Something for the weekend

Just heard this online at KCSM, the Bay Area Jazz Station. It's 2.30 a.m. over there, but I often find their lazy late-night moods match mine on a slow Saturday morning. Lots of wonderful things about this - the Hoagy Carmichael tune, Oscar Peterson on piano, Satchmo's growl. But just marvel at the purity of Ella's voice...

Brody and blowback: reflections on 'Homeland'

So farewell then, Homeland: or rather, farewell Season 1, since we’re told that a second series is currently being filmed. We’ll have to wait until the autumn to find out whether Carrie’s delayed memory of Brody muttering the name of Abu Nazir’s son in his sleep has been wiped by electro-convulsive therapy. (Apologies to non-aficionados: it would take far too long to explain…)

As others have said, Homeland really has been the best thing on television for a long time: combining an original premiss, nail-biting plot, intelligent script – and superb acting. From such a stellar cast, it’s invidious to mention individual performances: though Claire Danes deserves every award she’s got for her depiction of obsessive CIA agent Carrie Mathison, while Mandy Patinkin as her grizzled colleague Saul, and Morgan Saylor as Brody’s teenage daughter Dana also stand out, and (as with The Wire) it was good to see two British actors, Damian Lewis and David Harewood, taking on key roles.

Any criticisms? To my mind, the first half of the series, which cleverly played with our suspicions about whether or not Brody had been ‘turned’ in captivity was more engaging than the later episodes, which substituted the more traditional suspense of the thriller - will he/won’t he (blow up himself and half the US government)?  And I half-agree with Ed West that Brody’s conversion to Islam, and his turning from loyal US marine to potential al Qaeda suicide bomber, was not entirely convincing. (For those with an interest in matters theological, West links to a couple of interesting articles about the show by Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith – the first piece headed by a photo of three of the show’s photogenic stars which provides more, ahem, eye candy than one is used to seeing in the Catholic Herald).

My own marginal reservations about Homeland are slightly different to West's. I wonder whether, in attempting to provide a plausible reason for why a loyal US soldier would turn into a terrorist who would attack his own country, the programme-makers have failed to reflect what we know of the actual motivation of Islamist terrorists, and risked giving comfort to those who blame the West for providing the rationale for terror.

At about the half-way point in the series, we see the hostage Sergeant Brody – unwashed, long-haired, bruised and beaten – being taken from his hellish captivity, to the home of his captor, the terrorist mastermind Abu Nazir, in a remote corner of northern Iraq. Brody is allowed to wash and shave and given clean (ethnically and religiously appropriate) clothes. The experience looks like a new birth, a rising from the dead, and indeed Nazir’s house - clean, bright, book-lined – resembles a kind of paradise, after the purgatory of captivity. The picture is completed by Nazir’s cute son Issa, whom Brody is to teach English. Can this really be the hide-out of a notorious terrorist? It looks more like the retreat of a noted scholar, or a spiritual master, and indeed in this and subsequent episodes, Abu Nazir is often depicted in this way.

It could be argued that Homeland does, in fact, show another side to Nazir. After all, before being given this chance of new life, we see Brody (in scenes that are almost too gruesome to watch) being beaten, tortured and (he believes) forced to murder a fellow prisoner. But the programme fails to show any connection between Nazir the torturer and planner of terrorist outrages, and Nazir the scholar, man of God and loving father. Perhaps it’s expecting too much of as primetime thriller to get inside the mind of a terrorist, but what’s surely missing from the depiction of Abu Nazir and his world is the obsessiveness, the puritanical paranoia, the warped religiosity of the fanatic, with which we’re all too familiar from al Qaeda propaganda videos and the like.

The portrayal of Nazir is actually of a piece with Homeland’s sterling efforts to show Muslims in a favourable light. Back in the US, we see the FBI pursue Tom Walker, another ex-captive American marine who definitely has been ‘turned', into a DC mosque, where a number of innocent worshippers get killed in the crossfire. The programme goes out of its way to depict the imam and his wife (despite her traditional headscarf, shown as equal in status to her husband) as gentle, inoffensive types, with the programme-makers’ desire not to offend reflected in the Arabic greetings and general cultural sensitivity of Carrie and her colleagues. It feels like reverse or compensatory stereotyping, of the kind we’re familiar with from depictions of native Americans in anti-Westerns of the 60s and 70s, in which every Indian seemed to be of the ‘we come in peace’ variety, as if deliberately making up for decades of crude Hollywood racism. It’s not to say that such imams and such mosques don’t exist, far from it: but would a terrorist stooge like Walker, and his Saudi (and presumably Wahhabi) contact choose this kind of mosque for their rendezvous? Wouldn’t it have been more convincing – if risking accusations of more traditional negative stereotyping – to show something more like the Finsbury Park or East London mosques?

As for the explanation for Brody turning terrorist – the death of Nazir’s young son, to whom Brody has become close,  in a drone strike ordered by the programme’s one unmistakable ‘baddie’, the US vice-president - one can see why the scriptwriters hit on this, as it provides a powerful and intensely personal justification for Brody’s anger against his own government. But I think Lucie-Smith is right to question whether someone like Brody would ultimately put revenge for his captor’s son ahead of his attachment to his own children. Ed West is also right that drone strikes of this kind are hardly typical, and the episode distracts attention from the undoubted fact that almost all of the massacres of innocent men, women and children in Iraq after the fall of Saddam were carried out not by US forces but by al Qaeda and their sectarian surrogates – led by people rather like Abu Nazir - and were deliberate acts of mass murder, not accidental or ‘collateral’ damage.

Moreover, by choosing this event as Brody’s, and by extension Nazir’s motivation for a terrorist attack against the United States, the programme provides implicit support to blowback theorists, who misinterpret acts of Islamist terror as tit-for-tat repayment for western actions, rather than as the working-out of a twisted clerical-fascist ideology. As I’ve written before, blowback theory gets it back to front: the reactionary worldview comes first, and the sins of infidel westerners are mere excuses that play into an existing narrative. Even if the actions of western governments were blameless (and even when they are in support of Muslims, as in Bosnia), they would still hate us: not for what we do, but because of what we are.

By making Brody’s decision to work for Nazir a calm, rational choice based on emotions with which the viewer can identify, Homeland is certainly convincing on the superficial plot level, but in doing so it leaves no room for the role of ideology, or for the kind of brainwashing process that has always been evident in the few cases of hostages ‘turning’ to identify with their captors. There are hints earlier on in the series of Brody developing a kind of love-hate attachment to his erstwhile torturer, Nazir, but this is soon dropped in favour of the simpler motivation of revenge for Issa’s death. The only sign, on Brody’s return, of his continuing identification with his captors is his conversion to Islam, but this is kept in a kind of sealed box (literally as well as figuratively: he says his prayers in a locked garage after his wife and children have gone to bed) that is separate from his dealings with his family and friends, and the programme misses an opportunity to show how his new faith might have changed his outlook, for good or ill.

Having said all that, it’s surely a sign of Homeland’s general brilliance that, despite these cavils, I still think it’s the best television programme of the year. In its temporary absence, it’s time to settle down and watch the original Israeli version…

Nine links for the tenth anniversary

One week on, here's a round-up of some of the best blog posts and articles marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11, with brief quotes:

Minnie: 

Those who perpetrated these acts were – and are – in the dark.  And there is no light in them. They chose to pursue petty and irrational hatreds promoted to insane levels. These they nurtured in tandem with a sense of victimhood (characteristically an excuse for childishness when not used as a spur to constructive action). They chose killing other human beings rather than at least accepting the right of those others to live. They could have chosen joy and wonder. And they are owed no more respect than any other violent criminals who get off on hatred, selfishness and killing.

Martin McKenzie-Murray:

You would've thought that watching mass murder - committed in the name of love and God - live on television would've invited humility into the hearts of my friends who considered themselves enlightened progressives.

No.

They deserved it, you see. They had it coming. It was inevitable.

Norm on Seamus Milne:

People were revolted by his own reaction and that of his co-thinkers neither principally because of the causal hypothesis they offered nor principally because of their immediate policy recommendations. It was, rather, the use of a causal story to put the central emphasis of blame for 9/11 - just a day or two after the event - not on those who had planned and organized the attack and those who had carried it out but on...America.

Julie:

We must stop apologising for our own position. We did not cause 9/11 and we did not give rise to the ideology and narrative represented by Al Qaida, based on the perversion of Islam. We have to be confident and prepared for a generation-long struggle. This battle is far from over but it is too fundamental to allow a defeat.

Osama Bin Laden once said that the West’s problem is to find people willing to die for our values, while his problem is to hold back people willing to die for his.

We must prove him wrong – let this be the memorial for all those innocents who died on 9/11, 2001.

Poumista remembers another fascist attack:

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the horrific attacks on New York and Washington, carried out by far right Islamists [...] 9/11 is of course also the anniversary of the 1973 military coup in Chile, which replaced Allende's elected government with one of the most brutal dictatorships of our time.

Max:

For what it's worth, I believe that President Bush's response was right, at least in the counterattack he launched on Saddam and the Taliban. War against dictatorship, theocracy and fascism was worth doing, 9/11 or no.

Hitch:

10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pa., there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.

Tony:

The threat’s still from the same ideology and the same narrative, which is based on a perverted view of religion and which regards cultures and faiths as in fundamental conflict with each other. And there are two ways of life in the world today, this is why I say that the big divide in politics today is not so much left versus right as much as open versus closed.

And these people, you know, their view of the process of globalisation – and they’re very adept at using its tools by the way – they regard that as basically wrong, and contrary to their belief system, and they’ll fight very hard against us who want an open attitude of mind, and that’s the battle. Now I believe we will win it but it’s going to take time, and as I say, the struggle goes on, for sure.

 Terry: 

Mourn the dead. Fight for the living. No surrender.

By the dawn's early light

Ten years on, despite the grainy footage, I still find this early expression of transatlantic solidarity deeply moving. America, our thoughts and prayers are with you again today.

Go Fourth

Happy Independence day to all my American readers.

Politics on TV: US vs UK

Speaking of the Wedding…

A couple of days before the big event, my son and I happened to be in central London, and we made a special detour to Trafalgar Square, to take a peek at the temporary studio set up by the American cable channel MSNBC for their breakfast show ‘Morning Joe’, which was being broadcast from London all week. The photos I took on my iPhone (below) are rather disappointing, but if you squint you can just see the backs of Joe Scarborough’s and Mika Brzezinski's heads, and Willy Geist interviewing someone down in the square:

The actual programmes from London, which we watched in video extracts online, were less than riveting and Joe and Mika’s guests a cut below the quality usually found on their show when it's broadcast from New York or Washington. One exception was the superb Katty Kay of BBC America, who did her best to inject some realism about contemporary Britain into the discussion.

If this all sounds like the height of fandom, then you should understand that, when we visit America, we tend to leave the TV in our hotel room permanently tuned to MSNBC, and we usually wake up to ‘Morning Joe’. This was a love affair, or addiction, sealed during the 2008 presidential election. Watching the show, and others, on our recent visit to Miami, has prompted some reflections on what I would argue is the superiority of political coverage on US television, when compared to what’s served up to us in the UK.

That’s a counter-intuitive reflection of course, and it goes against everything Brits are supposed to 'know' about US television: that it’s ‘dumbed down’, superficial, dominated by airhead presenters and shockjocks. But allow me to make my case.

‘Morning Joe’ may not the best political show on US TV, and there’s a lot about it that can irritate: Joe’s egotism, Mika’s banalities, the preference for centrist commentators who don’t depart from the mainstream. But for visiting British political nerds like us, to have a whole three-hour daily breakfast show entirely devoted to politics is sheer luxury. One time on our recent visit, Carl Bernstein dropped by the studio and joined in an impromptu discussion with former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham and Governor Ed Rendell on the roots of the current gridlock in Congress. The talk ranged back and forth from Watergate to Supreme Court confirmations in the '80s, dipping occasionally into the further recesses of US history, with a diversion to debate the relative merits of Jefferson and Adams - and all in a format that was relaxed, unstuffy and popular. And how can you not like a programme that plays Springsteen and the Clash over its Starbucks-sponsored credits?

And that’s just one show on one channel. Tune into MSNBC on any weekday evening, and it's wall-to-wall politics, from the likes of Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, and more recently Cenk Uygur, from my son’s favourite progressive channel, The Young Turks. And I haven't even mentioned the weekly institution that is 'Meet The Press'. Liberal bias? Of course, but if that’s your view, you can always switch over to Fox, where you’ll get uninterrupted commentary from a conservative perspective.

I find this honest partisanship healthier and more dynamic than the spurious ‘balance’ of most British political coverage. For example, on another day during our recent visit, we saw Uygur devote a whole show to arguing that the Republican Party was in the pocket of Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce, while Schultz spent a passionate half-hour standing up for union rights, in the light of recent events in Wisconsin. If they were in Britain, they would have been cut off after five minutes, while an arbitrating presenter sought to bring in a ‘balancing’ view.

Of course, America is a big country, which may account for there being just so much more – and more diverse - political coverage on TV. But I’d maintain that the quality is better too: there’s just no equivalent in Britain to those MSNBC shows where a presenter or politician or activist is allowed to develop an argument, or a debate allowed to go on for more than five minutes at a time.

And I like the refreshing absence in the US, for the most part, of the Paxman approach to political interviews, which assumes that elected representatives are all lying bastards and appears to be aimed at catching out the interviewee. Which is not to say that US interviewers give their guests an easy ride, but they usually assume that you’re likely to get more out of a politician if you actually give them space to talk (or, to look at it another way, allow them enough rope with which to hang themselves). I also like the way US political programmes take written commentary seriously, regularly inviting on historians and biographers, and giving space to discussion of the day’s newspaper op-eds. ‘Morning Joe’ does this every day, comparing so-and-so’s latest column in the Wall Street Journal with what someone else has said in Time magazine. What do we get? A couple of minutes of headlines on the 'Today' programme, and a ten-minute review of the Sundays by viewer-friendly 'celebrities' once a week on 'Marr', supposedly our flagship political programme ('Meet The Press' it is not). Which is not to say that US television coverage is without its faults: it can be terribly parochial, focused on what's going on in Washington, but not overly concerned with the rest of the world, except as it impacts on America (there's been some excellent analysis on MSNBC of the current state of affairs in Pakistan, for example, following that other recent big event).

So what accounts for these differences, apart from the relative sizes of our two countries? Well, as a European social democrat, it goes against the grain to say this, but it may have something to do with the commercial ownership of US television stations. That famous BBC balance derives from the corporation being taxpayer-funded, and having to show that you're giving equal (which often means anodyne) space to each side. Whereas the owners of NBC, Fox, CBS and the rest know there’s a range of liberal, conservative and centrist constituencies out there they can appeal to.

But I think the most important reason – and it balances out what I said in my last post about the value of monarchical symbolism – has a lot to do with the United States being a republic. Perhaps I’m a little bit naïve and starry eyed here, but I get the feeling that in America politics is just taken a whole lot more seriously. When you have government of the people by the people, politics becomes the people's business, it's what we do among ourselves, not something that is done to us (though I admit the current anti-Washington mood stirred up by the Tea Party rather undermines this theory). A lot of what's wrong with political coverage and media debate in Britain - the Paxman sneer, the 'Have I Got New For You' cynicism, the sheer paucity of serious political programming - can be traced back to weaknesses in our political culture: to a pervasive sense that 'that lot' are out to screw us over, that at the end of the day politics is not really 'our' business. All of which, I would argue, is part of the long, weary hangover from monarchy and empire, and the consequence of never having had a proper democratic revolution.

I’ll end with a clip from that 'Morning Joe' discussion I mentioned earlier.  In some ways it's untypical – no black or female guests, unusually. And I admit it's no high-powered academic seminar - but that's part of my point. This is a popular breakfast show, for goodness' sake. When was the last time you heard this kind of serious, informed but relaxed political debate on British television, let alone on something like 'BBC Breakfast'? It gets going a couple of minutes in:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In my end is my beginning: reflections on royalty

I’ve been thinking about the institution of monarchy quite a lot recently. And not just because of a certain event, though I’ll come back to that. It’s more that I’ve been reading John Guy’s gripping biography of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, a rare example of popular history being thoroughly grounded in original academic research.

What, you might ask, am I - a lifelong republican, whose historical reading normally focuses on the 18^th century age of Enlightenment and revolution – doing with a book about a 16^th century monarch and representative of the reactionary Stuart clan, who claimed to rule by ‘divine right’? Well, I've begun to stray a little from my usual historical territory recently, trying to make up some of the gaps in my knowledge. I should also confess to a longstanding, if rather guilty, romantic fascination with the Stuarts, rooted in my research into my family’s history (which I can discuss openly here, now that I’ve abandoned my semi-anonymity). My father's Aberdeenshire ancestors were Jacobites who (so family tradition has it) had a hand in the ’45, and indeed my 4 x great grandfather, who was responsible for relocating the family from Scotland to London, was christened Charles Edward Stuart Robb in honour of the Bonnie Prince. But I admit that my fascination with Mary is also a symptom of my ongoing love-hate relationship with Catholicism. I’ve been reading Eamon Duffy’s revisionist accounts of the Reformation period recently, and have become fascinated by the heroism, as well as the poetry, of the recusants.

Guy’s biography prompted a good deal of reflection on political and religious matters, and upset some of my easy assumptions about the period. Mary emerges more positively than in some other accounts, and comes across as an intelligent, dedicated ruler who made some poor choices under insupportable circumstances, but certainly wasn’t guilty of most of what her detractors claimed. The whole story has the feeling of a tragedy whose ending was determined from the outset: incidentally, I’d forgotten that ‘In my end is my beginning’, which Eliot used in ‘East Coker’, was Mary’s motto.

Mary’s story certainly illuminates the close link between the institution of monarchy and a certain kind of religious worldview. When Mary was under attack from her political enemies, she fell back on the defence that she was an ‘anointed queen’, first of France, then of Scotland. But this idea only ‘works’ within a sacramental Christian framework. After the Reformation split with Catholicism, and even more since the slowly-won separation of church and state in Britain, it became increasingly difficult to justify the ‘sacredness’ of the monarchy. Part of Mary's tragedy was to become queen of Scotland just as this process was getting going. A belief in royalty as symbolic of ‘continuity’ or ‘tradition’ isn’t quite the same thing: it prompts the questions, continuity with what exactly, and which tradition are we talking about? (Part of me feels sympathetic to Chesterton's defence of tradition as a 'democracy of the dead', while the other half believes with Jefferson that 'the earth belongs to the living generation' and the past cannot hold the present hostage.) The institution was so much easier to defend when you believed your ruler was put in place by an act of God. But does this mean, conversely, that a sacramental Christian worldview leads logically to a preference for monarchy, or at least quasi-monarchical political structures, over democracy? (Catholic readers, please feel free to comment.)

In other ways, reading about Mary made me re-assess my inherited Whig view of history, according to which the Protestant Reformation was a necessary step in the inevitable progress towards liberty, democracy, and equality – including gender equality. But it was Mary, the unelected Catholic monarch, who was schooled in literature and philosophy in line with the latest Italian Renaissance thinking about women’s education, and who provided an example of strong female leadership. This was in the teeth of ferocious opposition from architects of the Protestant Reformation such as William Cecil and John Knox, the latter notorious for his ‘monstrous regiment’, and both entertaining deeply misogynist notions about women rulers. There was a grimly masculinist strain in Calvinism, which characterised Catholicism as feminine and therefore wily and untrustworthy, and included a Manichean sexual revulsion which associated Catholic ritual with pagan perversity (echoes of all of this can still be heard in the sermons of Rev Paisley, and it’s not a million miles from the rantings of the Islamists).

Then again, it was the Catholic Mary who instituted a kind of religious tolerance in Scotland, at the same time as Knox and his cohorts were beating up Mass-goers and trying to prevent Catholic services being held, even in Mary’s private quarters, while further south Mary’s bête noire, Cecil, oversaw the Elizabethan persecution of recusants. Her religious policy may have been forced on Mary by circumstances, but she seems to have believed in it, and certainly provided a better model than her English Catholic namesake, Mary Tudor.

My growing sympathy for Mary Stuart certainly made me review my deeply-held opposition to the whole idea of monarchy – all of this as the royal wedding was approaching. Having read Guy’s book, I began to see the value of the monarch as a transcendent national symbol. Did that symbol really have to be elected to be recognised as valid? Is the reverence that Americans accord the institution of the presidency really all that different from monarchical symbolism? After all, despite the key difference that the US president is elected, it seems to operate in very similar ways: as a West Wing fan I'm always stirred by those moments when the whole room rises to its feet to welcome the commander-in-chief, or when a Republican swallows their political misgivings and declares 'I serve at the pleasure of the president of the United States'.

On the other hand, is it possible to have a monarchy that is purely symbolic, without all the trappings of hierarchy and hangers on that seem to follow in its train, at least in Britain? I enjoyed watching the wedding, and wished the couple well. I suppose my feelings were much like those of other spectators, whether royalist or republican: the music was splendid, the ceremonial beautifully done, the Bishop of London’s sermon surprisingly spirited and refreshingly free from the usual Anglican waffle, Pippa was stunning, the Middletons carried it off well, and it seems that they (like Diana) will provide some much-needed refreshment to the Windsor gene pool (not least, if one may say so, in the looks department).

But then, shortly afterwards, someone told me that William’s aristocratic mates refer to Kate and Pippa as 'the Wisteria sisters’, because they’re such good social climbers – geddit? (Laugh? I nearly swallowed my silver spoon, dear boy.) And all my feelings of annoyance, resentment and frustration at the whole clapped-out system came rushing back.  If it were possible to have a reduced, bicycling royal family that symbolised the nation, without all the attendant deference, knowing your place, and being judged by your birth and not your abilities or accomplishments, then I might almost be persuaded out of my republicanism.

Almost, but not quite. Because, of course, as we Jacobites know, these Germanic interlopers aren’t quite the real deal. Which is a good excuse for posting this version of 'Come ye o'er frae France' by the French Celtic ensemble Boann, fronted by the splendid Celine Archambeau. There's something oddly winning about hearing broad Scots rendered in a French accent:

President Obama on Death of Osama bin Laden

'We were [...] united in our resolve to protect our nation and to bring those who committed this vicious attack to justice. [...] And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to al Qaeda’s terror:  Justice has been done.'

A prophet without honour in his own country

From Tony Blair's evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry, 21 January 2011

(I've now removed this video, since it insists on playing automatically whenever the page is opened, thus making it impossible to watch or listen to anything else.)

My transcription:

The numbers of people who are engaged in terrorism and become suicide bombers is very, very limited. But I think the global ideology that gives rise to this extremism has far deeper roots and, you know, I’m out in the Middle East a lot of the time now, and it’s the same issue everywhere. It doesn’t always come up in issues to do with terrorism or violence. It is about modernisation, it’s about attitudes to the West and it’s deep. It’s a lot deeper. And so, what happened when you got al-Qaida coming into this situation is that, it was more than just a few terrorists. It was backed with the ability to push an ideology that said, the West is fundamentally hostile to Islam, and that’s why we have to wage war against these people and we have to wage war against them and against the leaders that deal with them. Now, that ideology, in terms of how it results in violence, is very few people. That narrative about Islam and the West, I fear, has a far greater reach than we like to accept, which is why this problem is not confined to one area of the world today.

 […]

Because this is a looming and coming challenge. I’m out in that region the whole time. I see the impact and influence of Iran everywhere. It is negative, destabilising, it is supportive of terrorist groups. It is doing everything it can to impede progress in the Middle East peace process, and to facilitate a siutation in which that region cannot embark on a process of modernisation it urgently needs. And this is not because we’ve done something. You know - and I say this to you with all the passion I possibly can - at some point the West has got to get out of this - what I think is a wretched posture of apology, for believing that we are causing what the Iranians are doing or what these extremists are doing. We’re not. The fact is, they're doing it because they disagree fundamentally with our way of life, and they’ll carry on doing it unless they are met by the requisite determination and if necessary force.

President Obama goes in March 2009 to Cairo, right in the heart of Islam. He makes a speech where he says effectively, put aside the Bush era. I’m now offering you the hand of friendship. You, Iran, can come into partnership, you’re an ancient, proud civilisation, we will welcome you in. What’s the response he gets? They carry on with the terrorism, they carry on with the destabilisation, they carry on with the nuclear weapons programme. Now at some point, we’ve got to get our head out of the sand and understand, they’re going to carry on with this, and Iraq is one part of a far bigger picture.

Footnote 


Apologies if, as happens on my computer, the above video starts playing as soon as you open the page. I'm not sure how to stop this. Having this 'Talking Tony' on permanent loop reminds me somewhat of the gallery of living portraits in 'Harry Potter'.

Independent?

Weary of the anti-American anti-Israel reactionary chic of The Guardian, I've been experimenting with other daily papers. Recently, I've been giving The Independent a whirl (well, it does have John Rentoul, Steve Richards and Julie Burchill).

But the Indy's coverage of the Wikileaks saga has given me a distinct sense of déja vu. Yesterday's front page headline: 'Deceits, plots, insults: America laid bare'. And today's: 'Now we know. America really doesn't care about injustice in the Middle East'. A fair and balanced account of American foreign policy? I don't think so. Messrs. Milne and Steele couldn't have done better (Ah, I see: today's cover story is by Robert Fisk. That explains it.)

I shall seriously consider taking my custom elsewhere. But where...?

Rally to restore what?

I'm a regular viewer of The Daily Show (or at least, the edited, day-late version we get over here) but I sometimes think the acclaim for Jon Stewart as the liberal saviour of political television is overblown. We often find ourselves switching off at the first commercial break. Stewart's opening monologue/rant can be hilarious, but the fake news reports involving other cast members are frequently juvenile and embarrassing, allowing a single 'joke' to run on far too long. And Stewart's 'interviews' with politicians and other assorted celebrities tend to be wasted opportunities: frustratingly brief bouts of comedic joshing in the interests of book or movie promotion.

Having said all that, I wished Stewart's and Stephen Colbert's 'Rally to Restore Sanity' (held yesterday in Washington's National Mall) well, even if I agreed with some commentators that its effect on the Democratic vote, so close to the mid-term elections, might not be entirely positive. I didn't watch all of the coverage, but I found these comments on the event instructive:

Here's P.Z.Myers expressing disappointment that the rally turned into a plea for 'moderation' in political tone, rather than anything more substantial:

I don't want moderation, especially when the only people who will listen to Stewart and Colbert are the people on our shared side of the political aisle. I can understand where they're coming from; people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and Andrew Breibart are poison, Fox News is a propaganda organ without bounds working for the far right-wing, we've got evangelical Christians demanding the installation of a theocracy, and on and on and on. But who, exactly, do Stewart and Colbert regard as the equivalent of Beck and Limbaugh on the left? Is it Rachel Maddow? Amy Goodman? Keith Olbermann?

In other words, the rally could be seen as reinforcing the sense that has pervaded not only this mid-term election campaign, but the first two years of the Obama administration, that Democrats and liberals haven't found the language or the courage to fight back against the lies and insinuations of the Republican right. Myers concludes:

I was left cold by the fuzziness of the event. It could have been great; instead of embracing an apolitical perspective and saying nothing at all about values, it could have been a rally for moderation that emphasized the actual values that moderates hold: we believe in tolerance for people of different ethnicities and religious views and sexual preferences, we believe in building an egalitarian social and economic infrastructure, we believe in privacy and personal freedoms, etc., etc., etc., and they could have held to the theme of the rally by advocating rational argument and unified, organised activism within the system to advance those goals...but they didn't. There was no purpose given other than a generic insistence that we all get along nicely.

As for that plea for a focus on 'tolerance', it would have helped if the rally organisers hadn't included a performer who has expressed the most outrageously intolerant opinions. Appearing onstage in the National Mall was Yusuf Islam, the singer formerly known as Cat Stevens, who is on record as supporting the fatwah against Salman Rushdie and wishing the author dead.

So, as well as reflecting the US left's failure to find a positive political message with which to hit back at the Tea Party movement, the rally also demonstrated characteristic liberal naivety towards Islamism (some of this naivety was on display in the rush to support the Ground Zero 'mosque' in reaction to rightist intolerance). Someone with Yusuf Islam's views should not have been invited to appear at a rally in favour of moderation and tolerance: his opinions are the exact mirror image of the rightist extremism of Glenn Beck et al that the event was organised to oppose.

Update

Also recommended: the other Martin (Meenagh) on the rally and the congressional elections.

And via Pootergeek, confirmation from Nick Cohen of the culpability and duplicity of Mr. Islam/Stevens.

Impressions of LA

We arrived home from our half-term trip to Los Angeles yesterday afternoon. Here are some hastily-composed impressions, and a round-up of some of the things we did.

Our first impression of LA, coming in from the airport along the freeway last Saturday afternoon, was of an endless, repetitive, low-rise sprawl, spread out along grid lines, and made up of fast-food joints, small stores, malls, and rather-down-at heel tracts of housing. From time to time this sprawl would be interrupted, quite suddenly, by something very different - like the long avenues of palm trees and neat lawns of Beverly Hills, the bawdy glitz of Hollywood, or the shiny towers of Downtown. Seen from a hotel window, the place seemed vast and difficult to grasp.

On Sunday morning we went out to Santa Monica, arriving at the iconic pier just as the sun broke through, bathing even the tacky rides and concession stands in cheerful light. In one direction, white surf broke on the golden sands stretching northwards to Malibu. In the other direction, where we walked, were Angelenos enjoying games of beach volleyball, doing yoga, setting up picnics. We strolled in the sunshine, dodging the cyclists and skateboarders, until we reached the clutter of craft stalls and eccentric entertainers that is Venice Beach, a place that reminds you of the tackier and less glamorous side of the hippy era. Then it was on to the Third Street Promenade, uncannily like Lincoln Road in Miami, for shopping and lunch. Later, on the way back to the hotel, we stopped outside the Beverly Wilshire and walked up Rodeo Drive, with its glassy shrines to conspicuous consumption. The Art Deco of buildings like the Beverly Hills City Hall was rather more interesting.

Monday dawned wet and gloomy, but by the time we headed out it had become another light-filled LA day. This was our Hollywood day, beginning with an excellent guided tour of the Kodak Theatre, home of the Academy Awards, followed by the predictable photos in front of the Hollywood sign. Then it was time to inspect the stars along the Walk of Fame and the historic handprints outside the Chinese Theater.

Most of Tuesday was taken up with our tour of the Warner Brothers Studio in Burbank. It's difficult to pick out highlights, but I was particularly fascinated by the mid-western town, where the same buildings have served multiple purposes in different films and programmes over the years. We looked around a wood-framed 'house', for example, which appeared in East of Eden and The Shootist, but (much more significantly for our offspring) also served as the home of Ross and Monica Geller's parents in Friends. The tour included a visit to the set of Two and a Half Men, which was 'resting' this week: just as well, as its star, Charlie Sheen, was busy smashing up his hotel room in Manhattan. We'd tried and failed to get tickets to The Ellen Show, and were frustrated to learn that Michelle Obama and Jill Biden were appearing that day - we saw the massive extra security as we went past the sound stage. They were in LA to lend their support to Barbara Boxer's campaign in the upcoming mid-terms. We thought at first it might be Jimmy Carter, who was in town to promote his new book: they were giving out tickets to his appearance on Bill Maher's show on Hollywood Boulevard.

On Wednesday, before our flight home, we visited The Grove, shopping mall to the rich and famous, where we saw a TV chat show being filmed, stocked up on US political and historical books at Barnes & Noble, and got our daughter's iPhone fixed by a nice tech guy at the Apple Store.

Regular readers will know my penchant for, indeed my skill at, spotting celebrities when we're on holiday. So who did we see in LA? Well, that might have been Jimmy Smits going into a restaurant in Santa Monica, but it was definitely Robert Downey Jr and Zach Galifianiakis walking through the lobby of our hotel, where they were promoting their new movie, Due Date. They walked right past that English actor who was in Love Actually - you know, the one who takes the photos at his best friend's wedding, when he's secretly in love with the bride, what's his name - Andrew Lincoln. But best of all was finding ourselves having breakfast at the next table to Colombian politician and former hostage Ingrid Betancourt (whom I wrote about here), who I'm pleased to say was enjoying the kind of breakfast that must have seemed like a distant dream during her six years of captivity in the jungle.

By the time we left, our initial wariness of LA had turned into something like easy familiarity, even excitement at its radiant light and hectic energy. A final recommendation: my literary accompaniment for the trip was David Thomson's anecdotal, out-of-left-field but completely compelling history of Hollywood, and by extension of Los Angeles, The Whole Equation.

Footnote

Turns out Andrew Lincoln was probably in town to promote the new TV series The Walking Dead in which he has a starring role (there's an interview in today's Sunday Times).

I'd be safe and warm...

The sky may not be grey but all the leaves will soon be brown, and it certainly feels like a winter's day out there. Time for some California dreamin', in honour of our imminent trip to Los Angeles, which will mean things are quiet around here for a week or so.

Love the crazy bath-dancing on this Sixties TV show:

No book burning - but no excuse for violence

I don't believe that any books are 'sacred'. The Qu'ran, the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Tibetan Book of the Dead - all are human products and should be treated as such. In a free society no book, whether secular or religious, should be protected from criticism, ridicule or even condemnation if necessary. But talk of burning books of any kind makes me nervous and summons up some pretty unpleasant historical memories (see above).

So I hope Pastor Terry Jones cancels his plan to burn copies of the Qu'ran on the anniversary of 9/11. He is perfectly within his constitutional rights to do so (something the Pakistani government doesn't seem to understand), but it would be wise of him to desist. It would provide one more excuse (as if they needed it) for Islamist militants to run riot and terrorise the innocent. You can imagine the scene in cities across the 'Muslim world', as the usual 'rage boys', to use Hitch's coining, 'spontaneously' congregate in front of the cameras, miraculously supplied with American flags to tear and burn (where's their respect for other people's sacred totems?).

But let's be clear. If Jones goes ahead with his mindless stunt, and innocent people get killed in Asia or the Middle East, those deaths won't be his 'fault.' The blame will lie entirely with the perpetrators and their warped ideology, which sees every slighting of their beliefs as justification for murder and mayhem. In their fundamentalism and intolerance, Pastor Jones and the Islamists are mirror images of each other.

Update: 11th September

Predictably, authoritarian and corrupt leaders in the Middle East and Asia have leapt on the protest bandwagon, to bolster their own support. It was astonishing, and a little absurd, that President Karzai of Afghanistan used his annual Eid message to condemn the actions of an insignificant and unrepresentative clergyman halfway across the world. And his claim that 'insulting the Koran is an insult to nations' was patently ridiculous and designed to stoke the dangerous fires of protest.

Meanwhile, the protesting crowds in Afghanistan and elsewhere are said to be outraged just by the 'idea' of burning their holy book, even if it doesn't actually transpire. Watching and reading the reports last night, I thought I detected a note of disappointment in the protestors' reaction to the news that Pastor Jones may not, after all, go ahead with his book burning.

Finally, on this of all mornings, it struck me that the saddest consequence of this whole affair (so far) is that, on the anniversary of the terror attacks on New York and Washington, it has focused attention on the twisted fundamentalist ideology that inspired those outrages, rather than on the thousands of innocent victims and those who still grieve for them.

Zero tolerance

Three great contributions to the Ground Zero 'mosque' debate:

Hitch calls for tolerance on all sides - from Muslims as well as their opponents.

Chas argues that friends of Israel should reject alliances with anti-Muslim bigots.

And Norm links to a piece about inter-faith tolerance at the site of the attack on the Pentagon.

Update

Two more indispensable guides to the Fox-fuelled furore from Frank Rich and Justin Elliott.

'What do you think I fought for on Omaha Beach?'

In celebration of the overturning of Proposition 8, here's 86 year old World War Two veteran Philip Spooner speaking at a public meeting on marriage equality in Maine last year (via via):

Let freedom ring

Happy 4th, from across the pond.

Van Morrison: mastery and misanthropy

Added to my Amazon wish list: Greil Marcus' new book, Listening to Van Morrison. In yesterday's Guardian, Marcus described his experience of touring cities in America, reading from the book:

Usually, when a writer shows up at a bookstore and reads from or talks about a book he or she has written, people ask questions: how do you write? Where do you get your ideas? What made you write this book? But not this time. This time, in San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, people weren't necessarily interested in my stories about Morrison. They wanted to tell their own stories.

According to Marcus, many of those stories revolved around a 'fundamental contradiction: that they could be so moved by, so caught up in, something made by someone who seemed to want nothing to do with them'. One example will serve to illustrate the paradox of Van the Man's ability to move audiences - and his notorious misanthropy:

'We went to a show,' a man said in Portland, 'and it was magnificent. It seemed like there was nothing. He was finding songs inside the songs, songs we'd never heard, it was like they were songs he never head. When it was over, we went next door to a bar, a lot of people who'd been to the show were there, and of course that's all we were talking about. How great it was, and did you notice this and did you hear that - and then Van Morrison walked in. He came in, walked to the bar, everyone stood up and applauded, and he just sat down at the bar. Finally I got up the nerve. I went over to him, and I said: "Mr Morrison, your music has meant so much to me. Sometimes it pulled me through, when I didn't think anything would. I couldn't live without it." He waited for me to finish, and he looked at me, and he said: "Why do people feel they have to tell me these things?"

On the other hand, Marcus recounts this gem of a story:

'I was talking to my father today,' a woman in Portland said. 'He asked what I was doing tonight, and I told him I was going to hear someone talk about a book he'd written on Van Morrison. "Oh, Van Morrison!" he said. "You know, I used to work with his father on the docks in Belfast. After work he'd take me to his house to listen to his records. I'd never seen anything like it. Hundred and hundreds of 78s and LPs, jazz, blues, country music, everything. And there'd be the little boy there, dancing around the room, saying play that, Daddy! Play that!'

I came to Van Morrison quite late. I was already in my mid-20s, and living in Manchester, when an older friend introduced me to his music. I'd soon bought all the early albums, and they became part of the soundtrack of my life as I left university, started my first job, got married. H. and the children have never quite shared my enthusiasm for Van, though putting 'Moondance' or 'Caravan' on in the car will usually meet with general approval. For me, it's Astral Weeks that still has a special place in my affections, recalling particular times and places, and I never tire of it.

Here's the title track, perfect for waking up to on this summer Sunday morning:

'The activists were aiming for a fight'

Michael Sean Winters' article on the flotilla fiasco is so good, I've decided to reproduce it in full. After 2000 years of Catholic antisemitism, and the recent upsurge in leftist anti-Zionism, it's good to read a progressive Catholic commentator telling it like it is:

The world has rushed to condemn Israel for the deaths of nine so-called pro-Palestinian activists who were killed trying to deliver supplies to Gaza. Israeli forces, which have been enforcing a blockade of Gaza since 2007, seized the vessels and, when met with armed resistance, a firestorm broke out. An investigation will determine what precisely happened to ignite the shooting. But, no investigation is needed to know that anyone who is genuinely concerned about the future of the Palestinian people will recognize that the single most important step towards peace and justice for them is for Hamas to be removed from power in Gaza. A true pro-Palestinian activist would do nothing to aid and abet that criminal regime.

One thing is clear. The pro-Palestinian activists were aiming for a fight. If their goal had been simply to supply the humanitarian needs of the people who live in Gaza, they could have delivered their aid to any one of a number of humanitarian organizations that legally supply Gaza. 15,000 tons of such supplies are delivered by Israel every week. But, the vessels involved in yesterday’s flotilla were carrying building supplies that are banned by the blockade.

Imagine for a moment if the U.S. government knew that a group of sympathizers with Al-Qaeda were delivering supplies to an Al-Qaeda stronghold in Afghanistan. Any commander who permitted the supplies through would be court-martialed. We would rightly consider the sympathizers less sympathetically because they were aiding terrorists. Make no mistake about it, the difference between the Hamas thugs who rule in Gaza and the Al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan is a difference of degree not of kind. This is recognized by no one so much as by the moderate Arab states which, I am sure, are secretly applauding Israel today even while they publicly denounce her. They have more to lose in the struggle with Islamic extremists than anyone.

Evidently, some 120 of the activists on board the flotilla are currently being held in an Israeli jail. Before reaching the conclusion that Israel acted unjustly, ask yourself a quick question. If you were a human rights activist, would you rather be in an Israeli prison or a Hamas one? Or an Egyptian prison? Or a Turkish prison? It may turn out that Israel acted stupidly, or that its military forces acted rashly, but no one should deny that in their struggle against Hamas, their cause is the cause of justice and human rights.

This is a bad bad hotel

Proving that political protest doesn't have to be po-faced: LGBTQ activists use music, dance and wit to highlight poor pay and unsatisfactory health care provision for hotel workers, in the lobby of the Westin St. Francis, San Francisco. Only in San Francisco could demonstrators sneak the words 'gay ass' into a song about working conditions.

Lovers of historical trivia will know that the Westin, whose rather grim towers loom over one side of Union Square, has been witness to a number of remarkable events, including the attempted assassination of Gerald Ford in 1975. It's also the hotel where Dashiel Hammett wrote (and set) many of his detective stories.

(Via)