The appointment of former Labour minister James Purnell to a top BBC job - one of those titles like Head of Vision or Strategy or something - is old news now, but computer problems have silenced this blog as effectively as the Stasi for a week or so, and Purnell has been on my mind.
The hoo-ha about his appointment is overdone. For one thing, try finding a person fit to be Head of Strategic Vision, say, who doesn't have political views of one sort or another. Impossible. For another, the head of the BBC Trust is Chris Patten, a former Tory minister, and I don't remember anyone being up in arms much about that.
But if the BBC really wanted to appoint Left wingers to senior posts, it wouldn't have to go to former politicians like Purnell. It would just carry on with the same recruitment policies it's had for years.
If an organisation recruits from a fairly narrow - in educational and class terms - band of people, it will tend to get people with a fairly similar outlook. To be specific, the BBC tends to recruit intelligent, well-educated middle-class people with a Humanities degree from a good University. Who could possibly have thought that they would tend to be Left of centre?
Despite the moanings of various disgruntled BBC luminaries like Antony Jay and Michael Buerk, I very much doubt that there is anything resembling overt political bias at the Corporation. But the BBC, the window through which British people tend to view the world, is a product of the attitudes of its staff, which in turn are a product of their background and education. Andrew Marr hit the nail on the head when he remarked that if your staff tend to live in a fairly small area of West London, and eat, drink and in some cases sleep together (he should know), "a certain group-think emerges".
And boy does it. The experience of moving to the provincial suburbs after 16 years of London (Balham, Notting Hill and finally Stoke Newington) has persuaded me that the majority of people in Britain march to a different drum-beat, and their views - conservative with a small c - are very different from the metropolitan elite. I don't always agree with them, but it's clear to me that the BBC doesn't represent them.
You notice it in the programmes that don't get made, the people who don't get interviewed, the questions that don't get asked and the assumptions that are made about where the centre ground in politics lies. The BBC retains a surprising deference about the Royal Family, but on the whole it sees the world through the eyes of liberal Humanities graduates. There are worse ways of seeing the world, but nevertheless the appointment of James Purnell is a red herring. It's the big picture that's a bit fishy.
Thursday 28 February 2013
Thursday 7 February 2013
Quentin Tarantino, Hilary Mantel and Edward Elgar - all in one post
I wrote last summer about seeing Elgar's Coronation Ode performed at the Proms; to recap, it is a piece of jingoistic pomposity written for the coronation of Edward VIIth. The music isn't the Worcester Wizard's finest, but the really startling thing about it was the libretto, served up by A.C. Benson. Since Benson wrote the words to Land of Hope and Glory no-one should be surprised to find the Coronation Ode offered a disconcerting glimpse into the Edwardian mind, a place as remote from our sensibilities as the ice planet Hoth.
At the time I contrasted this almost incomprehensible difference with Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies, a historical novel which none of its admirers seems to have noticed superimposes a modern consciousness on Henry VIII and his hangers-on. Whatever else it is, BUTB (and its predecessor, Wolf Hall) is not a portrait of 16th century Britain.
If Elgar and Benson are utterly foreign to us only a hundred years on, Henry and his chums can only be recreated by a supreme act of imagination, which Mantel does not even attempt. I have always wondered what is the point of the historical novel, but one which doesn't even have a go at showing what might have motivated a people and informed their culture is more baffling than most.
I didn't expect to find Quentin Tarantino's new film, Django Unchained, doing this at all, let alone doing it a lot better, but it really does.
I'm not a Tarantino fan, finding the violence just a bit too pointless, but I like the bits of his films where the characters just talk to each other, and sure enough there is a quite wonderful encounter between Django, a runaway slave, Dr. Schutz, his mentor, and a slave owner, Calvin Candie, which forms the climax of the film (or should have - in a rare failure of pacing there's a further half hour tacked on in which Tarantino himself makes an ill-advised appearance). Candie, very well played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is a monster, and through him Tarantino has a very decent stab at doing something Mantel cannot. That is, showing someone thoroughly inhabiting a set of attitudes utterly alien to our own and yet functioning recognisably as a human being. Despite all the gore - the hallway of Candie's mansion appears at the end to have been showered in blood - I thought it was, as my children might say, proper good art.
I have recently found myself wondering what the composer of the Coronation Ode would have made of Britain today. Empire gone, locked in an uneasy embrace with the EU, gripped by austerity, in and out of recession. "Mightier still and mightier / Shall thy bounds be set"? Hardly. So I have written a five-minute orchestral piece, Blighty, which imagines a Pomp and Circumstance march for the new century. It is of course unperformable, a piece of post-modernism in which the language of Eric Coates rubs shoulders with hip-hop and ends with a whimper of defeat. But some pieces just have to be written.
As for Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies has just won another award. Funny old world.
At the time I contrasted this almost incomprehensible difference with Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies, a historical novel which none of its admirers seems to have noticed superimposes a modern consciousness on Henry VIII and his hangers-on. Whatever else it is, BUTB (and its predecessor, Wolf Hall) is not a portrait of 16th century Britain.
If Elgar and Benson are utterly foreign to us only a hundred years on, Henry and his chums can only be recreated by a supreme act of imagination, which Mantel does not even attempt. I have always wondered what is the point of the historical novel, but one which doesn't even have a go at showing what might have motivated a people and informed their culture is more baffling than most.
I didn't expect to find Quentin Tarantino's new film, Django Unchained, doing this at all, let alone doing it a lot better, but it really does.
I'm not a Tarantino fan, finding the violence just a bit too pointless, but I like the bits of his films where the characters just talk to each other, and sure enough there is a quite wonderful encounter between Django, a runaway slave, Dr. Schutz, his mentor, and a slave owner, Calvin Candie, which forms the climax of the film (or should have - in a rare failure of pacing there's a further half hour tacked on in which Tarantino himself makes an ill-advised appearance). Candie, very well played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is a monster, and through him Tarantino has a very decent stab at doing something Mantel cannot. That is, showing someone thoroughly inhabiting a set of attitudes utterly alien to our own and yet functioning recognisably as a human being. Despite all the gore - the hallway of Candie's mansion appears at the end to have been showered in blood - I thought it was, as my children might say, proper good art.
I have recently found myself wondering what the composer of the Coronation Ode would have made of Britain today. Empire gone, locked in an uneasy embrace with the EU, gripped by austerity, in and out of recession. "Mightier still and mightier / Shall thy bounds be set"? Hardly. So I have written a five-minute orchestral piece, Blighty, which imagines a Pomp and Circumstance march for the new century. It is of course unperformable, a piece of post-modernism in which the language of Eric Coates rubs shoulders with hip-hop and ends with a whimper of defeat. But some pieces just have to be written.
As for Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies has just won another award. Funny old world.
Tuesday 5 February 2013
Despising Chris Huhne
So now we know it was true all along. Chris Huhne really did put pressure on his wife to take speeding points for him.
The scale of the former Guardian journalist's dishonesty is extensive. Obviously he lied at the time of the initial charge. He lied in his public statements. Then he must have lied to his legal team (who could otherwise not have represented him). He made strenuous and unsuccessful efforts to have the prosecution struck out (at considerable expense to you and me, the poor old taxpayers). Only when the reality of the trial hit him did he finally listen to his legal advisors' warnings about the likelihood of a conviction.
Huhne has pleaded guilty in order to get some discount on his sentence.
Amidst the many unattractive features of his behaviour is the depth of ambition it reveals. Here is someone who has clawed his way up the greasy pole only to find the depths beneath yawning. Realising that ruin beckons, he scrabbles all the more desperately to stay aloft.
Here too is the arrogance of power. Motoring convictions are for the little people. People like me don't take a prosecution lying down - we try to get them struck out and issue public protestations of our innocence, deploring that the state should have been so misguided. We call a press conference!
Shades of Rebekah Brooks.
And yet amidst the loss of his career (although I wouldn't bet against a comeback) there is worse. The papers reveal a vituperative exchange of texts between Huhne and his son, a relationship apparently sundered when it became apparent that the ex-minister was leaving his wife for another woman. Of all the woes of his current situation this must be the most painful.
As time goes by the opportunities for philandering become mercifully fewer. So, less mercifully, does the inclination. Flowing blond locks (I have the photos to prove it, honest) fell out long ago, washed down the plughole of life. The clean cut jawline sags like an underdone doughnut. Infidelity, which might once have been attributed to an unscrupulous admirer or a moment of weakness, could now be achieved only by a determined campaign.
Thank God. Because nothing, nothing, would be worth the torment of my children's contempt.
Prison is the least of Chris Huhne's problems.
The scale of the former Guardian journalist's dishonesty is extensive. Obviously he lied at the time of the initial charge. He lied in his public statements. Then he must have lied to his legal team (who could otherwise not have represented him). He made strenuous and unsuccessful efforts to have the prosecution struck out (at considerable expense to you and me, the poor old taxpayers). Only when the reality of the trial hit him did he finally listen to his legal advisors' warnings about the likelihood of a conviction.
Huhne has pleaded guilty in order to get some discount on his sentence.
Amidst the many unattractive features of his behaviour is the depth of ambition it reveals. Here is someone who has clawed his way up the greasy pole only to find the depths beneath yawning. Realising that ruin beckons, he scrabbles all the more desperately to stay aloft.
Here too is the arrogance of power. Motoring convictions are for the little people. People like me don't take a prosecution lying down - we try to get them struck out and issue public protestations of our innocence, deploring that the state should have been so misguided. We call a press conference!
Shades of Rebekah Brooks.
And yet amidst the loss of his career (although I wouldn't bet against a comeback) there is worse. The papers reveal a vituperative exchange of texts between Huhne and his son, a relationship apparently sundered when it became apparent that the ex-minister was leaving his wife for another woman. Of all the woes of his current situation this must be the most painful.
As time goes by the opportunities for philandering become mercifully fewer. So, less mercifully, does the inclination. Flowing blond locks (I have the photos to prove it, honest) fell out long ago, washed down the plughole of life. The clean cut jawline sags like an underdone doughnut. Infidelity, which might once have been attributed to an unscrupulous admirer or a moment of weakness, could now be achieved only by a determined campaign.
Thank God. Because nothing, nothing, would be worth the torment of my children's contempt.
Prison is the least of Chris Huhne's problems.
Sunday 3 February 2013
Dr. Tim Morgan and The Perfect Storm
At the end of last year a ComRes poll revealed that only 6% of respondents understood that the national debt was rising rather than falling. That's because most people don't understand the difference between the deficit (our annual overspend) and the debt (the aggregation of all our past annual overspends).
I'm explaining it in case you are one of the 94%. If you're not, apologies.
In the face of such ignorance, it's hard to see how we're going to come to terms with the economic problems facing the country. Which are legion.
I was reflecting on this after reading the latest of Dr Tim Morgan's magisterial series of reports into the state of the British economy. Dr Morgan is Head of Global Research at brokers Tullett Prebon, and over the last year or so he has published three or four of these blockbusters. They are easy to find on the net. Just Google Dr Tim Morgan Armageddon. Yes that's right. Armageddon.
Broadly speaking Dr Morgan's thesis is that most of the growth we enjoyed during the Brown boom was due to borrowing. If you assume that this borrowing - government, consumer, housing-related - is at or near its peak, there is little likelihoood of a similar stimulus to the economy in future. So no wonder the economy is not growing. It's not going to. This is sobering, but for most people outside the Keynesian-lite cadre of Ed Balls and his fellow-travellers, not terribly surprising.
How did we get into this situation? Now Dr Morgan has released a new report, entitled "Perfect storm: energy, finance and the end of growth", which addresses the issue.
"Fundamentally, what had happened here was that skilled, well-paid jobs had been exported, consumption had increased, and ever-greater quantities of debt had been used to fill the gap. This was, by any definition, unsustainable . . . anyone who believed that a globalisation model (in which the West unloaded production but expected to consume as much, or even more, than ever) was sustainable was surely guilty of wilful blindness. Such a state of affairs was only ever viable on the insane assumption that debt could go on increasing indefinitely . . . the process of globalisation has distorted the normal relationships between production, consumption and debt beyond the point of sustainability. The West is in deep (and perhaps irreversible) trouble because it has consumed more, just as it has produced less."
I'm aware of course that I enjoy reading Dr Morgan's work partly because I like a frisson of horror every now and again; but also partly because I agree with most of his conclusions. There's nothing like a bit of external self-validation.
"The real causes of the economic crash are the cultural norms of a society that has come to believe that immediate material gratification, fuelled if necessary by debt, can ever be a sustainable way of life . . . " Amen to that.
And confirming my suspicion that all the financial services industry did was enable us to keep on borrowing, "There has been widespread public vilification of bankers, the vast majority of whom were . . . only acting within the parameters of the ‘debtfuelled, immediate gratification’ ethos established across Western societies as a whole . . . Bankers, trying to establish an even larger borrowing market . . . created the ultimately disastrous phenomenon known as subprime, in which mortgage funds were advanced to borrowers who were not remotely capable of keeping up
I'm explaining it in case you are one of the 94%. If you're not, apologies.
In the face of such ignorance, it's hard to see how we're going to come to terms with the economic problems facing the country. Which are legion.
I was reflecting on this after reading the latest of Dr Tim Morgan's magisterial series of reports into the state of the British economy. Dr Morgan is Head of Global Research at brokers Tullett Prebon, and over the last year or so he has published three or four of these blockbusters. They are easy to find on the net. Just Google Dr Tim Morgan Armageddon. Yes that's right. Armageddon.
Broadly speaking Dr Morgan's thesis is that most of the growth we enjoyed during the Brown boom was due to borrowing. If you assume that this borrowing - government, consumer, housing-related - is at or near its peak, there is little likelihoood of a similar stimulus to the economy in future. So no wonder the economy is not growing. It's not going to. This is sobering, but for most people outside the Keynesian-lite cadre of Ed Balls and his fellow-travellers, not terribly surprising.
How did we get into this situation? Now Dr Morgan has released a new report, entitled "Perfect storm: energy, finance and the end of growth", which addresses the issue.
"Fundamentally, what had happened here was that skilled, well-paid jobs had been exported, consumption had increased, and ever-greater quantities of debt had been used to fill the gap. This was, by any definition, unsustainable . . . anyone who believed that a globalisation model (in which the West unloaded production but expected to consume as much, or even more, than ever) was sustainable was surely guilty of wilful blindness. Such a state of affairs was only ever viable on the insane assumption that debt could go on increasing indefinitely . . . the process of globalisation has distorted the normal relationships between production, consumption and debt beyond the point of sustainability. The West is in deep (and perhaps irreversible) trouble because it has consumed more, just as it has produced less."
I'm aware of course that I enjoy reading Dr Morgan's work partly because I like a frisson of horror every now and again; but also partly because I agree with most of his conclusions. There's nothing like a bit of external self-validation.
"The real causes of the economic crash are the cultural norms of a society that has come to believe that immediate material gratification, fuelled if necessary by debt, can ever be a sustainable way of life . . . " Amen to that.
And confirming my suspicion that all the financial services industry did was enable us to keep on borrowing, "There has been widespread public vilification of bankers, the vast majority of whom were . . . only acting within the parameters of the ‘debtfuelled, immediate gratification’ ethos established across Western societies as a whole . . . Bankers, trying to establish an even larger borrowing market . . . created the ultimately disastrous phenomenon known as subprime, in which mortgage funds were advanced to borrowers who were not remotely capable of keeping up
repayments".
Dr. Morgan is right about almost everything. No, really.
"Alongside wasteful investment allocation and disastrous labour market policies, the West has allowed the rise of two extremely damaging cultural norms. The first of these is the unchecked rise of consumerism, fostered by an advertising industry which spends close to $470bn annually (and about $143bn in the United States alone)."
"The second is a sense of entitlement, both at the individual and at the national level. Welfare systems, originally intended as safety nets, have been allowed to price Western workers out of international markets. Benefits systems, even if they are not (as is often claimed) “lifestyle choices” for the recipients of benefits, certainly have been exactly that for the armies of administrators that flourish in almost all such systems. The rise of welfarism has imposed huge social costs and taxes on businesses, placing them at an ever greater competitive disadvantage which has been exacerbated by well-meaning labour legislation in which considerations of profitability and efficiency are also-rans when measured against supposedly ‘progressive’ social objectives. Worst of all, Western countries and their citizens have behaved as though their affluent lifestyles are some kind of divine entitlement rather than the reward of productiveness."
But admirers of Dr. Morgan will find new shocks in his paper. The first is that he thinks that the markets will "in the very near future" realise that central banks can never reverse their massive Quantative Easing. "If – or rather, when – the credibility of eventual reversal is lost, a dire chapter of recklessness is likely to end in money-printing, hyperinflation and collapse."
But there's worse. The long period of economic growth across western economies has coincided with and depended on the availability of cheap energy. But energy is now going to get even more expensive, partly because of rising living standards and rising demand in India and China, and partly because of the increased cost of extracting oil from the ground.
Put simply, the more it costs to extract energy the greater the percentage of a country's national income which has to be devoted to pay for that extraction. Initial oil deposits - the low hanging fruit if you like - were cheap and easy to extract. Now it's getting much much more expensive, and paying for that extraction will cripple economies, particularly those that don't have big reserves themselves.
Our way of life will be over, within a decade!
If I believed everything Dr. Morgan wrote I'd be stocking up on rice and pasta. I don't, or at least, not completely. For one, he seems to be enjoying his doomsaying slightly too much. And we shouldn't assume that because his analysis of how we got to where we are looks unnervingly accurate his prognostications will come true. After all, twenty years ago, when Britain was emerging from Black Wednesday and the longest period of economic growth in our history was just beginning, you could have stuck a hundred clever and well informed economists in a room and not one of them would have come up with the current scenario. The chances of Dr. Morgan being right in every particular are very small. Harold Macmillan's "events, dear boy" have a way of making idiots of us all.
Secondly, I think Dr. Morgan underplays the ability of technology to transform the way energy is consumed and supplied. Oil won't run out - it'll just become too expensive and we'll have to use something else. The something else could itself provide an opportunity for growth (the question of whether growth is of itself a good thing is for another day. Or days).
Lastly, although humans are very bad at preparing for change they are very good at adapting to it when it arrives. The world will look different, but we will probably cope with it.
The 94% who didn't know the difference between the debt and the deficit worry me much more than Dr. Morgan. Because it's in the dawning realisation for them that there may be no return to the old days of reckless plenty, and in the painful adjustment which must follow, that the true danger to civility lies.
But there's worse. The long period of economic growth across western economies has coincided with and depended on the availability of cheap energy. But energy is now going to get even more expensive, partly because of rising living standards and rising demand in India and China, and partly because of the increased cost of extracting oil from the ground.
Put simply, the more it costs to extract energy the greater the percentage of a country's national income which has to be devoted to pay for that extraction. Initial oil deposits - the low hanging fruit if you like - were cheap and easy to extract. Now it's getting much much more expensive, and paying for that extraction will cripple economies, particularly those that don't have big reserves themselves.
Our way of life will be over, within a decade!
If I believed everything Dr. Morgan wrote I'd be stocking up on rice and pasta. I don't, or at least, not completely. For one, he seems to be enjoying his doomsaying slightly too much. And we shouldn't assume that because his analysis of how we got to where we are looks unnervingly accurate his prognostications will come true. After all, twenty years ago, when Britain was emerging from Black Wednesday and the longest period of economic growth in our history was just beginning, you could have stuck a hundred clever and well informed economists in a room and not one of them would have come up with the current scenario. The chances of Dr. Morgan being right in every particular are very small. Harold Macmillan's "events, dear boy" have a way of making idiots of us all.
Secondly, I think Dr. Morgan underplays the ability of technology to transform the way energy is consumed and supplied. Oil won't run out - it'll just become too expensive and we'll have to use something else. The something else could itself provide an opportunity for growth (the question of whether growth is of itself a good thing is for another day. Or days).
Lastly, although humans are very bad at preparing for change they are very good at adapting to it when it arrives. The world will look different, but we will probably cope with it.
The 94% who didn't know the difference between the debt and the deficit worry me much more than Dr. Morgan. Because it's in the dawning realisation for them that there may be no return to the old days of reckless plenty, and in the painful adjustment which must follow, that the true danger to civility lies.
Thursday 31 January 2013
Slavoj Zizek, Zero Dark Thirty and the Royal Opera House
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek is in the news again for having written disparagingly about Kathryn Bigelow's new film Zero Dark Thirty. A re-telling of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, ZDT shows Jihadists being waterboarded (ie tortured) by the CIA. I haven't seen the film, but by common consent it adopts a neutral position on waterboarding. When Barack Obama appears on TV announcing the practice will stop, the watching CIA operatives are unmoved.
Zizek is horrified by this. "To depict it neutrally", he wrote in the Guardian, ". . . is already a kind of endorsement. Imagine a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool disinterested way as a big industrial-logistic operation . . . Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to endgender dismay and horror in spectators. Where is Bigelow here? Without a shadow of doubt, she is on the side of the normalisation of torture".
When his fellow Marxists have been responsible for at least as much torture in the last century as any other political group, it's refreshing to see Zizek keen to display his opposition to the practice.
But surely he is talking hogwash. Is it really art's function to tell us what to think? Would Zizek have liked ZDT any more if Bigelow had come down in favour of torture? Or is he suggesting that the only kind of art worth its salt is the kind congruent with his own political, moral or aesthetic views? If so, doesn't that reduce art to mere Brechtian polemic? And what if someone had made a documentary about waterboarding which didn't adopt a view? Would that be bad too? Should news gathering tell us what to think about world events?
It used to piss me off no end when the BBC News would report an atrocity with the words "the IRA has admitted responsibility". You admit something when it's wrong. I am perfectly capable of concluding that blowing people up is wrong without being told to think so. Someone somewhere will have thought blowing people up was right. That's their prerogative.
No, the point about art is that it allows room for ambiguity. One of the delicious things about Pride and Prejudice is that Austen leaves open the possibility that Elizabeth Bennett finally decides Mr D'Arcy is OK when she sees the size of his, ahem, estates at Pemberley. We are joyously free to make up our own minds what we think about that. Was it wrong of Dostoevsky to just show us Raskolnikov murdering his landlady and feeling bad about it afterwards? Should Camus have included a postscript to The Outsider to the effect that killing Arabs is wrong? I doubt they would have been better books as a result.
Slavoz Zizek's ubiquity is a puzzling thing. He regularly features in the London Review of Books. He holds academic posts at Birkbeck as well as in Slovenia, and has taught widely in the US (Columbia, Princeton etc). And yet every time I read one of his articles I come away thinking, "The man's an idiot".
(A variety of recent experiences suggests that some of these lionised academics are actually not as clever as your average QC - the experience of reading Richard Dawkins on theology started me off on this, and I'll come back to it in future).
Not only is Zizek's faintly bizarre criticism of ZDT baffling (perhaps Marxists just dislike seeing the US get something right), but he also misses a crucial and obvious point about the film.
Director Bigelow and writer Mark Boal were apparently helped to make it by the CIA, being granted access to confidential material. I am not a knee-jerk anti-American by any means, but it seems to me that an Agency which can kill people by unmanned drones operated from the far side of the world and can set up a fake immunisation programme to gain access to the DNA of Bin Laden's children, is an organisation with large resources of money and cunning. It is also an organisation which, rooted in a democracy, has a vested interest in portraying itself in a favourable light.
If the CIA told me it was raining, I'd go to the window and check. And yet Bigelow and Boal were happy to take what they were told and base a film on it. That's naive.
I'm very much looking forward to seeing Zero Dark Thirty, but I have absolutely no idea of whether the story it tells is true in any particular. I won't be any wiser when I've seen it either.
As for Zizek, a story in the paper the other day stated that the Royal Opera House has commissioned four new operas "inspired" by his writings. Yes, that's the ROH, which pays its Music Director over £600,000 (some of it raised from British taxpayers), commissioning work inspired by a Marxist who one presumes despises the privilege and elitism his world-view says it stands for.
Incidentally, the ROH Director at the time this scheme was dreamed up just happens to be Tony Hall, the new Director General of the BBC.
To say this is a situation rich in ironies does not come close to encapsulating its jaw-dropping nature. As so often with Zizek, one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.
Zizek is horrified by this. "To depict it neutrally", he wrote in the Guardian, ". . . is already a kind of endorsement. Imagine a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool disinterested way as a big industrial-logistic operation . . . Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to endgender dismay and horror in spectators. Where is Bigelow here? Without a shadow of doubt, she is on the side of the normalisation of torture".
When his fellow Marxists have been responsible for at least as much torture in the last century as any other political group, it's refreshing to see Zizek keen to display his opposition to the practice.
But surely he is talking hogwash. Is it really art's function to tell us what to think? Would Zizek have liked ZDT any more if Bigelow had come down in favour of torture? Or is he suggesting that the only kind of art worth its salt is the kind congruent with his own political, moral or aesthetic views? If so, doesn't that reduce art to mere Brechtian polemic? And what if someone had made a documentary about waterboarding which didn't adopt a view? Would that be bad too? Should news gathering tell us what to think about world events?
It used to piss me off no end when the BBC News would report an atrocity with the words "the IRA has admitted responsibility". You admit something when it's wrong. I am perfectly capable of concluding that blowing people up is wrong without being told to think so. Someone somewhere will have thought blowing people up was right. That's their prerogative.
No, the point about art is that it allows room for ambiguity. One of the delicious things about Pride and Prejudice is that Austen leaves open the possibility that Elizabeth Bennett finally decides Mr D'Arcy is OK when she sees the size of his, ahem, estates at Pemberley. We are joyously free to make up our own minds what we think about that. Was it wrong of Dostoevsky to just show us Raskolnikov murdering his landlady and feeling bad about it afterwards? Should Camus have included a postscript to The Outsider to the effect that killing Arabs is wrong? I doubt they would have been better books as a result.
Slavoz Zizek's ubiquity is a puzzling thing. He regularly features in the London Review of Books. He holds academic posts at Birkbeck as well as in Slovenia, and has taught widely in the US (Columbia, Princeton etc). And yet every time I read one of his articles I come away thinking, "The man's an idiot".
(A variety of recent experiences suggests that some of these lionised academics are actually not as clever as your average QC - the experience of reading Richard Dawkins on theology started me off on this, and I'll come back to it in future).
Not only is Zizek's faintly bizarre criticism of ZDT baffling (perhaps Marxists just dislike seeing the US get something right), but he also misses a crucial and obvious point about the film.
Director Bigelow and writer Mark Boal were apparently helped to make it by the CIA, being granted access to confidential material. I am not a knee-jerk anti-American by any means, but it seems to me that an Agency which can kill people by unmanned drones operated from the far side of the world and can set up a fake immunisation programme to gain access to the DNA of Bin Laden's children, is an organisation with large resources of money and cunning. It is also an organisation which, rooted in a democracy, has a vested interest in portraying itself in a favourable light.
If the CIA told me it was raining, I'd go to the window and check. And yet Bigelow and Boal were happy to take what they were told and base a film on it. That's naive.
I'm very much looking forward to seeing Zero Dark Thirty, but I have absolutely no idea of whether the story it tells is true in any particular. I won't be any wiser when I've seen it either.
As for Zizek, a story in the paper the other day stated that the Royal Opera House has commissioned four new operas "inspired" by his writings. Yes, that's the ROH, which pays its Music Director over £600,000 (some of it raised from British taxpayers), commissioning work inspired by a Marxist who one presumes despises the privilege and elitism his world-view says it stands for.
Incidentally, the ROH Director at the time this scheme was dreamed up just happens to be Tony Hall, the new Director General of the BBC.
To say this is a situation rich in ironies does not come close to encapsulating its jaw-dropping nature. As so often with Zizek, one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.
Wednesday 30 January 2013
Muslim Patrol and Quadistan
I once heard a young British woman of African extraction say she had never experienced racism. Whilst I expect she's in a minority, it still strikes me as significant that any such person could say so.
In the same way, whilst I don't think it is the end of the world when young Muslim men have been patrolling the East End of London driving away unsuitably dressed women, people drinking in the street and, in one unpleasant incident, a gay man, it clearly says something about Britain now which I think is interesting and baleful.
You can find the videos by searching for Muslim Patrol on Youtube.
Before Christmas the 2011 Census results revealed that non-whites living in London were for the first time a majority. I don't find this as surprising or as appalling as the Tory press seems to. Even when I was living there twenty years ago it was clear that London was an international city rather than a British one (one of the great things about Manchester is that it still retains a good deal of its Mancunian character; London on the other hand lost almost all of its London-ness).
But also I think the issue of skin-colour is a red herring. Who cares if people are white or not? I don't; or not much. For me what's much more important is their culture. I've often observed that I have more in common with my friend of Ghanain origin than I do with most of the white adults I meet in this corner of SK8. Culture is not a fixed thing - it flits across individuals with a fluidity that physical characteristics cannot match.
Are the majority of Londoners British? The answer appears to be yes. It seems that only about a third of people living in London were born outside the UK. That's still an awful lot of people though, and it brings me to why culture matters.
If you can't have a cohesive society where people are treated differently because of their skin colour, neither can you have one where people live in cultural ghettos. I always thought when I was young and idealistic that integration and acceptance would inevitably happen when children met and mingled at school. Unlike some, I have walked the walk, and my children have been to state schools were Muslim children were sometimes a majority. At their inner city Sixth Form College there is, sadly, very little mixing, something which has been formalised to the extent that the quadrangle where the Muslim students go at break is known as Quadistan, whereas the grass where the white kids hang out is called Vanilla Hill. These are names devised by the kids.
One reason why Enoch Powell was wrong about immigration of the 50s and 60s was that he failed to see that people from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean with a common post-Christian heritage would in the end rub along with and happily intermarry whites. I suspect it's the children of those marriages that are making up much of London's non-white majority.
What immigration's subsequent apologists failed to realise was that such integration wouldn't necessarily happen when Muslims came to Britain. Integrating cultures which differ so radically in their attitudes to family life, the role of women in society, relationships between men and women, the consumption of alcohol and sexual behaviour was always going to be much more difficult. The Muslim vigilantes in the East End are British people too. But whilst there are some things about their culture that I admire a lot, the sub-Taliban attitudes of Muslim Patrol are not mine.
In the same way, whilst I don't think it is the end of the world when young Muslim men have been patrolling the East End of London driving away unsuitably dressed women, people drinking in the street and, in one unpleasant incident, a gay man, it clearly says something about Britain now which I think is interesting and baleful.
You can find the videos by searching for Muslim Patrol on Youtube.
Before Christmas the 2011 Census results revealed that non-whites living in London were for the first time a majority. I don't find this as surprising or as appalling as the Tory press seems to. Even when I was living there twenty years ago it was clear that London was an international city rather than a British one (one of the great things about Manchester is that it still retains a good deal of its Mancunian character; London on the other hand lost almost all of its London-ness).
But also I think the issue of skin-colour is a red herring. Who cares if people are white or not? I don't; or not much. For me what's much more important is their culture. I've often observed that I have more in common with my friend of Ghanain origin than I do with most of the white adults I meet in this corner of SK8. Culture is not a fixed thing - it flits across individuals with a fluidity that physical characteristics cannot match.
Are the majority of Londoners British? The answer appears to be yes. It seems that only about a third of people living in London were born outside the UK. That's still an awful lot of people though, and it brings me to why culture matters.
If you can't have a cohesive society where people are treated differently because of their skin colour, neither can you have one where people live in cultural ghettos. I always thought when I was young and idealistic that integration and acceptance would inevitably happen when children met and mingled at school. Unlike some, I have walked the walk, and my children have been to state schools were Muslim children were sometimes a majority. At their inner city Sixth Form College there is, sadly, very little mixing, something which has been formalised to the extent that the quadrangle where the Muslim students go at break is known as Quadistan, whereas the grass where the white kids hang out is called Vanilla Hill. These are names devised by the kids.
One reason why Enoch Powell was wrong about immigration of the 50s and 60s was that he failed to see that people from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean with a common post-Christian heritage would in the end rub along with and happily intermarry whites. I suspect it's the children of those marriages that are making up much of London's non-white majority.
What immigration's subsequent apologists failed to realise was that such integration wouldn't necessarily happen when Muslims came to Britain. Integrating cultures which differ so radically in their attitudes to family life, the role of women in society, relationships between men and women, the consumption of alcohol and sexual behaviour was always going to be much more difficult. The Muslim vigilantes in the East End are British people too. But whilst there are some things about their culture that I admire a lot, the sub-Taliban attitudes of Muslim Patrol are not mine.
Tuesday 29 January 2013
Aditya Chakrabortty repents!
"Likewise, I say unto you," runs Luke 15:10, "there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repents".
Well there will be rejoicing this morning, because this blog's least-favourite economics commentator, Aditya Chakrabortty, seems to have had a Damascene conversion.
There has been nothing but ridicule, calumny and disparagement for Mr Chakrabortty in the past, for his ludicrous belief that the government can cure its economic ills merely by borrowing a bit more money. So I nearly choked on my home-made muesli when I read in his G2 column the following astonishing revelation:
". . . on the other (hand), you have the equally false position staked out by Ed Balls: that with a wave of a Keynesian wand we can be magicked back to 2006."
If I were a proper writer I'd be able to mimick one of those expostulations beloved of comic book characters, a kind of spluttering onomatopeia of the "WEURGHHLP!?" variety.
In a nano-second Chakrabortty has abandoned his former delusion and made a last-ditch grasp for reality's slender reed. Suffice to say that he has exhausted my capacity to render astonishment in print.
I know I should merely welcome this about-face and leave the carping for another day, but - if neither austerity nor neo-Keynesianism are the answer, what is?
It would be good if Chakrabortty could tell us soon.
Well there will be rejoicing this morning, because this blog's least-favourite economics commentator, Aditya Chakrabortty, seems to have had a Damascene conversion.
There has been nothing but ridicule, calumny and disparagement for Mr Chakrabortty in the past, for his ludicrous belief that the government can cure its economic ills merely by borrowing a bit more money. So I nearly choked on my home-made muesli when I read in his G2 column the following astonishing revelation:
". . . on the other (hand), you have the equally false position staked out by Ed Balls: that with a wave of a Keynesian wand we can be magicked back to 2006."
If I were a proper writer I'd be able to mimick one of those expostulations beloved of comic book characters, a kind of spluttering onomatopeia of the "WEURGHHLP!?" variety.
In a nano-second Chakrabortty has abandoned his former delusion and made a last-ditch grasp for reality's slender reed. Suffice to say that he has exhausted my capacity to render astonishment in print.
I know I should merely welcome this about-face and leave the carping for another day, but - if neither austerity nor neo-Keynesianism are the answer, what is?
It would be good if Chakrabortty could tell us soon.
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