Belief Systems

Tony Blair offered the Labour Party a half-hearted apology at the Party Conference in Brighton on Tuesday. Amongst all the verbal wiggling on offer, one phrase in particular stood out:

the decision (to invade Iraq), whether agreed with or not, was taken because I believe, genuinely, that Britain's future security depended on it.

The facts counter this belief, and have been reiterated with each new report on Iraq: no weapons of mass destruction, no ties with Al Qaeda and jihadists, a nation crippled before the war by allied sanctions and fly-overs. I'm not looking for belief systems in my Prime Minister, I'm looking for someone who responds to the facts on the ground. Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?

Four More Years?

An email from Chris, praising the blog, but more importantly looking ahead to November and the next four years.

All right, Stoner! Nicely done. I especially liked the piece on "The Sex of Nations". Hope you're steeling yourself for a second term of Bush as president because from where it stands today, it sure looks likely. But take heart! remember the recent history of second term presidents (could be characterized as "the chickens coming home to roost") - Clinton was impeached in his 2nd term, Reagan was battered by Iran Contra and Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment. So we could look forward to the growth of the Michael Moore Hate Bush culture with lots of extra-legal activities and street demonstrations as the whole Iraq Adventure comes unraveled. Hell, it could even start to look like the '60's again!

A Foreign Country

"The Past is a foreign country: they do things differently there"

The United States is a young country and a strong country, and the benefits of her youthful vigour are clear to see. But one of the characteristics of youth is wilful blindness to the experiences of previous generations. LP Hartley's opening line to The Go-Between (above) seems to be written for America, but upon analysis and reading his novel it becomes clear that he is referring to the differing responses to life's choice within a generation, not the cycles of repetition that occur throughout history.

One of the most glorious days of British History to historians and ruddy-faced schoolboys is the Battle of Waterloo, where combined British and Prussian armies under the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon and the French. No one argues (except maybe the French themselves) that the dismantling of the French empire in Europe was a good thing: one only has to look at the paintings of Goya to see the disastrous effects of the occupation upon Spain.

The main -and intended- consequence of the defeat of Napoleon was the removal of Britain's only rival on the world stage. From the fields of Quatre-Bras until the fields of the Somme a hundred years later, Britain was without a Great Power rival and therefore unchecked in her territorial ambitions, building the largest empire the world had ever seen.

With the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States finds herself in a similar unrivalled situation. The massive armed forces created as a counterpoint to the now-defunct Warsaw Pact create their own imperative for deployment by their very existence. America stands on the threshold of creating her own Empire; like the British, not by grand plan but by incremental powerful responses to differing, often unrelated events. The dangers to the world are obvious; the dangers to America are just as evident -she'll go to bed a democracy, and wake up an Empire.

Learn from your father!

Tree and wall, Berlin 2004 

Violets

Click on the link to go to the Dialect and Poetry page on the Ranamin Society's DH Lawrence site; then click on the link therein to hear Kenneth Branagh read "Violets" in a soft, buttery Nottinghamshire dialect. It'll change your life, or at least your day.

Blinking Red Hand (2)

New York (Eigth Avenue and 39th Street) and Brooklyn (King's Highway and Ralph Avenue) wags have found appropriate ways to modify the blinking Red Hands of Ulster: by carefully applying opaque adhesive paper to the index finger, then to the ring and the little fingers, while leaving the middle finger unobscured, a different message is sent to the hapless pedestrian.

Blinking Red Hand

New Yorkers will have noted the swapping out of the WALK / DON'T WALK signs with the walking white man and disembodied orange hand at every intersection blessed with a traffic light. Graphically, the new illuminated signs make some sense, as they speak to those who speak and read in tongues other than English. Graphically too, the same signs have all sorts of (unintended) resonances: the walking white man struts his superior stuff, selected in preference to walking green men elsewhere in the world (where green = go); the uplifted hand is similar in its posture to the Red Hand of Ulster, an unhappy echo in a city where the majority of Irish immigrants and their descendants are Catholic, and proud of it.

Dimly aware of the significance of the Red Hand to Ulster Protestants, and confused by one I saw on the wall of an Irish bar in Denver, CO, I surfed a few "No Surrender" sites. The most imaginative claims to the red hand's origin to Zarah, son of Judah, the fourth son of Jacob, whose unfairly disinherited descendants roamed the earth, founding the Kingdom of Ulster in 1480 BC. The Red Hand? We look to Genesis 38, v 18-20:

"And it came to pass, when she travailed that the one put out " his hand, and the midwife took and bound upon his hand a scarlet thread, saying "This came out first" And it came to pass, as he draw back his hand, that behold, ; his brother came out, and she said, "How hast thou broken forth? This breach be upon thee". Therefore his name was called Pharez. And afterward came out his brother that had the scarlet thread upon ftis hand, and his name was called Zarah."

Since this story ascribes a dubious religious foundation to Ulster, I prefer to ignore it and go the Celtic route. This from the (ahem) Orange Historical Society:

The Red Hand, has its origin in the tale of a race between two giants contesting for the possession of Ulster in a race across the Irish Sea from Scotland, and legend has it that one of the giants, namely O'Neill, to claim victory cut off his hand and tossed it ashore on to Ulster. However, as attested to by English heraldry based on the legend it was the left hand that was cut off symbolized with the left hand on the grant of title of a baronetcy.

The above quoted verbatim, with the interesting grammatical structure laying siege to the claim of Ulsterman as loyal English-speaking subjects of the Crown.

The next time the city changes the pedestrian traffic signals, let her adopt the international symbols of the little red man standing to attention (stop) and the little green man walking (go). There's room for graphic creativity within this convention: Berlin's walking man is a chipper little fellow, and in the pursuit of fame he's made the leap from traffic signals to T-shirts.

Free Radical

Tony Benn, since his retirement from the House of Commons, has metamorphosised from the tabloid's Marxist bogeyman into the avuncular role of the Grand Old Man of British Politics. To have achieved this remarkable (unsought?) change in the public's perception without changing his politics one whit is to his credit, as the Grand Old Man continues to make excellent sense in his deep and trenchant analysis of current events.

His succinct demolition of the US casus belli in last Wednesday's Guardian contrasts with John Kerry's weak half-criticisms of George Bush and the war in Iraq. Tony takes the high road, Bush has taken the low road, and Kerry insists on the bumpy dirt track between the two.

Kerry should be saying this:

The new president took the decision to invade Iraq when he entered the White House - almost a year before the attack on the twin towers - and that no one in Washington or London really ever believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the atrocity.

And this:

The real reason for the invasion was to topple Saddam, seize the oil and establish permanent US bases to dominate the region.

And this:

We also know, from the recent report of the Iraq Survey Group, that Baghdad did not possess weapons of mass destruction. Neither the president nor the prime minister has been concerned to discover that they misled their own people and the world on this question.

There's lots more, and all of it good. Check out his op-ed piece in The Guardian at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1309706,00.html

Kerry risks loss at the polls by pulling his punches -in effect he's colluding with his supposed opponent. That's not to say you shouldn't vote against George Bush -everyone who can should.

Britain to send more troops to Iraq?

SCENE I. Iraq. Before Basra.

Alarum. Enter KING TONY, STRAW, BROWN, BLUNKETT, and Soldiers, with scaling-ladders

KING TONY
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
...
Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George*!'

*born again

Thanks to
http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/henryv/

Childe Harold

When Julia from Hampshire visited the great and glorious NYC last year, and again when we met at my sister Christine's wedding in Southampton this August, we spent some time ruminating and reminiscing fondly about former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. With his fondness for his pipe and Gannex raincoats, he cut a grey figure in a grey British landscape, and history's verdict on his time in office has been neutral at best. In his farewell television interview for the BBC, I remember him stating that his greatest achievement was the foundation of the Open University -important and worthy, yes; exciting and world-changing, no.

Fast-forward to Tony Blair and Cool Britannia. Tony brought the nation The Third Way, an ill-defined, but possibly fruitful attempt to steer a course between US unfettered capitalism and Western European welfarismo. With the extremely competent Gordon Brown steady at the helm of the Treasury, Britain has enjoyed a unrivalled and prolonged period of growth -the only First World country not to go into recession the last time around. Record amounts have been spent on education and healthcare, and the baying of the redtop tabloids aside, the fruits of this investment are starting to be apparent.

Childe Harolde achieved nothing remotely comparable to this success, and instead presided over the seemingly relentless decline of Britain from Carnaby Street cool into industrial strife and industrial mediocrity, a decline which reached its peak in the 1979 Winter of Discontent under his successor, Jim Callaghan.

So why the dewy-eyed fondness for Harold Wilson? Not for what he did, but for what he didn't do. He didn't send the British Army into Viet Nam. He resisted the considerable persuasive talents and arm-twisting abilities of Lyndon Baines Johnson, successfully avoiding the entanglements of an unwinnable US imperialist war (the Australians were not so lucky or so prescient). There are middle-aged Englishmen and middle-aged Scotsmen alive today living lives of achievement or perfect mediocrity, whose end may have been very different had Childe Harolde been made of weaker stuff. And who would not swap widows grieving at the wailing wall in Washington for couples worrying about the minutiae of every-day living?

Thanks, Harold.

From God's eye(s) to Florida's ears

In the last ten years, Florida was hit by four hurricanes. In this election year of 2004, Florida has been hit by four hurricanes. A message to get it right this time?

The teat of democracy 

The Sex of Nations

Rumsfeld's old jibe about "Old Europe" and "New Europe" had more of a hint of Arnold's "girly-men" about it: that the nations of old Europe were weak and feminine in not supporting Junior's war. That the "New" European nations, newly-liberated from the Warsaw Pact's clutches, were hardened and masculine and thus willing to stand erect with the real men of America. Whereas the plump nations of the Western end -feminized on a surfeit of Prada and Truffaut.

So what about the sex of nations: are us Wessies really "girly-men"? The European Union could be seen as an attempt to create a family, a nurturing unit -surely a feminine structure. La France has Marianne / Laetitia Casta as her symbol, beautiful even when depicted by Delacroix as Liberty storming the barricades. The Germans refer to their nation as The Fatherland, which is somewhat male, but the new national symbol (that graces the covers of Berlin's guidebooks) is the Reichstag's new dome -the national breast to which the Germans return, to suckle at the life-giving teat of democracy. The United States of America is personified by Uncle Sam, undoubtedly male (if appearing to lack manly vigour, due to advanced age); the capital Washington DC is graced by an enormous stone representation of its namesake's phallus.

And where does the transatlantic 51st. State fit into all of this? At the time of Empire, Britain's cartoon personification was John Bull, pugnacious, vigorous, possibly a touch of gout. Our national animal was the bulldog, which shared the John's characteristics. But on the other hand we have Britannia, who poses in repose with shield and helmet, a girl. So, in the tradition of Danny La Rue and the Pythons, a little gender confusion.

Perhaps the real test of a nation's sexual identity is his or her's obscene gesticulations. To indicate to the hard-of-hearing by the linguistically-challenged that they should fuck off, American's extend the middle (and longest) finger priapically upwards -male. The British extend the index and middle finger upwards, but angled and apart -mimicking the dewy cleft that is the essence of female. Legs apart, case closed.

But all is not lost in the Land of the Free. Under the shadow of George's organ is Washington the city's best monument, the Viet Nam War Memorial. Recessed in a fold of the great lawn, enveloped in the womb of the earth, are the names of those who died in the nation's wars -the country's sons cradled in their mother's arms.