Tony Blair: Regrets, I've had a few... or one anyway, and it's a shocker.

Some time late last week Tony Blair was on the radio for some reason that I cannot now remember.  I’ve tried to find the interview on the Today Programme’s schedules on its website, but I can’t.  The only thing I can think of is that it was perhaps an old recording of Blair dating to the publication of his “memoirs” almost exactly a year ago.  (I’m putting “memoirs” in inverted commas here, by the way, specifically for Tony Blair.  Of course, all human memories are imperfect, all are interpretative, selective, or inaccurate in some way and to some degree or another, but I like to think that most people are basically honest and doing their best, however imperfectly, to remember things as they really were.  I assume therefore that most people, if they write their recollections about their lives or careers, write memoirs.  As for Tony Blair, however: he has never to my knowledge knowingly spoken the truth about anything in his entire life, unless it happened to coincide with his interests and designs, and seems capable only of constructing or in this sense reconstructing reality only inasmuch as it suits him or his ends in some way or another, so I am calling Tony Bliar’s memoirs “memoirs”.)  Anyway, I digress, and I apologise for the absence of the aforementioned contextual details, but they are really not that important anyway.  And I apologise if this is basically a year behind the times, although I’m sure many would agree that it never hurts to remind ourselves of the mendacity of Blair.  So, anyway, whether Tony Blair said it (again) last week or whether last week I was reminded of what he said a year ago, what’s important is what Tony Blair said and what Tony Blair said was this: the thing that he regrets the most about his premiership is the ban on foxhunting.  Let me repeat that.  The thing that he regrets the most about his premiership is the ban on foxhunting. 

I repeated that because it is impossible, utterly impossible, for a normal, decent human being to assimilate the moral implications of these words in merely one reading.  Those implications are simply too immense and too appalling to take in without reading them at least twice.  It is also impossible for any normal, decent human being to comprehend the fullness of their implications straight away.  When I heard those words, I had to repeat them, albeit perhaps in paraphrase, back to myself a number of times, and I had to spend a considerable period thinking about them, in an attempt, perhaps as yet futile, quite possibly ultimately futile, to think my way all the way around their moral enormities.  I knew right away there was something terribly wrong going on, but it took a long time to take in the fullness of the wrongness.  So, before going any further with this post (if you’re still reading it, then you have obviously not yet abandoned it in exasperation at ever knowing what my point is, though I would not have blamed you for having done so), but, as I say, before going any further, abandon your screen, make a nice cup of tea, or coffee if you’re a foreign Johnnie, and think through as far as you can, short of causing yourself mental injury, obvs, what Tony Blair said: that the thing he regrets the most about his premiership is the ban on foxhunting.  The thing he regrets the most about his premiership is the ban on foxhunting.  Right, go on, off you go. 

Back?  Good.  Right, I’m going to say it one more time: the thing Tony Blair regrets the most about his premiership is the ban on foxhunting.  That is to say, he does not regret the most, or indeed at all, as he has several times insisted, the wanton error of believing in Saddam’s phantom weapons of mass destruction just because he soooooooo wanted to believe in them and have a war in Iraq and show the President of the United States his bum.  Just the other day the former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller (yay, some relevance), revealed yet more evidence that Blair followed instinct on Iraq to the extent of defying evidence—as we all know well enough already—and as none of Blair’s self justifications will ever make us un-know.  Nor indeed does he regret the most that this act of staggering incompetence and irresponsibility has led to hundreds of thousands of military and civilian deaths, hundreds of thousands of deaths, deaths of human beings, human deaths, hundreds of thousands of them, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of other people who have been physically and psychologically wounded.  Nor the fact that this deadly goose-chase distracted from the business of holding to account those who actually were responsible for the 9/11 atrocity, which was really where all this began.  No regret that the Iraq war allowed Osama bin Laden to live nearly a decade after committing mass murder, that the Taliban are still running riot in Afghanistan, that there are Muslims all around the world, including within Britain, who are motivated (however wrongly) to murder their fellow citizens because the Iraq attack made them feel that it was actually an attack on them.  No, not these things; not these things, no.  What Tony Blair regrets the most about his premiership is saving foxes from being hunted with dogs.  Yes, what Tony Blair regrets the most about his premiership is saving foxes from being hunted with dogs.

I find it surreal, almost unbelievable, that Tony Blair actually regrets that he has saved many thousands of animals from ritualised slaughter, from being hideously killed through the process of being torn to pieces by crazed dogs under the charge of even-more crazed men and women who chase these beautiful animals while tooting absurd horns and wearing ridiculous costumes.  He regrets that.  He regrets that!  That is something that he regrets!  Actually regrets.  And not only does he regret that, but he regrets it more than he regrets anything else in his premiership.  That is, he regrets saving these beautiful animals from dogs and cruel lunatics more than he regrets the hundreds and thousands of needless human deaths he directly and personally caused through his stupidity, rashness, and hubristic insistence that he was right about Saddam’s weapons and that all the experts were wrong.  If that is so, and it is so, however incredible it may be seem, then he is truly one of the most amoral men ever to have lived.  Not immoral as such.  Not evil.  But nevertheless a man completely blind to the significance of his actions, a man who is thus completely incapable of understanding the gravity of what he has done, of seeing the consequences of his actions in any sort of rational and indeed decent perspective.  It appears indeed that he is some kind of off-the-autism-scale moral unrelativist who can only judge the events he put into motion by a calculus of how it somehow affected him, rather than by the calculus of pain caused to others, as admittedly incalculable as that may be.  Sadly, therefore, it seems he is a man who will never be able truly to regret anything he has done, not in any recognisably sensible way.  So there is certainly no chance that whatever severely attenuated and probably in fact in his case non-existent part of his brain that we might call his “conscience” will be as tortured as it certainly ought to be by the truly terrible things he has done. 

Niall Ferguson, Niall Schmerguson.

6 May 2013 update.

So Niall Ferguson has recently got himself in trouble for some ill-considered remarks about how John Maynard Keynes was a poor economist because, being gay, he didn't have children and therefore didn't care about the future.  He has since apologised, a good gesture, but one that is somewhat undermined by the fact that, according to many, he has a lot of form for this supposedly out-of-character and spontaneous outburst.  Others have criticised his qualities as an economist, despite his abilities as a historian.  In this old post below I point out that at least on occasion he's also a very poor historian.... 

First, the recent story and his apology: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/04/niall-ferguson-apologises-gay-Keynes

Then, the old post (September 2011).

There’s obviously going to be a lot of guff as well as sensible stuff said about 9/11 in the course of this 10^th anniversary week of that hideous atrocity, but I doubt we’ll see anything more ludicrous than Niall Ferguson’s counterfactual on the day and its consequences, linked below, or, in counter-fact, of the day that didn’t happen and the consequences of that.  This bunch of insupportable assumptions dressed up as a logical and likely chain of events following from the fictional foiling of the 9/11 plot--which just happen to show that Bush-Blair invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were right and a Kerry presidency would have been a catastrophe--is so full of holes that it is in fact a hole.  And yet, even while concocting this far-fetched and yet simplistic series of supposedly inter-locking unlikelihoods, he has the nerve to talk about “historical process” and how “the world is a seriously complex place, and a small change to the web of events can have huge consequences.”  My guess is that Ferguson’s brain must be an irony-free zone, a torpid lump in fact of nothing other than humourless right-wing dogma.  But, above all, what's he ultimately saying?  That he's glad 9/11 happened?  That’s certainly the implication, whether he noticed that or not.  I suspect he didn't.

Dispiritingly, as with David Starkey (see previous post, if you want to), this kind of thing doesn't but should turn the media off him—and it would if only we lived a society that valued rational and intelligent discussion enough to refuse to tolerate a market-driven-mad media that prefers to make money than to make sense.  (Now there’s a counter-factual for you.)  But, in actual fact, because most of the media, the mainstream of it anyway, is indeed a market-driven, advertising-revenue-seeking monster, it is therefore a massive-twat-generator, serving up braying media whores like Starkey and Forge who, as they up their own antes, are prepared to disgorge ever-more outrageous and therefore attention-grabbing spew in order to do nothing more valuable than advance their personal fame and fortune. 

And it makes me quite angry, in case you didn’t notice. 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/09/04/what-if-9-11-had-never-happened.html

   

A review of a bottle-opener, or decapsuleur.

In the last post but one I was saying about how great it is to laugh at and be laughed at by foreigners.  And that reminded me of a bottle-opener that pokes fun at the British that I saw in a shop in France this summer. A bottle-opener, I have to say, of such crassness that I stood staring at it for several moments, transfixed in astonishment at the totality of horror before me. Then I took a photo of it, which I've since lost, but I found another picture of the dubious product that I have posted here for you to stare at in awe. Go on, take a look at it. A good, long look. Study it. Study it closely. Go on. Feel my pain. 

So there it is.  A bottle-opener, a decapsuleur, mounted on a plank of wood upon which is printed several icons humorously representing Britishness. Or not humorously, depending on your point of view, and your age, and intelligence. It’s harmless enough, to be sure, not offensive in anything except an aesthetic sense. It is clearly not xenophobic or nasty in that kind of way. If anything it seems to come from a nice place, a place where one has a little harmless guffaw and nothing more at the foibles of foreigners. I should also be clear at this point that, whatever I may say about this decrapsuleur, I am a huge fan of almost all things French. I’m presuming, by the way, having failed to observe the bottle-opener’s provenance when I stood in a kind of reverie before it, that it’s a French creation and made for a French market, as it has the word “Decapsuleur” written across the top. On the other hand, it might have been made by a British company for a French market, although it also looks like something that might well go on the wall of ex-pat bar for the burbling delectation of excessively sun-tanned beer-bellied Britons. Whatever the case, it either shows how some French people imagine Britain, or it shows how some Brits imagine the French imagine Britain. And as the manufacturer, whether French or British, wants to sell these things, and as the French shopkeepers who buy them wholesale want to sell them too, whether to the French or to the British, we can safely assume they’ve all done their homework and that this thing reflects an amusingly purchasable version of Britishness in the minds of whoever the potential customers are. Indeed, I’ve seen all the icons or things like them on souvenirs reflecting Britain before, and so they clearly sell. And yet the way some of them are rendered at least in this particular instance is, in my opinion, really quite astoundingly appalling, although I think it’s perhaps the combination of all the images together that renders this bottle-opener such a catastrophic failure of taste. Let’s take each part of the thing one-by-one on its own merits, or, in fact, demerits, and then conclude with some overall observations about the whole horrendous melange.

The Union Jack that covers the backdrop of the little plank is fine. Indeed Union flags, especially slightly weather-beaten-effect ones like this one, are everywhere at the moment, and seem to be very much the thing of the season in the world of soft furnishings, for example, especially cushions.  Then there are some references to lager and bitter, and this is where things start to get distressing.  Okay, I suppose we Brits are indeed famous for liking our beer, although so is pretty much everyone else in the European family, and yet, to be fair, more singularly perhaps, we Brits do indeed distinguish beer by the names of lager and bitter. But simply writing the words “LAGER” and “BITTER” seems a little unimaginative to say the least. Couldn’t they have printed a picture of a couple of bottles or something a bit more interesting? And so the same with “ENGLISH PUB”, also in capitals but in even larger letters underneath. I mean, what the fuck is that about? Whatever it is, it’s just not good enough. I would not have the effrontery for example to produce a French-inspired souvenir and be so lazy as just to write PARISIAN CAFE on it. That would just be such an absymal insult to people’s intelligence as to deserve violent retribuition. I need a break. 

Okay, back. Then, after “ENGLISH PUB”, we have a complete change of theme where it says “Lord Brian”.  Yes, “Lord Brian”, right after the beer and pub references. Where did he suddenly come from, whoever the hell he’s supposed to be? Okay, whatever, let’s try anyway to make some sort of sense of “Lord Brian”. Right, Britain has its aristocrats and its House of Lords, okay, yes, yes, and Brian is a funny name, with Pythonesque connotations, as in “Life of Brian”, which is certainly a quintessentially British thing. And I suppose that the combination of “Lord” and the slightly risible name of “Brian” amusingly evokes the kind of in-bred gormlessness that the British aristocracy do better than anyone else to the east of Appalachia. So “Lord Brian” does kind of make sense, although it still seems to me a bit weird and random. The small crown underneath is, admittedly, a bit of a better effort. It at least relates to “Lord Brian” and thereby restores some sense of thematic coherence that was lost somewhere after “LAGER”, “BITTER”, and “ENGLISH PUB”, royalty being at the head of the famous British class system so unimaginatively represented by “Lord Brian”. And at least it’s a picture, as if whichever one of the gang of goofballs who happened to be responsible for this little bit of the bottle-opener had a sudden attack of shame and decided the least he could do was insert a modicum of effort into his or her part of this egregious endeavour. Then there’s the Bulldog, with its head tilted slightly sideways, presumably for extra funniness. Again, though, at least it’s a picture, not just the word “BULLDOG” printed mindlessly and in shouty capitals across the middle of the plank. It's as ugly as hell, though, although that’s appropriate enough for a bulldog, so some marks for authenticity there.  Then, however, finally, we have it: the coup de merde. Under the dog, it says, almost, “God Save the Queen”, except—oh no!—it doesn't!—it actually says “Dog Save the Queen”! Haaaaa! See what they did there? Fnerrrk!  Dog—DOG—Save the Queen! Dog! God backwards, see? Dog-God! Under a picture of a dog! See?!  See?! Hahahahahaaarrrggghhhnnn....  

Okay, so, to conclude, some of the features of this bottle-opener are fine, others are at least explicable, but others still are an absolute disgrace in terms of either conceptualisation or realisation or both. But does that explain the fullness of the badness of this decapsuleur? No, I don’t think it does. I think the full measure of its evil is to be found in the combination of all the features together in one place, on one single hapless item, in the synergy of awfulness, in the perfect storm of tastelessness, and in the lazy randomness of the combination. “LAGER”, “BITTER” and “ENGLISH PUB” are related to each other. “Lord Brian” and the crown are related to each other. And these are at least a little bit related to the saving of the queen and the tragic, hapless dog. But there is still a terrible sense of a jumble. It’s as if someone has decided that one aspect of Britishness is not enough anymore, not a sufficient blow to the senses to make a satisfactory souvenir, and that in order to sell something as British-ish you have to pile up chaotic heaps of incoherent representation. Or else someone of no discernment, some sort of gurning imbecile undoubtedly, has gruntingly gorged on some random morsels of British culture, has gulped them down without tasting them, has half-digested them, and has then lowered his arse down and shat them all out again onto a small piece of wood. I’m tempted to say it’s so bad that it’s good, but it isn’t. It’s bad, it’s just bad.     
                  

A joke about Germans that isn't about the war

In my last post, about David Mitchell, Adolf Hitler, and laughing at foreigners, I mentioned how German and Austrians friends get understandably tired of how the British seem to associate their countries so often and so much with the Nazis and World War II.  Then I remembered a joke I heard not so long ago that's about Germans but not about either the Nazis or the war.  And so, in the interests of international cultural understanding and good relations, I am posting the joke herewith....  

A British couple have a baby boy.  And after the birth the doctor tells them, look, okay, the baby’s fine—no problems—but I should tell you, just so you know, that your baby is German.  So the couple are a bit confused about what this means, but they’re okay about it and they go home and everything is fine, except that after a while they notice that the boy is not talking.  By the time he’s four years old they get worried as he’s about to start school, and so they go back to the doctors and the doctors check the boy over very thoroughly but find that he's perfectly fine, and tell the couple that, yes, he's German, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with him and he will learn to talk in his own good time.  So the years go by and the boy doesn’t talk, and every now and then the couple take him to the doctors and every time the doctors say the same thing: he’s German, but he’s fine, be patient, he’ll talk one day.  Then, one day, when he’s 17, the kid is having lunch, and he says to his mother, “Mother, this soup is a little tepid.”  And the mum swings around and says “WHAT?”  And the kid says, “This soup is a little tepid.”  And the mum says, “No. Never mind the soup. You spoke! For the first time in your life, you spoke! Oh my God! Why now? Why haven’t you spoken in all these years, all these seventeen years??!!”  And the kid says, “Because up until now, everysing has been satisfactory".  

Everysing has been
satisfactory