Bonfires

Book burning is back in fashion. This piece sums up the whole pointless affair, describing superbly how the actions of self-righteous nonentities were inflated by a stupid and lazy media to global significance.

In the meantime, just as Shuggy argued:

More than a dozen people were killed and scores injured in confrontations in Kashmir today following a report on an Iranian TV channel of the desecration of the Qur'an in New York on the anniversary of 9/11.

Deeply depressing.

To continue on the theme, but change the subject, I wanted to understand the references in George Szirtes' The Burning of the Books so I have just read Elias Canneti's Auto da Fé. The poem is a set of reflections on the novel and what an impressive and strange novel it is, though I have not come to terms with it in my own mind yet. At times disturbing and at others darkly funny, it is based on constant thought and communication leading to total incomprehension, collective and individual, breeding misogyny, murder and madness. And, centrally, it is about books, libraries, "those burning places of the intellect"*, their lives, their destruction.

It could not be more relevant to the folly of bigots.

It is Autumn and all we should be burning are the fallen leaves. The first poem in George's collection is Chet Baker, so this seems appropriate.



*George Szirtes - Postscriptum

Thoughts at lunch time

I was shopping in Volos on Monday and stopped off for lunch. The waiter heard English being spoken and started asking questions about what work was like in England and whether he could get a job. Qualified in computer programming and network design, there he was working as a waiter and saying that he had wasted the best years of his life. It was just one small indicator of life in deflationary Greece. In the meantime, Greek TV shows adverts for expensive English university accredited degrees in business studies - another costly route to a dream that will probably end in delivering coffees to ageing English tourists.

All the while, sitting at your table looking out over the Argonafton, hawkers from Africa and Asia keep trying to sell you grim religious pictures, cheap plastic toys or knock-off DVDs. God knows what they have risked to get to the promised land of the European Union. Roma children are begging in the street and ask for the unfinished pizza slices.

There it all was, amidst the comfort and prosperity of European life, a hierarchy of hope, disillusion and discontent, as seen from a pavement café in a Greek port.

In the meantime the English press have been obsessing over the Blair memoirs. All agree as to the excruciating written style:

"On that night of the 12th May, 1994, I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instinct, knowing I would need every ounce of emotional power to cope with what lay ahead. I was exhilarated, afraid and determined in roughly equal quantities."

Then there was Iraq, with a consensus, bordering on neurotic hatred, that the desire to bring down the regime of a brutal, mass murdering dictator and replace it with a democracy was somehow an act of unparalleled malevolence.

There was little in the coverage on Blair's social policy, other than to describe it as 'centrist' and essential to winning power. There was even less on the whole Third Way farrago, an intellectual mish-mash if ever I saw one. Few doubts were expressed about the nature of public service 'reform'. And there was nothing on the strange death of adult education, my particular obsession.

When I look at the New Labour years, what strikes me as vital is political economy. Blair was not an unsuccessful Prime Minister, but he was an unsuccessful Labour Prime Minister. Deeply attracted to fashionable nonsense (the weightless economy anyone?), the Blairite government fully accepted and accelerated the Thatcherite settlement, only moderating it through supply-side driven investment in public services. There was an easy association with wealth, privilege and a celebration of inequality, though only on 'merit' of course. And it did this at the very moment when Labour had the power and popular approval to challenge, revise and lead the country away from the prevailing neo-liberal consensus.

And all this leads to the scenes at the port. For us Europeans this isn't desperation or starvation, it isn't the hunger, disease, shortened and blighted lives of the slums of the developing world, nor is it the brutal racism directed presently against the Roma across our continent. It is a feeling of unease that things could and should be better, a nagging worry about the future, a sense of injustice at the immunity of the rich from the sacrifices now being imposed through economic austerity programmes. Lost potential, lost lives, curtailed dreams seem to be an ever present reality. Stories that highlight individual tragedies are sprinkled amongst general unease.

And when Labour bought into the political economy of Thatcherism they made themselves complicit in all this. This is the legacy awaiting the new leadership, only now they have to challenge a coalition government that Blair seems only too comfortable with. We will have to wait and see, but, like Paulie, I am not hopeful.

The truth

Dramatic video footage of the Cameron/Clegg negotiations has emerged:

A tale of two newspapers

In the Israel/Palestine conflict there appears to be a choice between victory for one side or the other or a settlement. The only problem is that victory is neither possible nor desirable. Israel cannot and will not be obliterated and the Palestinians will not and cannot have their right to self-determination denied. So the real choice is between a continued, corrosive blood-letting or a deal that will transcend the conflict and create a new reality, giving the opportunity for peace.

So where are you most likely to find an argument for continued struggle? The Guardian of course where this article, in a piece of psychic punditry, announces in advance the failure of the coming peace talks, or, if by any chance an agreement does emerge, that it must of necessity prove to be a disaster.

The Jerusalem Post, meanwhile, provides another platform for the practical optimism of Gershon Baskin of ICIPRI who argues that, "Failure to reach an agreement would be a crime against both peoples".

In the meantime, the current enemies of just such an agreement, in the same way as their earlier counterparts did, have announced their opposition.

September

O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stain'd

With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may'st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.

'The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and
Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till clust'ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather'd clouds strew flowers round her head.

'The spirits of the air live in the smells
Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.'
Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat,
Then rose, girded himself, and o'er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.

William Blake - To Autumn - 1783

I have never been here in September before and I will see most of the month out until I return to the UK. Already there is a sense of Autumn, the mornings and evenings are cooler and though still warm, the heat has a softer quality to it. Despite my ignorance and lack of stewardship, thin branches are bending under the weight of fruit. The village is noticeably quieter, many summer visitors have gone and it is absolutely gorgeous. As the loudspeaker on the hawker's van calls out, 'κρεμμύδια και πατάτες έχω', I have an overwhelming sense of my own good fortune and privilege. What could be better than to be here, now, on a September day?

Versatility

I like these internet toys. Apparently:

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Wow. I am proud of that, a fine writer. So how about something else, a bit of academic writing:

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Never read anything by him so I wouldn't know. So let's try another piece:

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Shit! Quick, delete it this instant. The shame, the shame. Slap another passage in to take the taste away.

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Who? Well what about trying something else.

I write like
H. G. Wells

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

There, that is more respectable, even if some of his politics were a bit dodgy.

Consistently male I suppose, but then I did a bit of cheating and found that Emily Bronte writes like James Fenimore Cooper, George Eliot writes like Charles Dickens as does Thomas Hardy, Thackeray and, I suspect, most 19th Century English novelists. Let's go earlier. Mary Shelly writes like Mary Shelly, but Laurence Sterne writes like Robert Louis Stevenson. Daniel Defoe has the style of Jane Austen. A little more populist perhaps, Agatha Christie writes like Arthur Conan Doyle. Oh well, so it goes ...

Thanks to Shuggy for helping me waste an odd half hour.

Your health!

Abstinence is a killer. Time magazine reports on some new research:

But even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables — socio-economic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on — the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.

So eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow the teetotallers die.

Relatively embarassing

After evolution and climate change, there is another global conspiracy for the right to challenge, the Theory of Relativity. Yep, theoretical physics is a liberal atheistic plot. Here is the clincher:

"Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of 'curvature of space' to promote a broad legal right to abortion".

If you can bear it, you can read all about it here.

Are you sure it isn't April 1st?

Thanks to DJG

Time out

As I have said before, it's a nice place.

Scandalous

From the Daily Mail (photo caption)

Struggling: More than 100,000 seven-year-olds is unable to write properly

I blame the teachers.

Thanks to Julie

Mooning

It is the August full moon tonight, a special occasion here. I am just back from the front with ringing ears where there was the big(ish) full moon party with a very loud and rather incongruous Greek heavy rock band. The last number ended abruptly when the electricity blew and we all trooped off into a quiet, beautiful and, of course, moonlight night.

The radio plays songs about the moon all day. Here are two, in a different vein to the music I have just been blasted with, one melancholy:



The words in translation (and another version) here

And one lively:



Words and translation here

Cultural news

Clearly essential reading for all opera buffs and, for once, the Amazon customer reviews explore this fascinating topic even more deeply. Read them carefully.



Hat tip? I bet you can guess who.

Heritage

This is already on the UNESCO world heritage list

Now it could be joined by this

The Mediterranean diet, with its mix of fresh fruit and vegetables, grilled fish and olive oil faces a final vote in November for ranking on Unesco's list of "intangible" cultural heritage, launched in 2003 to complement the collection of monuments and natural wonders, and covers oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals and festivals.

I wonder if they are going to include the fags and the tsipouro.

Tim Hayward gets "this act of insane redefinition" spot on.

Life and debt

Via Will and John comes this talk to the RSA by, and this interview with, David Harvey. Both seem particularly pertinent as I sit here in a country that is experiencing a severe economic downturn before returning to one that appears to be locking itself into a masochistic political economy, perhaps showing that, after all, corporal punishment in public schools did do them some harm.

What I liked about this talk is that Harvey is keen to break away from the idea being peddled, not least by some Greeks themselves, that the current financial crisis here is the result of cultural failings. Though the Greek state is hardly a model of efficiency and effectiveness, Harvey looks beyond this to systemic economic factors and, in doing so, challenges many of the other conventional explanations of the crisis.

His main argument is that this is not a series of crises, but a single one that keeps cropping up in different countries across the globe. It is located in the central contradiction of neo-liberal economics. The search for high profits to drive growth derives, at least partially, from the reduction of labour costs, mainly through eroding the power of labour in the market place, thereby adversely affecting the level of demand. So, with earnings stagnant, growth and consumption was maintained through the injection of credit and the invention of ever more complex new financial products to sustain that credit. Thus, when the bubble burst, the crisis appeared to be a problem of indebtedness, easily susceptible to moral arguments about spendthrifts, rather than one rooted in declining real wages - a classic crisis of under-consumption.

Harvey is a Marxist, though certainly not a dogmatic one, but the theory of under-consumption is not solely a Marxist theory. For example, here is the mutualist anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, writing in 1846 about the displacement of labour through mechanisation.

What a system is that which leads a business man to think with delight that society will soon be able to dispense with men! Machinery has delivered capital from the oppression of labor! That is exactly as if the cabinet should undertake to deliver the treasury from the oppression of the taxpayers. Fool! Though the workmen cost you something, they are your customers: what will you do with your products, when, driven away by you, they shall consume them no longer? Thus machinery, after crushing the workmen, is not slow in dealing employers a counter blow; for, if production excludes consumption, it is soon obliged to stop itself...

Proudhon was reiterating the views that were also to be found in early liberalism, especially amongst radicals. You can find concerns about under-consumption in Adam Smith, though one of the most persistent and obsessive liberal economists to warn of the dangers was Charles Sismondi (1773-1842).

And this is what interests me, early liberal economics certainly contained some orthodox thinkers such as Jean-Baptiste Say, but much writing is hedged with caution and caveats, whilst radical liberals were overtly critical of orthodoxy and made what they saw as the right of the workers to the full value of their labour central to their thinking. This spawned a whole range of political ideas, not just socialism, but radical liberalism, individualism, co-operation, mutualism and anarchism as well. With the revival of neo-liberalism in the latter part of the Twentieth Century, that critical liberal tradition was ignored and a new, utterly-self confident, version of corporate driven, turbo-capitalism emerged, claiming, somewhat dubiously, to be the true heir of classical liberalism.

If Harvey is right, and certainly the main empirical planks of the argument are all there, then the resolution of a crisis brought about by inadequate purchasing power in the economy through a policy designed to lower that purchasing power further seems hardly wise. From here in Greece, the signs are not good and even the bond markets seem to be opposed to human sacrifice. All of which highlights the increasing interest in the benefits of equality as well as the maintenance of living standards for the many, rather than the massive enrichment of the few.

Eleni

She's one hundred years old now. Eleni was my neighbour until old age forced her to go and live with one of her sons in Volos. She is back in the village at the moment, staying with another of her sons, so I dropped by to see her.

There were hugs and kisses, she is always pleased to see me. I think she appreciated us as neighbours and liked us around the place. Her hearing and vision isn't great, but though frail her sense of humour is buoyant and she rocked with laughter at my wild gestures that tried to convey some sort of meaning that my Greek language could never manage to do.

There is no flash on my mobile phone so the picture isn't great but that didn't stop her son trying to get me to take a photograph of the barbecue being built on their patio. They were trying to sell me one and thought I could show the photograph around. Sadly, it was too dark so the builder rushed to his car, stood in front of the barbecue, took a picture, showed it to me and then put his camera away. I think he missed the point.

At the moment I am reading about another Eleni, the mother of the author Nicholas Gage. She was tortured and executed for the crime of protecting her children during the final stage of the Greek Civil War. It is a brilliant, complex and harrowing book. And then I think that the Eleni I know was in her thirties when the Nazi occupation began, with its mass starvation and appalling hardships, closely followed by the brutalities of the Civil War. I wonder what she has seen during her long life, I will never know.

Still, she survived, gave birth to four sons and lives on. As does Greece, now a democratic nation, though facing new troubles. May Greek democracy too survive this unnecessary economic onslaught and leave the horrors of the Twentieth Century buried in the history books, never to be re-enacted.

What I did on my holidays

I suppose that after the hard grind of relaxing in Greece for a couple of months, the wedding in the Czech Republic was just the tonic I needed. And what a wedding!

Most tourist will be familiar with Prague, but Olomouc is less well-known, incomparably quieter and has a beautiful centre, ringed with hideous Stalinist architecture. Everywhere there are reminders of a troubled history. The Second World War memorials carry the unfamiliar dates of 1938-45. For Czechs, the war began with the dismemberment of their country and the start of the German occupation after the Munich agreement. Then there are the remainders of the Communist past; the murals at the railway station and, above all, the clock.

The town hall has hosted an astronomical clock since the fifteenth century. It has been remodelled frequently, the last time was in the 1950's. As the defeated German army left in 1945, someone, in an act of spiteful vandalism, fired a shell at the clock leaving it wrecked. And so it was rebuilt, this time in the style of Socialist Realism, a unique piece of Stalinist kitsch. Here it is as it was before the war and today.













Every day at twelve it gives its full performance in front of a small knot of observers. There is a YouTube video of it in action here.

Elsewhere, the city is studded with extraordinary Baroque churches, as political as the clock. They were built to mark the defeat of the Reformation in the Thirty Years War and flaunt the resulting Catholic ascendancy. One monument, the Holy Trinity Column, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, stands across the square, glaring at the clock.

Walking around a city you often get the sense of its past from the neglected and the run down, rather than from the celebrated tourist highlights.

A street scene or, in this case, a simple doorway gives a sense of faded elegance that contrasts with the crumbling concrete of badly built apartment blocks from the Communist era. It made me wonder about Stalinism as an aesthetic failure as well as a political catastrophe. Catholicism in Europe was associated with reaction, illiberalism, authority and control yet still produced some magnificent art. But perhaps the sheer ugliness was just the product of the times, when public architecture became particularly joyless the world over.

Then there was the wedding itself in a spectacular church on a hill overlooking the Moravian plain. If the outside wasn't imposing enough, the interior was wildly over the top, like Liberace on speed.

As a hardened cynic, even I was blown away by such a magical scene for a wedding. I could forget my antipathy to the iconography and wallow in pure sentimentality in a church full of seriously hungover people, at least the ones from England. That certainly is a bunch who know how to party. Late nights on the town for a couple of days before the event had left their mark, but they were only training sessions. It was time for the reception.

It started impressively enough with a waiter slicing the top off a bottle of champagne with a sword and the custom of smashing a plate on the doorstep of the restaurant that the groom has to sweep up with a dustpan and brush. It then turned out to be a fifteen hour extravaganza of food, booze and dancing to an ageing Rock 'n Roll band, playing the standards sung in Czech, either side of a disco featuring naff 70's and 80's pop music. The place was bouncing when this one came on. And then there was all that gorgeous Czech beer.

I had never been to the Czech Republic before. The one thing that struck me most was how orderly the country is. Even if there is no traffic, nobody crosses the road unless the pedestrian crossing lights allow. Small groups of people stood patiently by the side of empty roads waiting for the clicking sound made by the crossings to speed up, meaning that the lights had changed to stop the non-existent cars. The museums only allowed you to pass through them in one direction and stern attendants were everywhere to ensure that you did as you were told. In restuarants and bars plates and glasses were cleared away the second you had finished. Sunday night was near silent and the city centre was deserted apart from a few tourists. Yet the clubs stayed open late and served up huge quantities of alcohol and the bars and restuarants certainly didn't bother with healthy eating options and portion control.

It had been an unforgettable weekend; noisy, rowdy and incredibly drunken, spent with people who I like immensely in a remarkably beautiful place. Yet on my return to Greece, as I sat on the bus taking me down the peninsula, just behind the driver who was talking on his mobile phone and smoking a fag out of the window as he manoeuvred round hairpin bends, I enjoyed the culture change; friendly, informal, occasionally fractious, anything but organised though it still works and somehow more comfortable, like sitting in your favourite chair. I had been away and I was coming home.

Away

I am setting off this morning for the Czech Republic to attend a wedding. I shall be here for a few days, with the urge to do some sightseeing no doubt conflicting with the odd hangover. So all you will get here is ...

Sizzling in summer

One of the great pleasures of summer in Greece is being able to use the barbecue regularly, especially if friends come round to share a meal, talking and drinking until late in the warm night air. All types of meat, marinated in lemon juice and olive oil together with fresh herbs picked from the garden, taste wonderful cooked over charcoal, as does fish, bought the same day from the sellers at the front. Aubergines and peppers are beautiful too, grilled and sprinkled with salt, vinegar and oil.

But what is this? A study has found that this is really shocking behaviour.

Beer, ice-cream, crisps, Indian takeaways, chips and anything in batter: normally, it's a particular food type that gets blamed for helping the British to pile on the pounds. But now a whole style of cooking and eating has come under fire for encouraging obesity in the UK.

Research shows that Britons consume more than the recommended daily intake of calories in a single barbecue meal, with men often eating more than 3,500 calories and women more than 2,500.

Oh no! Douse those coals immediately or at least follow the report's advice. Replace those sausages with a "tofu kebab or mixed green salad with harissa dressing" or at the very least "exercise portion control".

So who carried out this research, which University or research establishment was involved? Er ... the study was "conducted by Boots and the Tony Ferguson Weightloss Programme" who just happen to have a new range of expensive diet products to sell to the guilt-ridden.

There was one consolation at the end of the piece,

However, the Boots research indicates that any advice on sensible alfresco eating habits is likely to be ignored: it found that although a third of those questioned (2,000 adults) were aware they eat more food than usual, 41% chose to forget how many calories they were consuming and ate as much as they wanted.

Bravo for the 41%! Anyway, I always exercise portion control at my barbecues, the portions are vast.

An advocate of peace

It is hard to add anything to this statement.

Mohamed Abu Muailek is a 25-year-old Palestinian, believes that Palestinians should seek co-existence with Israel. Mohamed is in jail and facing potential execution by Hamas. Once a militant, he is now a strong advocate of peaceful coexistence. He used to fire rockets from Gaza into Israel. Then, partly because of an internet friendship with an IT colleague, Mohamed changed his mind. Deciding that violence was wrong, Mohamed became a dissident, and argued the case for peace and co-existence with Israel. Hamas have jailed him and he is facing a likely death penalty.

The campaign website is here and a report of the experience of the film-maker, Paul Martin here.

Anyone prone to romanticise Hamas, please take careful note.

Thanks to Helena

Lost in translation

Waking early this morning, I did some web surfing and ended up on a Greek blog post listing some of the best moments of summer. Because my Greek is very, very rudimentary, I was lazy and used Google Translator. Here are some examples of what it came up with:

"The crowing of a misguided from the hot cock in a ill-afternoon hours"

"The repeated echo of a distant and allegedly festival is induced by the moods of the wind"

"Crack due to the unplanned rush of impatience forks when the waiter leaves the table dish with tzatziki"

And my favourite:

"Can meet again in passionate love of your vacation last year and I recommend your child"

Some advice - use a dictionary.

Shocking

You learn something new every day if you read the papers.

If we look at the industrialised world, basically 90% of all deaths are caused by ageing.

Well I never.

Politics and anti-politics

From over the pond - the Aegean that is - a reader based in Turkey drew my attention to this catchy paragraph from Peter Oborne's book, The Triumph of the Political Class.

"The only Cabinet minister in Blair's 1997 administration known to have had any experience of work in the commercial sector was John Prescott, a ship's steward in the '50s. He was later joined by Alan Milburn, who used to run a Marxist bookshop called Days of Hope, better known by the spoonerism Haze of Dope"

There is a lot to unpack in such a short passage. It is part of a common-place argument that politicians are distanced from 'real life' and have no understanding of the 'real world', being locked in a parallel universe of their own making. The argument isn't without merit, but in one sense it is a truism. We all live lives proscribed by the boundaries of class, gender, region, ethnicity, occupation etc. and do not have an intimate understanding of the lives of others, though we can try and learn and the failure to do so is a major contributor to bad management and poor policy making.

Yet there are other difficulties with the specifics of Oborne's comment. Anyone coming into government will of necessity have been an MP for some time and so politics will have been their full-time job for quite a while. Then what does he mean by "the commercial sector"? Private industry? And if so, why is this experience more valid than the public sector or the professions? And, of course, there is a neat, snobbish dig at Prescott in there too. But even taking it on its own terms, there is one major problem with this statement. It isn't true.

The claim that no-one apart from Prescott in the 1997 Cabinet had any experience outside politics seemed so unlikely that I did a bit of checking on the internet. It took less than an hour and this is what I found.

Margaret Beckett was a metallurgist for AEI, soon to become part of GEC. David Clark worked in forestry and was a lab technician in a textile mill, then became a mature student and university teacher. Nick Brown worked for Procter and Gamble. Frank Dobson worked in industry, but for the then nationalised Electricity Generating Board. Gavin Strang was an agricultural scientist.

Several cabinet members had experience of local government, the most notable being David Blunkett who had run Sheffield City Council, possibly a better preparation for a ministerial post than being a management consultant.

There is another side to the "commercial sector" as well. Unsurprisingly, the 1997 Cabinet contained four former full-time union officials, including Prescott. Day-to-day working in industrial relations is certainly an education in the only too real life experienced by many of the electorate!

The biggest single group was lawyers with seven in cabinet, does their work not count as "commercial"? There were two former adult education tutor-organisers as well and three University lecturers. Clare Short had been a civil servant and, given the new government's interest in the Third Sector as part of their Big Society fad, they might be interested to know that Chris Smith had worked for a housing charity.

There was no-one from senior business management or from the financial services sector, but are they any more representative of 'real life'? Anyway, given the overwhelmingly Tory ethos of business management, it would be odd to expect to find anyone building a career as a Labour politician from it. And though the ministers were all middle class professionals, quite a few had come from working class families and were the beneficiaries of the post war expansion of educational opportunities. Rather than being narrow apparatchiks, they had rather a wide range of experience and impressive academic qualifications.

It is always fun to point out where sloppy research undermines an argument, but I think that more important things are at stake. The book is riding a current wave of anti-politics, which I consider highly dangerous. It takes various forms; 'they are only in it for themselves', 'they are all the same', and other associated generalisations. Of course, if you ask people to expand on this and be specific they usually can't. This is because of a slippage between scepticism and cynicism.

Politics, as a means of managing our public and collective interests, is a necessity. It never goes away. I am deeply depressed about the awful level of current political debate, the dominance of an elite consensus on political economy and on the quality of political leadership. However, this is very different from a rejection of politics in itself.

Anti-politics is cynical not analytical. It is a blanket condemnation of politics and an expression of contempt for politicians, whatever they do or stand for. In itself, it posits no alternatives and has no analysis. There is the strange Tea Party anti-political movement in the United States, but perhaps the most egregious recent example is the Greek Sect of Revolutionaries whose first proclamation announced, "We don't do politics, we do guerilla warfare". Nobody knows what they stand for. I doubt if they do. Often this is an impulse that can be exploited by the populist autocrat who declares himself to be 'above politics' (the ultimate oxymoron for a politician), sometimes it can lead to the demand for a 'top businessman' to come and sort things out. Demagoguery replaces the building of movements, alliances and the representation of interests.

My deep disappointment with New Labour knows no bounds, and as for the new lot ... It would be a huge relief to see politicians shunning conventional wisdom and media stereotypes in favour of good research and pursuing principles instead of exercising their own cynicism through media-driven populist measures to be nasty to whoever is the latest folk devil. However, we do need to be able to explain why we think like that, rather than simply hug the comfort blanket of anti-political sentiment. Intelligent politics is the answer to anti-politics, it can be just as critical, but with reason and, most importantly, it offers us alternatives.

Thanks to John

Greek news

One thing that has irritated me about the coverage of the Greek financial crisis has been the way in which much of the fault has put down to Greek character flaws. Some coverage has been borderline racist. Now Austria's far right has taken a step over that line with this poster from the FPO.












When challenged, they claimed that it wasn't a Greek stereotype but a caricature of the blond, clean shaven, pale skinned businessman, Spiros Latsis. Hmm... Nasty stuff. Full details here.

In the meantime, Piraeus municipality has gone bust, the truck drivers have ignored the government's 'civil mobilisation' order to stay on strike, leading to a fuel shortage throughout the country, and, after machine-gunning an investigative journalist on his doorstep, a tiny group of psychopaths calling themselves the Sect of Revolutionaries have issued a communique saying, "We are at war with your democracy ... tourists must learn that Greece is no longer a safe haven of capitalism. We intend to turn it into a war zone."

And, you know what, it is a lovely place. Don't be put off, come and stay. Life continues. It is more than the weather that is warm at this time of year. It is holiday time, there are festivals, people are eating out, swimming, enjoying life and, if you are in tourism, working flat out. You wouldn't guess that there is a crisis (unless you want to fill up a car, or even get a bus or a ferry if this strike continues). But, at the back of your mind, you have to question the wisdom of an economic policy, imposed by international organisations that, far from throwing riches at ordinary Greeks, is impoverishing some of them. And you have to wonder where it may lead.

The reason

Michael Gove gives the most convincing explanation yet for the composition of the government.

'Rich, thick kids' achieve much more than poor clever ones, says Gove

Precisely.

Sooner than expected

Well, it didn't take long for the newly elected, red tape burning, opponents of the nanny state to start using their power to hector us fatties, did it?

GPs and other health professionals should tell people they are fat rather than obese, England's public health minister says.

Anne Milton told the BBC the term fat was more likely to motivate them into losing weight.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Thanks Paulie

Revising history

Nothing much is happening here. A tremendous storm with hail and lightning has cleared the humidity, mixing sparkling sunshine with cool clear air. A strike by truck drivers is leading to acute shortages of petrol, threatening transport links, though the air traffic controllers have ended their action.

And so, with little much to post about, thoughts turn to history and this rather splendid resource debunking the historical distortions of American Religious Right as they attempt to deal with a somewhat tricky obstacle to their theocratic nationalism, the establishment of the United States as an explicitly secular republic. Instead they argue that the original intentions of the founders of the constitution were for the United States to be a Christian nation. To do so they have to engage with a range of tricks drawn from the revisionist toolbox.

The inestimable Chris Rodda has a series of nine YouTube presentations on her site that are worth watching in full, coolly pointing out the distortions, selective quotations and spurious sensationalisms that are the stock-in-trade of this type of revisionism. One of my favourite moments is when she points to a much-used quotation from a letter from John Adams that suggests that Adams thought that any government was not legitimate without the guidance of the Holy Ghost. The paragraph in which Adams declares that such a view is "all artifice and cunning" is, unsurprisingly, dispensed with, thus making the letter appear to support what it was attacking.

So, if I have any readers left, I suggest you have some fun by watching these presentations in sequence as my lax approach to posting continues. As a taster, here is the first one.

A confession

I have never really liked George Orwell's 1984. It is a clever novel, has given the English language new words and the names for two naff TV shows. It is part of our cultural heritage. It has been substantially misread as everything from a savage criticism of the post-war Labour government (which Orwell supported!) to the BBC. Orwell always claimed that all he was doing was projecting contemporary totalitarian trends into a future dystopia - the clichéd Orwellian nightmare - yet this is where my doubts begin.

There is a standard phrase about taking things to their logical conclusion, which I think is wholly misleading. It is usually used to describe taking things to their extreme conclusion, something that can happen certainly, but also something that is not necessarily logical nor even particularly likely. And this is what Orwell's dystopia does.

I have other doubts too. Each time I have read the book the characters do not come to life for me and I find the the depiction of the working classes faintly patronising. However, it is the cynicism and the bleakness of the conclusion that I really dislike. Everyone can be broken, everyone can betray everyone else, everyone can be made to love Big Brother. Power is unlimited, the future is certain - "a boot stamping on a human face - forever".

All this was brought to mind as I have just finished reading another novel, written and published a year before 1984, also the last work of a writer who died shortly after completing it. It too chronicles a story of failed resistance to totalitarianism, this time loosely based on real events and personal experience, but it offers us a completely different conclusion.

Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is currently a word of mouth best-seller. It is available in a wonderful translation (yes George, I noticed) by Michael Hofmann, allowing both the poetic language of the novel and the use of Berlin street argot to become accessible to English readers. It has the odd clunky bit of plotting and the usual awkward contrivances of the novel. At first, it reads almost as if it is a detective thriller before becoming an essay on morality and the human personality. Yet the book is compulsive, disturbing and, in its way, beautiful.

Fallada's main themes are the resistance to the Nazis by people of all classes, collaboration by people of all classes, and the enthusiastic sadism of the true believer, again drawn from all classes. Centring on the inhabitants of one apartment block in a working class district of Berlin, it deals with low life opportunists, Nazi apparatchiks, those torn between their private lives and a sense of disgust at the crimes of the regime and the all-pervading fear that keeps people quiescent. The action by the main protagonists fails, as was always utterly inevitable, but this is the crucial difference between Fallada and Orwell, they are not broken. They do not come to love Hitler.

And from the disgust of ordinary people like these, a new society can emerge after the inevitable defeat of tyranny. For where Orwell offers us a vision of perpetual power, Fallada gives us one of perpetual resistance. Resistance that will, one day, end the darkness and overcome fear.

At the end of the book he writes of,

...life, invincible life, life always triumphing over humiliation and tears, over misery and death.

Orwell's bleak warning is countered by Fallada's bitter, painful, realistic and fully human hope.

There is one final irony. Fallada invested his hope of the rebirth of an anti-fascist Germany in the Soviet occupied East. He died in 1947 so did not see one totalitarianism morph into another. But then that too, in its turn, has fallen. I think history is on the side of Fallada. And with events elsewhere threatening a surrender to cynicism, it may be time to remember and support the resistance and hope offered by the lives ordinary people.

The heat! The flies!

Nothing much continues to happen here in its own delightful way. Last night was a panygeri for Agia Marina with music and dancing on the paraleia until around two in the morning. It was sandwiched between two minor earthquakes, one of which I slept through and didn't know about until I was told the next day. Tonight was a night for sipping wine on the patio until late. The weather has cooled slightly. At midnight the temperature had dropped below 21C, enough to trigger a state of emergency in England and get any self-respecting Greek reaching for their cardigan.

Great thoughts? There are few of those. In the drowsy heat of day the persistence of the flies in doing their best to irritate you annoys, but the abundant extravagance of life is everywhere, often with the cat chasing it until the shade of the lemon tree tempts it to rest. So, with nothing to say, here is a musical interlude.

A song

The internet may or may not be destroying your concentration span, but it retains the ability to delight. On finishing Sheila Rowbotham's biography of Edward Carpenter, I was struck by her account of how many of his friends and colleagues celebrated his life by singing the socialist anthem that he wrote, England Arise. But what did it sound like?

The words and music are available, but I can't read music and the contemporary feel would be missing. And, once again, the internet comes to the rescue, this time through the Bishopsgate Institute, an adult education centre with an extraordinary collection of radical material (even more apt as Carpenter's career as a radical started with him teaching university extension courses). It has a number of early sound recordings of radical songs including a 1925 recording of England Arise, made four years before Carpenter's death in 1929.

I find the hopeful utopianism of the period both poignant and moving. So click here and, if you like, sing along to the words below:

England, arise! The long, long night is over,
Faint in the East behold the dawn appear,
Out of your evil dream of toil and sorrow –
Arise, O England, for the day is here!
From your fields and hills,
Hark! The answer swells –
Arise, O England, for the day is here!

People of England! All your valleys call you,
High in the rising sun the lark sings clear,
Will you dream on, let shameful slumber thrall you?
Will you disown your native land so dear?
Shall it die unheard –
That sweet pleading word?
Arise, O England, for the day is here!

Over your face a web of lies is woven,
Laws that are falsehoods pin you to the ground,
Labour is mocked, its just reward is stolen,
On its bent back sits Idleness encrowned.
How long, while you sleep,
Your harvest shall it reap?
Arise, O England, for the day is here!

Forth, then, ye heroes, patriots and lovers!
Comrades of danger, poverty and scorn!
Mighty in faith of Freedom, your great Mother!
Giants refreshed in Joy’s new rising morn!
Come and swell the song,
Silent now so long;
England is risen, and the day is here!

Go slow

It is all the fault of the internet of course, it usually is. Apparently, "many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion".

According to The Shallows, a new book by technology sage Nicholas Carr, our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information. Round-the-clock news feeds leave us hyperlinking from one article to the next – without necessarily engaging fully with any of the content; our reading is frequently interrupted by the ping of the latest email; and we are now absorbing short bursts of words on Twitter and Facebook more regularly than longer texts.

So now there is a movement for slow reading to recover the lost arts of contemplation. Not that I ever lost them. I am a slow reader. Naturally and infuriatingly slow. Friends pile through a book, without speed reading techniques, in twice the time I do. They can start discussing the conclusion, whilst I am still on page 150, gazing into space or wondering whether I left the gas on. My slow reading is nothing to do with my superior powers of concentration, it is because I am a slow reader and was one long before the internet ever existed. Given my choice of career, it has not been a blessing.

I must admit that when I am on the internet I commit all the sins mentioned above. I skim and rarely finish articles. That is mainly because it rapidly becomes clear after the first few paragraphs that much of what is on there is deeply tedious, steaming ordure and I have a life. Being a slow reader makes you more intolerant of the time wasted reading rubbish. There are some gems on-line of course and those I read painfully slowly.

So now, on a perfect summer's morning, I shall sink into a chair in the shade on the patio and finish the last couple of chapters of Sheila Rowbotham's excellent biography of Edward Carpenter, a book that I have been reading for a very long time.

Drama

Lot's of exciting things happen here. It's non-stop action all the time.

Like this - Iannis tried to feed his goats on a branch of a tree in the garden, but they weren't interested!
















A day after that someone drove a big machine down our narrow lane to drill for water on their plot of land. Phew!



















Then ... er ... something ... Oh well, whatever it was it was thrilling ...

Another fine mess

There are some things that are predictable. There was little hope that I would look at the the new coalition's emergency budget with anything other than horror. Though I do have a range of critics to call on to support my view. Over in the New York Times Paul Krugman plugs away with increasing exasperation at the new economics of austerity. David Blanchflower launches continual attacks on what he calls, "This unnecessary and dangerous budget". Liberal Keynesians both. I suppose you would expect it from them too.

Now, in measured tones, doubts come from a more orthodox source:

Most advanced economies do not need to tighten before 2011, because tightening sooner could undermine the fledgling recovery, but they should not add further stimulus.

This from the IMF. Yes, Osborne and Alexander's critics now seem to include the IMF.

And as stories begin to crop up like this:

A school which burnt to the ground seven months ago, forcing its pupils to attend lessons in portakabins, was one of hundreds that heard this week that the government had called a halt to its rebuilding plans.

And this:

Millions of pounds intended to be saved by scrapping school building projects could be spent on legal fees as the government faces a spate of litigation from contractors and local authorities.

Not to mention this and this:

The government's new tax and spending watchdog needs urgent reform to establish its independence from George Osborne's Treasury, according to a report today by one of Britain's leading thinktanks.

There is a sense that perhaps all is not as well as might be with our new political partnership. I am beginning to wonder if this is how they got in.

Oops!

It's only rock 'n roll

"...when established politics is dead and trivial, and politicians are demonstrably part of the problem not the solution, culture becomes the only democratising agent."

This from the latest in a long line of superb, angry journalism from Ed Vulliamy on the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. It is about the organisation, War Child, born out of the war in Bosnia, when, as Vulliamy puts it,

... the so-called "international community" responded to this carnage with carefully calculated neutrality. While civilians were raped, incarcerated, "ethnically cleansed" and mass-murdered, the diplomatic community stuck defiantly to a policy of non-intervention beyond a mandate to deliver humanitarian aid. The British were to the fore in ensuring that nothing was done:

It is well worth your time reading the whole piece, a testimony to human resilience and resistance in the face of organised cruelty and international indifference, but here are two snippets. The first from Nigel Osborne, composer and music professor and one of the earliest activists.

"Rock'n'roll, is inherently democratic, whatever is done in its name. Against third-rate politics, in Bosnia and across Europe, we pitched first-rate music. If the local fascist politicians were going to have their speaker system in the John Major government and at the UN, then we were going to have our speaker system too."

And it is not just rock music, Vulliamy recalls,

I remember on my 39th birthday in 1993, after the massacre by shelling of civilians queuing for water in a suburb called Dobrinje, going to a lunchtime concert by the Sarajevo String Quartet in the blacked-out National theatre. The Serbs would usually attack such events, and one mortar landed so close to the theatre that the building shook and the viola player's stand fell over during an especially delicate moment of Haydn's String Quartet in D Major Op. 64, No 5, "The Lark". The first violinist, Dzevad Sabanagic, waited for his colleague to replace the score, called out the number of a bar prior to the interruption, and the quartet played on.

How many divisions have the arts? More than you might imagine.



You see Will, I obeyed.

Hyperbole

Well the 'progressive' coalition that never was, gave way to 'progressive' cuts and now 'progressive' is the word of our times and, never precise in its usage, is now utterly meaningless. But is that 'fair'? It must be because everything else is.

Every day another bit of meaningless verbiage seems to crop up. Today let's raise a cheer for the Blairite contender for the Labour Leadership, Andy Burnham:

Andy Burnham today calls for Labour to exhume its socialist roots and become the party of "aspirational socialism"...

What on earth does that mean? I suppose it is marginally better than the incoherent mess of 'Red Toryism'.

I despair at the linguistic wasteland of government by PR executives, but there is at least some compensation in the news that Vince Cable's new 'department for growth' may well be the first to shrink.

Perfection

Depression

And quite possibly a long one. Paul Krugman thinks so:

Why the wrong turn in policy? The hardliners often invoke the troubles facing Greece and other nations around the edges of Europe to justify their actions. And it's true that bond investors have turned on governments with intractable deficits. But there is no evidence that short-run fiscal austerity in the face of a depressed economy reassures investors. On the contrary: Greece has agreed to harsh austerity, only to find its risk spreads growing ever wider; Ireland has imposed savage cuts in public spending, only to be treated by the markets as a worse risk than Spain, which has been far more reluctant to take the hardliners' medicine.

It's almost as if the financial markets understand what policymakers seemingly don't: that while long-term fiscal responsibility is important, slashing spending in the midst of a depression, which deepens that depression and paves the way for deflation, is actually self-defeating.

So I don't think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the trade-offs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.

Imposing suffering on other people as a sign of leadership? Isn't that a bit harsh? Oh... Here's Frank Field, David Cameron's policy advisor on poverty, and yes he is a Labour MP.

He (Field) suggests that men who refuse to take up a government offer of work should have their benefit removed altogether, a far tougher sanction than they face under the current benefits regime.

To do what is the question that springs to mind. Starve? Beg? Rob? Or take that marvellous career opening in a contracting economy that opens up all the time to people Field describes as "the unmarried father who is often young, unemployed and often unemployable and who is unskilled"? Supply side dogma again. And the sort of community education that can make a big difference to individuals is now facing the looming inevitability of cuts.

Never mind, we can be reassured that this is a centrist government for a non-ideological age. Who better to say so than Tony Blair, who now regrets the time wasted in the first two years of the Labour Government ideologically overturning the work of the Tories (can't quite remember that bit myself).

So sorry Krugman, this isn't the triumph of the ideological preferences of Herbert Hoover, it is just good sense.

Well, at least the neo-liberal weather, brutally imposed on this normally sun-kissed nation by the IMF, has relented and it is now a beautiful day. So I am going to stop wasting my life reading the Guardian on-line and simply enjoy sitting in the shade on my patio. Bollocks to the lot of it, here's a YouTube.

Surprises

Not one here:

The impact of George Osborne's emergency budget on the poor has been revealed in a study that finds the country's least well-off families face cuts equivalent to 21.7% of their household income. That means they will be hit six times harder than the very richest by the coalition's deficit-cutting measures.

A bit of one here from William Keegan if you bought into the Government's 'record deficit' guff:

The Treasury view seems to have been brought back into circulation by Osborne. Most people accept that it was misguided in the early 1930s, when, at the time Neville Chamberlain introduced his deflationary budget of 1932, the national debt amounted to 177% of gross domestic product and debt interest was absorbing as much as 40% of public expenditure. By comparison, the latest Red Book puts debt at 61.9% of GDP in 2010-11 and debt interest at 6.3% of total public expenditure. Yet the way that Osborne goes on about it, you would think things were more like the 1930s.

A bloody great one here, especially if you expected to be annoyingly smug about being in Greece (and it is about to start raining again):

As Britain enjoys a sporting and cultural weekend that will linger in the memory, temperatures are set to eclipse those in Greece today as the country basks in a heatwave.

As for this, totally predictable, even the false hope and the goal that wasn't.

England, for all the exertion, had been a markedly inferior team.

World Cup latest

'Psychic' octopus predicts Germany victory over England

It's the prawn playing the vuvuzela I want to see next.

Green Greece

There was more rain this afternoon. It has left the garden incredibly green for late June in Greece. Now the birds are singing and the cat that comes here demanding food was found asleep on the sofa before being unceremoniously booted out. He is trying to move in. He still got his bowl of food tonight though. There are no great thoughts in my head, not this evening, not after the rain.

A coalition of cuts

There is only one real issue in the UK today and it is ideology. This may seem strange as Britain, with its deeply embedded political self-image of pragmatism and moderation, can often appear to be an ideological wilderness. Today's papers trail the forthcoming emergency budget, no doubt informed by countless confidential briefings. It is being made obvious that it will launch a massive programme of cuts and, whilst they still talk about us all being in it together, clearly some are more in it than others.

Keynesian liberals are appalled. Here's Will Hutton:

No country has ever volunteered such austerity. It is as tough a package of retrenchment as the IMF imposed on Greece, a country on the brink of bankruptcy. It is twice as tough as the famously harsh measures Canada took between 1994 and 1997. It is three times tougher than Sweden's measures between 1993 and 1995. In British terms, it is immeasurably tougher than what we did after the IMF crisis in 1976 or after the ERM crisis in 1992...

We are not in the position of Greece. Britain has a diversified economy. Our cumulative national debt is not large by international standards. Uniquely, the term structure of our debt is very long – around 14 years. Most of this year's debt will be sold to British domiciled individuals and companies, so the international sovereign debt crisis has much less impact on us. The level of interest on the national debt in five years' time as a share of national output is more than manageable. These are the truths about the situation; to claim otherwise creates distrust.

So why do it? Surely, what we are about to see is the dogmatic implementation of the underpinning political economy of contemporary conservatism, borrowing some of the small state hysteria of the American right, though without the paranoia, lumped together with the perceived self-interest of the business elite, but mainly settling into comfortable, thought free, treasury orthodoxy; the final resting place of the complacent.

Those of us who remember the 80's will realise that these moments do not occur in a vacuum, there has to be an international consensus. Thatcher had her Regan, neo-liberalism was in the ascendancy, attempts at Keynesian stimulus failed in France as Mitterand did a comprehensive u-turn. Today much reference is being made to Canada, Sweden and the like who made major structural adjustments, apparently successfully. Except...

One of the most trenchant critics of the current orthodoxy, Paul Krugman, points out in his blog that these cases are not analogous. Instead, he argues in this New York Times op ed "that economic policy around the world has taken a major wrong turn, and that the odds of a prolonged slump are rising by the day".

The other similarity with the Thatcher years is the existence of a crisis in the centre-left. In the early 80's it was the split in the Labour Party and the formation of the Social Democratic Party. Both opposed Thatcherism, but now, following the SDP/Liberal merger to form the Liberal Democrats, part of the former opposition is actually in the coalition government, whilst the Labour Party has lost power after a long period of accommodation with, rather than opposition to, neo-liberal political economy. The ideological sterility of Labour's leadership debate shows little sign of a political movement that can speak for any popular discontent arising from this elite economic consensus.

Whilst looking around for a coherent and informed political opposition and merely finding oneself in an intellectual desert, it is hard to escape pessimism. Krugman again writes that, "The triumph of prejudices over the evidence is a wondrous thing to behold. Unfortunately, millions of workers will pay the price for that triumph." And the last word goes to Will Hutton:

Number 10 and the Treasury believe the worst can be offset by aggressively low interest rates and more quantitative easing. They will work to a degree. But what is proposed still risks everything. Politicians pay the price with lost office. Millions of British will pay a higher price – the needless squandering of their lives.

Bravo Barack

Great choice Obama - but ditch Crete, this is the place to be.

Let them learn salsa

This will sound churlish. A statement from any government minister that sees adult education as anything other than an expensive luxury should be a welcome relief. I know that John Hayes, the Skills Minister, had extensive contacts with adult education organisations when in opposition and, I was assured by others, despite my cynicism, that he actually got it about its significance.

He certainly seems to given this reported statement:

Taking evening classes improved adults' physical and mental health, encouraged them back into work and helped build tight communities, the minister said. "[The classes] aren't just about utility in its narrowest sense," he said. "There are a lot of studies that show the beneficial effect adult education has on health and social interactions."

He also gets it about the utility of non-vocational learning. But, and there is always a but, he is a Tory and ultimately this is translated into a curious amalgam of a lack of substance in terms of policy and a sense of the absurd.

Hayes said courses such as dance or flower arranging were "arguably more important" in times of financial constraint because they made people happy.

So, after New Labour's commitment to make lifelong learning central to the new 'knowledge economy' (and then trashing it), we now see adult education advocated as a new opiate of the masses. Flower arranging as a compensation for losing your job. It isn't convincing, reflects a stereotype of the enormous variety of activities that fell under the lifelong learning banner, whilst the creation of a happy subservience doesn't encompass the vision that made so many of us give our working lives to adult education, before departing with some bitterness and a severance payment.

How to be a nuisance

Go here whenever anyone is enjoying a bit of peace and quiet and turn those speakers up. They work like this you know.

UPDATE

This is even worse.

(Ta Will)