No longer a joke

Bob, in a post about the long-held belief that no black man will ever be US president, quotes this old joke:

I firmly believe that, one day, a man in a kippa and prayer shawl will sit in the Oval Office...Unless, of course, he's Jewish.

Which reminded me of this line, repeated by Eliot Weinberger in the LRB piece I mentioned here:

If there's a black or woman president in the Oval Office, it means an asteroid is about to hit the Statue of Liberty. 

'Brothers and Sisters' a worthy Sorkin substitute?

Regular readers will be aware of my admiration for the work of Aaron Sorkin, and will understand the dark days I've been going through since the end of The West Wing and the cruel early demise of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. But despite any apparent involvement from the great man himself, Brothers and Sisters, now in its second series here in the UK, increasingly exhibits many of the signs of a Sorkinesque classic.

There's the same mix of political, personal and workplace drama, tinged with a liberal humanist warmth, plus some superb writing and acting. What's more, recent episodes have often seemed like a reunion of actors from Sorkin's greatest hits, such as The West Wing (Rob Lowe), Studio 60 (Steven Weber) and thirtysomething (Patricia Wettig and Ken Olin). Not to mention outstanding performances from other regulars, such as Sally Field and Calista Flockhart, and (to me, anyway) convincing American accents from Australian Rachel Griffiths and Welshman Matthew Rhys. 

The series somehow manages to be stunningly contemporary - covering issues such as Iraq, gay marriage and the presidential primaries - without being clunkingly issue-driven, as well as combining serious drama and comedy in a way that most other programmes (except those written by Aaron Sorkin, of course) quite fail to do.

LRB: faith restored (for now)

Reading the London Review of Books can be a bit like reading the Guardian: just when you decide you've had enough and have resolved to cancel your subscription, along comes something to restore your faith - at least, until the next time (see this post). So after gritting my teeth through recent issues featuring (inter alia) Gareth Pierce on the 'war' on British Muslims and Patrick Cockburn on the Iraqi 'resistance', the latest issue includes a couple of articles that make you think your £3.20 was money well spent.

I don't usually have much time for Ross McKibbin, but his in-depth piece on New Labour education policy, and particularly the city academies, is one the best things I've read on the topic, and has a good sense of historical perspective. I think he's absolutely right to say that, in the aftermath of comprehensivisation, 'the Labour Party had only the vaguest notion of what might constitute a democratic educational system.' His position on the academies is a pretty reasonable one: yes, they've achieved some successes, but why on earth do they need business sponsorship (which he describes as 'increasingly preposterous and socially regressive'), and what would be wrong with making all secondary schools quasi-academies: 'schools which possessed much of the academies' autonomy and their academic culture'? (see this post.)

I also enjoyed Eliot Weinberger's retrospective on the Obama v. Clinton contest. If you want a catalogue of reasons why Barack won and Hillary lost, then look no further. And he's quite amusing too. Listing Clinton's campaign errors, he describes her self-reinvention in Pennsylvania 'as a Woman of the People, waxing eloquent on her hunting days with Grandpa and downing shots in working-class bars, as she derided Obama - the son of a single mother on welfare - as an elitist, out of touch with the regular people she'd presumably been hanging out with all these years at Yale Law School, the Arkansas governor's mansion, the White House and the Senate'. Weinberger concludes on a note that spells hope for the Democrats in November: 'I have yet to meet anyone under forty who is not an Obamamaniac'.

Against mushiness

Andrew Sullivan links to an interesting debate going on over at The New Republic about Sally Quinn's admission that, though a non-Catholic, she took communion at the recent funeral of her much-mourned fellow-journalist (and staunch Catholic) Tim Russert. Quinn says she did it 'for Tim'. She concludes: 'I'm so glad I did. It made me feel closer to him.'

The Catholic League's Bill Donahue has responded that in Quinn's 'privileged world, life is all about experiences and feelings.' He continues:

Moreover, Quinn's statement not only reeks of narcissism, it shows a profound disrespect for Catholics and the beliefs they hold dear. If she really wanted to get close to Tim Russert, she should have found a way to do so with trampling on Catholic sensibilities. Like praying for him - that's what Catholics do.

Responding to the response, Quinn has said that she was 'baffled' and 'completely blindsided' by it, adding: 'I'm very pluralistic about religion.' Andrew thinks Donahue's statement lacks Christian charity, but most of the commenters at the TNR site seem to disagree - including a fair number of non-believers and ex-believers. Many of them, including some who claim not to have much time for Donahue or his organisation, accuse Quinn of naivety and of having a 'mushy' attitude to belief.

Perhaps surprisingly, my own reaction to Quinn's confession was rather similar. I've been trying to work out why this is, given that I'm an extremely lapsed Catholic and a secularist who has frequently argued in favour of the right to offend religious sensibilities. But I think there's a difference between offence that is caused (or taken) in the course of reasoned argument about the truth, and deliberately (or ignorantly, in this case) setting out to disrupt the practices of a religion to which you don't subscribe. 

If I'm honest, though, what really that gets my goat about Sally Quinn's actions, and her interpretation of them, is the touchy-feely, new-agey attitude that both Donahue and the TNR commenters detected. Quinn co-edits the 'On Faith' column at the Washington Post. Like Libby Purves' 'Faith' section in the (London) Times, this tries to cash in on the supposed revival of interest in matters of belief and exemplifies the 'all faiths are equally valuable and certainly better than no faith at all' approach that I criticised here. Honest belief, or unbelief, I can take, but not this lazy, muddle-headed 'we all believe the same thing really' stuff.

Rewriting history

Further to my post about revisionist histories of WW2: Michael Weiss writes on the same topic here, linking to Geoffrey Wheatcroft's NYRB review of a couple of books about Churchill, Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke and Pat Buchanan's attempt to rewrite the history of the last 60 years. Weiss is more tolerant of Baker's pacifism than of Buchanan's paleocon revisionism:

Nicholson Baker is a pacifist and therefore believes war is never justified. His principles have made his tract tone-deaf, voulu, and slightly creepy - but also, in its way, harmless. Even the untutored student of World War II can decide for himself, according to the in situ examples he provides, just how much there really was to choose between Hitler and Churchill. [...]

But Buchanan's cards are all showing, and they have been for years. He's made it his life's work to undo the established wisdom of the climactic event of the twentieth century and to offer this 'alternative' history of the hot war against totalitarianism from the perspective of the lonely little America Firster who has been as hounded and excluded from the great debate as Germany was at Versailles in 1919. He'll find he's still got his work cut out for him. Some things are true and right even if every schoolboy has been taught to believe they are, and history to the defeated revisionists may say alas, but cannot help or pardon.

Buchanan's self-reinvention as the cuddly token conservative on MSNBC chat shows makes it easy to forget the extent of his reactionary isolationism.

Live-blogging the tennis

As if to prove my point about the sexism of BBC tennis coverage, the tweedy-voiced male commentator has just (2.05 p.m.) described Anne Keothavong's blistering performance against Venus Williams (4 games all in the first set as I write)  as the 'hors d'oeuvre' before the 'main dish' of Andy Murray later on. Yuk. If you're not already doing so, you can watch the match here right now.

2.20 pm.

I don't know, I may be totally wrong, but perhaps there's a hint of something else besides sexism in play here. The same commentator has just described the spectators on Centre Court bedecked in Union Jacks as waiting to lend their support to Murray. But hang on, Anne Keothavong is the British women's No.1 - isn't it possible that their patriotic garb is as much for her as for her male counterpart? Or was the commentator betraying a feeling, however unconscious, that Keothavong, born in London of Laotian parents, isn't quite as  - well, you know - 'British' as Murray?

Religion as identity, and the dangers of communalism

The Guardian continues its implicit support for the campaign to have Islam recognised as an ethnicity, by describing Tarique Ghaffur as Britain's 'most senior Muslim police officer'. Since the story is about Ghaffur's claim of racial (not religious) discrimination, this label seems tendentious, to say the least. Is Sir Ian Blair Britain's top Christian cop? Why couldn't the paper have described the assistant commissioner, who was born in Uganda to Pakistani parents and grew up in Manchester, as the country's top Asian police officer? Islam is not an ethnic identity that you're stuck with for life, but a set of beliefs about which people can change their minds. Confusing the two only encourages those who would like to see causing religious 'offence' placed on a par with racial discrimination, and changing your beliefs defined as 'apostasy' and cultural betrayal.

More encouragingly, today's Guardian also includes a powerful piece by Rahila Gupta of Southall Black Sisters, in which she accuses the government and child welfare professionals of swapping the discredited doctrine of multiculturalism, with its muddle-headed toleration of 'cultural practices' that oppress women and children, for the equally dangerous mantra of 'building cohesion'. Secular groups working with minority communities - like the Sisters themselves - have seen their funding cut, while religious organisations are courted by government, and welfare agencies such as the NSPCC call for 'the engagement of faith and community leaders in the fight against domestic violence'. According to Gupta, these efforts are deeply misguided: 

The NSPCC organised a conference aimed at the Muslim community which was attended by 50 imams. It found unsurprisingly that, 'for some imams, the issue of domestic abuse is not on their radar'. Perhaps the most telling statement of all was that 'many mosques are the premises of men only'. In the teeth of such entrenched patriarchal attitudes, calling for the training of imams feels like trying to empty a lake with a teacup.

Gupta quotes a senior police officer as saying that 'the government's agenda on terror is hampering police work on issues such as forced marriage because the government is keen not to alienate those same leaders in the fight against extremism'.  When will the government realise that engaging with British citizens of Asian origin via self-appointed, patriarchal 'community leaders' is sexist, undemocratic and reminiscent of colonialism?

(See also these recent posts)