America: the country for old men

October 13, 2013

Old men and their tired faces. Pouchy cheeks and droopy eyes. Advised to watch their cholesterol and get the prostate checked.

On Thursday, America will be prostrate before its creditor nations unless by then the elderly men of Capitol Hill can agree to raise the Federal Government debt ceiling.

Shouldn’t be too difficult, gentlemen, deciding how much more we are allowed to ask to borrow; especially since our creditors cannot afford to refuse. We are, proverbially, too big to be allowed to fail.

Cut to Jim Yong Kim, lively and elegant in his cutaway collar. The chair of the World Bank is speaking about the dire consequences of American default – if it were allowed to happen on Thursday. Born in Seoul, raised in the Mid-West, former principal of Dartmouth College, nominated by President Obama – no less, he is Korean-American, surely symbolising this century as a co-production between East and West. Or if next week is truly telling, perhaps he already represents the changing face of power. Power having acquired distinctively Asiatic features, whereas until now it’s been too early to tell.

Gentlemen, we are, proverbially, too big to be allowed to fail.

Yet fail they might if they don’t sort themselves out in four days. Perhaps there will be an agreement before then, in which case the questions asked will be cut back to just one: what took you so long? But the answer to this question is also the reason why the default deadline may well go unmet.

Washington’s Congressmen have been ta(l)king so long because they’re in a double bind: if they act like the far-sighted, can-do country they used to be, this would entail substantive recognition of their current status as a dependent nation, increasingly reliant on the surplus produced elsewhere. On the other hand, as long as they lack the courage to look into this abyss, they also lack the gumption to get that crucial deal together. Aside from politicking in the West Wing and shenanigans on Capitol Hill, this is the existential crisis underlying Washington’s imminent debt crisis. read more

And Not A Drop To Drink

October 12, 2013

They may have tipped it over themselves, rushing to one side of the boat – these boats that have no name, never mind the hundreds crowded onto them – in a pointless attempt to attract the attention of the Coastguard plane flying overhead. Pointless because the plane would not have been there at all, if it hadn’t been dispatched to track the progress of this overcrowded vessel.

Migrants, migrants everywhere, and all they do is sink. Another 50 died yesterday; 300 the week before. Close enough to Italy’s outlying island of Lampedusa for their African bodies to be recovered from the wine dark sea and treated like Europeans – the Europeans they were never allowed to become.

In the makeshift morgue, untidy plastic sheeting – stiff limbs poking out at random – gives way to neat rows of well-made coffins. White ones for the little black bodies of children. An extra large casket for a mother and her new born baby. Umbilical cord still attached, the body of the babe was found inside the dead woman’s leggings.

‘And she wrapped him in swaddling clothes….’

Leggings, jeggings; pushing and shoving. To get on the boat; to get off when it starts to sink. The whole, tawdry business of trafficking and signing up to be trafficked.

Now this: nativity scene drowned out; epic story of Homeric proportions; matter of life and death.

From the outside, it’s difficult to make sense of it. Those orderly rows of coffins which say, in their orderliness, ‘welcome to the EU’ – ludicrous.

Perhaps the survivor who was treading water with his baby in his arms and watched his son drown because he simply didn’t have enough hands – perhaps he knows whether the glass is half full or half empty.

But that’s copping out. How would that man, of all people, be able to achieve a sense of perspective? It should be me, from this distance. read more

Getting To Know Me, Part Three

October 6, 2013

I picked somebody up off her bike after she crashed, and she told me I was an action hero. Insisted I wasn’t at all geeky, even if she was a bit dazed at the time. I’m not funny! Last month I found it hard to oppose making war on Syria, but I did it. When I first sought election as MP for Doncaster, I sat down to tea with a local Labour activist called Molly, and I was asked how I could possibly know anything about the lives of the people living in that constituency; still less represent them. Because I learned my values from my mother, I said. I didn’t have it easy when I was elected Labour leader, because there were repercussions for my family. Recently I have been campaigning again, standing on my pallet – mine is a pallet not a soapbox. Standing on my pallet I have answered questions from all sorts of people – angry people, hard-pressed people. I went into politics to help these people. And now I’ve come off the conference stage to find my late father’s name defamed. I repeat, I learned my values from my parents. They taught me to understand I was brought into the world to help people, OK?

No, Ed Miliband stopped short of claiming apostolic mission. But only by a few syllables. Sure wasn’t shy about personal influences and individual characteristics: I-this, I-that, I-and-the-other. Me and my mother. So much I-contact you’d be forgiven for thinking that the leader’s speech to party conference was less of a manifesto of what he (third person singular) could do for us (first person plural); more like a further exercise in validating, verifying, volumising the first-person.

Bigging Up Ed (again) only makes him a Big ‘Ead.

(Of course, that’s not what I intended. Not at all what I meant. I really did not mean to give that impression. I have been misinterpreted. I insist that the record must be set straight. I….etc etc.) read more

Westgate: What A Carry On

October 6, 2013

Kenyan policeman running into Westgate Shopping Mall, automatic rifle in hand. Shaft of sunlight catches him on the arm. He’s caught again a few minutes later: bullet in the belly.

But the scene is more loopy than Looper. People are dying……in episodes of Trollied or outtakes from Carry On films.

Fugitives running for their lives through Westgate’s ‘first world interior’. What an engorged mouthful Carry On‘s Kenneth Williams would have made of ‘in-teeer-ior’. Up your first world interior, Julian. Pad-Pad-Pad their feet on the hard wearing, non-staining floor tiles as seen in shopping malls the whole world over (Westgate’s could have come from Manchester’s original Arndale Centre, the one the IRA blew up). Rat-Tat-Tat sounds like a door knocker on Come Dine With Me; but they’re slithering to the floor with fatal gunshot wounds. Splayed out on the hard-wearing, non-staining floor tiles – just wipe away blood in seconds; while stocks last. Whereas 9/11 remains apocalyptic – always en vogue, Westgate Mall was banal. To maintain the aesthetic standards of the September issue, you sad, sick terrorists must recruit your own Anna Wintour. Without a white witch acting as editor in chief, instead of carrying on the terror you’ll find yourselves appearing in Carry On Terrorism. Ha-Ha-Ha.

Washington Side Story

September 21, 2013

As he left the stage at the end of his mid-week press conference, having talked cautiously out of the corner of his mouth for half-an-hour – because ‘sly old fox’ is a description he prob’ly wouldn’t object to, just as he was passing in front of the Stars and Stripes, the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Bank, a cerebral banker and Princeton academic by the name of Ben Bernanke, did a little skip.

Ben Bernan-ke, who announced that the Bank would continue subsidising the US economy to the tune of $85 billion dollars a month, prompted the markets to tick up-ke.

Let us now praise Uncle Ben, they said, for his unexpectedly good Offices. By the end of the week, however, the House of Representatives was threatening to vote down further government borrowing. This would send the American economy into a ‘tailspin’, warned President Obama; his smooth tenor voice shrilled to sandpaper as he said it. Wall Street duly dipped.

Without reaching another crisis like the ‘credit crunch’ – no flick knives in the alley nor blood on the boardroom floor, the up-ticks and downbeats of the American economy look set to singalong indefinitely.

(Apologies to Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim for faint echoes of their West Side Story.)

Cast In An Evil Role

September 12, 2013

Free at last, actor Michael Le Vell walks down the steps outside Manchester Crown Court. Left hand in trouser pocket, which says, only a little too loudly: I’m a cool kinda guy. Legs a little further apart than strictly necessary, which says: my balls are big so they do need more room. Acquitted on all 19 counts of child sex abuse, after two years of ‘hell’ who can blame Le Vell for strutting his stuff? Still less for going down the scally pub as soon as he scally could.

Le Vell now lives in Hale (the posh end of Greater Manchester), but hails from Newton Heath, a couple of miles north of Manchester city centre. The area was first industrialised as far back as the 1820s. It would be a hundred years, and more, before L.S. Lowry depicted Le Vell’s recent forebears as matchstick men (going to their wartime work in the Mather Platt factory).

For 30 years Le Vell himself has painted a picture of working class manhood, playing the part of car mechanic Kevin Webster (avec moustache = gay icon) in the longest-running British TV soap opera,Coronation Street. He says he doesn’t let his children watch the show if Kevin is caught up in a racy scene, in case they become confused about who their father is. But after 30 years in character he too must have difficulty distinguishing himself from….himself.

On trial, a.k.a. on stage in a Manchester courtroom, once again Le Vell became two personae in one person: the guilty man and the innocent party. Only the jury had the power to tell them apart. After his acquittal, we all know which of these was real. But there is something about the wider situation today which means that the doppelganger never altogether disappears.

Those now facing sexual abuse charges are drawn from all walks of public life – MPs (thin ones, fat ones); various actors; a host of radio hosts, starting with Jimmy Savile, anti-Christ. Odds are not all of these are guilty men; but it’s a dead cert that we’re all now involved. Even if each of us were to stand trial and be acquitted of anything-you-like, in today’s climate we are liable to remain the man who beat the charges and dodged the accusations – till next time. read more

Everywhere

September 10, 2013

At the TUC conference, earlier today. On stage behind Labour leader Ed Miliband, even the hand-picked phalanx of ‘ordinary people’ found it hard to focus on his speech. Young woman of colour, top-right, wore the same expression as my students: I’d-rather-be-texting. White man, front row, gurning on camera. Really! Meanwhile Mr Miliband said his set piece, reciting lines rehearsed too often; making robust gestures – hey, look at my robust gesture – which were mannered and effete.

Westminster, a day earlier. Margaret Hodge MP, chair of the public accounts committee, grilled BBC Trusties and ex-executives about excessive redundancy payments. Already in the pink (living well at public expense must be patterned on Lord Patten), they wriggled and turned red-in-the-face. Hodge herself seemed to be tinted yellow: her skin toned in with her purple top for maximum day glow effect.

On different days in different places, it varies from lacklustre to lurid; but the slow liquidation of British institutions is everywhere irreversible.

Which Side Are They On?

September 8, 2013

Left: eyes on sentry-duty, asking ‘who goes there?’ Right: same guarded look; of course the same piping on the tunic and the same cap, oddly-oversized.

Bus conductor? Russian admiral? No, it’s Thomas Highgate of the Royal West Kent Regiment, first British ‘deserter’ to face a First World War firing squad, 99 years before last night’s Last Night of the Proms.

When they sing ‘Rule Britannia’, Tommy, do you turn in your unmarked grave?

It’s the mouth that’s different. Though in both instances, Highgate’s lips are slightly apart, in the left-hand picture the former farm labourer’s mouth is ‘set on’, as employers and foremen used to say of their underlings: expectant, alert; ready to do his bit. Yet on the right the same mouth seems to be slackening, slackened, slack.

(Looking at these pictures online, I first thought that they were one and the same; only the sepia tint had made them seem different. On closer inspection, I noticed that in one picture alone the hat is higher than the slatted background; but I don’t know whether these two shots were taken in quick succession or on separate occasions.)

In the eyes of the officer class, the face on the left could still be trusted to join in with William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, inspired – it is said – by the Kent landscape which Private Highgate grew up in.

If you’d made it home, Tommy, you would have seen the Battle of Britain in the skies above Shoreham. It could have been you in the Home Guard in 1940, rounding up the crew of a German bomber shot down over Castle Farm; giving them a tot of brandy before handing them over to the Army.

Face on the right: no harmony here, no possibility of returning to Sunday matins or Promenade concerts at the Queen’s Hall; any sound emitted will only be the shriek of a Schoenberg. read more

Vladimir To His Mother

September 7, 2013

” ‘Liar.’ Regretted it as soon as I said it. Losing control like that, sounding off about the American Secretary of State over Syria – amateurish, childish. All those years of self-discipline, my lips becoming more bloodless with every step up the career ladder; and I’m still a big mouth boy to be kept out of the Pioneers?

“Mother, it cannot be.

” ‘President Obama didn’t get elected….to be nice to Russia’ – that’s me speaking; that’s how I talk. Sardonic, drier than the martini I don’t allow myself to drink. But wherever possible I am courteous, courtly, hospitable. Thus, draping a coat over Frau Merkel’s shoulders as if she were the most beautiful woman in the world as well as the most powerful.

“Is my hair too square? Do my thousand-dollar suits declare their luxury instead of partially disguising it. But who cares what those Little Islanders think?

“At the Peterhof on Friday evening, with all the world’s leaders in attendance, I was the chivalry of Imperial Russia and the intelligence of the KGB.

“Only I can represent my country in this way. Mother Russia needs her son Putin.”

The Rhythm Is The Message

August 31, 2013

He got rhythm.

Seated at the conference table, flanked by guy-in-a-bow-tie (hey, buddy, the sign says ‘White House’, not ‘Barber Shop’) and baby-faced-woman with Lady-Exec hairstyle, the President is a picture of panache: Barack Obama, who doesn’t have to try….too hard.

Apparently effortlessly, he is establishing the likelihood of American air strikes against the Assad regime. Of course there are cracks to be covered, not least the anomaly of stopping to explain the effectiveness of imminent military action. Which can only have the effect of making it less than imminent, thereby reducing its effectiveness. But the way he speaks effectively conceals such flaws.

This presentation is a sit-down, low-key affair; cadences are reduced accordingly. The rhythm’s the thing. It is audible throughout the President’s remarks. We can hear it, for example, in his enunciation of the following four words:

‘The kind of attack’.

Here they are broken down to show the underlying rhythm:

The Kind-of-a Ttack. Daa da-di-da daa.

In 4/4 time, beginning on the fourth beat of the bar: Crotchet, Triplet, Crotchet, Rest.

Again: The (Crotchet)/ Kind-of-A (Triplet)/ Ttack (Crotchet)/ Rest (Crotchet).

Thus Obama’s phrase ‘the kind of attack’ is couched in rhythmic form. His words acquire their sonority from the rhythm in which they are couched. If certain phrases resonate with the public, it is because they are formulated as rhythm; because they are composed of rhythm between words as much as the words themselves.

It so happens that the phrase used above to describe Obama’s way of speaking, is similarly comprised of the exact same rhythm: ‘the rhythm’s the thing’; Daa da-di-da daa.

Exactly.

But the thing about rhythm is its combination of exactitude and variation. Obama’s speech pattern is four beats to the bar. Precisely. But it also sounds something like but not quite the same as the speech of previous Rhythm Kings such as Martin Luther Jnr. Who patterned the democratic aspirations of the day, who formulated the degrading experience of many into one uplifting note, so that Obama could echo that sound and evoke its democratic content 50 years later. read more

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