October 1969

This is a fascinating article in Wired magazine about how in October 1969, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger decided to feint a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union. They believed that such an attack would terrify the Moscow government into helping them in Vietnam and taking disarmanent seriously. The risks were obviously vast as American planes crossed Canadian airspace into the Arctic ocean, the Russians had no reason not to beleive that they were under attack and consequently to respond appropriately. Nixon and Kissinger believed that only if Nixon were seen as a madman willing to do anything, would negotiations take place in ways that suited the United States. Obviously the calculation did not completely backfire- we are all still here- but on the other hand neither did it work fully. Vietnam did not see peace until 1973. Kissinger claims that the move was responsible for the gradual Soviet acceptance of disarmanent in the 70s, it would be interesting to hear from someone on the Russian side or even look at Russian documents to confirm what they thought of the crisis. As it is it remains one of those episodes when the cold war almost got very hot.

The inversion of Oscar: the neccessity of employment

Bruno Anthony is one of the most compelling evil geniuses in cinema. He is compelling because he is charming. He begins the film, Strangers on a Train, by attaching himself to Guy Haines, an amazing tennis player, and proposes a scenario

now lets say that you'd like to get rid of your wife... oh no no just suppose, lets say you had a very good reason, no no lets say, you'd be afraid to kill her, you know why, you'd get caught, and what would trip you up, the motive! ah now here's my idea... listen its so simple too, two fellows meet accidentally like you and me, no connection between them at all, never saw each other before, each one has somebody that he'd like to get rid of, so they swap murders...each fellow does the other fellow's murder, then there's nothing to connect them, each one has murdered a total stranger like you do my murder I do yours,... for example your wife, my father, criss cross.

That sets off a plot which twists and turns. Haines never wants to get involved- and Bruno spends the film trying to force him to murder Bruno's father and then attempts to incriminate him in the murder of his own wife (a crime that Bruno committed). It is a plot worthy of the finest artists of suspence and in Patricia Highsmith the novelist and Alfred Hitchcock the director it found those artists. Raymond Chandler was also involved but withdrew as a screenwriter. But the key here is in Hitchcock's version the character Bruno. Bruno is the charismatic centre of the film: he is charming and sinister, an artist- but this is also one of Hitchcock's most sexual films, filled with homoerotic tension between Bruno and Guy, phallic imagery- popping balloons with cigarrettes for example- and a conspiracy to murder which is in part a seduction.

One aspect of this deserves commentary- and that is the way that Bruno is a comment on Oscar Wilde's characters in his plays about Victorian London and hence a comment on European civilisation as a whole. Wilde's characters in his novels are typically idle aristocrats: they need no incomes and no occupations. They live lives without profession or usefulness: they are noble exceedingly witty and they are sexually ambiguous. These characters live in masks and disguises which hide their neverending expeditions to bunbury, to devise more time to waste time in London or to unfold their sophisticated plans. Wilde's plays often end with the good triumphant and married (eg the Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere's Fan) and conventional endings but their structures, their comedy is subversive. Hitchcock evidently knew Wilde well: his later films are indebted for instance for scenes and ideas to films of Wilde's novels and Hitchcock to some extent lived out a Wildean fantasy of life. But Strangers on a Train is a very Wildean film and its main character Bruno is deeply Wildean: a painting in Strangers just like in Dorian Gray reflects the true personality of a respectable man, Bruno even quotes one of the most famous lines from the Importance of being Earnest and there are many other examples of direct quotation. In the play Lady Bracknell commends Jack for smoking as 'a man should always have an occupation': are we surprised to find that in the first meeting between Guy and Bruno, Bruno tells Guy that he doesn't do anything- apart from smoking which he does too much of.

That cinematic quote of a theatrical line and Bruno's overall manner, his charm and disguises, not to mention the whiff of homoeroticism (indeed bisexuality- he manages to seduce Guy's wife into being murdered) is very Wildean. It reminds one instantly of Wilde's characters. Hitchcock though was no mere ingenue, quoting simply in order to quote. He knew what he was doing- and in the character of Bruno, indeed in the set up of Strangers on a Train, he was deliberately trying to do something. Hitchcock's intentions are not easy to elucidate: the film is dark and powerful. It ends with the best of endings: heterosexual unity in the face of bisexual criminality- but noone watches this film for Ruth Roman's performance as Guy's love interest. (Ruth Roman's pubescent sister is another woman semi-seduced by Bruno and their abortive romance is more interesting than the real romance between the sister and Guy- she is another with some amazing lines, 'Daddy doesn't mind any scandal, he is a senator'.) Everyone watches the movie for Bruno's act as a Wildean genius, a dark malevolent and yet charming and seductive presence on screen.

Let us for a second go back to Wilde. In Wilde's plays, the aristocratic dilletantes are the majority of the cast- in this play Bruno is alone as the sole member of the cast with Wildean characteristics. Whereas Wilde lauds leisure in the classical manner- as a Latin poet might laud otium, Hitchcock uses Bruno to express the value of a puritanical ethic. This isn't really about sexuality- there is no doubt that other members of the cast exhibit homoerotic characteristics- but it is about manner, it is about a judgement about psychology. Hitchcock's purpose here is in my view to reject the whole concept of leisure- instead of supporting character and enabling contemplation, Hitchcock tries to show that it fosters a spiralling of character out of control. Bruno is more clearsighted than most of the other characters: he has afterall experienced everything once. But his experience, his intelligence are redundent and he knows that he is a drone, he knows that he has been forced out of three colleges and that his position in society is not assured. In contrast to Wilde's assured aristocrats, Bruno's aristocrat has to realise that the twentieth century has changed the way that position works: employment now defines your status not your birth or even your cultivation. In a previous society, Guy the proletarian trier with a solid sporting and political career would be the outcast, in 20th Century America it is Bruno.

His reaction to that is interesting. Again for Wilde frivolous sparring reduces easily to conventional or even unconventional morality. In Hitchcock's darker view leisure creates the atmosphere which perpetuates triviality: and thence arrives at an even darker possibility as genius spirals into insanity and psychosis. Bruno is more charismatic than the rest of the characters, but he is not made happier, securer or stabler by this knowledge. Rather Hitchcock's movie is a sceptical statement about the possibilities of decadence, it is a statement about the psychological possibilities that lead on from leisure, that contrary to the Romans the devil makes work for idle hands. This insight is in part basically right- and Hitchcock far more than Wilde confronts the reality of leisure and aristocratic leisure at that- it gives the time for brooding, a brooding which can create genius but as in the case of Bruno also can create psychosis. The contrast to Wilde enables us to observe the way that Hitchcock makes a historical as well as a psychological case: the time of the aristocrats is over and in the new society of 1950s America leisure is, whether it was a sensible proffession in the days of Wilde's aristocrats when society was more leisured, corrupting.

Simply put, if your only profession is smoking, the consequences are likely to be devastating in our society.

H.H Asquith and Gordon Brown

Martin Kettle argues in today's Guardian that Gordon Brown risks facing the fate of Herbert Henry Asquith in the early twentieth century. I think that Kettle seriously underestimates Asquith and overestimates Brown's possible position in the UK's political history. In order to understand things I think we need to briefly understand where Asquith stands and why he is one of the crucial British Prime Ministers of the Twentieth Century- and then understand where Brown stands, at the moment, in British political history and what dangers threaten the Premiership at the moment.

Asquith was Prime Minister for eight years. He took over two years after a general election, when Henry Campbell Bannerman retired from the Premiership and he stayed there through a second and third election (both in 1910). He was a great reforming Prime Minister- bringing in a great deal of reform over the years. Asquith brought in free medical treatment for children, free school meals, pensions, sick pay, health insurance for the poorest workers and unemployment insurance. Asquith presided over a ministry of great talents: Lyold George at the Treasury, Winston Churchill at the Home Office, Board of Trade and later Admiralty. Asquith ultimately was also significant because it was he as Prime Minister who presided over the UK's entry into the First World War. That led to his fall as Prime Minister in 1916, but as long as he was a peacetime Prime Minister he survived and did rather well.

Gordon Brown shares neither Asquith's circumstances nor his longevity (yet). Brown became Prime Minister over what looks like a tired government with many ministers having been in charge for ten years- people like Jack Straw are old figures on the political stage. The cabinet is in no way as attractive as the cabinet of 1908. Brown has not brought forward any marked reforms: he has not yet brought forward ideas which will really change Britain, rather this is a continuation of Blair's regime at Downing Street. That is the sense that Brown is really so much different from Asquith: he is a continuation of a previously charismatic Prime Minister, Asquith was the charismatic Prime Minister. The other difference is in their mentality: Brown is by all accounts an obsessive, Asquith was relaxed to the point of insouciance.

Kettle's article suggests to me one of the major perils of making historical analogies. It is attractive to think that Brown is underestimated as Prime Minister and to look for other underestimated Prime Ministers. You could possibly argue that Labour faces a threat to its position as one of the two great parties of state from the Liberals (more on that later, I do not beleive it) and look to the last time one of the two major parties was replaced by another party (the Liberals by Labour in the 1920s just after Asquith had been the last Liberal Prime Minister). But that brings you to an illusory parallel. Asquith's situation and Brown's were and are so fundementally different: their tempraments are almost opposite, they took the Premiership in different circumstances as well, Asquith's career was a casualty of the First World War, Brown's might be of the pressures of the Premiership itself and there are further distinctions about the degrees of reform that Asquith and Brown have made to Britain. In truth its a bad analogy because it doesn't instruct us as to Brown's possible future and Labour's possible trajectory.

Intelligent design and terrorists

I just recently posted two articles at the Liberal Conspiracy: one is on the difference between Brits and Americans in their beliefs about evolution and what that shows, and the other is about why we ought to talk to terrorists.

Jesus Camp

Jesus Camp is a documentary about one of the most perplexing phenomenon in the world today- American charismatic evangelical Christianity. I think I have to preface this review with two comments: firstly I am not a believer and secondly if I were, charismatic religion revolts me on an aesthetical level. For me religion is quieter and more reflective, at its best it is deeply personal and internal- an examination of the soul- I come you might say out of a different tradition, in the sense that going back generations everyone in my family was either a Methodist or an Anglican. So in that sense, this film represents a strain of Christianity that I am naturally unsympathetic to: speaking in tongues and enthusiasm generally denote for me a rock concert, not a religious profession.

Jesus Camp was made to shock. The documentary makers are definitely not evangelical nor are they conservative: though their subject is both evangelical and conservative. They show their subjects- in particular Becky Fischer the children's pastor at the centre of the film- in a particularly bad light. Fisher uses the swell of group emotion to put forward both a religious and a political cause. She also teaches these kids to isolate themselves from other kids: the stress is on everyone else's sinfulness. Furthermore she and those affiliated with her ministry teaches them ideas which are just bizarre, that evolution did not happen, that Global Warming is a government conspiracy. What you have to say watching the film though is that she is an impressive propagandist in her own cause, she uses toys, keeps the kid's attention and is charismatic and fun to listen to. Her message is obnoxious and repellant- this is a call to extoll faith and neglect evidence based reasoning. She admits at the start of the program that she admires Islamic Fundamentalists and how in camps in Palestine they educate their kids (she derives this information from that incredibly accurate source- unidentified websites) to commit terrorist acts, she argues that she wants to do the same thing for young Pentecostal and Evangelical kids.

This woman is mad and dangerous. There is an issue though with her madness which I think the film should take more seriously. I am absolutely sure that lots of kids attend her camp in the summer but the film made me uneasy because it failed to take on two rather important questions. The first of which is that Becky Fischer may not be representative of most evangelical children's ministers: at various points she says that in her techniques she is an advance of them. I wouldn't mind betting that she comes from the more extreme fringe of this phenomenon. The second thing is that we should beware that we assume how the kids react to her: at one point one of the camp workers says that the kids are far too interested in having fun and far too uninterested in Christianity: they prefer climbing stuff to theology. In that sense I wondered how long this stuff will remain in the children's minds: you may be overcome in a crowd shouting that homosexuality is evil, you may be overcome in the crowd dismissing others, but does that endure or is that just a surface phenomenon. We get interviews with Kids demonstrating that some do internalise it, but I'm not sure we get any proof that all of them do.

There is another facet to this. This kind of ministry only works because in a sense there are kids who need it. One of the most interesting facets of this film I thought was less the condemnation of evangelical right wing crazies- I can do that for myself, thankyou- than the way that it portrayed the kids. At the beggining of the film Becky Fischer approaches two boys, who must be both about 10 and one of them confesses that he doesn't find social situations easy. For that boy religion gives his life meaning and means that he can confront to some extent his fear of social situations in Christian camp. Christian camp is something that these kids look forward to as a bonding experience. The thing that is central to them I'd suggest is that the Camp is fun, the beliefs flow out of the fun that they are having. In that sense, they aren't convinced by reason or by faith but by tieing together fun with this belief system. Its an interesting sidelight on why humans end up believing what they do, I don't think it is only relevant here and another post hopefully in the future will deal with it. But the central thing that I am trying to get at is that Jesus Camp is not a good thing, but that it supplies for these children things they would not naturally have.

All that said, and I hope you see why I am ambivalent about this film, the one thing you don't find at Jesus Camp is Christianity. Bear in mind all my aesthetical conditions above, but I found the purveyors of Jesus Camp to deeply unChristian. They do not know what Christ meant when he said do not cast the first stone, they seem not to have read the New Testament and to be using Christianity as a justification for expressing their own hatreds. More than the kids, it is the adults who run the camp who seem to me to end up looking ill, Fischer and her minions have such a warped view of reality, they are so consumed by hate, that they have lost their humanity. All kindness is directed to an end, all forgiveness is secretly abandoned and self righteousness is endorsed. I am not sure that that was the message of the New Testament. There is something very disquieting about hundreds of kids yelling 'righteous judges' without really knowing what it means and wanting to listen to anyone who disagrees. Something sinister about kids wandering around a bowling ring telling customers that they are going to hell.

Many of our belief systems in the end are psychological crutches- we rely on them to sustain us during the bad times and there is nothing neccessarily wrong with that. I think what we see with Jesus Camp is interesting: of course the theology and politics is crap, a point the film makers blast into your mind again and again and again. But in some way the more interesting thing is that the kids seem to enjoy it, for some of them it fills a gap in their lives. In part that is because say the boy who said he was isolated is home schooled- he doesn't meet many other kids- so in part it arises from this unique conservative Christian culture in the States, but it also arises out of real needs the kids have. I am not saying that I endorse anything that goes on at Jesus Camp, but in a way that's not the interesting question. The interesting question is about why these kids enjoy it so much, adult attention, the sense of being part of a 'greatest generation' and the comradeship of their fellow Christian kids I'd suggest have a lot to do with it. The basis of a religion, you have to be joking! But the film presents us, despite the intentions of its makers, with an interesting sociological portrait of how these camps perform a role in the life of the kids that go to them. And that is far more interesting than bashing Bush another time.

Paul Schofield

When Paul Schofield died I wrote this on Bits of News. I think at the time I should have posted it here- but I didn't and so I post it today, concurring even more than I did when I wrote it with my judgement on March 20th- as such I feel it should go on this blog.

Paul Schofield was one of the great actors of his generation. He did the great roles- Lear, Hamlet- and succeeded in being according to others the best Lear of his generation. He also took an oscar for playing Thomas More in a Man for all seasons. I came across him towards the end of his career, but even so you could see that this was a formidable actor. Its three performances of his- neither of which much remembered in today's obituaries that I particularly remember him for. That in a sense seared his impression upon my brain as a film viewer and as a consumer of poetry.

Schofield in 1989 was persuaded by Kenneth Branagh to take part in Branagh's Henry V as the King of France. Normally the French King is a pathetic man with little time on stage, but Schofield's presence imbued a small part with great weight and majesty. When he was on the stage, even playing a doddery old failing King, he gave that part a sense of Priam-like forsight. This was a man you could see who could not hold back the tide but could forsee the way that it was turning. He used Shakespeare's lines which create the personality of the King of France, to flesh out a role that was both feeble and wise. A role which in a sense performed the perfect counterpart to Branagh's Henry. Henry is of course the good King, vibrant and vital- Schofield's King was the good king grown old surrounded by foolish councillors and an even more foolish son. In a sense his presence in the play made it unneccessary for the earlier history plays about Henry IV to be performed- for Schofield's role demonstrated that the other side of Kingship was there, the side of kingship that worries and frets, that is powerless under the threat of fate. He performed that role so well that I can't think of the film without him in it- even though he was on stage during none of the major set pieces and probably only for a few minutes.

Secondly I came across him in Quiz Show where again he played a father to a brilliant son- but this time the brilliance of the son was flawed. The son, played by Ralph Fiennes, was corrupted by the lure of money. Schofield's role as the father was brilliant. He was able to make the father's slightly intellectually snobbish academic knowledge charming and forgivable. He was able to demonstrate how beneath the crust of sophistication there were very strong principles that this man believed in and wished to follow. Again Schofield's performance did not take away from the main drama of the film, rather his performance strengthened many of the other aspects of the film. He was the dressing that made the salad work, but he didn't obscure its other components.

My last memory of Schofield, and again it'll be one that lots share, is as a reader. He read in the early 2000s as he reached his eightieth birthday, the Waste Land on BBC Radio. He captured the full range of its voices, appreciated its nuances and the rhythm with which Elliot managed to infuse the closing calls at a pub or the crowds over London Bridge. Its one of the most frequently listened tracks on my Ipod and it demonstrates the ability of the man's voice to permeate the poem, to give a difficult text meaning and also its versatility, coping with all the different voices of Elliot's imagination.

I cannot claim that I knew Paul Schofield, nor that I saw his best work which people say was on stage. I was too young to observe him in his prime as an actor, too unobservant to realise as a teenager that I should have made an effort to see him and others of his generation before they passed. Yet I think from these three moments- captured on film and on radio- even I could sense today was a moment of sadness. We have lost a superb actor who lightened up the stage and was able to really reach into and think about great parts. For me, neither of the three experiences I wrote about above could have been the same without Schofield's sure grasp of what he had to do and his talent for doing exactly that- bringing out of his character something to make the films and poem work even better. Working with the grain, not against the other members of the cast, but with them and not overacting them off the stage with his performance.

PhD

I just thought I'd apologise for the radio silence on the blog- normal service will resume shortly- by saying that the reason is that I have just handed in my PhD thesis!

A Pigmy Leaf Chameleon

I was just watching Life in Cold Blood the latest David Attenborough series to get to sleep and saw this: its a pigmy leaf chameleon and is the smallest reptile in the world. Attenborough has been searching for it for the last fifty years.

Moses on drugs?

A recent paper argues that he was on drugs. I'd suggest that he hasn't proved anything: there isn't much else to say but if you are interested in a fuller discussion of the argument, then have a look at it. I don't suggest that you can refute the argument but I do suggest that the article doesn't prove its case.

Imagination and History

On November 14th 1959, the Clutter family were brutally murdered in their own home late at night. They were murdered by two drifters- Richard Hickock and Perry Smith- who hoped to find a large ammount of wealth at the Clutter household but of course found nothing of any value whatsoever. The tragic murder of the upstanding citizen Herb Clutter, his melancholic wife Bonnie, vivacious and successful 16 year old daughter Nancy and his fifteen year old introverted son Kenyon shocked the surrounding community. It also shocked America bringing down a group of reporters upon the sleepy Kansas town of Holcombe and in particular exciting the interest of Truman Capote, the novelist and essayist, who himself came to Holcombe and investigated the murders. His investigations turned into his non-fiction novel In Cold Blood and was dramatised in the films Capote and Infamous, both of which are amongst the better films of the last couple of years.

I have just read In Cold Blood- and what strikes me as interesting in reading In Cold Blood is its approach. Capote uses a novelistic format to put together what he says. That obviously means that his account is more vivid than say a historical account: this is a thrilling read about a gruesome matter and Capote gets you inside the mind of his characters. However nagging at the back of your mind is the question of how real what you are reading is. When Capote reports a conversation between the officer in charge of the case, Al Dewey and Perry Smith, the criminal, he cannot be giving you the accurate account of what happened. Dewey and Smith definitely talked to Capote- but it would be incredibly unlikely that their memories of that conversation would be entirely accurate or consistent. One of the best ways of telling that something is historical is that there are gaps and that knowledge is imperfect: Capote's account is too perfect. He also attributes motives where he cannot, even with his interviews, be sure that the motives are ones that the people felt at the moment that they committed the crime. Capote's account is therefore not the truth, it is a series of truths spliced with probable or possible ideas between them.

That may be true. But I would suggest that that has more in common with historical work than we all might think. Historical work relies on the imagination more than you might think. My own work for instance relies on the fact that fighting in a war is a traumatic experience: I cannot prove that every soldier in the New Model found the experience traumatic, but I can imagine that many did. Imagination fills in gaps by which we understand the rest of the evidence. So often for example what a historian does is go through the same process as Truman Capote- generating an imaginative construct and working his evidence into it. The ways that you tell good history is not that it avoids imagination, but that it involves an Occam's razor, whereby you rely on the least ammount of imagination in formulating your construct, and furthermore that you ammend and discard your imaginative construct with regard to what the evidence tells you. In that sense the Capote novel is more historical than we might think- it does not have the caveats that historians would introduce- but it does bring to light one of the real talents of history which is imaginative- empathy is neccessary in order to understand the way that evidence fits together, the person behind the instances of the past.

Why Tibet? Why Palestine? The Rational Choices of Protest

Dennis Prager draws attention to the differing treatment of Tibet and Palestine by the world: the Tibetans have been arguably more oppressed than the Palestinians and have behaved in some ways better than the Palestinians in resisting that oppression. Prager uses some rather extremist language to make his case- but some of what he says is true. Afterall anti-semitism is more prominent in the imagination of the world than anti-sinoism (at least the world excluding places east of Pakistan). Some of what he says is daft: apparantly the world's left dominates the world's media and politics, living with George Bush and Rupert Murdoch, I have to say I'm not sure I agree. Whenever I socialise with the 'left' they don't seem that happy that they are controlling the world- indeed there are reasons why rightwingers are happier with China than with Israel- to come back to Mr Murdoch, there is a market there whereas Israel is a much smaller and less economically important place.

But there is one reason that Prager completely misses and that is the rationality of protest. One of the most salient points made by George Orwell was that Gandhi would have been of little aid against Stalin: indeed one could say that for similar reasons the Dalai Lama hasn't succeeded against Beijing. But what Orwell said points to something really important- its politics not just political languages which govern the way that we respond to crises. The simple truth is there is not that much anyone can do to help Tibet. The government in China is a nasty despotic and tyrannical regime, it does not respond to persuasion and as a Westerner we can only hope that it falls swiftly. A protest in a foreign capital or a letter in a newspaper isn't going to hit the Chinese government, and isn't going to get through, given the censorship in China to the Chinese people. China's regime is opaque and hard to understand- but many of these cadres served the most murderous leader in world history- Mao Tse Tung, and participated in the regime that cracked down under Tianaman. The world's leaders have cravenly kowtowed to China over Tibet and Taiwan- but the truth is that we don't have much wiggle room with the Chinese- military threats and media tirades are unlikely to work so the West has put its hope in engaging with the Chinese and seeking to build a Chinese middle class which could at some point build an alternative regime. The hope with China is that economic growth will create the opportunity for a new regime to emerge, in stability, and that that regime will make progress towards solving issues like Tibet and Taiwan. The hope is that a Gorbachev or De Klerk will come to aid that movement. Its a long shot, but its quite possibly the only chance for the people of Tibet.

Israel though is a completely different case. Israel is a weak democracy. There are levers the West's governments and peoples can use to help the Palestinians that just are not available to us with the Tibetan situation. In my judgement we should not weaken Israel- that would isolate Israel as a uniquely bad country which is insane given the atrocities that others are committing. But that doesn't mean that protests and articles won't work in the Israeli context, Israelis consume the international media, they know what the view of other countries is of their position in the world. Fundementally the Chinese government is not open to persuasion, it is a semi-fascist despotism. The Israeli government is open to persuasion- just like say the American government is open to persuasion ultimately over Iraq. In that sense protesting about an Israeli occupation, even if its less worse than the Chinese occupation makes sense. There is a greater chance of your protest having an effect on Israeli policy because the Israeli government fundementally cares more about human rights than the Chinese government. Protests work best when they are directed at exposing actions that the governments concerned are themselves secretly ashamed of: the Israeli government has done some horrible things over the years, but in reality it is a different beast entirely from the Chinese government (and from many Arab governments.) It is a democracy with a free press and with free access to the global press. Prager is right what China is doing in Tibet (or for that matter what Russia is doing in Chechnya for that matter and we could go on) is worse than what is happening in Palestine, but ultimately because of the constitution of Israel's government and the exposure to international media of its population, thinking about persuading the Israelis through investigations and protests is worth while (whether those tactics work is a different matter). With China protesting about Tibet is likely to have about as much effect on the politburo as Gandhi might have had on Stalin.

This is a rough outline- but there is something here. The real reason why Mr Prager's point is true is that there is a chance of changing the Israeli public and hence the Israeli government's mind because of the nature of the Israeli regime- there isn't such a chance with China. If you really want an analogous case to the Palestinians which identifies the fact that the West treats them as a special case, you should look at another Middle Eastern democracy with a minority population- Turkey and the Kurds.

Le Doulos

I found it hard to review this film- I saw it this evening and it has taken me until now and listening to the dismissal of Stephen Fleming for the last time in Test Cricket (an occasion which is notable for New Zealand cricket if only for its historical significance.) Its not because the film is exceptionally complicated in form- its no Holy Mountain- of which I am still waiting for a review from Dave Cole after the behatted one dragged myself, Mr Sinclair and Vino to a screen to see it last Autumn. That is a call for the blogging community to put pressure on his hattiness to write that review- I am looking forward to it. But Le Doulos is no Lynchian masterpiece of the incoherent, its a very coherent detective and criminal drama, its got all sorts of the elements that one might expect from something like that- an interesting twisty plot, good acting, morose surroundings- dark and dripping with rain, a great jazzy soundtrack and irresistably cool leading actors- not to mention some sleek femme fatales at the side. It ressembles the great American noirs of the forties- deliberately- its structure reminds me of Out of the Past or of the Maltese Falcon- perhaps the closest modern parallels would be the Usual Suspects or LA Confidential. Getting hold of this film's plot is like trying to catch water in your hands, not easy, trying to get its point though is possibly easier.

What is its point? The film begins with a very didactic line- that the alternatives in its universe are to lie or to die. You have to watch the film in the light of the statement at the beggining where the director offers a commentary on his own film: and his commentary, his prologue, is a statement of the ambiguity of the life of his characters. They all live on the edge and to some extent, Jean-Pierre Melville the director, has tried to make us see them as all living in the same world through choices in his cinematography. None of these characters has a style of their own: they all fit into the film's style. All the men are dressed in trench coats, looking like so many Mitchums or Elisha Cooks. The scenes are dark- the interiors all seem underground or the curtains are drawn. When we are outside, we go out there in the middle of the night or in the evening and more often than not the camera follows the rain. This film has a style- and its characters are drawn into that style. They all are part of the same world- the criminal underworld. Most of the film revolves around a couple of robberies- we are dealing here with the classic figure of the depression, an individual gangster without a gang who makes a hit and makes his life through making hits.

This is a world then of gangsters and their molls. From the first frame of the film, Melville makes another point: that you can't trust a single individual in this world. That the world beyond the state is a world where everyone might be a liar. Its interesting that in the first conversation we hear in the film- after a long establishing scene with a lead character going through the rain to a desolate house- is about who is deceiving who. Both characters in the room don't trust each others' friends- they think that the other's mate is an informer for the police and at the end of the scene, despite the fact that they seem to be friendly with each other, one of these men shoots the other in cold blood. A shooting which the character that is shot does not expect and reacts to with surprise. Its an incredible opening scene and it sets the tone for the entire film: when you watch this do not expect anyone's motivations to be what they say are or to understand why people take the actions they take. This is a film in which one man can be said to have only two friends in the world: both of which he deceives compulsively. Beyond the rule of the law, everyone is imprisoned in his own distrust of everyone else and the most successful man is the most cynical, the most callous. You cannot even trust that when you open your own door, the consequence will not be deadly. In this game, outside the law, you either end up as a bum or dead- as one of the characters says.

This world produces a particular kind of character- Melville goes beyond the Hobbesian analysis he offers of the world beyond the law, to sketch the individual beyond the law. Again its interesting that all of them seem the same. They all have the same style, all speak in the same way- with short sentences, undignified by reference to art or music or anything beyond the matter in hand. This is a world where everyone is an undifferentiated egoist. All of them seek nothing but their own gain in life, their own satisfaction. There are ways of seeing the film as a testiment to one character's kindness to another: I don't completely see it that way. None of the characters demonstrate real kindness- fellowship there is a lot of, but there is a distinction between the thinking that makes you and I part of the same gang and the thinking that places you as a chief object of my actions. The first sees you as an instrument to the attaining of my end, the second sees you as an object of my generosity. The first action constantly recurs in this film: the second is nowhere to be seen. These are characters so free that they conform in every way to a type- they lose their individuality through their freedom. Anarchy here does not liberate but imprison.

And it imprisons them in a last and crucial way- a way in which it imprisons the audience and in which to return to my introductary paragraph makes a profound point about the nature of truth and its relationship to power. In this film, a narrative is offered of events and we all believe it: at the end that narrative is flipped. But unlike say in the Usual Suspects, Melville doesn't allow you the luxury of imagining that one of these narratives is true. Both could be. There is plenty of evidence that everyone in this film is a compulsive and perpetual liar. They tell lies all the time and they never tell the exact truth. At the end of the film, the forces of law enforcement are unable to find the truth about what has happened- at two points in the film anyone objective arriving on the scene would suppose that there has been a shootout between three characters whereas actually in both cases (the first in all seriousness and the second in black comedy) the scene we see has been directed by one of the characters involved. Truth is a casualty of the loss of order, memory is a casualty of the loss of law. These characters don't know what is remembered about them and what is remembered about others. They don't know what to remember. They don't know what to rearrange and who to beleive. Truth in this film is the ultimate reason why humanity beyond the law destroys itself and why it reduces itself into a common denominator- the egoist. Hobbes was right: life outside the law is a state of perpetual fear where man's equality with his comrade in their ability to deceive and kill each other is the only constant. Art and literature, philosophy, music even film vanish into a vortex of criminal suspicion.

Le Doulos is a great film which handles topics which are seldom touched, because it investigates human nature without the constraint of a state and human nature without a state is not a pleasant thing. Life beyond the law is the domaine of wisecracking gangsters, is the domain of noir and film noir is all about the inevitable downfall of all of its protagonists. The only way to escape is to leave that world and yet once trapped within that world, it is almost impossible to leave- characters do try but they cannot escape their pride or their pasts.

A great reason for Americans to vote Democrat in November

I complained about Barack Obama's supporters' videos before- but this is something completely different



Hat-tip to Aaron and Andrew Sullivan. Beware watching this is painful- very painful.

Reflexive morality

I think Rowan Williams really gets at something important in his argument here about the essence of Christianity. Dr Williams's article is an interesting one because it captures something important about human psychology- in a way its a counterpart to Barack Obama's speech recently about race. Both are very Christian documents but encapsulate truths which I think go beyond Christianity. You can see morality in two ways- you can see it as a set of things which allow you to make a judgement on others, ethics as a foundation for law in a sense- or you can see morality as a set of things which allow you to make a judgement on yourself. Partly this is a tempramental distinction. The first attitude of course is neccessary for the construction of a political theory: law is related to ethics and is the imposition of public ethics upon private lives, I don't think anyone could disagree with that. However I do think we often lose the second element of that dual conception of morality- that morality is not merely a system for the examination of others and their division into good and bad people, but it is chiefly a system for the examination of ourselves. When one listens to some commentators, particularly but not exclusively on the right, you get the sense of stern upholders of rectitude who rebuke the sinners of this world: but actually that's not true and anyone who has examined themselves thoroughly knows that its not true. As soon as you think about your own actions you realise that moral humility is the only route to any understanding of yourself or others. And that means that it becomes very difficult to say that there are people who deserve being discarded- because in reality their misfortune is often more a result of chance than of moral or other desert. Politics can too often turn as the Archbishop states into a round of recrimination that doesn't solve any problems but just makes those recriminating feel better about themselves. That is not productive and does not recognise the humanity of those who we are opposed to- as soon as we fail to do that, we have lost the argument and in my judgement become immoral.

Blogging audiences

Iain Dale is entirely right to say that blogging is not really a number's game. He is right for all the reasons he mentions. The one area I would suggest adding to Dale's account is the blog as purely a personal thing- this blog is undisciplined and eclectic partly because it just contains what I'm interested in on a particular day, could be Roman history, could be a 21st century Iranian film. You can market your blog obviously by being more specific but I think it depends what you are aiming for whilst blogging. Iain has been, though coyly he doesn't say this quite, a very successful blogger partly for his chatty style. Others adopt different styles and personas but there is no one right way to blog, you blog because you want to and ultimately its an expression of your personality. A blog which was marketted to a specific degree and turned away from your personality would not be one that was enjoyable to write (I have sometimes written articles because I had to and often those are the worst articles on here in my opinion). Iain is absolutely right and in some ways the more we worry about audiences, the less like blogs we become, the more constrained we are by our audiences.

Knowledge and Economics

Chris highlights a rather interesting fact- that consumer spending continued to grow over February despite the banking crisis and the panic in the City of London. Its not a fact that's been reported- and it could indicate that the economic situation is not quite as dire as it appears from reading the newspapers (it could not as well)- but there has been no discussion of it. There has been no analysis even of why it doesn't affect the underlying reality of impending doom. Its interesting for me at least to think about why. There are many possible causes- one of which being that those who write the newspaper articles are all of one mind and dismiss this fact as incidental for some reason and not reflective of underlying realities.

It isn't likely though that every journalist and economist working on these issues has actually made a conscious decision that these figures are to ignored. Rather I suspect they don't know about them. What this feeds into is an important intellectual concept about the gathering of knowledge and how it works. Since Thomas Kuhn philosophers have been interested in paradigms- insights that become the basis for everyone else's work. So for example scientists today will work with Einstein's theory of relativity seeking to extend it and allow for complications within it, they won't all go back and challenge it. Well something similar, but at a very greater speed, happens in journalism and on blogs. Everyone finds a story, they all agree that the story is crucial- say its the unpopularity of a government, the inability of a minister- and then they go and find evidence for it.

The process of journalism and of blogging is not as rational as it seems- we find the evidence which supports our conjectures about the world and we ignore the evidence which doesn't. The good bloggers or journalists go out and try and find evidence which contradicts their world view so that they have to think and be challenged- but there aren't many rewards for that. The rewards are there for people who carry on with the same world view (the Simon Heffers of this world) and who can fit any fact into it. With the economic crisis, there would be few rewards for saying that such a thing is not happening- the rewards come for stating with any ammount of economic literacy that it is and that its going to be awful, the next great depression etc etc. Afterall if it doesn't happen, the journalist will only be exposed in Private Eye but will be able to keep their job through the next paradigm.

Blackboards: Education and Civilisation

Blackboards is a stark film. It is an Iranian film, made about people on the border between Iran and Kurdistan during the war between Iran and Iraq. It portrays the life of itinerant teachers, roaming to find classrooms who will listen to what they have to say, to a basic smattering of learning- the alphabet and the two times table are the two pieces of information that our teachers attempt to convey. We follow two of these wanderers who separate off from the group and start attempting to retail their learning throughout the border areas. One takes the high path and the other the lower path. Reeboir goes up into the mountains and finds a group of young boys smuggling contraband between Iran and Iraq. Said takes the low road and ends up attached to a group of pilgrims attempting to get back to their homeland inside Iraq. Both form semi-emotional attachments: Reeboir to one boy who does sort of want to learn, Said gets married very briefly to a single mother in the party and then divorces from her when she demonstrates her lack of interesti in him.

Its a stark story though. The two characters encounter rejection after rejection after rejection. Said's relationship with his wife is particularly pathetic. She scarcely acknowledges his presence and doesn't even talk to him for most of the film. She ignores his efforts to teach her to read. But he also misjudges the situation, he is unable to see for instance that her ties to her son are more valuable to her than her ties to him, he fails to see that when she has lost her son, the last thing she wants is a lesson in Arabic grammar. Said's misunderstanding pervades the film. There is a sense in which this film is one of the most embarrassing I have ever sat through- you feel the embarrassment of the main characters. The truth is that they are trying to force education upon these people who don't really want it. Noone actually wants to learn to read and most of the time, Said and Reeboir are just hassling them to acquire a skill they see no need for.

And why should they need it? At no point does Said or Reeboir's skill come in useful. Ironically the one time someone does want Said to read something it is an old man whose son is in an Iraqi gaol, but the language of the letter is Arabic and Said can't read Arabic, only Kurdish. In a sense the whole film is summed up in the use of the blackboard. At no point is the blackboard actually useful as a teaching aide. Throughout the film, the blackboards that Said and Reeboir carry on their backs are used for all kinds of things- as shelters from airraids (as in the picture above) or rifle fire, cut up for splints so that an injured boy can walk, used to carry an old man who is ill or even used as a clothes line. But when they are used as blackboards- to convey knowledge- they are singularly inadequate. They fail to interest those who look at them- and on the one occasion where one of the boys does use the blackboard as a teaching aide, a bombing raid means that he has to flee. The last scene of the movie captures the utility of writing perfectly in this environment. Said wrote at the beggining of his relationship on the board 'I love you', his ex-wife turns away from him, carrying away her dowry, a blackboard with 'I love you' written on it. The irony is evident- words can say anything you want, but that is all Said has, the words and not the passion.

Writing is useless in this film because this film portrays a society right at the cusp of social development, right at the moment before society. We see no evidence here of law- and little evidence of property. There is nothing here- except warring armies whose shells, chemical weapons and rifles disrupt the lives of a nomad population. Writing is an artificial thing- writing 'I love you' to a girl only matters when she can read it and agrees with you on its meaning and significance. If she doesn't read or doesn't agree that those words are significant, you might as well have written 'I think you are a pink elephant' for all that it is going to effect the world. Similarly with writing when you are being bombed. The useful knowledge here is practical knowledge- medicine, remembered stories about rabbits- but training and academic degrees even in practical subjects are useless- there isn't the time to get them and to devote to them.

When we talk about civilisation, we often imply that it is natural. But it isn't. The best historians of the subject have discussed the way that civilisation is an artificial imposition- it is a creation whereby we warp the world. Much of what we do on earth to sustain it is useless- and its use is not its essence. The teachers come from a civilised world where one might want to read a book or a newspaper, to know what is going on. Education quite simply does not make sense to the people on the Iranian-Iraqi border, why should it? That implies something about civilisation in general- perhaps becoming civilised is not a rational choice- but rather a mutation produced by a particular constellation of things as a response to a particular situation. Blackboards leaves you in no doubt that there are few attractions to lure the people of Kurdistan to take up the blackboard and use it to teach: afterall when the planes are heading to bomb you from above, a blackboard is much better camoflage than sums are.

The Flight of the Red Balloon

The Flight of the Red Balloon is the kind of film that you shouldn't see in certain moods. Don't go if you want to see a film packed with action or plot- because this is not the film that will satisfy you. It will instead annoy. The film is a meditation. We follow a red balloon across Paris in the first twenty minutes and then we follow a family, a single mother Suzanne, her son Simon, Simon's Chinese nanny Song and various other characters who come in and out of their lives. Always round the next corner or behind the window lurks a red balloon which follows Simon- and Song, a film student, is making a film about the presence of red balloons in Paris (a homage to the French film, Le Ballon Rouge).

The film is languid. It really does not have a plot- there are several plots but none of them connect or really have anything to do with each other. Suzzanah's friendship with Song steadily grows over the movie. There are episodes in which Song does favours for her, translating the work of a Chinese puppeteer for her, turning her father's old 88mm film into modern video and generally being the friend that Suzanne needs. Suzanne herself is faced with repeated troubles- she seems always rushing to do something else. A single mother, whose boyfriend Pierre is a feckless novelist staying in Montreal rather than facing his responsibilities, she has to work, keep her son happy and also manage her own property. The anarchy of modern city life is central to the film's perception of Suzanne's life.

The director's choice is to eschew story in favour of a sort of realism. Hence the film doesn't really go anywhere or does anything. Rather than that we see the contours of real life- which are difficult to perceive as a narrative, we live our lives in streams of events not in stories. In one sense therefore this story is a more realistic perception than you often get in films of what life is like. On the other hand there are reasons why film makers in the past have forced their perceptions of life into stories. It keeps people watching- film is not merely documentary, it is also entertainment and a film which does not entertain ultimately is a worthless film. Hsiao Hsien Hou attempts to add a magical element to his story via the traverse of the red balloon across the screen and musical interludes- this is an attempt to add both meaning and mystique to the plot. One is tempted to wonder about the metaphysical meaning of the balloon- some critics view that balloon as an image of the way that the past constantly touches the present in the movie.

I am not so sure that there is a deep philosophical meaning here or that it is an interesting one if it is present. Rather this film strikes me as the kind of film that excites film students and those who love cinematography. There are some wonderfully crafted shots- some truly exquisite moments of cinema. There are also some superb moments for the characters- all the actors here, particularly the excellent Juliette Binoche manage to capture their characters. But ultimately this is a film without a plot, and thought it may have a philosophical point, that point is not easy to capture or define. Just under 2 hours is a long time to spend with a film whose only reccomendation is the beauty of its shots and moments of excellence. It seems barbaric to dismiss this film but there is something disappointing for the non-film student. Paris is indeed beautiful, the cherubic Simon is charming- but there isn't much more to this film than that.

The Flight of the Red Balloon is a film student's failure. Having said that, if you want to see some beautiful shots of Paris and some charming acting, you'll like it. But it has no plot, no real point. It is just what it is- a piece of triviality which aspires to be something more, a piece of beauty that lasts a long time admiring itself- and ultimately an exquisite folly. See it if that's what you want, but if you don't, I'd reccomend something more mainstream.

Remembering home: The Netherlands amongst Dutch Americans

David Zwart has an interesting article in the most recent edition of the Michigan Historical Review. Zwart argues that in the 1940s two images of the Netherlands came into contact and conflict. On the one hand the Netherlands Information Bureau (set up by the Dutch government during the second world war) attempted to put forward an image of the Dutch as modern and powerful, a good ally for the United States thanks to their toleration of religion, their modernity and their resistance to Naziism. On the other was the image cultivated amongst the conservative religious folk of places like Holland, Michigan. Many of these people had fled the Netherlands in the 19th Century, they had fled what they saw as religious persecution to the New World and compared themselves explicitly to the Pilgrim Fathers. Their image of the homeland was as a traditional and unindustrial place, a place where religious persecution thrived and that marked a moment in the eschatalogical history of the human race- when the people of God were turned on by a pharisaical majority.

Zwart devotes a lot of interesting attention to the ways in which people developed both identities. The Netherlands Bureau used all the traditional press tactics of the 40s, sending journalists to Indonesia for example and monitoring the American press. They also produced propaganda films in great quantity. Perhaps more interestingly, the citizens of Michigan, one of the largest Dutch settlements in the US, also sought to influence public opinion about their homeland. They put in a festival about tulips every year, emphasizing the traditional Holland that they had left. They also put on a festival about their own origins which blamed the Dutch 19th Century authorities for their intolerance. They emphasized these occasions with a national advertising campaign, seeking tourists and making the point that they shared an experience of America as a promised land of religious freedom and fulfilment. Most of these settlers had come from one church and retained their affiliation with it- so this religious sense of emancipation was crucial to their identity as Dutch-Americans.

It is easy to see that these two visions of Holland- one put forward by the Dutch government and the other perpetuated by an immigrant community were in conflict with each other. Zwart is not as good as he could be in establishing this conflict in a real sense- the campaigns don't seem to have been directly antagonistic- but there is no denying that their messages conflicted, their portraits of Holland were drawn from very different sources. Whether they confused Americans is another matter of course, and there are indications in Zwart's article that Americans were worried about other things, not less Dutch imperial behaviour in Indonesia and the Dutch position in the world, than the behaviour of Dutch Americans but still the detail is interesting. Often we assume that immigrant communities are a sort of fifth column for their home country: on this occasion though we see something very different. The community in Holland, Michigan and the Dutch community throughout the US had an image of the Netherlands that was negative, as a pre-industrial and repressive community. Their message directly conflicted with efforts to cement American-Dutch friendship in the mid-twentieth century. Relations between them and the home country were much more ambiguous than our picture of immigrants as fifth columnists might suggest: they brought their politics over from Europe, but it was a politics antagonistic to Europe. Their immigration was a moment of liberation from tyranny, it did not make them look nostalgically at the home country.

Barack Obama's religion

Reading about Barack Obama's speech on race (of which more here) what astonishes me is the religious rhetoric that Obama uses. His speech seems to me deeply Christian in its motivations- and in its tropes. Particularly Obama's concern with forgiveness shines through the speech and particularly his forgiveness for someone close to him who has disappointed him. Furthermore it is the absense of anger in the speech whether at black or white racists, but the willingness to find reasons for their evil feelings that suggests to me a deep Christian conviction. Central to the Christian faith is the idea that one should hate sins not the sinner, that one should forgive and turn the other cheek and that one should not cast the first stone. Senator Obama managed to bring out in his speech many of those sentiments and suggested that the best way to end racism was to end the conditions which brought it about. In this sense Obama is a more religious candidate than many I've heard of or read about before running for office, it will be interesting to see if this kind of rhetoric works. But its testament to the fact that religion in the US works on the right as well as on the left.