GODLESS COMMIES GAVE ME MILK

Here's an argument you don't see very often, from Tony Judt's introduction to his new collection of essays, Reappraisals:

Moreover, and here the memory of war played once again an important role, the twentieth-century "socialist" welfare states were constructed not as an advance guard of egalitarian revolution but to provide a barrier against the return of the past: against economic depression and its polarizing, violent political outcome in the desperate politics of Fascism and Communism alike. The welfare states were thus prophylactic states. They were designed quite consciously to meet the widespread yearning for security and stability that John Maynard Keynes and others foresaw long before the end of World War II, and they succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. Thanks to half a century of prosperity and safety, we in the West have forgotten the political and social traumas of mass insecurity. And thus we have forgotten why we have inherited those welfare states and what brought them about.

You should - but you don't.

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Elsewhere in the same piece Judt writes about the role that the intellectual used to play in public life and doesn't anymore; he cites among many others

Arthur Koestler, whose life, allegiances and writings established him for many decades as the intellectual archetype of the age, is no longer a household name. There was a time when every college student had read - or wanted to read - Darkness at Noon. Today, Koestler's best-selling novel of the Moscow show trials is an acquired, minority taste.

I think this last sentence is pushing it a bit. If we want to be mock-pejorative, call it a museum piece, no longer relevant, which might go some way to explaining why it's no longer widely read. We watched Smiley's People on BBC4 a while back, and it was like another world. I tried to imagine explaining the milieu to someone born after 1989. It would take you ages.

Nonetheless, though I haven't read Darkness at Noon I've had it mentally earmarked since I was at university in the early '90s. I kept coming across references to it, and the tones in which Koestler's name was mentioned clearly implied he was heavy-duty, significant. I hardly think he's disappeared from the public mind - or at least I did until I asked a couple of colleagues, "Who wrote Darkness at Noon?" and drew a blank. Each of them has not only a degree but a master's in history.

Well, shit, thought I.

TANGLED WEBS

Listened to Radio 3's Night Waves tonight, particularly for Philippe Sands talking about his new book Torture Team. The skinny on it is: in December 2002 Rumsfeld's lawyer drew up a list of proposed interrogation techniques which breached the Geneva Convention. Rumsfeld approved the list and this led to use of said techniques, including the now-infamous waterboarding, in Gunatanamo and Abu Ghraib.

Two very interesting points came out. The first was that an episode of 24 where Jack Bauer uses torture somehow had a big effect not only on popular, but official opinion of what was acceptable practice. Nice to know the US government is taking advice from the best minds in, uhr, television. Second, Alan Dershowitz wrote an article, which I vaguely recall hearing about, in which he said that certain forms of torture might be permissible in certain instances, for example the so-called "ticking bomb" scenario (which has always seemed to me to be on a par with the question, "And what if you came upon a German soldier raping your sister?" i.e. so restricted that it bears no relation to anything one might actually encounter in reality). Dersh's leetle contribution, which at least has the virtue of demonstrating that even Harvard professors can be nitwits, all of a sudden made it very difficult indeed for those in the Guantanamo administration opposed to the use of torture to carry on arguing their case effectively. The door, as Philippe Sands notes, had been opened, and once opened is nigh-impossible to close.

Incidentally, if like me you've never been quite clear just what waterboarding involves, or why it's effective, take a look at the wikipedia article. Among the merry pranksters who've used it are the Spanish Inquisition and the Khmer Rouge. One can only hope that those who believe it isn't torture (step foward, Rudy Giuliani) one day have the opportunity to experience it first-hand.

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The second segment was more disappointing. Apparently there's a new film out claiming that RFK's assassination was down to a CIA plot involving mind-control, multiple gunmen and a cast of thousands. Well, we've been here, in JFK and The Parallax View and god knows how many books and broadcasts. Presenter Rana Mitter and his guest Scott Lucas, American Studies prof at Brum Uni, dismissed it as tosh and had a brief and unenlightening chat about the mind control/assassination meme in fiction and reality, with reference to The Manchurian Candidate and Project MK-Ultra, nothing those of us with our flying saucers parked out back haven't come across already. But then, then, Mitter asks, what is it about America, that when a political figure gets assassinated, there is positively a public demand for a conspiracy to blame, instead of the lone crazed gunman? (This from the country which has spent god knows how many millions proving three times in court that Princess Diana died of the bleedin' obvious.) Lucas gave a reasonable-sounding answer but didn't challenge the premise underlying the question: that a conspiracy is never to blame and all arguments to the contrary are intrinsincally pooh-poohable (despite his having earlier given several examples of CIA conspiracies to assassinate Castro).

Now, clearly, sometimes nutters strike. John Hinckley and Arthur Bremer are examples (although, weirdly, Hinckley acted out of an obsession with an actress in a film based on Bremer, who was, in turn, inspired by Sirhan Sirhan and Lee Harvey Oswald. If that isn't a meme out of control, I don't know what is.) And just because JFK and RFK both died by assassination doesn't mean the two incidents are connected. Not least because there is an important disctinction to draw between them.

RFK was assassinated by a man who was caught at the scene, tried, convicted and imprisoned. Regardless of why or even whether he did it, it's comprehensible.

JFK was assassinated by a man who was subsequently caught, arrested, then himself assassinated by a man who dies in prison a few years later. That stinks. The thing is, if it happened in Italy, though it wouldn't stink any the less, one wouldn't be at all surprised. One would think: business as for the past several hundred years. In the white-picket America of the early sixties, only then does it become bizarre, in need of exegesis. Gore Vidal has put it more succinctly: JFK's send-off was "purest Palermo".

[AMENDED MON 19/11/2007]

STAINED GLASS TELLS OLD STORY

From "Lost New York", the first essay in The Last Empire. Gore Vidal is reviewing a novel called Many Mansions by Isabel Bolton, published 1952 and set in 1950:

The old lady finished her reading: 'If her book should fall into the hands of others addicted as she was to the habitual reading of novels, what exactly would their feelings be?' One wonders - is there such a thing now as a habitual reader of novels? Even the ambitious, the ravenously literary young Adam seems to have a suspicion that he may have got himself into the stained-glass window trade.

Of course, Vidal has been raising this question for all of his career, and continues to do so today. I think it's certain that there are fewer and fewer literary references in public discourse, and that people in general don't have a literary common ground (other than Harry Potter). When I was at university I met an old fella who told me his father would meet with friends of an evening to read aloud their favourite passages from Thomas Hardy, and that this wasn't at all an unusual pastime. But then I suppose Dickens was the TV of his day, and followed with the kind of unifying, street-emptying attention people would one day give to Z Cars.

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In 1876 Vidal kind of provides his own answer, through the mouth of his narrator Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler:

My pen delays...Stops. Why write any of this? Why make a record? Answer: habit. To turn life to words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round. Words translate and transmute raw life, make bearable the unbearable. So at the end, as in the beginning, there is only The Word.

I don't quite agree with this, but it's a good answer. Not quite as pithy as the beginning of his answer to a long, rambling and (to judge by the reaction) irritating question I posed to him when he was on a book tour in 1998: "Writing is basically an extension of thinking."

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I posted a little while back that 1876 was much taken up with the buying of American politicians, but despite the massive and widespread corruption which Vidal depicts, I wasn't prepared for the thrilling change of gear in the final section, when the presidential election goes to the wire. Up to this point, grand theft has seemed wrong but still sort of fun, committed by boring or jovial rascals; in any case, everyone does it, fortunes are there to be made in the Gilded Age and only the terminally unlucky or foolish suffer (we are talking here about the elect, the members of the American oligarchy which, of course, did not and does not exist - not the Civil War veterans who occasionally intrude on the narrative with their raggedness and missing limbs.) And then, having jollied and joshed us, Vidal gets serious, and it's like a slap in the face.

-- SPOILER ALERT 1876 --

The candidates are Governor Samuel Tilden (Dem, dry, highly intelligent but somewhat charmless, a reformer) and Rutherford B. Hayes (Rep, a man seemingly without qualities other than being the one candidate his party can unite behind). Tilden will neither take bribes nor buy favours; Hayes is no more corrupt than any of his peers, which is still saying a great deal. Tilden has already won the popular vote by a quarter of a million, has 184 electoral college votes, and one more will secure him the presidency; Hayes is on 165, and needs all of the 20 remaining votes from Oregon, Louisiana, South Carolina and - yes - Florida. The results from all four of these states are in dispute.

Tilden addresses the press:

With altogether too much delicacy Tilden referred to the current "subject of controversy," making the point that in the twenty-two previous presidential elections, the Congress had simply recorded the votes sent them by the Electoral College. But now the Congress must choose between two absolutely conflicting sets of votes sent them by four states.

Tilden reminded the audience that three years ago the Congress had declared illegal the present Government of Louisiana, whose Returning Board has just seen fit to reverse the state's popular vote. Tilden also spelled out the illegality of the South Carolina and Florida boards. But where he ought to have thundered his contempt for the most corrupt and now tyrannous Admininstration in our history and unfurled his banner as our rightful lord, he was throughout his address very much the dry constitutional lawyer and in no way the outraged tribune of a cheated people.

All the way through this final section, Tilden is almost, almost there, but not quite. It should be his, it must be...and yet he seems to be unable to clinch it, despite the egregious nature of Republican attempts to pervert the count. By the time I got to this part, I was already experiencing a serious case of deja vu:

During the week since the electoral commission was given the two (actually, because of a technicality, three) sets of Florida returns, things did not appear to go well for us despite the brilliance of Charles O'Conor.

For one thing, the commission has never seriously tried to examine any of the initial voting frauds in Florida. The Republican case is based on the fact that the Hayes returns are the only valid ones because they have been signed by the carpetbag Republican governor of the state, while those favouring Tilden were only signed by the state's attorney general. For a whole week the number of angels able to dance on that pin's head have been counted and re-counted.

The entry for Tilden on Wikipedia notes:

While the Republicans boldly claimed the election, Tilden mystified and disappointed his supporters by not fighting for the prize or giving any leadership to his advocates. Instead he devoted more than a month to the preparation of a complete history of the electoral counts over the previous century to show it was the unbroken usage of Congress, not of the President of the Senate, to count the electoral votes. [Bigelow v 2:60]

The italics are mine.

-- SPOILER ENDS --

I came to 1876 totally cold (apart from recognising the name of Rutherford B. Hayes), began it with mild trepidation, continued with pleasure, raced through the end, and put it down with real satisfaction. A thirty year-old novel about a one hundred and thirty year-old scandal, which shines a powerful light on America today. Yup, I'd say that's a vindication of the stained-glass trade.

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It's accepted that the presidential election in 2000 was 'troubled', 'controversial' - that's to say, stolen. But no-one describes the 2004 election in those terms, which is astonishing given the number of complaints of irregularities. Gore Vidal wrote the introduction to Rep. John Conyers' report What Went Wrong in Ohio, which goes into these concerns in depth and is available as a PDF.

JUST ONE MORE THING AFTER ANOTHER

I'd been trying to extoll to someone the virtues, the cleverness, the neatness, the deliberately narrow but rich set-up, the exquisite pleasure of watching the psychological torture that Columbo inflicts on the party he thinks and we know to be guilty.

"Uh-huh...Columbo. Smart cop plays stupid, yeah?"

Which stopped me short. "Yes, I suppose so," I said, deflated, and saddened that she had managed to reduce one of my household gods to his essence so completely that there was no possible comeback. At the time I was arrogant enough to think that this indicated stupidity on her part: I mean, couldn't she see...? Of course, it was acuity, and a technique that I've found to be useful since then.

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Thus, it's unfair to describe Edwin Muir's Scottish Journey as an extended grump - but not by too much. Granted, it does not take account of Muir's elegance, perception and the force of his argument, in a book which is still in print, regularly name-checked or quoted in Scotland, and has served as an inspiration for similar, later tours which try taking the nation's temperature; granted also that by any standard the view becomes depressing once Muir leaves Edinburgh, particularly in the industrial West. In fact, one can't imagine that anyone in the low dishonest decade was having a particularly good time of it, post-economic crash and pre-war (apart from in Spain and China, where war had got off to an early start.)

Nevertheless, Muir seems to see the 1930s in Scotland as an endpoint, with no prospect of things improving. In a way he was right - they got worse, but they did get better afterwards. Without falling into the traps of hindsight or historical inevitability, one can still say confidently that things do change. Watching the first two episodes of Smiley's People the other week was like looking at a museum piece.

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Thinking of this, I predict that Labour will lose the next General Election. Brown simply doesn't feel lucky, not enough of a winner. My tip is to begin preparing for the consequences of this now, and try to see past the grey, muddled, inglorious 18 months which I guess are in front of us. I will be delighted if I'm wrong about this.

NO MORE VILLAINS ANYMORE

In which we consider how dissatisfying the 2004 version of The Manchurian Candidate was compared to the 1962 original, which was as quick, detailed and cunning as the remake is clunky, obvious and over-wrought. I was afraid this would be the case, and when it was released at the cinema I deliberately stifled my initial reaction to rush out and see it immediately. While I could think of many good political reasons to remake it, even with the application of thumbscrews I doubt I could come up with a good artistic one. The Manchurian Candidate (1962) is simply the most finely-crafted film I think I've ever seen, even better than The Third Man. It works as a political thriller and as a psychological study; it uses every trick there is to tell its story and not one of them seems anything less than entirely right; it is, as Roger Ebert says, "inventive and frisky, takes enormous chances with the audience" - for which read, assumes the audience is intelligent, something you practically never see on film or TV - "and plays not like a 'classic' but as a work as alive and smart as when it was first released." Quite. Why remake it?

Well, the road to hell, and all. Playing "overheard" audio or TV commentary as the transition between scenes is just the laziest, the most hackneyed, the most ham-fisted way of providing context, and when it's used to deliver a political message it becomes perfectly obnoxious - and I agreed with everything it was saying. Yeah, yeah - war on terror, undermining of civil liberties, America being destroyed from within, I geddit, I already goddit, and therein lies the problem. By taking elements which were floating around some hazy interzone of public consciousness, fitting them together and bringing them into sharp dramatic focus, the 1962 version was eery, disturbing, and as it turned out, in some measure prophetic. The 2004 version doesn't tell us anything we don't already know. It's playing catch-up.

The basis of the original film is that, in a brilliant inversion, communist spies are using the very forces of tub-thumping anti-communism (read, clearly, McCarthyism) to work their way to the White House and undermine American freedoms by riding a tidal wave of public fear and hysteria which will allow them to assume "powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy" - presumably with full public support. In a final twist to this plot, Angela Lansbury's character intends to turn against her communist backers. The message that comes through is that by this stage it won't really matter who is in power, or what they believe, which is why a film ostensibly about dirty commies continues to appeal to knee-jerk liberals. It also chimes nicely with Senator Vandenberg's comment to Truman that in order to continue public funding for the military at a wartime level, they were going to have to "scare hell out of the American people" - a trick which continues to work well. In fact the old film is more on the button than the new one, which for its part tells us - what? That politicians can be bought? Indeed they can, in which case why go to the intricate trouble of brainwashing one? There couldn't be a more compliant president than Bush, though in his defence it doesn't seem he has much of a brain to wash.

As a final note, it's essential to both plot and theme that all of this is to be achieved through what Neil Gunn called the breaking of the mind - the cracking open of a single individual so he can be remade to political ends. It's as potent a central idea as that of Life is Beautiful - the protection of the child in the midst of horror, in order to save humanity.

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I'd find the disappointment of Candidate Mk#2 easier to bear if it wasn't the second time it had happened in a year. The State Within was similarly shaky, disappointing and redundant, like a cut-and-paste of news clippings. A few weeks after the final episode was broadcast we watched Defence of the Realm, which was simply chilling, and accurately reflected the occult (to use David Peace's word) quality of politics in Britain in the 1980s. Now it just seems sordid, and sad, not to mention enormously destructive if you're Iraqi.

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The buying of politicians is nothing new, and is a central motif of 1876 by Gore Vidal, which I'm reading with easy pleasure. I tried it ten years ago and couldn't get anywhere with it, said so to a friend, was so non-plussed I was even considering flogging it back to the second-hand shop. The friend, with not-quite mock condescension, counselled me to put it by: "You know, one day you'll be looking for something to read and -" he pointed and winked sidelong "- that'll be it." And he was right.

ONE MAY BE PERMITTED TO HOPE FOR THE BEST

Belated post, I know. Jonathan Freedland wrote in The Guardian that it's an indictment of our entire political system that Blair was not impeached over Iraq. One might add that it's an indictment of our elected representatives that any of them supported the invasion in the first place, a far more significant intelligence failure than any coming from the security services. But after all that has been revealed, for the House of Commons to give Blair a standing ovation at his last PM's questions...

And they wonder why the SNP won in Scotland.

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One of the Glasgow car bombers qualified and worked as a doctor in Iraq. Which would be enough to turn anyone into an extremist - having to deal with the results of sanctions, radiation poisoning, invasion, civil war.

That doesn't mean that it's acceptable to attack civilians, of course. However, it must be noted that someone whom many might well consider to be an entirely legitimate target will shortly be starting work in the Middle East as, incredibly, a peace envoy. The Eumenides may yet have their day.

NOW HERE'S AN IDEA...

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

- Sinclair Lewis

IN WHICH THEY SERVE


Whoever did this deserves an award at public expense. Seen in today's Metro, picked up from Bristol Indymedia.