Pope would be eternally grateful.

However, they failed to understand that Mr Trump had been able to use the Pope’s liberalism to his advantage within his chosen electoral demographic. In his continuingly successful campaign narrative, ‘Arrogant self-hating liberal stooges supporting namby-pamby liberal Pope, duped by the bad guys in Mexico’ is grist to Mr Trump’s populist mill.

Note also that Mr Trump did not say that the Pope had no right to comment on or get involved in politics. Even though he did say that the Pope had no right to make a judgement on his own Christianity.  I found that interesting and we should perhaps remember that Mr Trump’s mother and her family are MacLeods from the island of Lewis in the Scottish Hebrides, a community whose religious life remains dominated by a fundamentalist form of Calvinism. This is not to say that Mr Trump is an elder in the United Free Church of Scotland but I’m pretty sure that what religious foundations he possesses, worshipping God through self-reliance, hard work, maximizing his God-given gifts and material success, were passed down to him through his mother’s line.

For many Roman Catholics, Protestantism is a heresy and for a surprising number of Protestants, the Pope and the Catholic Church remain the apogee of idolatrous worship. Mr Trump does not fear the Pope, just as Henry the Eighth, founder of the Church of England, did not fear the Pope.

Returning to the right of religious leaders to involve themselves in the politics of the day, I have always considered that idea to be an infantile supposition on the part of modern politicians in ‘secular’ societies. The Pope, for example, sits at the head of a church of over 1.25 billion people. It is simply absurd to suggest that such an influential figure should not hold and express opinions on current events of every sort. Indeed, it would be absolutely negligent of him not to and to stay silent would prove the very irrelevance of the church that so many secular materialists insists is the case.

Note that secular politicians do not generally complain of religious interference when church leaders agree with them and, don’t forget, agreeable clerics are very important when God is required to support a war. No, I’m afraid it won’t do. The separation of church and state in modern societies is designed to prevent unelected clerics exerting political power and influence over secular government public policy, notwithstanding the presence of English bishops in the House of Lords. However, the principle does not, as far as I am concerned, prohibit religious leaders speaking their minds on matters that affect the daily lives of their flocks.

The Pope is perfectly entitled to use his position as one of the most senior interpreters of the word of Christ to condemn building barriers between people. Mr Trump is perfectly at liberty to disagree with him. We should expect and accept no less from both of them.

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The most important news on earth.

I have just read on the BBC, who posted it as a global headline, that JAY Z has changed the spelling of his name. I'm not sure that I will ever recover from what is easily the most shockingly significant piece of news that I have heard in my lifetime.

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The people who keep us free

Governments love silence, we must all be Alex Navalny. Now!