Ooh, ha ha, look at the French economy! (Don't look at the British one!)

There has been a lot of France-bashing lately. One notable recent example involved Andy Street, boss of Penguinosexual retail outfit John Lewis. And there’s another one in today’s Sunday Telegraph. Here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11218338/Life-in-France-Now-is-our-winter-of-discontent.html

Let’s leave the Street incident behind, in part because his words reveal him to be a ludicrous buffoon who deserves no further attention, and in part because although the other one comes from the Telegraph and would normally therefore deserve exactly the same amount of further attention, it is actually written by a French person, namely Anne-Elisabeth Moutet. We can therefore be sure that the opinions therein are not merely the unpleasant emissions of a xenophobe, and we can take them seriously as a genuine critique of the state of things. Moutet is very clearly a Sarkozist, an ultra-Sarkozist, actually. Her one criticism of the former and probably next President of the Republic is that his “reforms and cuts” were “timid”. Her critique, then, is an ideological one, not a bigoted one. Great, good, and fine, but it doesn’t make it a truthful one.

That’s not to say there isn’t truth in some of Moutet's words. François Hollande is, she writes, “a graduate of the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), the incestuous, elite civil service school that shapes most French political and economic leaders.” Fair enough. And, apart from the risible comparison to an unelected, despotic Soviet regime, she may be right that “The Brezhnevian intricacies of the tight circles of power in France” in which the “énarque” Hollande “only hired other énarques in his cabinet” and “even narrowed it down to giving three dozen top jobs to the friends he had made in his very own ENA class, between 1978 and 1980” is a serious problem for France.

Yet there is also contradiction and confusion here, as her support for David Cameron is apparently undiminished by the Bullingdonian intricacies of the tight circles of power in England, in which the Etonarque Cameron only hired his chums from Eton and Oxford (apart from the one who went to Westminster school and who the others thus call oik, and never mind that the British private school elite is by all accounts a good deal more “incestuous” than the French ENA one).

There is also omission and the trickeries it tries to hide. While Moutet is right that the French have a problem with too many voters attracted to the far right, including many working-class voters, she nevertheless makes no mention of Britain’s identical problem. Presumably because the explanation may at least in part be that Hollande and self-styled Blairite Manuel Valls have lost touch with their grassroots supporters in the same ways that Tony Blair and Ed Miliband have. By moving to the right. But, of course, pointing out that there is no genuinely socialist alternative to the main parties in their modern centre-right manifestations does not fit well in a thesis that blames the Left for the popularity of the Far Right.

There is also, if you’ll excuse the technical terminology, total bullshit. Such as Moutet's claim that “The French, especially in the public sector, go on strike on the flimsiest of pretexts.” No. No they don’t. No one gives up pay, inconveniences others, and risks their jobs on “the flimsiest of pretexts.” Not even the French. They may strike more often than the British, though not as often as many British and even some French people think they do. But when they do, it’s to stop their wages and working conditions being driven down to, say, British levels. And that's no flimsy pretext at all. Moutet may not like their 35-hour weeks, decent pay, and job security, but most French people who have them seem to like them very much indeed.

I could go on and on in the vein of the above, and a Sarkozist could go on and on rebutting me, and we could both could go on and on in an endless cycle of reciprocally unconvincing interpretations of the facts as each of us sees them. But my main point here is not about facts anyway; it’s about tropes. Because what Moutet does in this article is pile up exactly the same tropes about the French economy and French society that British French-bashers so often do. And not just the xenophobic British. These tropes are repeated so often that they have become truisms even among thoughtful British people. Which of course is exactly the point of rhetorical tropes. They are axes that you grind until they eventually become axioms. The tropes, the axioms, are these. That France is a soviet republic (if you think I’m exaggerating, I refer you back to the Brezhnev reference). That the French go on strike for the “flimsiest of reasons”, despite only working 35 hours a week and enjoying “golden contracts”. And that for these reasons France has higher unemployment and lower economic growth than Britain, France is sclerotic, France has no future, and the French are angry and alienated.                   

I’ve addressed the first and second of these points already and my imaginary Sarkozist interlocutor and I could argue them out all day long. In any case, they’re only the premises for the final and concluding points, the ones about economic performance and the future. And it’s these conclusions that really matter, despite the disproportionate amount of time the French-bashers spend on the premises. In fact, the reason the French-bashers spend so much time on the premises is probably precisely because their conclusions are so very shaky they can’t stand up on their own. Let's look at them a little bit.

First, yes, Britain’s unemployment is lower. (Slightly.) Because successive British governments, the current one and its supposedly leftist Labour Party predecessor, have colluded with business interests in driving down wages (and simultaneously legally disabling trades’ unions so they can get away with it), to the point that many British people with jobs still require state welfare and Big Society food banks to survive. (So much for the anti-statism of the right.)

Second, yes, Britain has higher economic growth. (Slightly. For now.) Because Britain has sold off or is selling off its public infrastructure to the same private sector that is impoverishing poorer working people. And privatisation is even impoverishing the better-off as well. Take my own university sector. British students now pay £9000 a year in tuition fees, and that, plus their maintenance costs and years of lost income when studying, will impoverish large sections of the future middle classes. Except those whose parents are rich enough to pay for their educations for them. And except for those who never earn enough to repay their universities, leaving a massive black hole where the British Higher Education system used to be.

France is sclerotic? The sclerotic metaphor always amuses me, given its implications of poor circulation and movement. Which brings me to transport. Some French-bashers have actually started criticising the French transport system and other of the nation's essential services. Take Moutet: “the country's vaunted infrastructure – trains, even the electrical grid – has started falling apart, because maintenance is neglected in favour of paying a workforce with golden contracts.” Well, the French transport system may not be perfect, but it is not falling apart and it still makes Britain’s look like that of a fourth-world country of centuries ago. You can get caught in traffic jams in France, my home city of Lyon is notorious for it, but you can often drive around for weeks without seeing road works. As opposed to Britain, where you have to allow two hours to go to the bog in case they’ve coned off your hallway. Again. I commute to work on a E1.50 ticket for Lyon's integrated transport network that lets me use all the buses, trams, metros, and trains I can get on and off of in an hour if I feel like it. And the buses, trams, metros, trains, and stations are clean and safe. And there hasn’t been a strike in the 10 weeks I’ve been here. All thanks to the ministrations of a combined state-run and state-regulated private economy. In Britain, on the other hand, it costs a billion pounds for a ten-hour, two-mile journey in a filthy, stinking train full of vomiting drunks that you will thankfully avoid anyway because the service has been cancelled. Again. All thanks to the non-ministrations of a privatised sector in which maintenance is neglected in favour of paying shareholders with golden bonuses. Also, I’d like to ask Moutet who owns much of the privatised British electrical grid. Why, it’s EDF, the French state-run energy corporation.

France has no future? France has its poor people, for sure, but it still has a large well-paid and job-secure working class. If you don’t believe me, I refer you back to Moutet’s and others’ complaints about the over-paid and overly-secure French working class. Also, French students pay about £200-300 a year in tuition fees. Not a big problem for most to pay off. These working- and aspiring middle-class people are the future consumers of the French economy. That's the same future in which more and more British working-class people will not spending money but will be begging for survival at food banks. And the same future in which British middle-class people are not spending the money they earn because so much of it gets deducted to pay off their student debts. And as well as cash, the French people of the future will have capital, because the French state hasn’t sold all the country’s infrastructure off to the greedy and the can’t-be-arsed-to-maintain-or-fix-it. For those bits it has sold off, it forces private buyers to look after workers and service users, rather than sacrifice them for the sake of the limitless greed of shareholders and in fetishistic pursuit of deregegulation. So, France is poorer than Britain for now. But France’s future looks fine once the current economic slump is over (which, lest we forget, was caused by unregulated private enterprise, not by the state or by the poor who the Cameronites and Sarkozists and their many supporters in the media seek so hard to blame). Britain’s future, on the other hand, can most charitably be described as post-apocalyptic.

The French are angry and alienated? Yes, many of them are. And often with good reason. But, also, anger and alienation are the political default positions of the French. Which I think is a good thing, on the whole. Unless they vote in a Presidente Le Pen, in which case it’s a terrible thing. I just hope the Left gets itself organised and recovers enough if not all of those voters who think Le Pen is the only answer to the problems of the many who are unemployed or who aren’t well-enough paid and who don’t have "golden contracts". But I’ll bet even these French people aren’t half as angry and alienated as many Britons are going to be, when those Britons stop reading those distracting articles about how France is a soviet republic, that the French are overpaid, underworked, and always on strike, that France has higher unemployment and lower growth than Britain, that France is sclerotic, that France has no future, and that the French are angry and alienated. When they finally look away from all these “look-over-there, not-over-here” tropes and notice what has become of … Britain.  

 

Kubla Cam. Or, a vision in a dream. A Frackment.

I originally did this as "A poem for the Right Dishonourable David Cameron, 'pon the occasion of his appearance before my Lord Leveson. Apologies to the wonderful Samuel Taylor Coleridge."  I now revise it slightly as "A poem for the Right Dishonourable David Cameron, 'pon the occasion of his indebtedness to his fracking friends, and the unrelated £500,000 paid by them unto the fracking Tory Party, and other sundry accomplishments." 

Kubla Cam. 

Or, a vision in a dream. A Frackment. 

In Bullingdon did Kubla Cam

A stately restaurant destroy:

Where Barf, the lumpy river, ran,

And damage measureless to normal man

Was nothing to Bozzer, me, and Oik.

So 10 Downing Street is fertile ground

From walls and towers gilded round:

Outwith were gardens with sinuous drills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And there were forests ancient as the hills,

We vend to fracking friends with glee.

But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A fracking place! As holy and enchanted

By tory wailing for her demon-giver

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was fracked:

Amid whose swift half-intermittent burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

And chavvy grain beneath the fracker’s flail:

And ’mid these dancing rocks once and ever

It stank up momently the sacred river. 

Five miles meandering with mazy motion

Throught wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the money measureless to normal man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

And ’mid this tumult Cam heard from France

Avaricious voices Totally prophesying cash!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From underneath the jubilee,

It was miracle of enterprise,

A darken'd dome where sleep and freeze

Those I force to work for free!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of asylum hope’d for.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such deep delight ’twould win me

That with music loud and long

I could build that dome in air,

But instead I sent the scrounger home

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashman eyes, his floppy hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on you and me hath fed
And fracked the milk of Paradise.

Employability (again). It’s not about jobs: it’s about “embedding entrepreneurial thinking in your curriculum.” That's a quote.

Just over a year ago I wrote a blog post about how I was required to spend an hour-long seminar in a history course at my university to teach CVs.  This was my department’s way of conforming to the government’s “Employability Agenda”, which pushes a version of “employability” into academic curricula.  The post is here.  http://sonofsar.blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00Z&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00Z&max-results=19

A shorter version of the post appeared in the Times Higher Education in March 2013.  Here it is: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/employability-agenda-isnt-working/2002639.article

The THE article in particular evoked some agreement and some critical comment, most of the latter taking one of two lines.  The first and most hostile one claimed that I did not care about students’ job prospects.  I had in fact made clear that I actively support students’ with their employment prospects by clearly explaining  the “transferable skills” I teach on their courses, by spending as much time as students ask for discussing their futures, and by writing the best letters of reference I can.  But such things are often lost on the ideologically enraged.  The second and friendlier line of comment focused on ways in which the embedding of employability that I described could be made a bit softer.

Ironically, it was the first line of commentary that got closest to my point (hence, I suppose, its hostility).  That is, that “employability” is not so much about getting students jobs as about ideologically indoctrinating them to accept modern corporate-capitalist practices as normal.  Now, to be clear, I have no doubt about the perfect good faith of most of my colleagues who are involved in implementing employability in the curriculum, including the one, someone I like and admire very much, who devised the CV seminar.  I just think they’re wrong in thinking that employability is a benign or at least apolitical mission to help students get jobs. 

In the above post and article I made the following points in support of the case that “employability” is actually highly political.  Not party-political (indeed it was introduced by New Labour and has simply been continued by the Conservatives and the other party they’re in government with, the ones who made a cast-iron promise to abolish fees and thereby remove one of the foundation stones of the privatisation and corporatisation of higher education).  But political in the sense that it serves a broader pro-corporate-capitalist ideological agenda by using academic courses to normalise modern corporate business practices and to encourage students to adopt such key facets of ideal modern corporate employee behaviour as interpersonal competition as the means of individual advancement, as opposed, say, to unionism as a means to collective advancement and the general social good.  Or some other set of values that might emerge from universities, were they to continue with their traditional emphasis on free-thinking rather than adopting the employability agenda’s focus on free-market thinking.

I pointed out, for example, that responsibility for universities no longer lies with the Department of Education, but with the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills, and that’s where the “employability agenda” originates.  That if “employability” was about jobs, rather than about using education as a form of indoctrination, universities would be encouraged to invest more in Careers Offices, which employ experts in … employability, rather than being encouraged to “embed” in academic curricula what are actually very particular interpretations of what “employability” is, and that are quite different from the un-ideologically-driven “transferrable skills” that academics have always taught, such as grammar, how to structure an argument, and … critical thinking.  And that indeed the whole clunky vocabulary of modern corporatism (including words like “embed”) is the very language of the “employability” agenda.  (For more on that, see this other post: http://sonofsar.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/cascading-emails-or-bizguistics-and.html.)

You can see these points developed via the links above.  The point of this post is, after admitting that many were unconvinced by my argument that “employability” is deeply political in its inspiration and implications, is to add another piece of evidence that I hope some will find more convincing. 

The other day all staff in my university received an email entitled “Understanding and embedding entrepreneurial thinking in your curriculum.” The email identified its audience as follows: “Target Group – All Staff, particularly those involved in curriculum or module design or employability.”  The email offered “a three day course for any member of staff who wants to be able to embed entrepreneurial thinking … into their existing curriculum, and in doing so prepare their students for the highly changeable, flexible and challenging workplaces of the future.” The course would be “delivered by Professor [Xxxxx Xxxxx], an expert in driving the move towards the Entrepreneurial University.” 

The agenda--“to embed entrepreneurial thinking in your curriculum”—could hardly be more clear or explicit.  True, it is voluntary at the moment, at least for academics if not for the students subsequently taught by the ones who volunteer to learn “to embed entrepreneurial thinking.”   But given what this email indicates about how the “employability agenda” is moving forward, so to speak, I wonder how long before such courses are compulsory.  I’ve been told, for example, that I must repeat the CV seminar I first blogged about.  I will because I must, involuntarily.

  

Anyway, contrast the idea of embedding “entrepreneurial thinking in your curriculum” with how most of us in the past were presented with the idea and the point of our higher education.  When I went to university I hoped and was assured that its purpose was to open my mind, to learn critical thinking skills, to think about how the world might be different.  Yes, I would hopefully get a good job afterwards, and I did, but I was never told and never wanted to be told that that was the main point of my education.  And certainly not that I was going to be embedded with entrepreneurialism.  Those who want to be “entrepreneurial” have plenty of chances to be so.  There’s ample opportunity and incentive to become so outside universities, and universities do not stop people being so.  My university education did not try to make me oppose “entrepreneurial thinking”, but nor did it indoctrinate me to accept it.  It was about opening minds, not about closing minds by embedding particular systems of thought.

As for preparing students for the “highly changeable, flexible and challenging workplaces of the future….”: is it now literally the business of higher education to encourage students to accept as givens such modern flexibilities as unpaid internships, zero-hours contracts, short-term contracts, and all the other Dickensian violations of working people’s rights, interests, and well-being that modern corporations have been entrepreneurially bringing back?  Are our students expected to accept these things for themselves, or are we to teach them that it’s fine to impose these conditions on others while pocketing colossal bonuses for doing so?  Are they to be taught, perhaps in Development Studies modules, that when workplaces become too “changeable, flexible and challenging” for first-world legal systems, these conditions can still be imposed on workers in poorer countries whose governments have more entrepreneurial attitudes to pay, conditions, and death  in the workplace?  Are new Geography modules going to focus on identifying off-shore tax havens?  How far will all this go?  The above may seem fanciful to some, but all of these examples of entrepreneurialism are practiced by the same people who are driving the employability/entrepreneurship agenda in our universities.     

If things keep going as they are, then what will soon become fanciful is the idea of teaching students to question the very idea of “highly changeable, flexible and challenging workplaces”.  Of teaching students to think about what “highly changeable, flexible and challenging workplaces” do to individuals, families, communities, societies, and countries.  And of teaching students to think about alternatives to “highly changeable, flexible and challenging workplaces.”  Some of us still engage in this kind of open-minded teaching and learning, but will it still be possible to do so when “the move towards the Entrepreneurial University” is completed? 

     

On complaints to the BBC about the coverage of the death of Nelson Mandela, by fans of the sitcom Mrs. Brown's Boys

Apparently some 850 people have complained to the BBC about the corporation’s coverage of the news of the death of Nelson Mandela, many of them apparently upset by the initial announcement forcing them to miss the last ten minutes of utterly inexplicable and indescribably execrable sitcom Mrs. Brown’s Boys.  What I find most dispiriting about these situations, though, is how the BBC usually defaults to cringe-mode, taking such complaints seriously, as if the kind of people who make them should actually be taken seriously.  I wish sometimes the BBC would give a bit of aggro back to those who give it to them, and do so because they assume the BBC won’t give it back.  I therefore offer the following as a form-letter the BBC might send as a response to Mrs. Brown’s Boys boys (I expect most of them are boys).
  

The letter might also serve at least as an attitudinal template for responses to attacks the BBC is all too frequently subjected to by the usual subjects. Namely, the minions of the Murdoch press, ever eager to attack a national treasure in order to pay obeisance to their lord and master, their press-baron Skeletor, and the wild-eyed, mad-haired, port-reeking, saloon-bar Tory-boors, ever eager to immortalise their imbecility in Hansard. 

Anyway, here’s the letter.

Dear Viewer,

We are sorry* you feel discommoded by our coverage of the death of Nelson Mandela.  However, Mr. Mandela spent 27 years in prison and then became the first black and indeed democratic president of South Africa, and did more for the cause of human freedom than anyone else in our time.  We therefore felt that the passing of this great icon of justice was a more urgent and significant matter than your desire to watch the last 10 minutes of Mrs. Brown’s Boys.  We thus stand by our decision, and we suggest, furthermore, that you really ought to get a fucking grip.

Yours sincerely,
The BBC

*Not sorry

The Gettysburg Address & Abraham Lincoln’s debt to Daniel Webster

If you’ve clicked on this blog post then there’s a good chance you’ll already know that today is the 150^th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s delivery of his Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the memorial to those who died at the three-day Pennsylvania battle in July 1863.  Even by the fabulous standards of American oratory, it’s a corker. Here it is, and below that are a few uncharacteristically brief words by me about a few lesser-known aspects of the great speech’s intellectual provenance.

            “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

            Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

            But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”    

[There are actually several slightly different text versions of the speech, but the above is the most commonly cited one, and is the one inscribed on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, and on display in the Lincoln Room of the White House. It’s named after Colonel Alexander Bliss, who asked Lincoln for a copy to use when fundraising for soldiers and for whom Lincoln wrote and signed it in 1864.]

What’s well enough known about the Gettysburg Address is its invocation of the US Declaration of Independence.  Four score and seven years ago in 1863 was 1776, when indeed the Continental Congress brought forth a new nation in a declaration that said indeed that all men are created equal and entitled to liberty. Also: life and the pursuit of happiness.  What’s less well known, at least today (if not in 1863), is the speech’s invocation of the US Constitution (drafted in 1787, ratified in 1788, and put into effect in 1789).  And the invocation of the Constitution in the speech in turn is less well known because what’s also less well known is Lincoln’s intellectual and rhetorical debt to a US Senator from Massachusetts named Daniel Webster (1782-1852), who made a then-very-famous speech also about the Union during a controversy that took place a generation earlier.

Briefly, the Nullification Controversy began in 1828 with the passing of a federal tariff on imported goods, raising pre-existing tariffs dating to 1816 to 25-50 percent, designed to protect budding American manufacturers.  Southerners, South Carolinians especially, objected to paying higher prices raised by this 1828 “Tariff of Abominations” that effectively advantaged northerners, especially New Englanders.  The controversy reached crisis-point in 1832 when a special convention South Carolina “nullified” the tariff within the state, and President Andrew Jackson sent gunboats into Charleston harbour to uphold federal law if necessary.  No shots were fired on this occasion, as Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky brokered a compromise whereby the tariff was gradually lowered in subsequent years. 

Some historians, notably William Freehling (Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836), argue (entirely convincingly imo) that this controversy was less about the tariff and more about South Carolinians exploring ways that they might in the future defend the institution of slavery.  And indeed during the long controversy they developed the substance of constitutional theories they would employ to justify secession from the Union after the election of Abraham Lincoln (who they saw as a threat to slavery) as President in 1860.  In 1830, for example, Robert Hayne of South Carolina argued in the US Senate for “state compact theory”—that the individual states retained their original sovereignty, that the federal Union was a mere “compact” between the sovereign states and not itself a sovereign entity, that the federal government was a mere “agent” of the states, that the states could therefore “interpose” their sovereign authority against the federal government, and that the states could thus nullify a federal law or even indeed secede from the Union.  In two extended responses to Hayne, Daniel Webster made a rather different argument about the nature of the federal Union.  For Webster, the states were not sovereign at all; the people were.  And it was the people who, in the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention of 1787, had created the Union.  The US Constitution, after all, begins with the words “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”  The states could therefore absolutely not interpose against the people’s sovereign authority as constitutionally expressed through the federal government.  Indeed in a speech of January 26-27 1830 known as the “Second Response to Hayne”, Webster said the following: “It is, Sir, the people's Constitution, the people's government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.”  Lincoln’s particular formulation was “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” but it’s clear that Lincoln was borrowing.

Webster ended his responses to Hayne with the following rhetorical flourish.  “When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shine on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as "What is all this worth?" nor those other words of delusion and folly, "Liberty first and Union afterwards"; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart, - Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”

Webster died in October 1852, and while he lived to see the Union under even greater threat than it had been when he made his great speech, he didn’t live to see the Civil War. But in playing his part in saving the Union that Webster spoke so eloquently for, Lincoln more than paid his dues to his rhetorical forefather.

 

A Question for Royal Baby Reporters; Or, What Have I Become?

Update on 4 May 2020

I originally wrote this post as a kind of allegory of what I saw more and more of during my later days at Swansea University--people collaborating with the rapid spread of neo-liberal practices in UK universities. At that time I thought a lot about how people respond when such forces make themselves felt: some resist; some act like nothing's happening because they're either vulnerable, or cowardly, or foolish; others collaborate, some for the reasons just described, others out of ideological commitment or amoral ambition. This post is about the collaborators. And about how to avoid becoming one. And now it comes back to my mind as I watch the UK news and see Chris Witty and all the other NHS medical higher-ups standing alongside Johnson, Hancock, Gove, Patel, and that idiot foreign secretary whose name I've temporarily forgotten and can't be arsed to look up, or whatever minister happens to be misinforming everyone on any given day. I wonder--as they knowingly mangle the figures of the dead and actively collaborate with the cover up of the homicidal austerity-crippling of the NHS and government incompetence as causes of so many unnecessary deaths, and with the succcess narrative that this cynical government is concocting before our eyes--if they wonder: what have I become?       

Update on 22 December 2013

Last night on BBC 2 I watched a programme called “Moments in Time” about memorable news photos of 2013. It focused mostly on the truths photos can reveal, only occasionally hinting at how they can deceive, or how the media can use them to create their own realities, like Dick Cheney does. It was an interesting programme all the same, yet one part of it was quite disturbing, at least to me.  That was a section about how a Daily Express photographer ensconced himself for four days in July in a fourth-floor room opposite St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington in order to secure a photo that from a high-angle that would show the face of the then-expected Prince George. There was no critical comment on this, no questioning the ethics of such subterfuge to obtain the kind of picture that the baby’s parents seemed to be trying to avoid. Odious Boris-sister Rachel Johnson was the only commentator, and she just emitted unctuous guffs about how the picture would make even the “most cynical republican” go out and buy a “coronation mug”. Well, I’ve got news for you, Odious Boris-sister Rachel Johnson. No it wouldn’t. Because, as the post below argues, the people on the street waiting for the birth, and especially the one hiding in a garret, who I didn’t know about before, were “basically doing the same job as the ones who chased this baby’s grandmother into that tunnel in Paris.” It’s only monarchists who find this kind of thing acceptable.

Anyway, here's the original post of 22 July 2013.

It seems that a royal baby is about to be born. This sentence suggests that this post may be out of date very soon, indeed perhaps before it’s even written, but it won’t be because it’s not really about the baby, so please carry on reading. So, anyway, for several days, dozens of journalists and TV reporters, maybe hundreds, have been waiting outside the Lindo Wing of St. Mary’s Hospital, in Paddington, in London. Waiting. Waiting and waiting. Waiting for a young woman . . . to have a baby. And why are they waiting? So that they might be able to take a photo of the woman, or the baby, or the father, or maybe the father hanging the baby out of a window in what would soon be a legendary display of Michael-Jackson-style parenting. But probably not. The most they’ll probably get is some pictures of the parents and their minders eventually leaving the hospital in some days’ time carrying some lump of sumptuous swaddling in which there is, somewhere, quite deliberately quite well hidden, a baby. The parents might show a bit of the baby, maybe a peek of part of its new-born face. But even if the reporters get that, who the hell cares? All babies look the same anyway.  Just small, pudge-faced sub-humans incapable of expressing anything facially or otherwise except dumb incomprehension at who or even what they are supposed to be. So what they’re waiting for, these journalists and reporters, is, basically, nothing. What they’re really there for is for the sake of being there, of being in roughly the same vicinity, when a young woman . . . has a baby. The utter douchebags. 

Indeed they’ve been waiting so long now that they have in fact become news. Last night I saw the reporters  . . . on the news, reported on by other reporters while sitting under umbrellas doubling as parasols in London’s unseasonable summertime sunshine, smoking cigarettes, eating crisps, especially the ones who really need to stop eating crisps, while waiting. Waiting and waiting.  Waiting for a young woman . . . to have a baby. I almost feel sorry for them. Some of them, anyway. Nicholas Witchell, for example, seems like a nice man, though certainly a deeply vacuous one, and I certainly felt sorry for him after the abuse he received from Prince Charles, that unconstitutional-secret-MP-letter-writing-tax-money-taking-tax-dodging-homeopathy-believing-in-new-architecture-hating-Poundbury-creating-shit-biscuit-selling buffoon. And maybe some of these reporters are as nice and to-be-pitied as Nicholas Witchell. Maybe some of them love what they do and genuinely, believe they are actually contributing something to society. But, in aggregate, these people are basically doing the same job as the ones who chased this baby’s grandmother into that tunnel that night in Paris. They are hoping, in fact actively planning, that this new human being’s life begins in a storm of flashbulbs, just as the other one’s ended. As if we are no more the wiser about these things now than we were then. Which, evidently, we are not.*

And so I ask myself, while they’re sitting there, waiting, waiting and waiting, waiting for a young woman . . . to have a baby, if they are using the time to ask themselves a question: what have I become? For some of them, answering that question won’t be as difficult as it ought to be. Some of them might be perfectly happy with what they are. Maybe they think they’re truly improving the lives of this country’s many royal watchers and enthusiasts, and that doing so is not at all related to anything one might call an always dangerous and occasionally fatal pantomime of modern monarchy. Maybe they really don’t think of themselves as the privatised, out-sourced PR machine of an insanely outdated insult to modern concepts of democracy and equality. Maybe they don’t think of themselves as justifying the giving of millions of taxpayers’ pounds to already-very-rich tax dodgers with countless enormous houses, while their colleagues act as the privatised, out-sourced hate-generating machine for The Collaboration Government, justifying the deprivation of taxpayers’ money to those who are in immediate danger of losing the one home they have. 

That, of course, is just some people’s opinion (yes, including mine, though I’m no republican hard-liner, believing indeed that there are worse and more dangerous insults to modern democracy, such as Nick Clegg and David Cameron**). But at the very least some of them might wonder, as they sit there waiting, waiting, waiting, for a young woman . . . to have a baby, what became of their original ambitions? Is this what they thought they’d be doing in July 2013 when they first conceived the idea of a career in journalism? As they sit there, do they wonder what became of the dreams they had when they started their journalism degrees? Did they apply for their first jobs hoping to combat evil in the world? Hoping to expose corruption in business or politics, or business and politics? Did they hope to reveal poverty in unknown places, to make people want to make it a thing of the past? Did they hope to report on wars in the hoping of doing at least a little bit to end all wars? Did they hope, all those years ago, to try to make the world a better place? If so, do they wonder, now, as they sit there, waiting for a young woman . . . to have a baby, scattered across the pavement and the road, almost literally the litter of their former hopes and dreams: what have I become?

And why did I become what I am, they might also ask? Some no doubt are there because they want to be. These people are either ideologically committed to individualism (their own, that is, always) over all other concerns, or they’re just sociopaths. It doesn’t much matter which, even if there’s any actual difference, which there isn’t. Most people of course are not quite so venal. They will be there more or less reluctantly, perhaps wishing they were doing something more worthy, but are, perhaps they say to themselves, just following orders. I kind of understand. It’s very difficult not to be institutionalised in these ways, in the media or indeed in all kinds of institutions, with all the carrots that institutions offer and the sticks they beat you with. Militant individualists/sociopaths love carrots. They love carrots so much they’ll do anything for them. They’ll dress their actions up as giving people what they want, and they’d be at least partly right—but that of course happily for them coincides with their institutions’ profit-maximising economic models, and the more profits they make for the institution the more they as individuals will be promoted and paid by their institutions. So it’s really just about the carrots. The others, the more reluctant, generally love carrots too. I mean, who doesn’t like a carrot? But they will generally be more scared of the sticks than they are lustful of the carrots. And sticks are scary. Institutions can use sticks to just poke you and demoralise you, they can beat you with them, and they can even use them to chase you off their premises so that you end up on the street. Though not this time as a paid-up member of the institutionalised or even freelance paparazzi: this time as a tramp. 

What lesson is there, then, in the sight of these reporters on the road, these standing, sitting, squatting, crisp-eating street statues of sold-out dreams? For the incorrigibly individualistic and sociopathic, obviously none. But for those who’ve been turned that way, and for the rest, the reluctant but scared, maybe. For those starting their careers, like those students I just saw graduate, our future most-likely leaders, certainly. Yes, we all have to compromise to one degree or another. No one can be perfect in an imperfect world. But there are some general rules one can follow. First, I suppose, remember, or don’t forget, your ideals and dreams. Then, measure your life’s achievements, at any stage in that life, against those (assuming they involved making the world a better place rather than a worse one). Conversely, don’t measure yourself by the often spurious affirmation of the kind of people you would once have despised. Grow your own carrots, in other words. Obviously, these are indeed general rules, but I suppose in each particular case where you might want to apply them, you can ask: does doing this mean that I, at least metaphorically speaking, am eating, sleeping, and excreting in the street in the hope of making other human beings’ lives less private, pleasant, and safe than they ought to be? And if enough people follow these general guidelines, if enough people really want to make the world a better place, then together perhaps we can make it one.        

* This is the point Hilary Mantel was making in that article (only, obviously, much more intelligently and eloquently than me).

** Obviously I’m joking, though I’m also totally serious, and I will expand upon and attempt to justify this seemingly ludicrous statement some time soon.

Why I don’t hate the Boden Bumpkins; Or, why I really quite like Mumford & Sons

The appearance of Mumford & Sons at Glastonbury pleased a lot of people, but, if my twitter timeline is anything to go by, it also generated a lot of hate.  Well, I say hate.  It was actually mostly just piss-taking, but, nevertheless, piss-taking with some resentment included.  Here’s why I think the resentment is misguided, or at least misdirected.

The first thing that emerges from the mockery is that it doesn’t really derive from tastes in music or from regard for the Mumfords’ musical talent.  The former if not the latter comes up sometimes, but something else is happening.  The main critique seems to be that they went to public (i.e. private) school, that they’re posh, that they must therefore owe their success to privilege above talent, and that they’re therefore not authentic (whatever authenticity is).  Let me say first, I think I kind of get this animus.  Music, like sports, is supposed to be one of society’s few level playing fields, where working-class people with talent get a rare fair shot, so it’s aggravating to see those who are over-privileged in other areas eating up the scraps as well as the lion’s share of life’s offerings. That’s perhaps more true now than ever.  Twenty years ago our poshest of posh actors called themselves such relatively ordinary things as Hugh Grant, then along came someone who openly referred to himself as Rupert Everett, and now we’ve gone the full Benedict Cumberbatch.  And of course, most fundamentally (and seriously), and not at all unrelatedly, our Blatcherite classless society has given us a government of Old Etonian, Bullingdon millionaires who are clearly intent on consigning the post-war experiment in (greater) social democracy and fairness to the history books they think it belongs in.  It seems there is nothing we can do to stop the poshist take-over the world, so what we do is mock.  Indeed in these days and times I’ve even indulged myself in some Mumford mickey-taking, calling them the Boden Bumpkins on previous occasions as well as here.  But I still think it’s not right.    

Let’s leave aside the economic inaccessibility and social exclusiveness of such sports as boating, golf, motor racing, tennis, etc., and let’s leave aside this and the previous governments’ selling off of sports fields and thereby profiteering from the destruction of ordinary people’s dreams, not to mention the nation’s health and all the other general benefits that come from universal accessibility to sport and exercise facilities, though the myth of the music industry as a field of fair play will come under attack shortly.  Surely the real problem here is not that the Mumford boys went to public schools but that anyone does.  Believe that private schools should be allowed to exist if you will, but let’s be honest about them.  The entire point of public schools is to give the kids whose parents can afford them an unfair advantage over those whose parents can’t.  Wealthy people do not fork out x-thousands of pounds a year for something they could have for free without expecting something back in return.  Therefore no serious discussion of equal opportunity can begin without the proposition to abolish class segregation in education.  So, ridiculing Mumford & Sons for being public schoolboys may be cathartic, but it doesn’t help us deal with poshism any more than mocking Hitler’s missing man-egg helped defeat Nazism.  In any case, what would we prefer Mumford and his Sons to do?  Go into the wildcat wing of the banking industry and aid and abet the economic ruination of the nation on its next tiresomely predictable occasion?  In fact, rather than that, they’ve chosen to entertain people and enrich people’s lives with their music.  Good for them, I say.  And let’s hope the next Fred Goodwin wants to spend a bit more time fiddling with his banjo and a bit less time spunking the nation's money away.

You may or not like the Mumfords’ music.  Personally, I do.  I love bluegrass, folk, and rock & roll, and I think the Mumfordian fusion makes a fantastic sound.  I find their song lyrics a bit obscure, being more of a “Because you’re mine, I walk the line” kind of guy.  But that’s purely personal taste and, in any case, that line’s already taken and people need to try something new.  But the resentment isn’t so much borne of taste as of a sense that poshos can’t be “authentic”.  I leave it to people more expert than me to question the very notion of authenticity, but I admit again that Mumford & Sons are up against it on this count.  Public schoolboys doing folk music?  Not as obviously or as pathetically and dispiritingly fabricated as Gordon Brown pretending to listen to the Polar Baboons, but I see the point.  And yet, John Lennon wasn’t the working-class hero he wanted to be, yet he generally gets more pleb-cred than the poorer Paul McCartney.  Also, those regarded as unimpeachably authentic both by background and artistic integrity are rarely consistently so.  In the 1970s and ’80s, though it pains me to admit it, Johnny Cash made more cheese than France.  Anyway, perhaps the Mumfords’ undisguised poshness is a sort of unlikely gift; their literariness mixed with mandolins gives us something new and interesting, like an unexpectedly entertaining cameo by Laurence Olivier in an episode of the Dukes of Hazzard.  And, in any case, perhaps the Mumfords actually do have a kind of “authenticity”.  They were schoolmates who formed a band, whatever school their parents sent them to, and by all accounts they worked hard, touring endlessly to gain a diverse and highly appreciative fan-base.  They write their own songs and they play their own instruments, which brings up what they’re importantly not.  They’re not just another boyband/girlband rolling off the production line of Cowell Enterprises.  And they’re not Justin Beiber, that monstrous pop goblin and corporate-sponsored totem of the industrialised, for-profit sexualisation of the under-age-female marketing opportunity.  So, okay, Mumford & Sons may not be genuine good ol’ boys, but they’re  really not the genuinely bad guys either.