#47 Mother Merkel and the Anglo-American Babes

February 15, 2015

She doesn’t do it the Anglo-American way. Not for her the well rehearsed impression ofspeaking off the cuff. No prolonged playacting – being seen on camera repeatedly reaching outwards; inviting, grooming the far-flung viewer to come sit on the sofa.

Instead, reading a prepared statement on the Ukrainian ‘peace deal’, is as it says – reading, eyes on the script, lips synched to the page. Compared to Barack-Blair (rhymes with thin air) and their juniors, her performance – but that’s it, ‘performance’ is what it’s not – is as foreign as the preferred pronunciation of her first name: Angeeela; long ‘e’; short on rhetoric.

Mutti (Mother) Merkel, childless herself, is said to treat the German people like children – cutting up policy into bite sized pieces lest they find it indigestible. Let the German people decide whether to accept her domestic regime. But internationally this criticism is hard to swallow, especially as issued in those areas of the world stage – UK, USA, where the recent staging of politics (sofas and soundbites galore) has also been its babyfication.

Those who live in doll’s houses – grow up!

#25 Not The Nine O’Clock News

July 21, 2014

Stretcher-bearers wading through wheat and behind them a field of sunflowers higher than the tallest man. A scene as seen previously in the paintings of Van Gogh – but now with real-life corpses instead of Vincent’s death-wish.

Yet it flies past me – the tragedy of 298 passengers and crew killed when a Malaysian Airlines airliner was shot down over eastern Ukraine, presumably by the Russian backed rebels currently controlling the area (though this is still to be verified).

Plane downed over the Great Plain and I know I should be feeling their pain. But for reasons still to be verified, my anti-missile shields have gone up; nothing’s getting through to me – not some body’s holiday reading strewn across the blackened crash site nor the teddy bears of dead children nor the fact that some passengers were human-rights-types en route to an AIDS conference in Australia.

It’s because the casualties are being played for political purposes, I tell myself. It’s because the coverage is strictly one-dimensional, with ‘the vics’ used to indict ‘perp’ Putin, president of Russia.

Show the punters enough victims and there’ll be no disputin’ who did it – seems to bethe gist. Pile high the body bags to hide the praise previously heaped on ‘progressive’ Ukrainians who are pro-Europe and anti-Russia.

I prefer the local miners: outwith the painted ceilings of geo-politics, coming up from underground and searching dutifully for human flesh among the sunflowers; and their wives wearing socks and sandals, plump in cotton print dresses worn thin over many years.

These are the sensitive ones, I tell myself. Despite coarsened features, they are thecivilising influence. How different is their dignified respect for the dead – in contrast tothe prodding of corpses for political ends. read more

#8 Humanity abhors the icon

April 15, 2014

Instead of prompt resolution, i.e. Crimea Annexed, this time the fomentation of civil unrest, i.e. Crisis Deepens. With a light touch light the touch paper and retire, only in order to re-appear as peacekeepers – reducing ethnic tension; curtailing civil war.

That’s the plan, but which side is being talked about here – Russia or the West? The same could be said of either: they’ve both been stirring up strong emotions; then stealing away with faces covered or wearing a well-rehearsed expression. Note from the Fashion Police: if you can’t go for the Balaclava round here, where can you be seen in one? In the realm of realpolitik, the plot is always thickening, bubbling away like Bisto. Meanwhile in Liverpool on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, or in Boston a year after the bombing, there is only the absence of guile; abdication of self-interest in memory of the dead; the transparency of innocence. I think not. Rather, after loss of son or daughter, I suspect every step out of bed has to be negotiated. Rounds of diplomacy are required to answer the question of self-determination: Why should I be, when my child is not (to be)? Recurring question, secret diplomacy, successive rounds – all before you’re out the door. Be advised: there are no absolutes of innocence or experience. Behind the balaclavas, even veterans wear both of these. Hence the mask: to hide the other side. And the line about Fashion Police? Only something silly to undermine the iconography.

#2 Slow, Slow, Quick-Quick, Slow

March 3, 2014

The red tea lights are the same: outside Kunming railway station; insidethe Maidan (square) in Kiev.

Lights lit in memory of 29 knifed to death on Saturday by Uighur separatists in south west China, and 77 killed during successful demonstrations against pro-Russian President Victor Yanukovych, who fled the Ukrainian capital on 21st February. Lively little lights to take away the stillness; unholy stillness which otherwise outlives removal of human remains. Meanwhile in the Crimea, an Orthodox priest (just don’t say ‘Russian Orthodox’ to thewrong person) uses what looks like a washing-up brush to spray holy water on soldiers from both sides – Ukrainian security forces and troops from the Russian Federation. The diplomatic situation seems too big for them; absurdly large like the hats on theheads of Black Sea sailors. While Russian infantry with chins tucked into dust masks are perhaps trying to hide their tender years; kissable mouths would give them away as conscripts. Yet any Ivan can easily become Terrible, should the situation demand it. Terrible as theknife-wielding posse which ran riot – slitting and stabbing – through Kunming station, Yunnan province.

On the periphery of the world economy, in far-flung provinces and narrow peninsulas,the slow pace of development can turn into its opposite at almost any moment; outrunning the most mercurial diplomat, turning gunboats and sabre-rattling into live ammunition and thousands of little red candles.

Redundant Composition

February 22, 2014

Of their faces shiny with virtue and simultaneously sooted with smoke from burning tyres, there is little more for me to say. The young woman shot in the throat, who tweeted her last tweet and then came back from the dead, leaves nothing unsaid. Protestors barracking their leaders for settling too easily; the presidential palace deserted except for animals in the private zoo – all of these articulate what’s happening in Kiev with the possibility of its opposite, without needing any help from me.

There is realpolitik: Russia’s sphere of influence versus the self-interest of the EU, played out on the streets and played badly – for short-term positive image-points rather than the long game of Diplomacy.But the turn of events in Ukraine – the possibility that they will turn and turn again – eludes both the diplomatic game and the critical analysis of it.

At the other end of the news reporting spectrum, there are pin-sharp pictures which bring the-right-now to us readers right-here. But their technical quality lends a spurious clarity to events which are still hazy; their outcome yet to be decided.

Analysis and illustration: neither approach quite captures the quickening uncertainty of the moment.

Nor is this the time for Singing The News. Other events have prompted me to use an experimental form of reporting in order to locate the true liveliness of those involved; and this, in turn, is to suggest the possibility of other outcomes – that it is possible, after all, for events to turn out otherwise.

Nowadays we are normally so far from recognising this possibility, it takes an unusual form of composition to construct it. But in Kiev today the possibility speaks for itself. It is writ large in a situation which could patently go either way; and there is nothing for newscompositor to do but sign off for the night. read more

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Tag Archives: Ukraine

#47 Mother Merkel and the Anglo-American Babes

#25 Not The Nine O’Clock News

#8 Humanity abhors the icon

#2 Slow, Slow, Quick-Quick, Slow

Redundant Composition