before you read that Saturday travel section

"It is too easy to dwell on the contradictions of our concern for things that, in our well-meaning way, we nevertheless conspire to destroy. A more constructive solution might be to take steps not to find out about things like the Sentinelese in the first place, or failing that, to wipe them from our memory. The Iberian lynx. A dying Aboriginal Australian language. Choose something endangered every day and purge it from the servitude of our impotent concern. Forget to visit the fragile Alaskan ecosystem. Forget to visit the zoo to ponder the fate of the caged Siberian tiger. Let us ignore the world into a state of wellbeing. Ignorance has brought us to this and only ignorance will set us free."

This is learned and always-delightful fellow poet-blogger Puthwuth, making a point I made recently myself - with a vehemence unexpected even by me - when I was asked why I don't read the travel section. Only he says it better, as I helplessly veered into a rant about SND and the smug bourgeois with their three-wheel off-road buggies in Fresh & Wild... mind you they are ignorant enough already. Oops! I did it again. I do have to go down to Church St later but I can rest easy: as one of the endangered species, I may be a blot on the new order down there but I'm not exactly endangering any fragile ecosystem.

PS - Editing in: I've just remembered - last night I dreamed I was in Woodstock... shome coincidence shurely...

"an unresolved mass of imagery, which sort of in the end... floats over people"

That's what you get if you say, when taking the picture, "let us for the umpteenth time capture the pathos of a starving child" - and not, "why is this child starving?" "Who's denying the food? What's the background, what's the history?"

So says the Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths, who died yesterday aged 72. A Welshman who left Wales at 16, but said that growing up there influenced everything he ever did, he spent a lifetime photographing conflict and its aftermath so you wouldn't have to.

Of his work in Vietnam, photographing the effects of the war on civilians, he said to the BBC in 2005, "I wanted to show that the Vietnamese were people the Americans should be emulating rather than destroying." He was instrumental in influencing American opinion against the war.

But it wasn't all war. His photographs from Wales and England from, being frank, before Ms B was even born (this is somehow humbling, when you go to look again) are starkly revealing - of things Britain probably didn't want to know.

He says, "Any intelligent society would somehow give special privilege to critics. It's by criticising society that humanity has made progress... However, that's not the way the world works right now. What you have now is that you have the bandits in control, and they control the way people think." Follows a detailed explanation of how the bandits do this. All on film. Beautiful. Listen to him - listen to him on the visual history of the 20th century - and learn.

While he will be right in what he says about power and control, he also has a point about the power - and the responsibility - of the photographer. This man helped to make the very history that was being written while I was growing up. We say these images are "iconic," but that's just lazy. Think about what it means to be the person who made something so powerful and important. Jones Griffiths lies somewhere behind all of little Miss B's backyard ruminations on the nature of war, the world and her place in it as a little girl and future woman, whether there would still be a draft when she reached 18 and whether they would be drafting girls by then, what she would do if they were, America's place in the world, what it would be like to be a little Vietnamese child, etc. That's the power these images had.

I think he'd be happy to know about those ruminations. This is photography with a heart - with empathy, encouraging empathy in its viewers - but above all it's photography with a mind, in service of truth, against cant and self-serving conveniences. Jones Griffiths wants you to feel, but even more than that he then wants you to think.

Don't get me wrong: Ms B loves art for art's sake. Indeed I have argued its case many's the time; but the success of the case may depend on what is meant by "art" and what, at bottom, one thinks it is for (even when only in its own service). Jones Griffiths understood about art. He said, I forget where, something wonderful about the first time he ever saw a photograph by Cartier-Bresson (aka, of course, the Master). It was upside-down. He was in a class or something, and the teacher had deliberately reversed the picture so as to draw attention, not to the subject, but to the composition. Jones Griffiths said this had a permanent effect on how he looked at things, and this to me is a sign of the utter integrity of his vision. An eye that can't push itself past the obvious and really see what's there is no eye. And a heart and a mind without an eye cannot produce art - and photo-journalism, without being art, cannot succeed.

Some people might say 72 was a good age, but to lose this person now, at a time when we need his particular qualities so much, seems a tragedy. He was so young. Younger than we are.

international women's day

You know the Baroque: I'm not really into these international this-n-that days, with the possible exception of International Pirates Day (Q: Why are pirates called pirates? A: Because they arrrrrrrrr). And I won't be going to any International Women's Day events nor will I listen to any Women's events on Radio 4, or whatever they do. I think I saw something about an all-women poetry reading which I won't be attending; I'm a little wary of anything where people get to feel smug about how misunderstood they are. (I'm be home watching Ghost Club.)

But today is a day to realise that:

Convictions for reported rapes in the UK have plummeted from from (what we then called "only") around 30% in the 1980s to an appalling 5.7% now - the lowest in Europe. More women are reporting rape than ever before. Most are raped by people they know. And juries are reluctant to convict if the victim had been drinking. (It's worth knowing this, girls: go to a party and you have no protection in the courts if something happens later.)

In some countries rape qualifies as "adultery" for which the woman can be punished.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, aka "Mr Reasonable", has even made his famous remark about "some aspects of" sharia law being "inevitable" in Britain. Yeah, right. Here in Baroque Mansions we deliberately stayed away from that one. But it's just civil matters, you know. Still within UK law. Well, sharia is not fair to women, either as law or, more importantly as the sensibility under which people live (as we, under British law, live within its sensibility; come on, this isn't rocket science); I saw this even in my limited capacity working for years in a Muslim neighbourhood. Sharia courts are far more likely to rule in favour of the male-dominated sensibility, according to the religious texts. Read this. Really: read it.

Let's not forget about the case (in 2002) of Amina Lawal - she was sentenced to stoning (to death) in Nigeria because she had a baby two years after separating from her husband! The male partner in question was not prosecuted, "for lack of evidence." Oh - and her defending lawyers won on appeal (she is now remarried) on a sharia-based defence that it is apparently possible for an embryo to lie dormant for up to five years, thereby "proving" that the baby "must be" her ex-husband's.

Also, in the UK! The Department for Work and Pensions has recently ruled that it will pay additional benefits to Muslim men [sic] who have up to four wives! Yes! Just as long as those marriages were contracted in countries where polygyny is legal. Even though polygamy is illegal here.

Er - don't you think it's funny that they're not talking about paying the benefits to the women?

Worldwide, women are still paid on average 16% less than men. Apparently the pay gap is even wider for highly educated women. (Get that! Mind you, I suppose Martin Amis and the footballers have pushed men's average hourly pay right up.) In Britain they get 17% less. In Japan apparently they get 49% less. (Yes, that's a 4.)














Of the 1.2billion people estimated to live in poverty, 70% are women and children. In the developing world a woman dies from pregnancy or childbirth complications every minute.

AIDS is rising faster in women than it is in men:

"Women now make up nearly half of the 37.2 million adults aged 15-49 living with HIV worldwide.

In sub-Saharan Africa about 60% of those with HIV are women. And among young people aged 15-24, 75% of those with HIV are girls and women. Only a quarter are the boys.

Over the past two years alone, the number of women infected in East Asia has increased by 56%.

In Eastern Europe and Central Asia the number has increased by 48%." (figures from here)

According to the UN, for women to be "adequately represented" by their governments, 30% of government representatives should be female. Thirty countries have reached this figure (including Burundi, Guyana and Rwanda) and only three countries - Chile, Spain and Sweden - in the world have achieved gender parity. In the UK 18% of MPs are female. In the USA, only 14% of seats in Congress are held by women.









41 million girls in the developing world are being deprived of an education. How will they ever get into parliament, so they can make it illegal for men to infect their wives with HIV?

the placebo effect: how depressing is it, really?

Or: the truth about great expectations

This week's revelation that placebo pills "work just as well" as the seratonin-uptake-enhancing Prozac family has been a bit of a shocker for anyone putting their faith in the efficacy of modern medicine. I mean, we always knew it was a shibboleth; but where knowing is one thing, and being told is another, this business of being shown seems a step too far!

Or is it?

Inrterestingly, the Boston Globe ran this fascinating piece the day before the SSRI story broke:

"SCIENTISTS AT CALTECH and Stanford... provided people with cabernet sauvignons at various price points, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90... The subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better, even when they were actually identical to cheaper wines."

In this instance the scientists were testing the neural responses of the participants, and guess what! Their brains responded differently - that is, physically - to the same wines when they thought they were more expensive. (It doesn't record what was happening with their taste buds. I know to my chagrin what a cheap cabernet can taste like.)

The Globe article continues, rather trenchantly:

"Expectations have long been a topic of psychological research, and it's well known that they affect how we react to events, or how we respond to medication. But in recent years, scientists have been intensively studying how expectations shape our direct experience of the world, what we taste, feel, and hear. The findings have been surprising - did you know that generic drugs can be less effective merely because they cost less? - and it's now becoming clear just how pervasive the effects of expectation are.

The human brain, research suggests, isn't built for objectivity. The brain doesn't passively take in perceptions. Rather, brain regions involved in developing expectations can systematically alter the activity of areas involved in sensation. The cortex is "cooking the books," adjusting its own inputs depending on what it expects."

Now, of course, this is what behavioural therapy is all about, as my darling friend Ms Rational Self-Determinism would be quick to tell us (though I personally think that behavioural therapy is fine as far as it goes). But what about those times when even positive, thinking, exercise, routine, having something to look forward to, etc, can't help us? Don't we need a little something extra to recalibrate the enzymes? (And no, I don't mean that cheap cab sav.)

Hmm. This new research appears to be telling us we don't. It's all there inside us. Even if we can't find it.

Mark Lawson in today's Comment is Free makes the cogent point that, instead of lamenting that SSRI's "don't work" (sic: plainly, according to their users, they do), we should be celebrating the idea that the placebos work just as well:

"Depression, at a basic level, is a loss of belief in the usual ways of getting through the day: habit, optimism, energy, hope. Exercise might be a better solution than drugs, but a bottle of vodka worse. If faith in a pill works, then the confidence trick involved is entirely benevolent except for the false profits of the drug barons. Instead of damning Prozac, we should be cheering placebos."

In other words, we really do respond the way those wine-tasting Californians say we do, and we should be jolly happy about it.

Look at it this way: people can walk through fire and report no pain. Someone I know just ordered Paul McKenna's wait-loss kit, trusting to hypnotism to help her go down a couple of stone. And childbirth groups have long worked on the basis that young women respond better, with fewer physical traumas in labour, if they know what to expect and how it all works.

A careers consultant - not the most hippy-dippy type of professional, I'd have thought - told me just two days ago about the power of "visualising. " The way he put it was this: the brain has a tendency towards normalisation, towards sanity. Whatever your thought patterns are, your brain will say to itself, "this is sanity: this is a reflection of how the world is." He said, if you want to change something, you simply start by telling yourself it's the way you want it to be. You repeat the words to yourself before sleep. You visualise it as a reality, with images and sounds and even smells - just like one of those compelling daydreams you have predicting certain disaster in whatever sphere of your life, only this time you put the energy into daydreaming something you actually want, not fear. And you conjure up a positive emotion to associate with it. He says after several weeks of this your brain will start to rebel at the disjuncture between what you tell yourself and how you behave, and your behaviour will fall into line with what your brain now perceives - critically - as its expectations.

His example was a person wanting to, say, lose weight or stop smoking, but you could use it for any situation I suppose.

This in itself, as I told the nice man, is very like a party game we were doing on New Year's Eve, called Cosmic Ordering, where you write a letter to the cosmos telling it what you expect it to deliver to you in the coming year. Ideally you write it and give it to someone else to hold, and just forget about it: the work in your unconscious is done. Apparently this is not like a letter to Santa: you don't have to promise to be good. Better in fact if you don't, because it's not about hoping for it, it's about simply expecting it.

Failing that, you could read one of the rash of recent articles all about how depression is good for you. Or you could just stay on the Prozac: after all, it works just as well as a placebo.

the world turned upside down

After last week's shock announcement that the Home Secretary needs a bodyguard to go for a kebab, and thinks (yes she does; she said so) that "no one would" go out and about in Hackney after dark, we now find that our new Housing Minister Caroline Flint is shocked at the number of council tenants who don't have jobs. Funny; one might be reasonably shocked by these sorts of things, but of course the big difference between her and Labour Ministers of old is that she thinks all these jobless tenants are just a bunch of lazy bastards.

The number of council tenants without jobs has risen, from 20% in 1981 to 55% now. That means of course that where most council tenants previously were trotting off of a morning with their dustcarts, chip vans and nail files, nowadays they are less cosy to look at and think about. According to Flint, that's reason enough to take these people in hand and make sure they're at least looking for a job - sinisterly, even to make sure they're "employable"* - before they're allowed to have a council home.

After all! The likes of us aren't paying perfectly good taxes to support the likes of them, are we!

"She told the Fabian Society on Monday: 'The link between social housing and worklessness is stark. I am concerned about what has been called a collapse in the number of people in council housing in work over the past 25 years.

'We need to think radically and start a national debate'."

Okay - so let's start the debate. First of all, I move that the word missing from her statement to the Fabians is "causal." There is no evidence that being given a council home has in any way encouraged these people to become, or to remain, jobless.

In 1982 the unemployment rate famously topped 3 million, or one in eight people. It was going up, at the time, not down. Remember why Thatcher was so thrilled when Argentina invaded the Falklands?? In 2007 the unemployment rate was around five per cent, or one in 20 people. Spot the difference. I'm not even sure what the population has done in that time, but the actual number of unemployed people now is around 1.5 million, or half what it was in the early eighties. Does that sound to you like a huge segment of the population has just decided not to work?

As it happens, in 1984 - three years after the date the Minister is concerned about - yours truly here was party to the purchase of a flat in Wimbledon (I know, I know - I was a child bride, I liked being near the Wombles) for £29,950. The combined salaries involved in the mortgage - from two young people both, at that time, working in shops of one sort or another - came to roughly £16,000. In other words, we were earning more than half the amount the flat cost.

Er - compare that to now. On a salary of over four times what I was earning then, I am unable to afford to buy a flat. Well - okay - I have kids, I'd need a bigger flat, and I'm only one adult in the equation, not two. However. The average price of a home in 2007 hit around £200,000. Even in nasty old Hackney you can't even buy a garage for twice the combines earnings of two shop assistants.

The Telegraph puts it this way:

"To put current house prices into perspective, the median weekly wage, according to the Office for National Statistics, is £447 – equating to £23,244 a year. Average house prices, then, have reached a remarkable 8·6 times average earnings."

Now, you may recall that many council properties have been sold off under Right to Buy. Many of those places now fetch the same prices on the open market as other properties, despite the fact that councils deprived of the rental income can't even afford to keep up the communal areas properly - such is our housing shortage - and, thus, the competition for those that remain is so fierce that there are severely overcrowded families growing up and even leaving home before they can be rehoused in larger properties. I, at one stage having not worked for nine years and finding myself with nowhere to go, spent several years in a one-bedroom privately rented flat that cost me more than a 3-bed council house would have (of course I was working; I was doing nothing bloody else). I currently, in a 'good job', spend nearly half my take-home pay on the rent of the cheapest habitable two-bed flat I was able to find (in good old Hackney). (It's very nice, actually, but that is beside the point.)

Now, in this climate it stands to reason that the few council properties that do remain will go to the most desperate people in our society, those with no jobs, those who can't raise a deposit for a rented place, those who have been made homeless (the only way to get housed in inner London), those who have no other option. The ones the council has to house.

They are the deserving poor.

Of course fewer of them are working.

Caroline, wake up! Wake up! It was all a dream!

* I wonder if that means they have to speak English, too.

"I am my own work of art"*

I long ago worked out that one of the main things I want out of life is to get through it with my personality intact. By this I mean that when I'm eighty, in the home, I want to be still making my decisions based on what I want - even if the only choice I get is what I want on my porridge (I know: porridge? I'd be lucky!) - rather than on what doesn't scare or threaten me in some way ("Ohmigod, not porridge, I can't stand that stuff ever since that bastard threw some on me back in 2010," etc). I want to be laughing and having fun in my wheelchair. Or, you know, complaining in an honest and enjoyable way about the ugly, uncomfy headrest, rather than feeling hard-done-by that I'm not in the first team of the home's salsa class. I don't want to be fuelled by bitterness - though I might accept a half of bitter (okay, make it a pint).

Of course this is what we all want, but in the course of the baroque peregrinations it has come to attention that this precise idea of intactness of the personality - of an integritas, as James Joyce might have said* - is in fact the thing that's at stake. One can't allow oneself to be weakened, to become weak, or to be made smaller, or to have things taken away from one's essence, as a result of things that have merely happened. Bigger, yes. Though I keep saying I'll do something about that. But to have one's horizons and powers and capacities shrink? To concede? Nooooo.

Well, this morning on the way to work I began reading Christopher Reid's enormous (though by his account extremely partial) edition of the Letters of Ted Hughes. Opening it at random, I read this, and it made me feel very sad:

(to Lucas Myers, 29 September 1984)
"I keep writing this and that, but it seems painfully little for the time I spend pursuing it. I wonder sometimes if things might have gone differently without the events of 63 & 69. I have an idea of those two episodes as steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself, leaving me that much less, just what was left, to live on. No doubt a more resolute artist would have penetrated the steel doors - but I believe big physical changes happen at these times, big self-anaesthesias. Maybe life isn't long enough to wake up from them."

A more resolute artist? Not long enough? Even for somebody as larger-than-life as Ted Hughes?And can he really have been just wondering this in 1984? I ask this not to pry or to cast doubt on his experience, but because he reminds me here so much of people I've known, who maybe haven't managed to stay intact, who never really figured out what had happened to them.

* Who said this?

** Sorry to do this to you. The relevant passage from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

--To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: AD PULCRITUDINEM TRIA REQUIRUNTUR INTEGRITAS, CONSONANTIA, CLARITAS. I translate it so: THREE THINGS ARE NEEDED FOR BEAUTY, WHOLENESS, HARMONY, AND RADIANCE. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?

--Of course, I am, said Lynch. If you think I have an excrementitious intelligence run after Donovan and ask him to listen to you.

Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher's boy had slung inverted on his head.

--Look at that basket, he said.

--I see it, said Lynch.

--In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time.

What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehended it as ONE thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is INTEGRITAS.

--Bull's eye! said Lynch, laughing. Go on.

--Then, said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the
synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is ONE thing you feel now that it is a THING. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible,
separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is CONSONANTIA.

--Bull's eye again! said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is CLARITAS and you win the cigar.

--The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol. I thought he might mean that CLARITAS is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks in the scholastic QUIDDITAS, the WHATNESS of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, though I have been far from the news (at least, after lying in bed listening to a special feature between 7.30 and 8am, the result of forgetting to turn off my alarm - and very fascinating it was too); I never even bought a paper. But here is Linda Grant with a wonderful remembrance.

And here is Antony Hecht:

The Book of Yolek

And here is Roger Mitchell, with magic effects by Michael Donaghy:

The Story of the White Cup

never so badly... er...

art, casting its glow on the deep complexities of society

We could be on the verge of a new Renaissance - just like the one they had in 15th-century Italy. Hurrah! And it's not even an overstatement, according to the culture minister (who he? ed.), but is "exactly true."

"Exactly!" That makes it practically scientific! Leonardo da Vinci would love it. Let's resurrect him.

Apparently it's all about changing from a "target"-driven arts funding establishment to an "excellence"-driven one - so says a report about to be published by the government, written by Sir Brian McMaster, an ex-director of the Edinburgh Festival (hereinafter known as "The "Edinburgh International Festival"). It all sounds like a jolly good idea, of course. Excellence! Let's have some more of it. It even sounds a bit like Excelsior! But what is it? How can you tell when you've got it?

Let us see if the words of McMaster himself shed any light on this mystery. In the Guardian's article on the report, he says that 'the society we now live in is arguably the most exciting it has ever been', and the arts 'have never been so needed to understand the deep complexities of Britain today'. He argues for a new 'appreciation of the profound value of the arts and culture'."

In case you are in any doubt as to what those meaningless strings of phrases might mean, the culture minister is on hand again to clarify it for us: it's 'the reclamation of excellence from its historic elitist undertones'."

So: just like the Renaissance then! Will we shake off the shackles of the mediaeval Church and rediscover the intellectual and cultural glories upon which so much of our civilisation is based? Will we discover perspective?

Will we discover how to mix any two pigments, I mean tenses, to create a tense that previously existed only in our own imaginations? Or will "the society we now [sic, & model's own italics] live in" continue to be cut off cruelly from how exciting it "has ever been"? Or was it not so exciting back when it wasn't happening yet? And will the government fund a study to find out how badly the arts used to be "needed to understand the deep complexities of Britain today"? Or, in the past, did they not really care how jolly complex we would be today?

Or should, if we're going to fund people out of the public purse (you know, the one with your money and my money in it) to write reports that could decide if this clarinettist or that theatre director is going to have to retrain as an electrician, should we make sure they know what art is, what it's actually for, and - er - how to construct a sentence that isn't complete gibberish? As a poet, as a poet who may yet come to have a stake in all this excellence-based funding malarkey, I'd like to think that the people who thought it up could recognise excellence in my art if they tripped over it. But let's just stick to the basics for now.

Let's say, the visual arts.

Sadly, the article fails to give any concrete reason - that is, a reason based on some empirical evidence from "today's" art world rather than from its own theoretical posturing - why we might be on the brink of something as amazing as Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Giotto, Pisanello and Botticelli (i.e., all the Ninja Turtles) all at the same time. We'll have to imagine that for ourselves. We've rediscovered the diamond-encrusted skull! Er - I know... And we've made a very referential video of a renaissance-type bowl of fruit, filmed it rotting, and speeded up the film so the flies buzz, ike, really extra-fast... I mean because in today's busy society, the gallery-goer might not get that a bowl of fruit is about mortality unless they can see it rotting before their eyes - kind of like as if it was on TV, yeah, that's it - 'cause, you know, we never let fruit rot these days. We just stick it in the fridge and then we throw it out.

So yeah, its gonna be just like a new Renaissance, only we gotta get the policies right. Then the people can produce something really "world-class" (the culture minister's term, not mine!).

So, let's see. We'll have Hirstonardo, Quinntelangelo, Taylor-della-Wood, Eminanello... Let's see.

Nope. I'm not seeing it.

Or - just to get serious for a minute - does the minister's use of that word "world-class" betray something else at the root of all this, something about export markets and the revenue from BritArt...?

I totally - don't get me wrong - me and all my mates down the pub totally applaud an excellence-based arts funding strategy. But if that's really what McMaster and his friend want, why are they still talking as if it was all about targets? Why do they think that merely "world-class" (clearly in market terms) is the same as the greatest art ever known the history of the Western world, which by the way is not going to be possible to create in our culture of today, which persistently worships mediocrity? Sorry. Deeply complex. Our deeply complex culture. Why are they using phrases like "society today"? You know and I know, and my mates know, that these people are still carrying their mental ticklist, they'll say "but how many people went to the gallery", and they'll still think poetry's "elitist".

Around about this point, are you wondering what Orson Welles (henceforth to be known as Wellesavaggio) would say about all this? So was I. (I have it on good authority that this isn't a Greene-scripted line, btw, despite the credits, funding conditions, etc, but came, ad hoc - if that isn't too elitist a phrase - from the Great Man himelf.) He'd say: "in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

But enough of movies. Words not mentioned in the Guardian article - though the report, Supporting Excellence in the Arts, might be worth a read and a giggle - include any variant of "beauty" or "beautiful"; "artist", "education", "life", "challenging", "intellectual", "aesthetic", "drawing skills," etc etc. Or "patronage".

But don't laugh too much. It's published on Thursday. Better to start grinding your lapis lazuli, things could go mega.

world gone insane

Reality TV and the courts: who can tell the difference? The worst part of this peccadillo seems to be the woman's husband spouting on on all the talk shows... Very interesting. If the offence had been less sexual in nature - that is, less embarrassing for his own masculine self-esteem - would he have said those things? And this had the complicity of the courts. And look what her lawyer said!

Er - and look at these figures. Which one are you? How long, do you think, before we'll all be on probation, or wearing tags, or going back to prison for conducting an innocent workplace conversation with a salami? since when are some kinds of food simply "bad" and others by virtue of their very existence "good"? And you know I love my vegetables. I just hate petty fascists.

"Ban unhealthy foods from hospital vending machines"? Imagine: you're waiting for your aged relative to come out of the operating theatre, or your wife's been having a baby. You're stressed out and overtired. You go to the machine for something to give you a lift and it offers you - an apple or a pear. Give me a break. (What they need, in fact, is better quality chocolate.) There is a time and a place for everything and if anyone wants to talk about food in hospitals they could start by trying to get decent food provided to the fecking patients. I saw not one piece of fresh fruit when I was in hospital this year, you were lucky to be offered a little sealed plastic pot of tinned fruit cocktail once a day. And let's not even start on their total lack of commitment to providing food that's appropriate to the patient's medical condition!

But oh yes, let's put a tax on custard creams. Or on a wonderful smoked ham or farm-reared free-range pork, or on the aforementioned Italian salami, or a ricotta, or a bottle of olive oil. That'll get us eating better! But not on the fruit cocktail in a tin. Noooo. And not on the fish fingers with orange coating.

DNA holds clues to personal beliefs. It It must be true, I read it here. Donate yours now.

By the way, I've had very little, and patchy, internet over the past two days. I did spend an hour or so going in rings around all the various voice-recordings of Virgin Media, speaking to several real people along the way - but all the real people have the power to do is put you through to the recording, and one of them couldn't even speak English, anyway. Sorry Virgin - we aren't fooled! The guy was in India. If you ring Tech Support you don't even get that: you just get a phone ringing into the void until you eventually hang up. On one of the recordings there was news that "some customers in the N22 and N18 areas" may be experiencing "some trouble" with their internet connection. Does N16 count as "the N18 area?" Where is N18? But it's all right because the engineers "expect [sic] service to be restored as soon as possible." Phew!

2008: looking better?

Sorry, this is a non-post. It's sort of a non-week. I'm not even getting my work done, and I bought the wrong kind of printer ink yesterday. I think my brain is fuzzy from eating unhealthy food.

the people in mud huts

Doris Lessing - I hope I'm as good at 88!

Doris Lessing, in her Nobel acceptance speech last night, gave an intense and vivid description of the importance of books - where books really are important, to people who have literally nothing else. Contrast this scenario with our own spoiled, internet-dazzled society: we who think we know everything, Googling away at the drop of a hat, know nothing.

There seems to be an issue with effort. It's so easy just to type in whatever you're looking for - and who cares anyway whether Wikipedia is really reliable. It's close enough, right? And if you're 90% likely to get information that's good enough, who cares that the interpretation was wrong, or the birth year listed was one year out?

When did we lose our respect, our hunger for knowledge? When did looking it up on screen replace actually wanting to know it in the first place?

Lessing says:

"What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: 'What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?' In the same way, we never thought to ask, 'How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?'*

Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men's libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less."

And she talks about villages in Zimbabwe where people in mud huts with no books and no paper, and certainly no Wikipedia, are trying to learn. It's the hardest thing in the world; often they just want to learn to read. Just as she says these kinds of mud huts have been built always and everywhere - eg in Saxon England - so these places have always existed, where people have to carve civilisation afresh from its raw materials.

America is of course addicted to its legends of the west, and its pioneers, who did just that, and in sod huts to boot. I grew up addicted to these stories. Of course I learned all about it by reading - about children in covered wagons, and how they made their food, and how they built their houses, often with borrowed Indian lore. The trail west was littered with unwanted items, packed hopefully in the east and just too heavy to carry all the way: Grandfather clocks, rocking chairs, small pianos; chests of superfluous clothes. But people didn't abandon their family Bibles, their violins, their John Bunyans, their Paradise Losts.

I also loved stories of the Middle Ages, even the Dark Ages - which was Saxon England, of course. I confused everyone I knew at 15, the year I was in a crazy hippie school called Shanti,** by choosing for my independent project a research paper about Alfred the Great. (This really was a strange thing to do. I had a little card index full of notes, whose sources I meticulously recorded. Other kids, for their projects, did quilting; one gay redheaded boy went to Vermont to be a ski instructor. And one girl in 10th grade, who had been sent to Shanti because she was pregnant, had her baby for her project.)

Now, Alfred the Great really was great. He defined an England for the first time, made it out of the old Saxon kingdoms that weren't strong enough to see off the Vikings individually - East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria and Wessex (of which he was the king) - ended the hopeless war against the invaders with the truce of the Danelaw, and established a civilised infrastructure. Chief among his achievements was this one simple thing: he built schools. He decreed that every freeborn boy should learn to read, and also that those able to should learn to read Latin. He translated many works into English; his English version of Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy was popular throughout the entire Middle Ages, and he was a poet too: many sections of that work are now felt by scholars to be rather - ahem - original, some in alliterative verse. Alfred knew that, as Doris Lessing says, writers (and thinkers, and people who can simply tell the difference) can come from mud huts, but they are less likely to come from mud huts where nobody reads.

You could also say they're less likely to come from a house where people are watching "Big Brother" or playing computer games all day. Because, fun and ironic as the one may appear to be, and quick as the other may make one's reflexes, they both rely for their success on a lack of discernment, which they also feed.

My "counsellor" at Shanti School, a 32-year-old skinny guy called Chuck, had left his wife in Cincinatti to take the job - at $8K a year, as opposed to a $32K academic job he had also been offered - so as to assuage his guilt at being a white middle-class male. He used to read us his letters from her in what passed for "home room." Once, he even cried. I guess a paper on Alfred the Great - the ultimate affluent white guy - wasn't really Chuck's bag. Already in his bad books for not signing up for the Racism Awareness Workshop (of which more another time, maybe), I tried to argue that Alfred the Great was my Roots, but nobody was impressed. Chuck gave me a B+ without ever reading the paper.

Of course computer games, TV and the internet aren't the problem: they're just conduits. The problem is that we're growing lazy, smug and boring; we think we know everything and don't need to devote our lifetimes to learning. As Lessing puts it, "We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing." This is, for example, how I came last week to be listening to a very nice girl telling me how some people think Curious George is a Racist Book, because Curious George (the curious little monkey) is like a boy, but he's brown (duh) and he gets into trouble (of course he does - he's a curious little monkey!) and this apparently means little black boys are being compared to non-human primates. (Don't even get me started.)

And look at the Shilpa Shetty racism row last summer: in a society where anyone at all in charge was using any discernment, or was able to pick through the platitudes to an actual idea of what is what, none of that would have happened. And your kids and mine were watching it, when they could have been reading Vanity Fair. The book.

Lessing finishes with an amazing story about a young African woman queueing up in the dust for water, small children hanging off her skirt, engrossed in a torn section of Anna Karenina. In her story, the young woman is so engrossed that she can barely put the book down, although she's only managed to pick through one paragraph of it, even when it comes her turn to get water. It may be that Lessing is right, and this woman is more indicative than we are of civilisation. While she and others like her are trying to become "full human beings" - full "of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge" - the rest of us (well, not quite all) are throwing it away as if it didn't even matter. Because to us, as Freddy Mercury himself said, nothing really matters.

I found Lessing's speech incredibly moving. In some ways it reminded me of my own desperation for books when I was growing up; it also made me grateful for my riches, reading about the man in Zimbabwe who, trying to start a library and sent a box of books from America, put them away wrapped in plastic saying, "but if they get dirty where will I get more?" whilst facing my own wall of books. It also shamed me as a parent. When did I get so lazy? I suddenly think I should put a password lock on the computer and ration out the MSN on the basis of chapters read. After all, her shelves are groaning with Jane Austen, To Kill a Mockingbird, I Capture the Castle, A Wrinkle in Time. Is it an insane idea?


* We'll just disregard that for the moment; we know the kind of thing she means. She probably doesn't even know about Chip Dale or Non-Working Monkey, or even Baroque in Hackney. I do have thoughts about all this of course, relating to cumulative structure, the development of ideas, the nature of the blog form and so on - and my thoughts are not all complimentary to blog form - but that's for another day.

** "Shanti" means "the peace that surpasseth all understanding." Call me a Westerner, but the older I get the more I think that "the peace that surpasseth all understanding" can only usefully be applied as a definition of death - and thus, in my book, is something I'm not very interested in. At the least it sounds pretty damn boring. In any case, there was no peace at all in that place, not even the kind most people would be able to understand, and even appreciate. But that too is another story... and it was the first time we ever heard Mama Baroque say the F word!

something old, nothing new

"Pornography, kissing policemen and erotic pictures" - it sounds delightful, doesn't it? We'll soon have something of the kind in London, in the Barbican's new exhibition, "Seduced" (advance booking, timed tickets, over-18s only). But in Paris, of all place, no...

An exhibition of contemporary Russian art, planned by the state-owned Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow to be shown in Paris, is now being meddled with by the Russian Minister of Culture. Apparently it would bring disgrace on Russia if some of these pictures were seen in Paris, especially the one above. "It is inadmissible...to take all this pornography, kissing policemen and erotic pictures to Paris." he said. I'd like to think the Minister, Alexander Sokolov, was at least blustering, shaking his whiskers about; but sadly, I expect it was more like a dry statement, possibly in a press conference or else a release, maybe drafted by a poor harmless press officer, and utterly dull except for its content.

The picture above, titled in English variously as "The Age of Charity" or "An Epoch of Clemency," singled out particularly by Sokolov (let me ask: is it just possible he used to be a policeman of some kind?), is by our "something blue" - a Siberian art duo called Blue Noses. Read all about them here, in the blurb for a show at Matthew Bown Gallery; and here, on Matthew Bown's extremely interesting Russian art blog.*

In fact, this picture reminds me of not only one, but two other pictures. The first is cited as the inspiration for the image by the artists themselves, Alexander Shaburov and Viacheslav Mizin: good old Banksy's Kissing Policemen.

" 'We were inspired by Banksy's iconic image of two constables kissing. We wanted to do the same but in Russia,' Mr Shaburov said, in the same Guardian article as quoted above.

"The image had nothing to do with gay people, he added. Instead, it was an absurdist fantasy about what might happen if everyone showed mercy and tenderness to each other. 'Given the fact the state has banned it, we haven't quite reached this point yet,' he noted."

The second thing it reminds me of is one of the most surprising pictures I've ever seen in my life, and it came straight out of Stalinism - from the cover of a Stalinist propaganda magazine called USSR in Construction. Of course the import of the picture is completely different - it depicts a peasant embracing a soldier with a passionate kiss on the mouth - and the fact may simply be that the sexualisation of contemporary culture makes this picture more surprising to me than it would have been to some babuschka in Archangel in the 40s. But the fact also remains that USSR In Construction was a miracle of progressive art that was simply, for some reason, allowed to happen, even in one of the largest-scale dictatorships of the twentieth century.** There's a display in Tate Modern, and I wrote about it here.

This bring me to the third thing this fracas reminds me of, and it's not a picture. It's a sad truth about the nature of progress in culture. Right now in the USA, even a poem - Ginsberg's "Howl" - that was cleared of obscenity by the courts, in the 50s, can't now be broadcast on the airwaves because it would contravene all sorts of codes and laws about "decency."

Plus ça change, and maybe we've always been more alike than we wanted to think. Clearly the "old" item in our little rhyme is the political censorship of art, which we can now see flourishing on both sides of the Superdivide and under the so-called Free Market. "Let me to the marriage of true minds admit impediments..."

I for one think the picture above is completely successful, poignant and sweet. I can't wait to go to the Barbican and see the Mapplethorpes.

* Not wishing to digress: Matthew Bown has also reproduced another of the banned pictures, which does in fact look a little more politically-uncorrect to me... interestingly. Have a look here.

** Mind you, Stalin was notoriously capricious when it came to art, and especially writers: he tolerated, for sentimental reasons, Pasternak (eg), whilst simultaneously sending thousands of other artists to the gulags. USSR In Construction was not allowed to persist indefinitely.

cup poems from Guantanamo

poet Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, with his son, kept his sanity through poetry - but has since been rearrested and disappeared

Remember the old Soviet days, when poems and novels were smuggled out of the USSR in suitcases - when prisoners wrote poems about freedom and then had to scratch the words out of the dust on the floors of their cells? Remember apartheid, the way the black writers of Africa were denied their voices? Remember how unjust that was, how we reviled the governments that did that to their prisoners?

I interviewed Irina Ratushinskaya once, when she gave a reading in London after the publication of her book of prison poems, and she told me how she had written them in her head, transcribed them infinitesimally onto scraps of toilet paper and then slipped them to visitors. She was a tender little thing, solid and no-nonsense but very young - maybe younger than her years, for having spent several of them locked up.

Well, it's happening again. Locked in solitary cells, forbidden even to write letters home* under suspicion of every word being a coded message, the prisoners of Guantánano Bay - most of whom, remember, have no known terrorist connections, have never been tried, and are thus technically innocent - are writing poems, any way they can. They write them in toothpaste, etch them on the edges of styrofoam cups, horde scraps of paper, they write them in between brutal interrogation and torture sessions, and give them to the only people they're allowed to see: their lawyers. Thousands and thousands of lines of poetry have been confiscated and classified by the US military.

One of those lawyers, Marc Falkoff, was so struck by two poems he'd been given that he thought of asking other Guantánamo lawyers if they had ever been given any poetry. They had. And this time - in a delicious ironic disjuncture, because this perpetrator is in fact the Land of the Free itself - the government has no option but to allow the poems to be published, under Freedom of Speech.

According to the CBC:

"Falkoff said the poems have been translated from Arabic to English by a limited pool of translators granted security clearances by the U.S. military and some of the poetic cadence may have been lost in the process.

The poems were cleared by U.S. military censors, who screen any material sent out of the Guantanamo Bay prison."

Funny old world, eh?

However, "Many poems did not make it through the Pentagon's security screening.**

A Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, described the detainees' poems as 'another tool in their battle of ideas against Western democracies against whom they are at war.'"

In a refreshing paean to the power of prosodic device (their English teachers would be so proud) US military officials say: "poetry ... presents a special risk, and DoD [Department of Defence] standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language". The fear, officers say, is that allegorical imagery in poetry may be used to convey coded messages to militants outside," according to today's Independent.

Almost makes you want to go away and write some allegory, doesn't it? However, the poems are gut-wrenchingly far from being allegorical: take this poem by Jumah al Dossari, a 33-year-old Bahraini who has been held at Guantánamo Bay for more than five years. He has been in solitary confinement since the end of 2003 and has tried to kill himself twelve times while in custody.

death poem (mp3)

Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.”

Here is a sound file of some "cup poem" fragments by the Afghan/Pakistani poet and religious scholar*** Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost. He was released by the Americans, and has subsequently been arrested by Pakistani security - and disappeared.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that in these sort of contexts the phrase "religious scholar" usually seems to mean "ultra-rightwing Taliban-supporting lock-up-your-daughters back-to-basics scholar" - and in this case, the poet was, before his arrest, editing three Taliban-friendly magazines, though he had no connections with the Taliban or Al-Qaeda itself. I would just like to stress that I'm not supporting the Taliban here! Far from it. The poet in question would himself probably not like me even having the ability to write this in his support. What I'm supporting is the US government not becoming like them.***

The book - Poems From Guantánamo: the Detainees Speak - is published by the University of Iowwa Press this month, priced to sell at $13.95 (just under £7 at current rates), with additional content by Ariel Dorfman, and quotes from Gore Vidal, Adrienne Rich and Robert Pinsky.

The book's web page also has an impressive list of link to do with human rights and publishing. Proceeds from the book will go to the American Center for Constitutional Rights.

* except, apparently, for ten minutes a week, heavily censored, via the Red Cross.

** and there was me, thinking Don Paterson had a reputation for editorial rigour!

*** On this note, trivial and unconnected as it may seem, I noticed that in the movie Waitress, which I saw last night, they were unable even to say the word "abortion" - though the subject came up two or three times in the film, as the heroine is unhappily pregnant by her violent husband. They just did that thing of interrupting the sentence right before the word, and of course the heroine said she could never even consider such a thing! And her doctor was keen to say he wouldn't provide the service anyway. The film, quirky and unreligious as anything, is set in the American South.

Freelance nutter gets new gig

I see that Yvonne Ridley (aka "Sister Yvonne") – former English tabloid journalist, current spittle-flecked* Islamist and sufferer from Stockholm Syndrome – has joined the staff of Iran's latest propaganda initiative. Press TV is aimed at viewers in Europe and the US, and has as its chief news anchor a real Lord Haw Haw character in Henry Morton ("Salaam, and welcome.").

Ridley has had a chequered journalistic career, and it will be interesting to see how this comical Wahhabist fares under Iranian Shia tutelage. Ridley worked until recently for the London-based Islam Channel, but was given the boot after offending its Saudi backers. Only that's not how Ridley's friends describe the affair. In a brilliant display of originality and political acumen, the Ridley fanclub claim that it was all part of a cunning plot cooked up by the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

In 2003, Ridley was fired by al-Jazeera from her position as editor of the TV station's English-language service. Angry at her dismissal, Ridley is said to have "declared jihad on al-Jazeera". She sued for unfair dismissal, and won a settlement that no doubt buggered up her dole claim.

Back to Ridley's current employ. I was approached in January by a certain Keivan Hassanpour of Press TV with a view to working with the new channel. Maybe I was seen as someone who could carry news of Iran's scientific triumphs to the western world, and enthusiastically present its side of the nuclear story. Whatever the reason, it says a lot about the thoroughness of the station's HR procedures.

But that's by the bye, and while I am always open to new commissions, I'm not that desperate. Still, if I had access to a satellite receiver, I would definitely tune in to Press TV from time to time for a spot of light entertainment. Fawning interviews with Hugo Chávez sound absolutely delightful, as do live political debates hosted by "Sister Yvonne".

Going by Ridley's track record, however, it's unlikely she will be there for long.

* Talking of spittle-flecked, did any of you catch Melanie Phillips blowing a gasket on yesterday's Moral Maze programme on Radio 4? You can listen to the programme online for one week after broadcast.

Aside from the raving bag lady with an NUJ card, it was in parts an intelligent discussion about the nature of Islamism and religious-inspired terrorism. Shiv Malik was particularly good. In the second part of the programme, the Muslim Council of Britain's Inayat Bunglawala had his arguments disassembled with surgical precision, and received a severe verbal kicking from Phillips.

One of the highlights of the programme was sometime biologist and regular critic of Israel Steven Rose lambasting Phillips for her obsession with "The Jewish Problem". Following Rose's tactful intervention, the stunned bag lady made a few strangulated noises in protest, and was promptly shut up by presenter Michael Buerke. I was driving at the time and had to stop the car, so distracted was I with what was coming over the airwaves.

independence day

Alan Johnston is free, after three months held captive by the so-called Army of Islam (top marks for originality there - we're sure to remember that brand). Opening the headlines this morning I was greeted by this picture - imagine! What a glorious wake-up!

I read the articles in the Guardian, and then started my morning blog perusal. The first blog I turned to - maybe, in fact, chosen because of the topicality of the morning's news - showed me a different picture (thanks to my guest-blogger Jura Watchmaker).

I do remember the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit and his two colleagues last summer - a summer of constant bad news and sadness, much of it concerning the very young conscripted people who seem to make up Israel's armed forces. And you know what? I had forgotten. And the reason for that is beause, unlike Alan Johnston who had the BBC behind him,* they haven't been in the news. Looking around a bit this morning I discovered that Gilad (who is only 19 even now) is still in captivity. He looks like a lovely boy. He is in fact a French citizen (as if that made a difference).

There are concerns over the wellbeing of the other two, Eldad Regev and Edud (Udi, for short) Goldwasser, both of whom also look jolly nice; Udi had only recently got married.

So, sadly, I will be replacing the Alan Johnston sticker in my sidebar with this:







I know that all these concerns appear relatively remote from the busy, singleminded politicking of Ben Franklin et al. (much as one loves to ponder on Thomas Jefferson's peculiar icy brand of rationalism and all that...) but then - now more than ever - we are all swimming in the same soup. America may have got its freedom from England, but I don't think any of us can really call ourselves free while all this is going on.** We should, however, now more than ever remember what we got from our Enlightenment forebears.*** I for one always find Tom Paine refreshing:

"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself."

As for the other two Israeli captives, in the absence of any security that they are even alive, all we can do (though I know Francis won't like it! call it early training) is pray for them.

(And if you think that even the idea of ecumenical praying is dangerously close to dancing with the devil, I'll refer you to this lovely story I read on normblog.)

* And lest I sound at all cynical, I'm not. I was moved to tears by his acocunt of hearing about the worldwide vigils on his birthday.

** In my own case I am painfully aware on a daily basis that I don't know enough to be able to interpret the news properly - how could anyone keep up?? Spinoza, as my E-Verse Radio newsletter this week tells me, had something to say about this:

"The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free."

Something to aim for, then.

** Not long now till the election...

Banner Yet Waves

Banner Yet Waves
Erin O'Brien

When you are the American flag, you are beautiful. Every American carries you. You have your own birthday, although it passes quietly, unlike the birthday of the country you represent, with its grilled meat and dazzling fireworks.

People leave their rough woven blankets and clay casks to sigh before your bounty. People abandon their kin to huddle beneath your shelter. People risk their lives to walk freely upon your gilded paths.

You are proud.

You hang straight down in the middle of the country. There are those who are behind you and those who face you with jaws set. In each of them you evoke something unique, from blind faith to yawning indifference. You protect all of them just the same, even the ones who are screaming as they burn you.

On September 12, 2001, nearly 3,000 holes in the cloth of you garnered something very rare: sympathy. Pure and golden, it shone from flags from all over the world.

You were born from American flesh. You were wrapped around this new flesh in order to swathe it, to shield it. But your seams have grown tight, so tight they nearly burst as they attempt to cover the burgeoning fat of the flesh. The fat is rich, fed from corn and milk and oil. The fat is ravenous. It grows larger and larger while your size remains the same.

Those who love you have left you in unwise hands. Some regret it, some do not.

Those hands did not assign proper value to the world's sympathy. They squandered it. And now flags across the globe shun you. They hate and distrust you.

Men who pray at the altar of greed feed the fat. Their lies fade the honor of your stars and stain the color of your stripes.

For each soldier who leaves hearth and home to fight for those lies, one of your stitches weakens. Nonetheless, in the day, you deny your troubles and wave spectacular in the sunlight. In the night, however, you worry over the threads of your fiber, if they are loosening, if they are becoming thinner and weaker.

When you are the American flag, you are heaviest for your soldiers.

They carry you on high and remain strong. This strength, in its inception, progression and demise, evokes tears. You are immersed in the tears. You are saturated with the tears. Despite these tears, the tears of virgins and mothers, your stains persist.

You hung unceremoniously over desert sands while a man deemed evil hanged from a rope that divided his country. Now you are draped around the vulnerable shoulders of his people. You are obliged to remain and shield those people against chaos. At the same time, you are inappropriate garb. Your fabric scratches and irritates the Iraqi skin. The longer you remain, the worse it gets.

While you were serving as that unwelcome cloak, God delivered a terrorist unto the earth.

Her thunder boomed for days before her deluge arrived. But instead of heeding the warning and unfurling you, instead of holding you up as a barrier between the Crescent City and the murderess Katrina, a man named Bush crumpled you into a knot of weariness and lies and shoved you into his back pocket.

You have 50 stars and 13 stripes. Your ratios are exacting as are the manner in which you are to be displayed and folded. The number of coffins you respectfully cover is also counted with precision. However, those who count for you are not so skilled at counting for others. Hence, since spring of 2003 when your reign of undeniable witness ensued, the number of Iraqis that have died is unknown. Estimates range from 5,000 to 500,000, as if zeros meant nothing.

You are sorry.

On that foreign soil, new babies are bathed in the blood of their mothers before you while your minions at home knit their brows and agonize over mocha frappuccino or vanilla latte.

Still, you have hope.

You are red with anger. You are white with fear. You are blue with sadness.

You are the American flag. Every American carries you.

* * *

This essay was originally published in the print and online editions of the Cleveland Free Times.

Gray's anatomy of human nature

I have been reading Bryan Appleyard's review, in the Sunday Times, of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, by professor John Gray. It's so interesting - so full of things that I've been thinking, and thinking I was the only one thinking them - and also of things I'd never have thought of, that now look like things I was waiting to realiser - that I have lifted some snippets out of it for your, dear reader, delectation. By all means go and read the whole article. Or read Appleyard's blog post about it. Or even buy the book.

By the way, I'm not framing it all as quotes. Unquoted statements below are Appleyard's; quoted statements are Gray's. The analysis of liberalism is largely Isaiah Berlin's.

.....

Antiutopianism is the deep consistency in all [Gray's] thought. It led him to support Thatcher in her efforts to save the British economy from the near-anarchy of the late 1970s, but mostly in her resistance to communism, that supremely lethal utopian project. Yet he also observed the agonies of liberalism in her deluded attempt to impose free-market reforms and intense social conservatism, nostalgic for the bourgeois discipline of the 1950s. “It was an impossible task. She produced a society that was almost the opposite of the one she intended. The free market dissolved the very values she espoused."

Man, he asserts, is a tribal carnivore possessed of reason. His reason may give him science, a progressive, cumulative enterprise, but it cannot give him the wisdom to transcend his nature.

Uncovering the faith base of seemingly rational opinions is a Gray speciality. He finds the apparent rationalism of militant atheists such as Daniel Dennett, Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens particularly funny.

He regards atheism as a late Christian cult, based on the supremely Christian (and Marxist) idea that by changing people’s beliefs, you change their behaviour. He also sees an irony here. “They attack something congenitally and categorically human as an intellectual error, yet call themselves humanists.”

...With the threat of religious-linked terrorism, the lesson of that secular fanaticism that had cost tens of millions of lives in Russia and China – and continues to do so in Sri Lanka and Nepal – seemed to be completely forgotten.

The liberal state’s job is to hold different world-views in balance, but it cannot resolve conflicts between them. It cannot, for example, say to Muslims “You are wrong” and to Christians “You are right”, because it then ceases to be liberal. At its most effective, it holds back the instinct of humanity to form itself into competing tribes. But the liberal state is perpetually threatened by – and will, over time, surely be overthrown by – an unusually aggressive tribe. True liberalism is, therefore, necessarily a tragic view, sceptical of all notions of progress.

“Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life.”

...Many of the neocon prophets were originally Trotskyists, a clear sign of the utopian linkage between Marxism and the neocons.

...The roots of modern terror lie in the western Enlightenment. Before the 18th century, he argues, wars and terrorist campaigns were not conducted as if they were mechanisms of general improvement. It was the French revolution that introduced the idea of terror as a tool of progress

nothing to do with me?

Yesterday I had a conversation with a fellow blogger about the minefield that is online politics. That is, the vitriol with which political matters get discussed in the blogosphere. It seems dangerous to get involved, even if you think you know what you think, because really - life's hard enough.

One subject I've steered well clear of is the Israeli/Palestinian issue, because I just don't feel well-enough informed to be able to defend my position. Even so, I was nonplussed and chagrined some time ago when I had an email from my union - the NUJ - describing its AGM, at which, no, I hadn't been present.* This email went all through the kinds of things you'd expect it to say, and then at the bottom, tucked into a sentence containing three separate issues which had been voted on, there was a small item about a protest boycott against Israel...

Well. I thought that was a little bit strange, a little bit overtly partisan for a union which represents journalists, who are supposed, after all, to pursue (I thought) the facts, and the truth, not opinions. Especially not mass, crowd opinions. This boycott is being compared to the boycott against apartheid South Africa, but even in my Woman-on-the-Clapham-Omnibus state I can see that the situation is a mite more complicated than that was. And my distrust of trendy mobbishness is such that I had my doubts about that one, too.

Anyway, shortly thereafter I found Norman Geras posting frequently on his blog with reference to a similar boycott, by the academic union, against Israeli academics. This also seems strange! I thought academics operated on an international "Academics Code" (more like guidelines, evidently) whereby they were supposed to be impartial - pursuing pure research, facts and the truth, etc - and to stand above politics. But here they are, boycotting their (non-political) fellows, for political reasons!

The hoo-hah over Rushdie's knighthood - and the fact that the honours committees were supposed to have not offered honours to people who might spoark off a reaction elsewhere - illustrates, to me, the urgency of our need to establish some kind of line and then stick to it regardless of what those who disagree with it might think, say or do.**

Here's Norm, making a pretty damn good point:

"Imagine two situations, both involving a religion with influence over large numbers of people. (1) The religion teaches that all are children of the same God and have a spark of the divine within them; and therefore one must treat others with respect. (2) The religion teaches that only some people are favoured by God and those who are not so favoured are contemptible and inferior or some such."

So, today I happened to look in on a favourite blog of mine, The Shaigetz, which is written by a Hassidic Jew living somewhere in my neighbourhood. This writer is apparently someone who left the Hassidic fold and then went back, at a cost of much soul-searching, and having confronted and accepted the anomalies inherent in true multiculturalism. This quality makes him or her a wiser person than many. I was struck by this most recent post:

"Of course our Universities and College Union, the UCU, voted overwhelmingly in favour of seeking 'a comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli institutions'. They represent the students, the loony left, the ones who are going to right the world's wrongs – with, of course, special focus on those perpetrated by societies or groups perceived to be more consistently successful than their own.

What really bugs me is the muted reaction by everybody else. Is it just because we don’t blow up trains that nobody cares very much that blatant anti-Semitism has become the hallmark of the British left? Is it just because nobody is scared of us that nobody minds that British academia has been turned into a hostile environment for anyone Jewish? Not for being Jewish, of course. But, because as Jews, they represent the State of Israel.

In an ironic twist of fate the wandering people now carry a state as their cross as they traverse Europe.

I am a British Jew and I am not prepared to carry the torch for anyone. But neither am I prepared to use a different yardstick for my people than for anybody else. I therefore never ask brown people for their views on Africa, slant-eyed ones about Tiananmen Square or short, fat, white ones with loud shirts their position on the war in Iraq. I likewise do not wish to express my views on the occupation except to declare, that if I were to feel under siege, unwelcome and unwanted in the UK, I could hardly be blamed if I recalled the justifications for fighting occupation, I heard on the BBC."

I may not know much, but I do know that if we believe in the right to free speech our journalists union should not be throwing its weight into one side of a story. And that if we really truly believe in the right to free speech we should not be "worried" about our decision to knight Rushdie. You know? We should remember what happened before.

* I do realise that this is a living lesson in the cost of not participating - being an activist - and that if I'm not there to vote I can't expect to be represented. Then again, I also feel this motion should have been discussed more widely, debated maybe by emails etc, before being passed. I may have been lazy in trusting the union not to throw a curve ball, but then you can't be everywhere at once.

** I also happen, as regular readers might recall, to be deep into Louis MacNeice's long, brilliant poem Autumn Journal, which is about the atmosphere in the autumn of the Munich crisis. Do we all know what that was? That was when the European leaders got together and tried to appease Hitler by selling Czechoslovakia down the river. Result? Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.

"But once again
The crisis is put off and things look better
and we feel negotiation is not in vain -
save my skin and damn my conscience.
And negotiation wins,
If you can call it winning,
And here we are - just as before - safe in our skins;
Glory to God for Munich.
And stocks go up and wrecks
Are salved and politicians' reputations
Go up like Jack-on-the-beanstalk; only the Czechs
Go down and without fighting."

The moral cost of political inactivity - or individual nothing-to-do-with-me-ism - is one of the main issues in Autumn Journal, and MacNeice points the finger at himself as much as at anyone else.

happy birthday Alan Johnston

It is 66 days since BBC correspondent Alan Johnston was abducted by a group of armed men in Gaza. Thursday is his birthday.*

Thus begins a moving article written by BBC World Editor Jon Williams, to wish his correspondent many happy - much happier - returns.

I don't think it needs reiterating how valuable Alan and people like him are to the rest of us - they do what we wouldn't dare to do, for the sake of knowledge, and now he is paying a pretty inhuman price. Can you imagine what the world would be like if all the foreign correspondents went home? Can you?

Read the article, and click HERE - or on the button down my sidebar - if you haven't already signed the petition for his release. The very least good that can come of it is that he will somehow hear of the petition, and will know that thousands of people are campaigning for his release. That might be a nice birthday present to have.


* On lighter note, and for future reference, when Alan gets home he might enjoy knowing that he was born on the anniversary of the day the saxophone was patented...

Alan Johnston - what you can do

As I write this, the journalist Alan Johnston has been in captivity for nearly two months. No one knows where he is and no one is really sure if he's okay - though apparently at the NUJ's vigil last week there were "assurances that he is alive" and that the British and Palestinian governments are working together to secure his release - as we should bloody well hope they are. If I'm not mistaken this is the longest that a Western hostage has been held with no claim being made by a kidnap group, and no idea where he is.

I know it's not a very Baroque subject, but what is happening to him is positively - as they say - Byzantine. I'm not a reporter and I have something like awe for people like Johnston, who not only are reporters (and thus, unlike me, have to get their facts straight every single time) but go and report on the hardest things that are happening in the world. I for one cannot get anywhere near the bottom of the situation in Gaza, to say nothing of the whole Palestine/Israel issue. It does my head in, whatever else my head may be good for, and that's the truth. Alan Johnston is a much-needed member of our society. And the fact that he and I both belong to the same union makes me feel both proud and very small.

Click on the button I've added to the sidebar,* and it will take you through to a BBC page where you can add your name to a petition and learn more news.

* At the time of posting this button is sitting right next to a huge picture of Richard Gere, but I'm hoping this situation won't persist for much longer.