Anne Boleyn

I haven't seen the Other Boleyn Girl yet, but as an early modernist I suppose I'm obliged to at some point! I do think though that its interesting that its this aspect of Anne's story that we highlight in drama and in movies- the recent Henry VIII series on the BBC was similar. Anne Boleyn for those who don't know successfully managed the transition from being Henry's queen's lady in waiting to Henry's mistress to his wife and queen. But in a way that's the least interesting thing about her: Boleyn was an incredibly interesting woman in her own right, without thinking about her connection with Henry. She was a patron of the careers of many Protestants at Henry's court- and though we don't know how much influence she had on Henry's policy in the Reformation, there is a good case for saying that she was one of the drivers behind the Reformation. She was also an incredibly intelligent woman- Henry was attracted by her intelligence at first but then repulsed by the fact that she refused to bow to him all the time, by her temper and her sharpness. Her fall which flowed from her character and her enthusiasm for Protestantism in some ways is much more interesting than her rise- pretty women attract compliments and royal patrons all the time- but Anne wasn't just a pretty woman, she was an intelligent, skilful player of the court game, with an ideological coterie around her of radical protestants and a strong temper and sense of herself. I doubt we'll see that in the movie (except maybe as a negative and an adjunct to her charm)- and I do think its interesting that whenever you see this queen displayed on screen, her sexiness is emphasized at the expense of her intelligence. Partly that's because cinema likes a pretty body more than an interesting mind- but partly one suspects a residual sexism in the way that we approach Anne. We don't see the intelligent woman, as much as the sexy schemer.

Artistic Beauty

An interesting article in today's Boston Globe makes me re-think the whole concept of artistic beauty. We often think that artistic beauty is an objective standard: that there are some things, a landscape by Constable or Van Gogh that just have as part of their inherent nature, beauty. That's true to an extent. The article in the Boston Globe though draws attention to research that casts doubt on the status of artistic judgement or rather on what it is actually judging. The study involved people judging the respective merits of various types of wine- the people were invited to rank the wines in order to merit. They did, and the orders of merit followed the prices that they were told that the wine cost, but what the scientists didn't tell them was that all the wine cost exactly the same ammount because they were exactly the same wine. Consequently the right judgement was that the wine had the same degree of merit because it was the same wine.

But why did people judge it differently? Well lets go backwards a little, why do we find anything artistic beautiful. Its quite clear why I find a beautiful woman beautiful (and others might find a beautiful man beautiful)- there is a clear evolutionary reason and though types of beauty change over time, I don't need to be taught that. But I do need to be taught about art, about music and about wine. We all learn about that, whether its through school, the guides at museums or art galleries or even friends and families- our taste is inherited from other people. And our taste is a way of communicating with other people- we tend to respect people who see the same piece of art in the same way as we do. I do it with books: one of my best friends from Oxford is a friend who I realised I had to know when she spoke about how much she loved Jane Austen. Many of my other friends are friends because of what they and I mutually like- that I'm sure is true of some of the readers of this blog and some of the blogs I also visit regularly. Shared appreciation is a means of communication.

So lets come back to the wine. To what extent are we, when we respond to art, responding not so much to the art, as attempting to say something about ourselves. There are genuine likes and dislikes- we all have them. Part of those likes and dislikes are disagreements about what in the real world constitutes a desirable value- your well written sentence and mine may be different entities. You may applaud say William F. Buckley's perambulations through language, I may like the plainer style of George Orwell. The point though is that to some degree our artistic judgements are also social. They are judgements about conventions. In that sense the people, who were studied by the scientists in the study reported by the Boston Globe, acted perfectly rationally. Price is a conventional market of quality- it is what a person will agree to pay for something and the higher the price, the higher the conventional merit assigned. So when I say to you that conventionally this wine is thought to be better than this, there are strong reasons for you agreeing. As recognising artistic beauty is in part a means of showing you 'get it', then recognising the beauty of the higher priced wine and its superiority to the lower priced wine, shows that you 'get it' and are part of the group that 'gets it'.

I'm not suggesting that all judgements like this are social judgements- just that in part they all are. What is interesting about this study is that it shows how far the idea of artistic beauty is a language with which we demonstrate our taste and personality to others. Its a signifier of what we beleive ourselves or want ourselves to be.

Now ain't the time for your tears: Orlando Figes's The Whisperers

Sofia Antonov-Ovseyenko was arrested on 14th October 1937, she wrote a letter to her husband Vladimir, not knowing that he too had been arrested on the same day.

M[oscow] 16/X. Prison
My darling. I do not know if you will receive this, but somehow I sense that I am writing to you for the last time. Do you recall how we always said that if someone in our country was arrested it must be for good reason, for some crime- that is for something? No doubt there is something in my case as well but what it is I do not know. Everything I know, you know as well, because our lives have been inseperable and harmonious. Whatever happens to me now, I shall always be thankful for the day we met. I lived in the reflection of your glory and was proud of it. For the last three days I have been thinking through my life, preparing for death. I cannot think of anything (apart from the normal shortcomings that differentiate a human being from an 'angel') that could be considered criminal either in relation to other human beings or in relation to our state and government... I thought exactly as you thought- and is there anybody more dedicated than you are to our party and country? You know what is in my heart, you know the truth of my actions, of my thoughts and words. But the fact that I am here must mean that I have committed some wrong- what I do not know... I cannot bear the thought that you might not believe me... It has been oppressing me for three days now. It burns inside my brain. I know your intolerance of all dishonesty, but even you can be mistaken. Lenin was mistaken too it seems. So please believe me when I say that I did nothing wrong. Beleive me, my loved one... One more thing: it is time for Valichka (Sofia's daughter) to join the Komsomol (youth Communist party). This will no doubt stand in her way. My heart is full of sorrow at the thought she will think her mother is a scoundrel. The full horror of my situation is that people do not beleive me. I cannot live like that... I beg forgiveness from everyone I love for bringing them such misfortune... Forgive me my loved one. If only I knew that you beleived me and forgave me! Your Sofia

Reading that letter, I do not know of any conceivable human reaction but to weep. But of course the fate of Sofia was the fate of millions of Russians, arrested and taken to Labour camps and some of them shot, during the Stalinist terror of the 1930s and 1940s. Orlando Figes, the British historian of Russia, has produced in his new book an account of their lives, particularly the lives of Russia's 'twentieth century' generation who were born in the twenties and lived into the nineties and 2000s. These children lived through the destruction of their parent's lives through the purges, fought in the Second World War, lived through the resumption of Stalinist terror in the forties, then were disorientated by the Kruschev thaw and retired as the Soviet Union trembled and collapsed in the eighties and nineties. The average age of the people that Figes interviewed in coming up with his latest book- The Whisperers was eighty- and his team interviewed them in 2002.

The book takes the form of a series of thematic chapters based around time periods or types of experience under Stalin. What Figes has done is to leave the contemporary accounts to speak for themselves. This is as much a collection of documents as a history- it is a history because Figes provides a compelling narrative, but the long quotations and Figes's approach which is to provide personal stories and accounts of moments of the Soviet past, gives that historical account a wonderful vividness. Again and again, you think that you cannot see a grimmer reality, time after time the barbarity of the Stalinist regime stuns you. For example, at one point during the war, those who turned up 20 minutes late for work were prosecuted for desertion from the domestic front. Tragic stories multiply and following families through the Soviet era you see how unending suffering repeated generation unto generation. Particularly sad though is not the direct destruction of lives: but the realisation that around everyone who went into the machinery of death left behind them mothers, daughters, sons, husbands, fathers, wives and other family members. Family members who immediatly acquired a stigma to their names- but who also lost their family member. Children in particular were left as orphans, often waking up one morning without parents and struggling to continue in schools. Teachers emerge as the heroes of Figes's story. Ida Slavina lost her mother and father, within five months both were arrested. From then on, she was passed round between the families of her classmates, eventually she found a job as a cleaner and worked there in order to raise the money to rent a small room. She was assisted by her teacher Klavdiia Alekseyeva. Klavdiia stopped anyone denouncing 'enemies of the people' in the classroom and noone was expelled for their parents' arrest at school, she sought to inspire her pupils by telling them their parents wanted them to continue at school. In some cases she directly supported them, for example she paid eleven children's school fees so they could continue to stay at school.

Relationships between people changed as a result of the terror. Many prisoners when eventually released just could not come back to families. The terror went on as the pace of urbanisation was raised. Often several families were packed into small living quarters. There was effectively no privacy and the realisation that anyone might inform on you, meant that families kept themselves to themselves. Guarding their portion of the kitchen sink intensely and not speaking to each other about anything that might give them away. In a society where you might be arrested for an anti-Soviet joke, it was not worth saying anything to anyone else. Children were brought up implicitly to keep secrets about their parents, conversations would stop or change direction if someone not from the family came into the room. Figes shows how people were thrown back on their families: for fear that others might hand them into the secret police. Though even families might split- he has stories of children being sent away as their parents were arrested and seeing aunts and uncles shut doors in their faces, terrified of being seen as an enemy of the people. The society of whisperers that was created- hence the title of the book- was a society where private life had to retreat. Everything according to the state was public: and that meant that people withdrew into their internal world- sometimes scribbling diaries in code- in order to protect themselves from being arrested.

Figes's book is a masterpiece because it sketches the unknown, to me, dimensions of this totalitarian silence. But he also sketches its development. The Second World war brought a new kind of liberty and solidarity. The state had to relax its controls. Priests for example were allowed to function once more and prisoners in the Gulag had their conditions relaxed slightly. Many children of enemies of the people were permitted to take up key jobs in order to aid the war effort. Those who had been purged felt useless and suddenly the war gave them a sense of purpose- their contribution they often said was to work hard in the Gulag, to work hard in the army. This kind of sentiment made the war a uniquely liberating experience for the Soviet population- whilst of course being horrific in its other effects. But the forties saw another burst of repression as again people were rounded up and taken into the Gulag. Figes wonderfully creates through the testimony of the individuals who he documents the sense that persisted right through to the present day, that someone was following them and that somehow any period of grace would be ended. Its something that endures today. It definitely effected the population's understanding of the Kruschev thaw as well- and the population were right because under Brezhnev Stalin was rehabilitated. The Soviet state was also very keen not to rehabilitate those it had arrested unjustly. Rehabilitation did happen in the 1950s, and many especially Communist party members desired it fervently: to have a clean passport was something that everyone wanted, because it was a signal that they would not be arrested again. But even then the sense persisted- a population lived with a paranoia about the state, about everyone else in their society sometimes even about their own children.

'One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic', that quote is attributed to Stalin, and it sums up something that is actually very true. What I found particularly poignant about Figes's book is that he brings alive some of those individual stories- some of those tragic stories. Bob Dylan's song about the death of Hattie Carroll told us repeatedly that now ain't the time for your tears as his story dived further into tragedy, this book feels like on every page it has written that now ain't the time for your tears. The stories just stand on each other, one after the other, and the immensity of Stalin's crimes is demonstrated because though we only have a fraction here of the estimate of his effects, we can see the devastation of what he did. Bringing to life these personal stories creates for me at least a much more real sense of what those statistics mean. It also creates a sense of the historical scale of what happened- for the consequences of the Stalinist terror doubled and redoubled down the generations. Millions were imprisoned which meant that millions of children grew up as orphans effectively, millions of relationships were damaged, millions of lives were destroyed, millions of families were left with a traumatic memory of fear and terror. A French psychologist travelling to Russia in the 1970s said he had never seen a population with so many facial tics- he wasn't wrong, I suspect just as the effect of the first and second war endures in the rest of Europe, the effect of the terror endures in Russia. But much more profoundly because the tyranny which created the terror lasted right up until the 1990s- though there were thaws, the Communist party remained in control till Yeltsin and under President Putin efforts are being made to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin and deny the purges. (One reason why I cannot abide or support Putin, is the thought that he wants Russian textbooks to under report the Terror, having read this testimony I'm not sure what words can convey how objectionable Putin's comments about exageration of the Stalin regime's evil are.)

I don't think I can convey the immense nature of what this book does- Figes's reporting isn't central to it, he has done a good job but its a self effacing job. Ultimately the quality of the book is in the collection of primary evidence about the Terror and how it effected people- there are so many other aspects to it as well- he concentrates on the Kulaks and the way they were stigmatised for no reason, on the role of women and the Spartan lives of the early Bolsheviks compared to the new generation of Bolsheviks coming through in the thirties. I just don't have space. But I do have space to say this- go back and read the letter with which I began this review, reread it and remember that millions of Russians in the 1930s could have and did write letters like that. Many of them like Sofia who were committed communists, others who weren't but all incredulous that they had been arrested because they were not guilty. Some of them though lied, they told their children as they went that they weren't guilty so that their kids could fit into Soviet society. Remember that, oh and remember that many Russian citizens only found out what had happened to their arrested family members in the eighties and nineties when the archives were finally opened: wives waited twenty or thirty years for husbands who had been shot the night that they were arrested. Remember and remember that every time you remember, now ain't the time for your tears, there is so much more to remember and to weep over.

Unproductive work

James Higham rightly points to some ludicrous research investigations- into whether men and women differ evolutionarily in the ways that they perceive colour or into the ways in which owning a cat reduces heart disease or an over consumption of marzipan leads to death- in one of his latest articles. I do agree with James that there are some areas of research, particularly in the humanities that I don't understand, but it is worth remembering that research that often looks useless can turn out to be anything but. Much research activity in the sciences and arts that has looked useless in the past actually turned out to be very useful in the end. One of the inventors of chaos theory for example, used to love taking planes to random places, just in order to look out the window and sketch cloud formations. Fractals, an underlying part of current mathematics, were invented in 1917 before they could ever actually be used or tested. Research is a fairly hit and miss activity and an anomaly, which seems trivial, may be a way into a subject which leads eventually to the discovery of a new way of thinking. Take the cat research that James laughs at, he might well be right to laugh at it, but say that I generated through that a way of understanding companionship to have physical and neurological results which ultimately saved people's life and enabled us to understand the human organism in a better way, would he be laughing then?

I am not saying James is wrong to question all this, just its worth bearing in mind the ways that research can often be productive even when to an outsider it seems stupid or perverse. There are every day things which once established- say the chemicals inside marzipan and what it is that kills a human being when over consumed- that can help us in solving other more inaccessible problems. Going from a different angle, often elucidates things that others don't understand and its always worth asking why a certain piece of research is being done before rejecting it immediatly.

Eastern Promises

David Cronenberg is one of Hollywood's leading figures at the moment. The History of Violence, his last film, is a truly astonishing piece of work that stars Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello. It examines the ways that people are not what they seem and family life masks all sorts of compromises between violence and civility. Eastern Promises is another film about the dark underbelly of life- again Mortensen is a figure trapped between civility and darkness, violins and violence- and again Cronenberg wants us to examine the way that we live our lives and what lies just beyond our vision, round the corner, out of sight, behind our backs, in the dark crannies of consciousness. He wants us to remember that everywhere you go, a rat is only 6 metres away from you, despite the cleanliness of the surfaces you are eating off, there are rodents in the dark chewing at the things you throw away.

Cronenberg's canvass is wider in Eastern Promises. It is London- the city of immigrants- in many ways the defining city of our era. London is my city- and its wonderful to see a director use it as his canvass, without needing to provide Big Ben and the monumental architecture of neo-Gothic Victorians. Rather Cronenberg focuses on London as it really exists- or it really exists alongside that other existance in Westminster- the London of the East End, of Brixton and of suburbia. Its this London, filled with resturants, bars, drab barber shops and costcutter supermarkets, windy and rainy and dirty that he focuses on. Its a London filled with immigrants from every nation on earth, selling their own food and drink, socialising amongst themselves, talking in their own languages, and communicating with the wider society as well.

The sense of this city's social architecture and the way that so many groups co-exist on its fringes owes something to films like Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. Here, as in Goodfellas, we see a family involved in the mob from an ethnic minority that essentially runs that community inside London. There is a patriarch, Semyon and his objectionable son Kiril. Into this world comes Naomi Watts's Anna. Anna turns up in their world because as a midwife in a hospital she delivered a child from a mother- this child was different though because the mother died without providing any data to recover who she was. And Anna therefore embarks on a search to find out who the baby is and where its relatives live- a search which takes her directly into the world of the Russian mafia and into the lives of these three characters, Semyon, his son Kiril and his driver (played by Mortensen).

The stage is set, and it would be unfair to tell the rest of the plot, suffice it to say that several murders are involved, that there is copious reference to the illegal world of smuggling and of prostitution and that the solution to it all is complex and allows us to reevaluate at least one of the major characters. Its a stunning film. The acting in particular is good. Mortensen has never been better- or rather if you have only seen him as Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings, you have missed out on his extraordinary work for Cronenberg. He has such presence on screen that its difficult to take your eyes off him and he inhabits his character entirely. Watts again is an actress of real class, she has done it before (Mullhulland Drive is one of the best performances by any actress for years) and though the part doesn't require extraordinary work, she does what she is required to do.

In my judgement this isn't up there with the History of Violence, there is something slightly more random and slightly more normal about this film than about that masterpiece where an innocent world just blew up in front of you. But its still well worth seeing- this film shows us a real cinematic intelligence striving with a very contemporary issue. The way that our societies have become fractured and separated and the way that even in a small space like London, stories of unbelievable brutality may be happening just next door or down the street without you knowing. In part this is a fable of urban life- a Jack the Ripper de nos jours- reminding us that these are mean streets and the key to this film is that you have to be mean in part to walk down them yourself.

The Peshawar Spring?

There has been a lot of euphoria about Pakistan's election results- see for example here. And there is lots to be euphoric about- the extremists have been routed as have the military and liberal democratic parties seem to have won the polls. But lets not get over exuberant. Pakistan still has a long way to go before it becomes a liberal democracy- and furthermore we have been here before with all the parties involved. Both Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto (now dead whose husband, Asif Ali Zardawi, nicknamed Mr. 10% for his corrupt activities when she was last Prime Minister) had had goes at ruling Pakistan and neither made a particularly good fist of it before. It was under Benazir that the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, it was under Sharif that they cemented that power. Furthermore both parties have until now, hated each other, accusing each other, rightly, of corruption. We should not imagine such attitudes are going to be dropped.

Pakistan's problems go much further than a one-off election can resolve. Good government is a part of liberal democracy as well democratic institutions. Take one example, last year when the earthquakes hit northern Afghanistan, the effort, as File on 4 (the radio 4 documentary program) found to help many of the poor caught in the tragedy was organised by religious charities with political connections to terrorist organisations. Radical Islam was being spread by aid. That's a function of the fact that the Pakistani state is weak in many parts of its territory. Under 50% of the population are literate and under 40% of women are literate (according to the CIA). Debt is still over 50% of GDP. Its terrifying to think of the prospects for a democratic regime where only 49% can read election literature and in some regions that will be far lower. Furthermore the government to come faces real problems- how to diminish public debt, how to cope with a fall in the US economy (a fifth of Pakistan's exports go to the US, a twentieth go to the UK, so a fall in those two economies could prove disastrous), how to cope with the Taliban and the tribal areas? Furthermore what will any future administration's relations be with the army and with President Musharraf? Sharif was not a success as Prime Minister- and the leadership of Bhutto's old party is still confused.

I'm not saying that the elections in Pakistan weren't a good thing- they were. But lets reign back on the euphoria. Pakistan is going to need a hell of a lot of luck and help and aid to acheive a proper stable democracy any time soon. Furthermore its going to need patience from its allies- should we as Senator Obama reccomended invade to kill militants, then we could risk making any government in power even more unpopular. Pakistan is a vast place. There are areas which are incredibly peaceful. There are other areas where it is less so. Part of the problem for us as Westerners looking at Pakistan is to remember how vast and how complex it is- and also to try and keep sober. Not everything in as disastrous as it seems, not everything is as great as it seems. There are signs of hope in Pakistan, but to turn this into a real Peshawar Spring will require many more years of luck yet.

Action Aid

A mate of mine who runs an advertising company is working for someone called Action Aid- who campaigns to regulate the places that supermarkets buy food. Anyway the campaign's objectives are good- to regulate the way that supermarkets treat their suppliers and in particular the way that the workers for those suppliers are treated. Anyway here is me, Tiberius Gracchus, explaining it in a funky banana costume (so much better than a page of print!)...

Action Aid's website is here, and other videos are here.

Debasing the Currency: the Decline of Political Journals

Don Paskini is right when he says that in general British political weeklies are not in an amazing state. My own view for what it is worth is that only the Economist, for its breadth, and Prospect (occasionally), for its depth, are worth reading (I disagree on the first with the Don)- the New Statesman is the same standerd as what you get in the Comment section of the Guardian every day, and the Spectator is about the same with respect to the Telegraph. One cause, as Paskini rightly argues, is that comment is now truly much freer. The internet allows you to surf sites that will beat the regular journals out of the ground- just by reading Matt Sinclair, James Hamilton, Chris Dillow, Vino Sangripillai, Unity, you can easily read as many quality articles in a day as are put out by the major journals and on as wide a variety of subject. I chose the five bloggers above to reflect what I mean- just take a brief look across them, Matt gives you political thought, James takes one area of society and provides rigorous analysis, Chris is one of the best economists out there in the blogosphere, Vino looks at all sorts of stuff briefly but often interestingly and Unity is the man for sweeping long investigations- by reading those five and more like them, you get everything you would want from a magazine that costs you a fiver (and that's in the immature British blogosphere, in the American the mind boggles as to the ammount of quality stuff)! Competition has drained the unique nature of the magazine and makes the Olympian look less austere.

But the magazines are less austere in themselves. You see ultimately all of us have day jobs, whilst the writers from the journals don't and therefore could be distinguished by specialist knowledge and research and to some extent in the Prospect and Economist that is what you get. But that is not always true. Journals have been killed in many ways by their own successes. Its interesting for example to read Byron York's essay on the American Spectator and wonder about the applicability of its doctrine more generally. York argued that the American Spectator had been killed by getting a burst of readers from a set of scoops about President Clinton: the journal bet that the scoops would continue and that the increased numbers would continue and it changed its nature and eventually it was destroyed by that change, in spectacular ways. Now noone in the UK publishing industry is being so foolish, but sometimes I wonder if in a more minature version that kind of thing is happening to the New Statesman and the Spectator in particular.

Take for example the most recent episode at the New Statesman. The journal published a poorly researched article from a journalist under the thesis that global warming had stopped: shortly after it published a rebuttal from its environmental editor. But that wasn't before the original article had caused a storm on the net and furthermore had undermined the magazine's reputation. You can imagine though the thought which led the editors to want to publish the original flawed piece- even though it was awful, it would create a buzz and a buzz is what leads to journals getting readers and hence money. The business plan seems to be to shock someone into buying the magazine in question. That means that often the quality of the article in question is neglected in the cause of its shock value. Whether that is a successful longterm strategy, I'll leave others to consider, but essentially the Spectator and New Statesman have sought to create larger readerships or to stop the decline in their readerships by getting people to sit up and notice. And its not a recent phenomena: the reason I decided never to buy the Spectator again was when they carried an item at some point in the nineties about the political preferences of the Spice Girls. The intrusion of more competition means that for the journalist its easier to rely on what they have (and what others definitely don't have- with a few exceptions) the story and to neglect analysis which its harder to be good at. In a sense the reason to read the journal becomes the inside knowledge that the journalist has, that none of us has. Whereas analysis is found elsewhere. Journalists do that because its easy in part, and because its an easy distinction to spot. I have never met Tony Blair, they have.

You see when I and Don Paskini complain about the major journals, I suspect we are really talking past their editors. What I want from a journal is something I cannot get from a blog- an involved, well written, thoughtful analysis done at a perspective. Something longer than a blog article, but shorter than a think tank report. Something digestible in ten minutes. And I want it written by someone who knows the subject, who may not be known to me, but who has worked on something for years and is telling me what they know about it: something like the TLS for example but about politics. What I get from the journals is hooraying for either side (something that I'm quite capable of imagining on my own or consuming from the papers, news or blogs) or gossip. Often in the New Statesman and the Spectator its gossip which takes itself seriously- the Peter Oborne school of journalism finds a trend in a government and proclaims the age of the lie or some such nonsense- and that reflects the desire the distinguish the magazine from the newspaper. That's why increasingly its the comment sections that the journals look like. I don't know that that is a viable business plan- to be distinct from your blogging competitors because you are in Westminster and they aren't and to be distinct from your newspaper competitors because you offer a facile kind of analysis. What I do know is that its not what I want from a journal, I'd prefer them to have people working on each article for three weeks and telling me something new- but then I'm not the consumer they want and nor I think is Don Paskini.

Ultimately I want analysis- and with a few notable exceptions there seem to be few journalists out there willing to provide anything that hasn't been said three thousand times before. The Decline of the Journal is a result of the Decline of Analysis and that proceeds out of many different forces within our society- market forces, both in terms of how journalists want to work and what they think their consumers want them to produce.

Barack Obama- Communist

Yes apparantly. Because according to Lisa Schiffren over at the National Review, there are two quite obvious reasons to think someone is a communist. One is that they go out with someone with another race and even marry them: it stands to reason that they must be a goddamn commie- and if they are the kid of an interracial marriage that's even more true- afterall when you run for office, its legitimate to begin investigating everyone back to your forefather's forefather.

It is a terrible piece of journalism and illustrates to me that this isn't going to be a pleasant campaign- the knives are out. This is McCarthyism of the worst kind- its deeply unpleasant and should have no place in political journalism. Lisa Schiffren should be sacked by the National Review.

The Man who shot Liberty Valance and the Story of America: Republican Solitude to Democratic sociability

John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart came together in 1962 to make with John Ford, the Man who shot Liberty Valance. The posters advertised the fact that the two great actors of the Western had been united together in one film- what they didn't say was that here we see the two actors as opposites, opposites that reflect the earlier histories of their careers and the history of the United States. Ford showed in the film how America had in the course of the early twentieth century chosen a future and a way forwards and had neglected and destroyed its past. In that sense the Man who shot Liberty Valance, a flawed film because in part it is too didactic (and in part because of the age of its stars- both Stewart and Wayne were in their late fifties when the film was made and don't quite come off as fresh faced heroes) is an extended meditation on the American frontier and its place within America. Far from being the society of the frontier, America, Ford implied, was the society that had turned its back on the frontier and the West and its future was the East coast.

The situation in Ford's film is not difficult to understand. On a windswept night, before the coming of the railway, a young lawyer, played by Stewart, called Ransom Stoddard comes into down on a stagecoach. The coach is held up by a gang of desperadoes, led by Liberty Valance (played by Lee Marvin) and Stewart's naive insistance that Valance live by his coscience ends with him getting beaten up. He arrives at town a couple of days later and settles down in the town cafe. The family there care for him. In town he meets a couple of key characters- a cowardly marshall (Andy Devine doing what Andy Devine was great at doing), a drunken, unstable and yet brilliant journalist, a girl called Hallie and her lover Tom Doniphon. Doniphon is the only one who can physically stand up to Liberty Valance, the outlaw, and protects Stoddard on various occasions. Stoddard arrives at the very moment that Valance is being used by the neighbouring big farmers to stop the territory applying to join the United States (which would dilute their powers). By educating the people of the town, Stoddard persuades them to vote for statehood against the farmers and eventually that leads directly to a confrontation between Stoddard and Valance and the revelation of the man who really did shoot Liberty Valance. Stoddard gets the girl (Hallie) and ends up a senator. Doniphon tries to kill himself and almost succeeds and his life after that moment is wasted and consumed in dissapation.

Stewart and Wayne are here playing roles that they had constructed over the previous thirty years of their careers. Stewart had been playing naive democrats who triumphed over circumstances since the 1930s- he had diversified in the late 40s and 50s working for Alfred Hitchcock and making Westerns- but those earlier parts in films such as Mr Smith goes to Washington still resonated. Wayne too had monopolised the tough westerner, grim and complicated. His earlier work in the Searchers is a great example of this aspect of Wayne. For Ford, placing them together, enabled him to balance two perceptions of America's past: the democratic and civic and the wild frontiersman. But the film represents less an examination of those two ideas than the examination of the decline of the second and the rise of the first. There is no sense that Doniphon would ever move East, but its significant that Stewart's character follows the advice of Horace Greeley to 'go west, young man' and conquers the minds of the people of the town.

Conquest and violence are motifs running through the film. When Stoddard arrives in town, Doniphon tells him he has to get a gun to resist Liberty Valance. That advice is repeated again and again. But the real conquest here is the conquest of Doniphon's territory by Stoddard. Through education, the townsmen seek to exclude Valance by election and law, not self defence. Stoddard offers Hallie the gift of reading, Doniphon offers her a house that he built himself, and Hallie chooses the teacher over the practical man. Through publicity, Stoddard's reputation conquers and effaces Doniphon's. After the progress of several years, noone can remember the great Doniphon, whereas everyone from the moment he arrives recognises and remembers Stoddard. The pen triumphs in this film over the sword (despite the fact that the only resolution that can work with Valance relies on a quick and calm hand on a gun). The pen though obliterates those that use the sword: Doniphon's virtue is forgotten and Stoddard's is remembered.

America has changed. Doniphon of course is independent of anyone else. He constructs and destroys himself. Stoddard is dependent on others for his own safety and his own approval. The one is a product of lonely virtuous pride- a Cincinnatus who denies any civic office. The second though is a product of the modern age- social and sociable. By the time Stoddard returns the town has become his and Doniphon's funeral is a lonely one. But Stoddard feels a regret of sorts. He feels a regret that the memory of Doniphon has faded. A regret that the honourable man he knew has lost his reputation in the wastes of time and a regret as well that he has migrated from a town that loves him, to the cities which don't. There is a strong sense in the film of community: community that may be under threat in the early days but that is looked back at with nostalgia by those that have left it. One wonders if Stoddard when he moves back to Shinbone feels that loss of community and regrets the way it has departed. He seems to want to have that lifestyle again: setting up his own law practise in a small town but he can never reach the self sufficiency of Doniphon.

The world was changing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the frontier. The change was inevitable: this film reinforces that, without Stoddard's educational work the town wouldn't have known about the plots to subvert its rights. But equally something is lost: what is lost is the magnificent personality of Doniphon. Wayne's performance is the most charismatic in the film, Ford allows it, and he allows it in order to demonstrate how the independence of the hero is lost in the rush to modernity. Stewart's character is the future for America, but its a future that leaves behind the pioneers that made America. A future for democracy and liberalism but not for classical republicanism: no matter whether you think the world America lost (of independent farmers) was worth retreiving, it is undeniable that Ford's historical analysis was right. And there is something in the emotional appeal that Doniphon has over the modern citizen Stoddard.

But in a tough minded film, its demonstrated that the emotional appeal isn't enough: with modernity comes inevitable loss and rightly the democratic character triumphs.

Student Lifestyles

Alex Singleton posts rather interestingly about student lifestyles. Its interesting- Alex sees contemporary studenthood as being too puritanical and too priggish. Too many people are focussed on careers in the City, too few on getting drunk and having a good time. I agree in part with him: the students I knew at Oxford were almost all unbeleivably stressed. One of my friends had grey hairs fall out as she did her finals (finals at Oxford are all done in a week and the results from them determine your entire degree). Partly I agree with Alex, though I think its worth having hard degrees which make people stressed. They signify more.

Where I completely agree is the focus on careers. Almost all students I knew worried about what they would do afterwards. The point that neither universities nor schools make to people is that you can make a mistake at the age of 16, 18 or 21 and change your mind still. Its perfectly sensible for people to try things and find out what they like. Career choices at university are presented as life and death moments upon which everything hinges: but they are not. Many people have not fully made up their minds at 21 and its perfectly fine to change and switch careers say until a little later in life: those who aren't lawyers by the age of 23 are not failures.

I disagree with Alex partially though. When I was a student- the one thing that really suffered was not people's social lives, but people's intellectual lives. I went to Oxford, expecting to find an intellectual nirvana, what I found were a number who were kindred spirits. But so many were doubtful and disdainful of intellectual things. Some were open say to some things (art history) and not to others (physics) which is more excusable (vice versa happened to). But the real tragedy was seeing intelligent people whose minds were shut to anything that would not earn them money in the future. That's a slight caricature, but there is a grain of truth in it, it was anti-intellectualism in universities and not the lack of party spirit that I thought was the real tragedy.

I don't know how to solve that, there may not be a solution, and I think its part of a society which occasionally prioritises wealth over other things. Partly its also about the insecurity of student life, when you get to 21 you don't realise that you can get a job and security- and part of the issue is that I wonder whether students do degrees too early in their lives, before they lose their anxiety. Its an interesting problem- but I don't agree with Alex ultimately- my issues with university were far more about how few seemed to love their subjects and some seemed to love their subjects less after doing an undergraduate course.

Should Chris Dillow be hated for living in England?

Chris Dillow justifies class hatred over on his blog: for him it is a payback for the fact that the middle class have so many advantages in life from educated parents to moneyed lives and even nepotism. Chris argues this with his usual persuasiveness- but his case is pretty bad and even Chris can't really sustain it. Its available to attack on so many different measures but I wish to concentrate on two particular reasons why Chris is wrong to laud class hatred. (Particularly as I like Chris want to erode class with policies that would promote equality.)

1. Class is not the only way of distinguishing advantage. I know plenty of middle class people who were born with MS, ME, deep diseases of the mind and body- does Chris believe that the ill are entitled to hate the well, that the depressed entitled to hate the happy. Furthermore would he not agree that irrespective of the vast class divisions in England, they are as nothing compared to the vast divisions between nations. Would Chris not agree that on the same logic he advances for class hatred, then Zimbabweans and Bangladeshis should hate that epitome of white privilege, Mr Dillow? Hating people for what they cannot change is foolish, and its even more foolish when you consider that though evaluating the desert of various classes is easy, evaluating the desert of individuals is much harder. Would Chris not agree that he deserves hatred because he was born with, completely irrespective of his merits, the talent to get a job- the genetic inheritance to do well and the luck of life to exploit that inheritance.

2. Hatred is a destructive emotion. It does not help anyone who feels it, less than those who don't. We have had hundreds of years of class hatred- but I don't see the working class storming the barricades. Rather I think hatred encourages people to try and stuff the middle class by earning more than their contemporaries who went to Harrow. Far from encouraging egalitarianism, this is a different form of Toryism: its the argument that if only we could have a pure meritocracy, the people at the top would deserve their places there in some sense. Genetic advantage good, environmental advantage bad. Class hatred, just like the even more justified ethnic hatred that on Chris's argument Africans ought to feel for anyone in the West, often makes people throw their hands up in frustration rather than achieving things in life. And some of those that succeed- assume that they are so justified by their success, that they spend money and time combatting any attempts to make society more equal. (Chris suggests that anyone middle class who hasn't ended class deserves hatred: I'm not sure why its only background that he mentions there- surely that applies to those who become middle class as well).

The truth is that noone in society deserves their wealth. We are all the product of random events from our birth forwards, and if we are successful, we are purely lucky. Genetics, environmental factors, even the moment when we got an interview and the other guy didn't all add up to make me suspect that it would take only a slight misstep for all our destinies to change completely. If we are to hate privilege, then we should hate success- which would produce interesting incentives within society. Furthermore we should pay much more attention to what people do with their wealth, than how they got it. If Chris wants to really hate someone, then why not look at the percentages of money that people give to charity from their own fortunes.

Ultimately I think that Peter Moores deserves more praise than Piers Morgan. The first went to Oxford and Eton, but then proceeded to give away 141 million pounds to charity- helping struggling artists get their lives together. The second went to a comprehensive and is nothing but a scumbag and an idiot and has used his success to hurt and destroy other people. The same could be said of leading economist J.M. Keynes, impecably leftwing and middle class, and the McCarthyite yet working class Horatio Bottomley. Ultimately it doesn't matter in life where you came from, its what you do with what abilities you have, in particular whether you use them to help your fellow man that matters.

Rejoice, Rejoice

Fidel Castro's resignation is something that all right thinking people should rejoice about. Whilst the rest of Latin America has gradually cast off the tyrants of earlier years- Pinochet and Peron are no more- and come to democracy, Cuba has been isolated in its perpetuation of a dictatorial system. Perhaps the day of Cuban liberty is still far off- Raul Castro may continue his brother's repression indeed he almost certainly will- but this is one sign that the Castro dynasty may be ending. Its vital that all friends of liberty turn their thoughts now to what happens after the monstrous dictators are removed and how we can help Cuba accomplish the transition towards what, for most of the continent is becoming the norm, Democracy.

Leo Strauss

A lot of nonsense is written about Leo Strauss, mostly by people who believe him to have founded neo-conservatism, and very few interesting examinations of his thought are put out there. I think from the little I have read of Strauss, Lady Strange's recent post sums up some of his most important contributions to western thought. I would reccomend it for anyone who wants to understand what Strauss was about- and in particular how his thought is an attempt to redefine the boundaries of what we think of as political. Strauss wanted to exclude many of the political sciences as we know them now from the purview of politics. I do not neccessarily agree with his point- though I would suggest in focussing on the character of the statesman he was absolutely right- but I still think he is interesting to look at, particularly given the influence he still has in the United States, its worth knowing about what he was on about.

Mistaken Identity

I just went and looked at who has linked to this blog and was really thrilled when I saw that Reason Magazine had linked- oh but then I realised they attributed my article on jury trial and Twelve Angry Men to Matt Sinclair- its a good article, but I'm not sure its a Sinclair masterpiece!

Note to self, obviously too many discussions about the Archbishop of Canterbury are leading to people confusing me with Matt- time for another subject! :)

A fistful of Dollars

Often rightly described as the first of the Spaghetti westerns, a Fistful of Dollars began the careers of so many greats in modern cinema. From Clint Eastwood's mesmeric performance to Sergio Leone's debut as a Western director, this is a film where history runs red on the screen. Its influences were profound- whether on its participant's own careers or on the careers of film makers like Sam Peckinpah who took the operatic nature of violence and advanced it another level- and to some extent Eastwood's taciturn character in the film defines the Western drama for years to come. The man with no name (though the town gravedigger calls him Joe) has no family, no friends and never tells anyone about himself. He just strides across the screen infusing it with authority and making the other characters- desperadoes included- crouch in his charisma. Only in the scene where Eastwood is tortured is there any doubt that 'with the cavalry arriving in town, and the American so quick on the draw' Eastwood controls every scene he is in. Repeatedly refusing to tell others where they stand in the story that he creates- he forsees most conclusions and creates most of the plot.

The plot is simple- with themes going back to Shakespeare and beyond- it is largely derived from a Japanese film Yojimbo made by Akira Kurosawa. The town of San Miguel is split in two between two mafiosi like gangs (one even presided over by a formidable matriarch). The Baxters and the Rojas have been at each other's throats for years: they despise each other and have been at war. The plot goes on with the man with no name standing between them- attempting via a heist performed on the US army- to manipulate them to destroy each other. He has no particular reason to do this, no particular love or hatred for the town (at one point he shows some sympathy but its shortlived), the man with no name seeks destruction for its own sake and his character is a vacant canvass upon which we put the images that we would like to see. Gnarled features and a perpetual cigar hanging from lips, with a hand used to holding a pistol, the man with no name is a force of nature that blows everything off course.

So what is this film about. It is not about character- though Leone's closeups are incredible- it is about politics. The film is a fable about the creation of states and the creation of order within a community. At the beggining of the film one of the Desperadoes comments that he wants to create peace which is why he has hired the man with no name. Of course the point is that the man with no name works for noone- he has no loyalty accept to himself and ends up destroying every other kind of power in the land save for that of the self. He sends both of the mafiosi cliques to their deaths through their suspisions of each other and by the end of the film, the last shots show an emptied town. However its not quite an empty town. The last lines of the film 'you mean the Mexican government on one side, the American maybe on the other and me smack in the middle' parallel earlier lines that the man with no name says about the Rojas and the Baxters, but with one difference the new situation is 'too dangerous' even for the greatest psychopath of them all. Order has been created in the final frames because the power of the mafiosi has been destroyed and replaced with the power of the states.

Another way of looking at that is to look at the role of the modern in the film. Throughout it all the characters make indications that the modern world is here to stay. They use Winchester rifles and take target shots at the armour of Conquistadors. The state is here the ultimate in modernity: Winchester Rifles can be defeated with pistols and the armour of Conquistadors can repel bullets- but what Leone is saying here is something greater that the most powerful invention of modern life is not technological but political. The state can be defeated by neither a quick hand nor an armoured chest, the state has the power to control far in advance of any gang of mafiosi and a man with no name cannot exist save beyond the frontier. In that sense Leone creates a much more vicious and primitive West than some of his colleagues in direction at the time, and he also demonstrates how the power of the state, more than any technological force, changes society and creates the possibility of perpetual peace.

Business Reporting

Guido is entirely right in this post: he is right both as the substantive issue which is the way that Newsnight misreports the market results, and more importantly right on a broader issue which is the way that the media reports about economics and business. I am not an economist nor am I a mathemetician: but I'm underwhelmed by the way that I see reporting on economics done- I think it turns people off and doesn't help them understand and often perpetuates bad ideas. (There are obvious exceptions). Lets take some basic starting points. The media's reporting about economics is often jargon filled and explanation light. So for example at the moment we have had many reports about the Governor of the Bank of England's statements that interest rates may have to stay high in order to diffuse inflationary pressure. We have almost no explanation though of why it is neccessary to stop inflation rising too fast, no explanation of what interest rates do to inflation and why they do it. I've never seen a journalist really explain that inflation isn't a measure of the level of prices but a measure of the rise in prices: when we talk about inflation rising or falling, we are talking about the speed of the rise in prices quickening or slowing. And this permeates right across economics: for example, we seldom hear about the real debate over council tax which is between those who are capital rich and income poor (pensioners with houses) and those who are capital poor and income rich (new entrants to the labour market often), or about the principles which underlie the concept of free trade.

It strikes me that this is important. As politics becomes more technocratic, more coded in vocabulary, and less about class conflict as it has become over the last twenty or thirty years, its vital that to remain democratic, we still understand what's going on. I often think that the real problem with politicians and levels of public trust in them, is that often politicians of all parties seem to be speaking in code. And people only speak in code when they want to fool you. Or politicians speak in simplicities which everyone knows they don't really believe. Compare say the debate over Northern Rock with the debate over Iraq: whatever your views on both issues, I think that the public were much more informed about Iraq than about Northern Rock. And it wasn't just that they were more interested (for obvious reasons) in Iraq. Whatever you think of the debate, the debate was conducted in simple terms and using profound ideas. Economics strikes me as one of the areas in which governmental practice and what people imagine government does diverges radically. Take regulation, the Financial Services Authority which regulates banks (but not credit cards??????) applies a 'principles based approach'- there are good reasons why they do that- but its not what I think most people think a regulator does. The FSA doesn't walk around with a code, like a Banking parking inspector, pointing to yellow lines. It regulates in a different way but I doubt that many members of the public know that.

If it matters, then why is economic literacy a problem? Firstly I do think that political literacy is a problem. I've said before that I'm not sure how far the population can run the country if they don't understand what it is that they are running. But I do think that there are bigger problems in economics. Partly its because in a broad sense the economic arguments are over: there aren't many communists left, and most unabashed capitalists at least pretend that they want a welfare state. The argument is over levels and degrees, its over principles but principles which are in some sense shared on both sides. Economics has a scientific aspect, as well as a normative underpinning. You can't have a good economic viewpoint unless you get the morality right: but once you have done that you do need to do mathematics, and particularly calculus (which is the study of the gradients of graphs) in order to turn that viewpoint into policy. Mathematics terrifies people in a way that most other subjects don't. And its a subject that has been particularly affected by jargon: partly because it is the abstract depiction of human beings rendered as integers. Economics aspires to be a kind of physics of humanity- seeing humans as particles and measuring their interraction.

I don't think that there is neccessarily a solution to this: but it opens up a political problem. Increasingly politics is becoming less democratic because the population doesn't understand the government: that's what I think distrust in politicians is really about. And that has damaging ramifications, take the rising protectionist sentiment in the United States or the absense of public discussion about pensions in Europe, we risk inventing problems and ignoring them and we risk the stability of our political system when we do that.

George Osborne's choice of schools

Apparantly George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, has got his kids into private schools. Mike Ion is not impressed, he thinks that this represents the abandonment of progressive politics by the Cameron conservatives, and that Osborne should have chosen a state school rather than becoming part of the problem by sending his kids to a private school.

I have always found such arguments unconvincing. Ultimately as far as I see it, every person in the UK has the right to send their kids to private school if they have the money. Yes they may be perpetuating inequality: but a variety of other choices also perpetuate inequality as well- buying houses in 'nice' neighbourhoods or having books available to your kids at home or even the type of food you buy for your children and yourself. Furthermore we are criticising Osbourne without knowing the reasons he wants to send his kids to private school: he may have really good reasons for choosing that private school over this state school for his children. It is not for us to second guess the choice of other people.

It is not my opinion that Osbourne needs to justify his choice of school for his children, anymore than he needs to justify his choice of supermarket. What he does need to do is provide an analysis of the state system and how to make it better for everyone else: that is his job as a politician but once his job is over and he goes back home and spends the money he has earnt, I don't think it is any of my business that he spends it one way or another (providing its legal). Focusing on where he sends his kids to school misses the issue- its what he wants to do to the system in which so many others send their kids to school that's the real issue. At the moment it seems to me our political system does not let politicians get away with poor personal decisions, but lets them get away with poor policy decisions.

That's the wrong way round: lets ask the Tories complicated policy questions and not about their personal lives.

Reasons to love Cricket

Stephen Fleming has just announced he will retire as New Zealand captain. On his resignation he has asked how he wanted to be remembered and he said he would want to be remembered as a thinker about the game, as someone who could bring together a team and make them more than the sum of their parts. If anyone needs a justification for watching sport, then the fascination of human psychology under pressure is a great one- cricket shows that often at its best. Its fiendishly complicated and incredibly thoughtful as the bowler, captain and fielders conspire to trap the batsman into playing a shot he doesn't want to play. I'm sure the Umpire will have something to say as will James Hamilton: but I think its interesting that the bit of cricket that Fleming declared he enjoyed was the thinking, the way the game could be shaped by leadership and tactics. Its one of the things I enjoy watching team sports- you can see the tactics being played out on the field.

Campaign Chaos

Hillary Clinton hasn't been doing as well as predicted since the New Year: she was expected by some to have the nomination sown up at that point, some even predicted that Super Tuesday would be a coronation. They were wrong and the result seems to have been widespread discontent in her campaign for the Presidency with her long term aid, Patti Solis, leaving Clinton this week. The Atlantic has a fine article covering Solis's resignation, rumours had been swirling even before Solis left about the disfunctional structure of 'Hillaryland' and journalists had picked up on those rumours. Hillary's team is obviously involved in mutual recrimination about how they have lost their frontrunner status.

Both of the articles I have quoted above suggest that what this demonstrates is how uniquely disfunctional Hillary's campaign has been. I don't think that's true. Seasoned observers of US Politics have commented to me before that Clinton has run an almost perfect campaign- obviously it hasn't worked but on the other hand, she hasn't self destructed and Obama has run a brilliant campaign. Furthermore any campaign faces downturns and moments of pressure: pressure produces internal stresses however tight the team of people put together by the candidate. It also produces a kind of focus that makes the inner circle unable to see the wider picture: hence the need to bring in new blood in order to give new advice to a candidate. What we are seeing with Clinton is really the effect of a long campaign.

What's interesting is not what this tells us about Clinton- but what this tells us about politics and campaigning. I think the articles and the events of the last few days capture the intense closeness of politics: the suffocating claustrophobia of living in a campaign where every leading article is a major event. Sometimes that can obscure the longer term issues or even policy discussions: it produces fierce rivalries as well. Understanding the lives that politicians live is indispensible to understanding the kind of decisions they will take: I think what the Clinton campaign illustrates is the way that politics is a very visceral experience, altering day by day. Politicians have to cope both with the intensity of living in a perpetual drama and complete alterations in fortune: their psychology has to contain the confidence to survive that and be brutal to their allies and friends.

That atmosphere determines exactly what kind of politicians and hence leaders that we get at the end of the process- the Clinton campaign's breakup is a useful indicator of the way that politics works in the United States and by implication in most of the West.