Honk if you love Jazz

It is, apparently, International Jazz Day.  Why jazz needs an International Day, I have no idea.  But lots of things have National and International Days and Weeks, and even Months, so why shouldn’t jazz, I suppose?  So go on, then, enjoy your Jazz Day if you love your jazz.  Go on, honk if you heart jazz, go on--honk!  Go on!  And toot and parp and then honk some more.  Let's hear some random honking, tooting, and parping for International Jazz Day!  Yay!  These noises are, after all, perfectly fitting onomatopoeic tributes to your horrendous musical taste.  I, however, have decided to mark International Jazz Day with a mean-spirited polemic against jazz and, more importantly, what jazz sometimes represents.  The following is, I should say, some reheated bile that I once spewed on Facebook.  Anyway, brace yourselves, and here we go.

Me, I cannot stand jazz.  For me, jazz is to music what warts are to the human face, what camels are to the animal kingdom, what fruit and vegetables are to eating.  Insults: ugly, hideous insults.  Of course, this is just a matter of personal opinion, and I acknowledge that you cannot help liking jazz any more than you can help having a hideously warty face.  But what really gets me about jazz, and this, admittedly, is not the fault of the genre itself, or its practitioners, but what really gets me is when jazz gets used as a cultural signifier by people who don’t actually like the music but like what they think is its image and what they therefore think their artfully constructed love of jazz says about them.  Of course I know some people actually like jazz, genuinely like it, and fair enough.  With all its jolly honking, tooting, and indeed parping, jazz is bound to appeal to some people in the same way that bright colours, spinning bow-ties, and clowns appeal to some people, and you, genuine lovers of jazz, are entirely exempted from the hate-filled claims I am about to make.  Thing is, though, let’s face it, far too many people claim to like jazz for them all to be telling the truth.  So what are they playing at, these fakers of a love of jazz?  It seems to me that in “liking” or “loving” jazz, they’re trying to show that they like and appreciate vernacular cultural forms, that they can relate to the alterity of it all, yeh, so they’re cool, man, kinda groovy, freethinking yeh, a little bit *alt.*, little bit rad, despite being a solicitor by day, while at the same time their appreciation of jazz demonstrates their impeccable aesthetic taste and intellectual discernment.  In other words, they’re trying to be non-stuck-up and non-conformist, and yet unwittingly, and indeed witlessly, they’re doing it in a totally stuck-up and conformist way.  In these ways, jazz is just a meme, and not a musical one, but, for Jazz-love-fakers, a cultural one, and is thus the opposite of what they think it is, and it says the opposite about them from what they think it does. These people live in Islington in the late 1980s and early 90s. They probably “love” contempowawy darnce as well.  And they're posh too, and talk all lah-deh-dah, like “Yah, Tarquin and I are gaying to the Montreux Jizz Festival.”  The idiots.

If you don’t believe any of the above, check out the YouTube video below of a pair of appalling drongoes doing some “Experimental Jazz” in front of a small crowd of precious gumps pretending they’re enjoying what they’re watching and hearing.  I mean look at them.  Listen to them.  That tool can’t play a trumpet any more than I can, and the drummer’s even worse.  Sounds like an avid vegan's arse blasts at the wrong end of International Mung Bean Day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT2kvMSVrFI

Really Extreme Fishing with Robson Green

Because my life is sometimes so exciting, from time to time I find myself sitting in my armchair in my slippers reading my Radio Times, with my cup of tea and my toasted tea cake to hand.  And in these circumstances, as I peruse the cornucopia* of television entertainment advertised therein, I sometimes find myself utterly at a loss to understand what on earth is going on.  [* I wasn’t totally sure I was right to use the word cornucopia here, so I checked it out on Googlepedia, and Googlepedia said this: “A goat’s horn overflowing with fruit, flowers, and grain, signifying prosperity. Also called horn of plenty,” and I thought, yes, that’s what I meant, so I left it in.]  It’s not that the programme titles are difficult to understand.  The problem is often the opposite of that—that I am left at a loss to understand what on earth is going on if I take the titles as literal descriptions of what’s in the actual programme.  I’m talking about programmes like I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here (there really is no punctuation), Embarrassing Illnesses, Embarrassing Bodies, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, The Only Way Is Essex, The Jeremy Kyle Show, and so on.  You’ve seen them too.  Of course, eventually I come to understand what these emissions comprise, either by watching them or by osmosis, the latter process involving glancing at  tabloid newspaper headlines and reading the more informative Facebook and Twitter feeds. 

But one programme I never either watched or got clues about via tabloids and social networking is this one: Extreme Fishing with Robson Green.  So, one evening recently my life got so overwhelmingly exciting that I decided to research what this programme was about by utilising the internet: the ultimate goat’s horn overflowing with fruit, flowers, and grain, signifying prosperity.  Also called a horn of plenty.  And on the internet, or horn of plenty, I discovered, to my enormous disappointment, the nature of which is explained later, that Extreme Fishing with Robson Green involves the rather un-extreme actor fishing for unusual fish in unusual places. So the four episodes of series one, for example, involved Robson Green fishing for tuna in Costa Rica, for catfish in the USA, for sardine in South Africa, for blue marlin in Spain and Portugal, that kind of thing. This was admittedly evidently exciting enough for enough viewers to tune in to prompt Channel 5 to commission a second and this time nine-part series in which Robson Green fished for things such as sablefish in Canada, hapuka in New Zealand, and arapaima and fresh-water stingray in Thailand.  Now, I think you can already see what’s happening here: inflation.  The passage of time and the imperative to improve the viewers' experiences of piscatorial extremity led to more and then more extreme fishing in more and then more extreme places.  Indeed, by the time we get to series five (tellingly but inaccurately entitled “At the Ends of the Earth”), Robson Green is fishing for six-gilled shark in Ascension Island, ruby snapper in Papua New Guinea, Pacific giant crab in New Caledonia, and silver piranha in Argentina.  In a sign that the franchise was by this time reaching the end of its natural life, series five had only six programmes.  Besides, where do you go with Extreme Fishing once Robson Green has been to “the ends of the earth”? Okay, er, Slightly More Moderate Fishing, Again, with Robson Green?  I think we can all agree, that that means, in terms of television spectacle, and therefore viewers and therefore advertising revenues, we’re going nowhere any more.

So, here’s my pitch to get commissioned a sixth and maybe seventh and maybe even endless numbers of series’ of Extreme Fishing with Robson Green.  First, I propose, and herein is the source of the enormous disappointment mentioned above, that the whole concept the show was based on initially was wrong, even possibly misleading. But it’s not too late to change.  Indeed, now they’re running out of species and places, change is a matter of survival. The problem is that the first five series were all about “what” and “where”: all very salmon fishing in the Yemen, and therefore clichéd and boring.  And indeed, it means that the species of fish and places they were fished were “Extreme,” supposedly, rather than the extremity inhering in the fishing itself.  That indeed is where things get misleading, because, presumably, when Robson Green fished for barracuda in Cuba, he used tried-and-tested local Cuban methods of barracuda-fishing.  And that of course would have been highly advisable for health and safety reasons.  In other words, then, he did “Ordinary” fishing for “Extreme” fish in “Extreme” places.  Even then, though, it requires a certain Brit-o-centrism to describe barracuda and indeed Cuba as extreme.  They’re not extreme to either barracuda or to Cubans, presumably.  I, a Briton, would certainly think it odd if the Cuban equivalent of Channel 5 had a programme entitled “Extreme Fishing with Roberto Verde” in which Roberto Verde spent a quiet afternoon mildly fly fishing on the River Avon.  But, anyway, the main point is, the newly and more accurately re-conceptualised, revamped, and far more exciting version of Extreme Fishing with Robson Green needs to get away from what and where and move on to “how.”  Yes, HOW!  That is, not what fish you fish and where you fish them, but HOW you catch the fish.  A much more exciting idea, as we’ll see.  Also, a new series conceptualised this way would be much cheaper and more environmentally-friendly to make, because you would not have to worry about expensive or endangered species or hard-to-reach and exotic locations.  The catching of the fish is the spectacle.  And if the fish-catching methods are sufficiently extreme, then no one will care if the fishing is for tiger fish in Zambia; it could as easily be about fishing for trout in the Manchester Ship Canal.  So, to give specific examples that I believe will prove beyond all doubt the enormous potential viewing appeal of a sixth series of “Extreme Fishing with Robson Green,” here are some ideas for what could feature in particular episodes:

Robson Green goes pike fishing with a pump-action shotgun.
Robson Green goes cod fishing with hand grenades.
Robson Green goes crab fishing with a pneumatic drill.
Robson Green goes blowfish fishing with a steam roller.
Robson Green goes puffer fish fishing with a hat pin.
Robson Green goes catfish fishing with a dog.
Robson Green goes tiger prawn fishing with a real tiger.
Robson Green goes goldfish fishing in steel toe-capped boots.
Robson Green goes bream fishing with a cricket bat.
Robson Green goes trout fishing with a hockey stick.
Robson Green goes chub fishing, kicking the chub on to the river bank.
Robson Green goes carp fishing, stunning the carp with head butts.
Robson Green goes swordfish fishing, grabbing the swordfish by their snouts and smashing them against a rock.
Robson Green goes fishing for leaping salmon, chopping them in half in mid-leap with a samurai sword.  
Robson Green goes fishing for electric eels, throwing them into a wood chipper.
Robson Green goes tuna fishing in an underwater car with a machine gun on the front, like in The Spy Who Loved Me.
Robson Green goes lobster fishing with a remote control Transformer Robot.
Robson Green goes mussel fishing in a gigantic It’s a Knockout pirate costume, and has three minutes to put as many mussels as he can in a couple of big red buckets using his huge foam pirate hands, and then has to run though a large paddling pool while members of the production team try to knock him over by throwing water-filled balloons at him, until he reaches a skating rink, where he has to empty the buckets and try to stand upright while smashing as many mussels as he can to smithereens with an enormous yellow rubber mallet.
Robson Green goes fishing for shark by jumping them.
End of series.

The 1970s were a Bad Thing—A BAD THING—whatever Dominic Sandbrook may say.

So, a few afternoons ago I was sitting in my armchair reading my Radio Times, with my cup of tea and my toasted tea cake to hand, and my slippers on my feet *, when I noted with interest that Dominic Sandbrook is hosting a new TV series starting this week on BBC2 about the 1970s.  Here’s a link to information on it on the BBC’s website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ghscj [* I once mentioned to my mate Nick Davies that I read something or other in the Radio Times and he went into a quite hilarious extended riff at my expense about me drinking tea and eating toasted tea cakes in my slippers etc, but you probably had to be there.]  Anyway, according to Dr. Sandbrook’s RT preview of his series, and according to TV previews I’ve seen since, the programmes aim to debunk the popular conception of the 70s as a deeply desperate and dismal decade.  Now, hmm, now, yes, hmm, now, I was born in 1965, so I was four when the 70s began and I was 15 when the albeit arbitrariness of human constructions of time brought the era to an end.  As opposed to young Sandbrook, who was 5 when the long and literally dark decade ended.  Of course that by no means means that Sandbrook is unqualified to comment on the 1970s, or else I’d have to declare myself unfit to comment on the 18th century, which I do, as my job.  Nor does it mean he is less qualified than me to talk about the 70s: I don’t doubt for a moment that his extensive research makes him much better qualified than me.  But I can’t help thinking that, well, yes, and indeed OMG, I remember the 1970s, and, yes, well, OMFG, I have to say that I am a trifle sceptical about Dr. Sandbrook's claims.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I like Dominic Sandbrook.  What I’ve read of his work strikes me as fascinating, provocative, beautifully written, informative, and popular in a good way.  And I’m also not jealous or in any resentful of the popular and commercial success he has achieved while he was in and since he left academe.  I’ve criticised popular historians before (Steve Sarson's Blog: David Starkey: what the ****? and Steve Sarson's Blog: Niall Ferguson, Niall Schmerguson.), but I did so because of what these guys said, not because of what they do.  These people and their many counterparts play invaluable roles in spreading historical knowledge and in generating interest in history among audiences way beyond what I and most academic historians can hope to reach.  And that keeps the likes of me in work.  This can be characterised as a Good Thing. 

Yet I can’t help thinking that the claims that Dominic Sandbrook claims to make represent a bit of revisionism gone a bit too far.  Sandbrook has form for this kind of thing, writing in White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (2006) that the 60s were not really all that swinging and were, contrary to popular belief, a bit rubbish.  Ironically, considering what he says of the 70s.  But, while wondering whether the imperatives of writing for a wider audience encourage a bit of over-egged but commercially friendly controversialism, I have to admit that it happens in academic history too (by “academic history” I mean history produced for a largely academic audience; I don’t mean that Sandbrook’s work is not of academic quality), and academic publishers need to make money as much as what I’m calling commercial ones do, and nowadays we UK academics exist in a marketplace where we must prove the “impact” of our “outputs”.  Even before the days of the “impact agenda,” though, we had historians making counter-intuitive and therefore attention-grabbing claims.  Such as medieval historians claiming that medieval artwork was just as good as renaissance art.  But, Oh, come on!  I mean, come on!  I mean COME ON!  COME! ON!!!!!  Have you, you who make these claims, BEEN to Florence and seen room after room after room after room after room of Madonna con Bambinos?  Those stupid and ridiculous mono-dimensional pictures, with no light and no shade, just one pan-faced Mary and one 30-year-old baby Jesus after another after another, all exactly the sodding same, and all with backgrounds of kingy-blingy gold and blue, when the whole point of this “king” is that he was born in a rickety, stinky old stable and was surrounded in his infancy by hay, mangers, mud, wood, and donkey droppings.  You’re seriously saying that this crap is comparable with a Caravaggio?  You’re seriously suggesting that these tinctured turds measure up to a Titian?  If you’re saying that then I’m saying that I’m J-Lo’s bum double.  Or, for another example, how about those who claim that the Vikings were simple peaceful farming folk?  Well, maybe some of their descendants were.  But the ones who first left their shores in longboats were long-bearded axe-wielding bastards named Harald Hard Ruler, Sweyn Forkbeard, Eric Bloodaxe, Stenkil, and Cnut, and they terrorised, pillaged, enslaved, raped, and murdered their way through the populations of these British Isles and beyond, leaving nothing in their wake but death, destruction, and half-eaten and thoughtlessly discarded chicken legs.  These can be characterised as Bad Things.

So, anyway, it seems to me that maybe Dominic Sandbrook is trying to do for the 70s what some aesthetically-challenged medievalists did for art history and what some cranially-challenged Viking skolurs did for Anglo-Saxon history.  Like I say, though, I like Dominic Sandbrook and I’m going to give his show a go.  I’m sure it’ll be fascinating and fun.  It may even convince me.  His ideas certainly, admittedly, sound more plausible than those of the medieval revisionists I’ve mentioned.  I may well write about the 1970s afterwards, one way or the other.  But beforehand, at the risk of sounding like I’m barfing up a Stuart Maconie script written by researchers for I ♥1970-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 or 9, here’s a list of Bad Things about the 1970s.  Some of them are general Bad Things that many of you will recognise, others were more personal Bad Things that I experienced myself, though you may recall similar sorts of experiences, but all of them are Bad Things.  Afterwards, in the interest of balance, however specious that concept is, I will mention some Good Things about the 70s.  But then I will conclude that overall the 1970s can be characterised as a Bad Thing.  So, here we go.

* Endless, endless, endless industrial inaction.
* Blackouts.

* Red Robbo.

* The election of Margaret Thatcher and the birth of hegemonic neo-liberal politics in the UK.

* The IRA.

* Astrid Proll, though 70s terrorists sounded sexier than the Abu Hamza types we have now.

* The oil crisis. Which, thank goodness, is now long over with.

* Pol Pot.

* Idi Amin.

* Plane hijackings, on a daily basis.

* The later stages of the Vietnam War, without the really cool soundtrack that the earlier stages had. 

* Glamorous Rock.

* Disco.

* Discos.

* Johnny Cash’s tragic “Cheese Period.”

* Chopper Bikes.
* The Ford Crapi, the Dagenham Ferrari, nuff said.

* Flares.

* Trim phones.

* Douchebags.

* Douchebags who could—and would—imitate trim phones.

* Douchebags who could, would—and did—imitate trim phones on That’s Life.

* Dogs who supposedly could say “sausages” but who could actually only growl “ghshsughshsughsh” on That’s Life. If their owners forced their jaws open and squeezed their arses hard enough.

* That’s Bloody That’s Sodding That’s Bloody Sodding Life.

* The Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Wisdom affair.

* The cutting edge of sexual liberation being represented by Sid James, that gurning geezer off On the Buses, and that quivering erection-on-legs who was in Man about the House.

* Racial politics, as represented in Love Thy Neighbour, Bernard Manning, Jim Davidson etc etc etc and et bloody and unbelievably cetera.

* TV presenters on Pebble Mill at One and Midlands Today who spoke a posh foreign language, tyelling ass for exaarmple thet aarfter the knews there will be a progremme about the potaarto femine. (That was before they invented “regional” accents in the 80s.)

* Summer-holiday-time children’s TV schedules made in That London for Them Southerners, so that the Banana Splits started two weeks after the summer holidays began in the Midlands and, even worse, ended two arse-aching and bitterness-inducing weeks after we went back to bloody buggering school while Them Southerners ponced around on their sofas or couches, or whatever they called their settees, in their mansions eating foie gras, caviar, and foxes, while enjoying the Banana Splits and talking to each other in their non-regional accents. The bastards.

* The vandalisation of the Blue Peter Garden.  By a bitter provincial.  But I can’t say who it was.  Or I’d have to kill you.

* White dog poos. What was that about? as comedians like Peter Kay say.
* Watneys Red Barrel (with not even a redeeming apostrophe).

* Double Diamond “beer”.

* Babycham “?”

* Working Men’s Clubs that smelt impossibly glamorously of darts and of beer- and urine-soaked Axminster.

* Convenience foods whereby granulated carcinogens could be turned into pooey puddings by just adding lime-encrusted tap water, and that are to this day busily concocting cancers in the intestines of everyone over the age of 32.

* Mince.  Every night.  Every sad and sodding night.  For ten years.  For ten desperate, depression-era fucking years.  

* My mum deciding that, after Egon’s barber shop closed, the hairdressers cost too much, and so she began cutting my and my brother’s hair herself, giving rise to the famous Lutterworth “Knife and Fork Job.” Pic below.

* The Queen’s Silver Jubilee, when everyone gathered for street parties and ate jelly and wore paper hats in communal rituals of moronically happy obeisance to a millennia-old harbinger of death and bringer of oppression that even the most primitive Amazonian Head Hunter would point and laugh at and that... oh... er... Diamond Jubilee....  

* The summer of 76 that was so sunny and hot that everyone had a fucking headache all the time, which was made worse by the fact that you had to talk to and be all chummy-chummy with your horrible, boring, sweaty neighbours at effing standpipes, as if we were all gruel-eating Dickensian grotesques, and yet still all happy and chipper and keep-calm-and-carry-on and make-do-and-mend and community-spirited and shit, so that photographers could take photos of us to fool future historians into thinking that, in contrast to the popular belief and indeed the very real reality that the 70s really were a Bad Thing, and despite being gruel-eating Dickensian grotesques, 1970s people were all happy and chipper and keep-calm-and carry-on and make-do-and-mend and community-spirited and shit.

Okay, so there were some good things about the 70s, and in the interest of pointlessly balanced argument I’m going to list them now.  All of them.

* Tiswas: a partial compensation for Noel Edmunds’s Multicoloured Swap Shop (why was it multicoloured? Why? Why?).  
* The Rockford Files, a more than sufficient compensation for Petrocelli, but not for Petrocelli and Starsgay and Butch combined. 
* Hill Street Blues, and the birth of the modern US police drama.
* M*A*S*H, Cheers, and the birth of the modern US sitcom.
* A Tory Prime Minister, Red Ted Heath, who talked about “the unacceptable face of capitalism,” while today no “Labour” Party leader would dare much less desire to utter such heretical words.
* And, er, that’s it.
* And anyway, even if the list were longer, one Lindisfarne Gospel does not cover a million Madonna con Bambinos.   

  The famous Lutterworth Knife and Fork Job c. 1976

Rick Santorum is not a Puritan. Nor is Rush Limbaugh.

There are certain common historical misconceptions that really drive me round the bend.  I know they shouldn’t, but they do.  One of them is that the antecedents of the modern American religious right are New England’s seventeenth-century Puritans.  The supposed existence of this lineage was recently repeated, almost, in The Observer last Sunday in an article by Paul Harris about recent rows about sexual politics in the United States. This latest battle in America’s tedious yet terrifying culture wars kicked off when notorious radio shock jock and sick prick Rush Limbaugh called Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” for testifying in Congress in favour of government-backed birth control.  Limbaugh also apparently said that “If we are going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something. We want you to post the videos online so we can watch.”  On the face of it, that seems pretty appalling, and everyone said so at the time, so much so that Limbaugh actually apologised.  On the other hand, there is a kind of doth-protest-too-much case to be made that Limbaugh actually likes sluts and prostitutes a lot more than he’s trying to lead us to believe.  Or likes college students but also gets off on calling them dirty names.  Whatever floats your boat, Limbaugh, but how about you keep it to yourself next time?  Anyway, satisfying as the subsequent advertisers’ rush-from-Rush has been, his insults should be seen, as the article says, in the wider context of a wave of state legislative attacks on American women’s sexual health, and the fact the these attacks are backed by the bunch of barrel-scrapings that constitute this year’s Republican presidential candidates, competing as they are to be the most swivel-eyed Armageddonist to have his hands on America’s massive arsenal of nuclear weapons.  And we’re not only talking about abortion here.  Nope, we’ve moved beyond that now.  We’re talking, as was Fluke, about contraception.  And some of the institutions threatened with loss of funding deal with such illnesses as breast, cervical, and ovarian cancer too.  This is not just a war on sex, then; it’s a war on women.  Anyway, below is a link to the Harris Observer article, and below that is a link to the Emily’s List website of the ten worst such attacks on women going on in the US at the moment. 

Now, there are plenty of people far more qualified than me to talk about the modern sexual politics of all of this, so after linking you to the sites below so you can see what I’m on about, I’m going to pass over that matter and move back to what the supposed historical origins of these shenanigans are.  Back to the Puritans mentioned above, who almost always, but should never, get blamed for giving birth to the monster that grew into the modern American religious right. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/10/america-war-on-sex-hots-up

http://emilyslist.org/blog/Top_10_Terrible_Horrible_No_Good_Very_Bad_Attacks_on_Womens_Rights/

To be fair to Paul Harris, he’s personally non-committal about the figurative ancestors of Rush Limbaugh, Rich Santorum, Mitt Romney, and the rest.  He says that “Many commentators” blame (or praise) the “long shadow of the “hardline Protestantism of 17^th-century settlers”.  He then says “Another theory” supposes that the supposed impeccable personal qualities of the Founding Fathers have led many Americans to expect similar moral probity from their leaders since.  And “A final theory” explains modern sexual Puritanism as an outcome of America’s peculiar kind of “modernism”, which, unlike centuries-worth of “organically evolved social mores” in Europe, is part of an on-going American history of “self-invention.”  As I say, Harris comes to no conclusions.  Fair enough, if that’s what he wants to do, or doesn't want to do,  although he does make an error of omission, which I’ll come back to in a minute.  I, however, have opinions about this, and a blog, so here we go.  In reverse order, and speaking of the final theory first, I can only say WTF?  Why would constant self-invention lead to modern sexual Puritanism?  It can also lead, and as Harris equivocally says it might, to sexual liberalism and even libertinism.  Indeed, he says, they may be in a dialectical relationship with each other.  In other words, then, the theory can explain everything and its opposite--and therefore can’t really explain anything.  We’re still left wondering what makes some go one way and others the other.  In any case, Harris without warning has by this point in his article moved away from explaining misogyny and on to explaining more general sexual prudery.  These two things are not necessarily related, much as they might be and indeed in this instance are, but they needn’t be and so the explanations for one do not necessarily explain the other.  And it’s certainly not the case that cultural reinvention leads directly to misogyny, or its opposite, or in fact to anything in particular at all.  The middle theory, admittedly, is more interesting, at least in as much as Founding-Father filiopietism might contribute to general sexual Puritanism, at least as regards Presidents since.  But pretty much by definition therefore it doesn’t address and thus doesn’t even begin to explain the modern American right-wing war on women.  Again, then, Harris is answering a different question from the one he started out with, one about general sexual prudery rather than one about misogyny.  But, anyway, there is still the question of the first theory—that the problems the modern religious right has with sex and with women (let’s give up on Harris’s failure to distinguish and just think of the two together) goes back to those seventeenth-century Puritans.

On the face of it, it seems plausible enough to blame the Puritans for the puritanical and misogynistic in much of modern American right-wing religiosity.  There exists a popular notion, even entertained by non-specialist historians, that the Puritans founded America and their legacy pervades US culture to this day.  This idea is echoed in American political discourse in our time.  Ronald Reagan, the founding father of modern neo-conservatism (okay, in my time—readers of a younger persuasion may not feel the same about what “our time” is), called America a “city upon a hill” and “a beacon to the world,” recalling the words of John Winthrop aboard the Arbella as he and his Puritan followers were preparing to disembark on the shores of Massachusetts.  Then again, Reagan also said “It’s morning in America,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean, and “A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?”  But, anyway, the Puritan thing, it’s still wrong.  The Puritans did not found “America.”  A small group of Puritan separatists who had broken away from the Church of England, and who were led by William Bradford and are commonly called the Pilgrim Fathers, settled Plymouth Plantation in 1620, although the colony was absorbed into Massachusetts in 1691.  Another larger group of this time non-separatist Puritans, under John Winthrop, began settling Massachusetts in 1629, beginning the Great Migration that lasted throughout the 1630s and leading to the settling of that and other New England colonies.  Yet not even all New England settlers were Puritans.  The original settlers of New Hampshire were fishermen who basically told Puritan Divine Cotton Mather to bog off when he tried to preach at them.  Many of the settlers of Connecticut were New Yorkers.  Rhode Island was settled by people who dissented from the Congregational church of Massachusetts.  Moreover, few of the settlers of other colonies were Puritans.  The first English colony settled in North America, in 1607, was not Plymouth or Massachusetts, but was Virginia—and the settlers there were mostly Anglicans, although their behaviour was largely distinctly irreligious.  Maryland was founded by the Calverts, who were Catholics, and other settlers there were a mixture of Catholics and Anglicans, with a few Puritans among them.  Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn and settled by fellow Quakers, but, again, there was religious diversity.  None of the other colonies, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, the Carolinas, and Georgia, was settled primarily for religious reasons, much less for Puritan ones.  The Puritans were a tiny minority among the English, European, and African settlers of colonial British America.  The Puritan-origins-of-America thesis is in fact a post-Civil War founding myth.  After that conflict, and the emancipation of the slaves that it accomplished, it seemed unseemly to associate America’s origins with the ancestors of the rebel slaveholders of Virginia, even though they were the first settlers, even though they were quite typical of settlers generally, unlike the Puritans, and even though Virginia was such a dominant force in early America that it produced four out of the first five Presidents of the United States.  It was much more fitting, or rather much more comfortable, to associate America’s origins with the pious refugees of Massachusetts who were seeking religious freedom—although in fact they only wanted religious freedom for themselves and they were literally damned, so they believed, if they were going to grant it to anyone else.  

Furthermore, as noted above, the Puritans settled New England, in the north-eastern corner of what is now the United States.  Modern American evangelism does not come from there—the bible belt stretches across the South and West.  Paul Harris’s aforementioned error of omission is in his failure to mention this signal fact about the religious right today.  Also, the religious right today is evangelical, usually Methodist and Baptist, although, as the article points out, Rick Santorum is a Catholic and Mitt Romney is a Mormon.  Now, first, can you imagine what the Puritans would have made of these guys?  They were deadly enemies of Catholics and, if Mormons had been around in the seventeenth century, the Puritans would probably have done to them what they did to Quakers: that is, they would have expelled them on pain of death.  But, second, the Puritans were not evangelicals.  They were Calvinist Congregationalists.  That is, they believed in predestination, and that only Visible Saints, only those who could demonstrate they had Grace and were chosen by God to go to heaven when they died, could be members of the church.  In other words, they were the opposite of evangelicals.  So if you can draw a line backwards from our modern American evangelicals it would not be to the Puritans of New England.  It might be to the Baptists and Methodists of the mid-eighteenth-century Great Awakening, a revival movement stretching from New England to Georgia, or it might be to those of the early-nineteenth century Second Great Awakening, stretching from New York and into the West, all of whom aimed to convert others and bring them into their churches.  But it would not be to the Congregationalists of New England, who believed you were either born a true believer or you weren’t.  There is, then, no line to be drawn between the seventeenth-century Massachusetts Meeting House and the Mega-churches of the modern-day bible belt.
                         
Puritanism was pretty much a spent force before the first Great Awakening anyway.  As Puritan preachers constantly complained, religious ardour diminished as people spread out from the original New England town settlements into the countryside in search of land.  And Puritanism pretty much killed itself as a serious social, cultural, and political force through the manifest insanity of the Salem witch trials of 1692, as if people in general suddenly said to each other, “Holy shit, Ezekiel, our leaders are completely fucking batshit” and no one took them all that seriously anymore.  Even some of the Puritans themselves woke up from their own nightmares.  One of the judges at the trials was Samuel Sewall, who later apologized for his contributions to the hideousness, and in 1700 he published The Selling of Joseph, one of the first anti-slavery tracts ever written.  In this witch-finder turned liberator, you can almost see the entire Enlightenment unfolding in one man’s lifetime.  That’s certainly not something you can say about Rick Saintorium, who hasn’t even reached the Reformation yet, or Newt Gingoutan, yet to clamber down from his tree and walk upright on the savannah, or Rush Limpanzee, still making primal screeching sounds in his radio studio/zoo cage while violently masturbating with one hand and with the other furiously hurling his own excrement at anyone who comes within range.  Really can’t see Samuel Sewall doing any of that.

The Amazing Adventures of Clunk: a postmodern superhero story

Back in 2002, in the early days of the wideworldinterweb, when people still paid attention to Friends Reunited and other cave paintings, someone did something cruel, evil, and funny.  Some unknown person (or at least unknown to me, though they are presumably known to themselves) from my old school, or perhaps two or more people working together, although the literary style suggests a single writer, appropriated the identities of several (10) Lutterworth High School and Grammar School* old boys and girls and made entries on Friends Reunited in their names (*it was and is actually a Comprehensive school, but continued to go by the name of Grammar School, even after the medieval era.  Mind you, though, if you think that’s bullshit, it’s now called Lutterworth College).  Anyway, as I navigated around the Lutterworth-schools sections of the re-acquaintance-themed netsite, I noticed that the interconnections between the unlikely entries told a dark and exciting tale of alien invasion, conspiracy, murder, incarceration, escape, and robots.  The entries and the tale they told came from the differing individual points of view of the stolen identities who were the purported writers.  The clues that allowed readers to link from one to another were mentions of names in one entry which tempted you to log on to the named person and see what their entry said.  Sure enough, it would contain a continuation or another version of the story.  Total brilliance.  In the meantime, it had a bit of fun with the characters concerned, whether they were the supposed writers or others named in the story—usually old Lutterworth High School teachers of the 1976-79 era, l’epoch Clunk.  

After a while, the entries got reported and taken down.  Luckily for humankind, however, I cut and pasted them into a Word document, so they have survived for posterity.  Well, actually, I’ve since lost the e-document, but I recently rediscovered a hard copy, which today I scanned and copied into this blog post for your amusement.  Obviously, the said reproduction is going to be of greatest interest, if it's of any interest at all, to those who went to school in Lutterworth in the seventies and very early eighties.  But the way the story is constructed and the medium through which it was told may also interest others who are interested in that sort of thing.  (I apologise, btw, for the pretty shitty quality of the reproduction, but there you go.) 

The supposed lead story-teller and hero of the whole scenario is David Clarke, or Clark, or Clunk--as he was always known.  The nickname, Clunk, which to the best of my recollection he carried throughout his school years from the age of 5 to 16, was a perpetual and pithily hilarious reminder that he suffered from severe learning difficulties.  Incidentally, and this is the point at which I digress, I remember that one social-economic indicator that every schoolboy and girl back then recognised was the number of arms a kid had on his or her glasses.  If he or she always had two arms, both of which were always in perfect repair, then he or she clearly came from at least a solvent family, and perhaps even a family that was quite well off.  If they always had two, but with one of them sometimes attached with, say, a sticking plaster or band-aid, then they were from a poorer family but one with capable, make-do-and-mend kind of parents.  If they went around for periods of time with just one arm to help their nose in its job of supporting their spectacles, however, then their parents were obviously poor and relatively un-resourceful in other respects as well.  The longer the periods spent with one-armed glasses, the poorer and less resourceful the family was likely to be.  Now, where is this leading, you may well be asking?  Well, the thing is, in my recollection, Clunk, whose parents were, alas, very poor and un-resourceful on account of their own obviously severe learning difficulties, usually came to school with one arm on his glasses.  Except for one day, when he came to school with no arms on his glasses.  To cope with the fact that the second arm had become detached and had presumably somehow got lost, one of Clunk’s parents had, in an attempt at resourcefulness that was so desperate that it was in its own special way valiant and admirable, attached his glasses to his face with an elastic band going around the back of his head.  The effect--that is, the tension stretching the skin on Clunk's face and the consequent contortion of Clunk's eyes--most likely impaired Clunk’s vision even more than his original genetic defect, so someone was probably doing him a favour in assembly when they placed their finger beneath the elastic band and then quickly lifted it, sending the glasses and band flipping spectacularly through the assembly hall air for a good 20 metres and maybe more.  Poor Clunk. 

Anyway, the others in the story.  Reggie Lightbrown was called Goony on account of the fact that he was both mentally and physically goonish, goonoid, and indeed goony.  Ian Holcroft was called Scabby because he had eczema.  And Shane Richards was called Honey Monster because he looked exactly like the Honey Monster in the Sugar Puffs adverts back in the seventies.  We were not witty, as such, we were quite literal, and we were cruel, but we were funny.  Or so it seemed to us at the time.  The other “writers” had no particular nicknames, but their idiosyncrasies are vividly displayed in the characterisations given to them here by the actual writer.  The other non-authorial characters featured in the narrative include Clunk’s older brother, Charley, who had considerably greater learning difficulties than even Clunk, and never went to normal school, but could often be seen sadly lumbering around Lutterworth with little more physical agility or mental awareness than a bovine that had escaped from its farm and found itself confused and terrified by the people and the cars and the noise of the town.  Charley Clarke was picked up and dropped off at our school each day on his way to and from his special-needs school, a passenger on what we routinely referred to as "The Spag Chariot".  I remember an English teacher going absolutely batshit at us when he heard us calling it that, though I can't remember his name, though I can remember knowing he was right but my friends and I carrying on like that anyway.  The other non-authorial characters are teachers from 1970s Lutterworth High School.  Mr Greenhalgh was indeed a terrifying and mentally unstable deputy head with a penchant for grabbing children by the tie and half-throttling them if he deemed the knots of their neckwear to be excessively large.  Mr Seal was indeed an inadequate and consequently sadistic PE teacher, if you’ll excuse the redundancies in this sentence.  And Mr Elliott, a music teacher, did indeed, I now realise after reading this story, resemble a robot. 

As you will no doubt already have noticed, the people in this story or these stories are people who stood out: hated teachers and weird kids.  People who, frankly, bring out the worst in most of us: sometimes these weird kids suffered, as many of the rest of us were often cruel to these people.  I am not proud and I have no excuses that will save me from eternal fire if such eternal torment actually exists, but I would like to say that if I had been 45 when I was 5 and 46 when I as 16 I would definitely have behaved differently.  One thing I will say is that some of the teachers were little better than us children back then.  I still remember Mr Bailey taking the register and calling one kid “Jathon Watth”.  Because Jason Watts had a lisp, see, see, fnnrwaahaa?  Thththththththth—hahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaa.  A fucking teacher, for Christ’s sake.  I remember well enough that I was not immune myself from the mockery of teachers and peers.  During one of the more corpulent stages of my childhood, for example, Mrs Knapp called me a “fat slob” in a geography lesson, and for no particular reason that I can recall. I remember also being called “Elephant” and greeted with such salutations as, in the local accent, “SARS! You big, fat fookoh!”  Sadly, none of that taught me to be any more considerate of the feelings of others, or not at the time anyway.  For example, the person who nicknamed me “Elephant” I nicknamed “Pipes” because he was skinny, like a pipe-cleaner.  Fortunately, I believe things are rather better in schools these days.  Or at least the teachers are made to behave better, even if there’s not much you can do about the kids.

So why am I reproducing this and putting it out into the world on my blog?  Well, perhaps it’s not justifiable. In fact, it really probably isn’t.  But I’d say this: the protagonists are highly unlikely to see it, and if they do then it was all a long time ago by now.  I don’t think it’s particularly nasty, anyway.  Indeed, Clunk actually comes of it rather well.  Here, he’s obviously intelligent and literate, which one must suppose he kept a secret at school.  He is a bit paranoid and rather irresponsible with regards to firearms, and yet he’s fundamentally decent, heroic, and kind of a Fox Mulder figure.  Besides all that, some old friends from time to time over the last nine years have mentioned that they too saw this story on Friends Reunited, and in turn I’ve mentioned that I believed I had a copy somewhere and would let them see it again if I found it.  And it was a cleverly inventive and therefore interesting use of what was then a new medium of communication.  And it’s pretty funny.  If you don’t think any of what’s below or above is funny, then fair enough, I admire you, you are a saint, and I apologise.  But I bet you did.  Go on, admit it.  You knew you shouldn’t, but you did.  Go on.  Admit it. You did. Yes you did.       

If anyone knows who the real author of all this was, by the way, do tell.

Britain *ALREADY HAS* a Bill of Rights! (Yes, apparently, it really is necessary to shout.)

BBC Radio 4 is a radio station that considers itself informed and informative, a bastion of the Reithian educational mission of Auntie Beeb.  It is indeed a radio station on which regulars varying from pompous Today Show host John Humphreys to the snobbish and far-less-left-wing-than-he-thinks-he-is though admittedly clever and funny comedian Armando Iannucci regularly heap implied and explicit scorn on those they suppose to be less educated and less intelligent than themselves—i.e. everyone else.  Yet this morning some of those on the station proved themselves (not for the first time by any means) to be staggeringly ignorant, at least by the standards which they believe they meet and everyone else does not.  This morning they revealed, obviously accidentally, that they do not know that Britain already has a Bill of Rights.  I shall explain the circumstances of this revelation in a second or two, and a second or two after that I shall explain the Bill of Rights itself for those who wish or need to know about it, but first let me make clear where I’m coming from here.  You may suspect that I am being just as contemptuously arrogant here as the people I’m accusing of contemptuous arrogance.  But the reason I’d say I’m not is this.  I’m not contemptuous of those I suppose to be less educated and/or intelligent than me.  Nor am I contemptuous about those who I know are more educated and/or intelligent than me but who happen not to know that Britain already has a Bill of Rights.  But I am contemptuous of the kind of people who are contemptuous of those they suppose to be less educated and intelligent (no and/or for these people) than themselves but who in fact don’t even know that Britain already has a Bill of Rights.   

Right, I’m glad we’ve got that sorted. 

So, anyway, this morning, just after the 7.30 news, or maybe just before, it’s not on iPlayer yet and, anyway, who cares?, the surely-not-coincidentally named Michael Buerk (all he needs is a definite article for a middle name and the picture is complete) was previewing The Moral Maze, a discussion programme that he chairs.  As The Moral Maze aims to discuss the ethical issues behind the week’s news stories and therefore tries to be relevant, “The” Buerk’s preview was prefaced by a distinctly pro-May-sounding account of Home Secretary Theresa May’s dubious and indeed much disputed claim that under the Human Rights Act, a European law adopted by Britain in 1998, and which some Tories want us to unadopt, an otherwise apparently illegal immigrant was allowed to stay in Britain because he has a cat.  “The” Buerk has form for retrograde palpable nonsense, claiming in 2005 for example that the “shift in the balance of power between the sexes” has gone too far and that men are now just “sperm donors”, so I’m quite comfortable making these claims about “The” Buerk’s views on immigrants, the law, and cats, however much they are actually based on groggy early morning half-listening.  What I did hear clearly, though, was the next bit.  It was about history, so the brain woke instantly and the ears perked up.  What The Buerk (screw the quote marks, they’re not necessary) suggested next, as the premise of tonight’s show’s discussion, was that perhaps instead of relying on European laws and conventions, Britain should adopt its “own Bill of Rights....”  Obviously not realizing that, as I say, Britain already has a Bill of Rights.  This was bad enough, this already had my blood boiling, and with my hypertension issues that is not a good thing, but what he followed that up with made it even worse.  What he followed up that up with was “.... perhaps based on that of the United States.”  Rrrrgggrrrggghhhrrraaaggghhh!!!

Those of you who are historians, or at least historians of the modern (ish) world, will know precisely why I go Rrrrgggrrrggghhhrrraaaggghhh!!!  You will know that it is because, as I say, Britain already has a Bill of Rights.  And far from being based on the American Bill of Rights, the American Bill of Rights (1791) is partly based on the British Bill of Rights (1689, actually originally technically the English Bill of Rights, as it was passed before the 1707 Act of Union that abolished the Scottish Parliament and incorporated Scotland into an English-British state).  Now, once again, let me be clear, I have no contempt for those of you who are not historians and do not know that Britain already has a Bill of Rights, or that it helped inspire the American one.  I do not even contemptuously suppose that you are less educated and/or intelligent than me just because I know something in my area of expertise that is not in yours and you therefore don’t.  Perhaps you’re highly educated and/or highly intelligent, but have been misinformed by those who contemptuously suppose themselves to be more educated and intelligent than you are.  That said, if you do reflexively think yourself as being more educated and intelligent than everyone else, and yet don’t know that Britain already has a Bill of Rights, and that it influenced the American one, then I think you are indeed a Buerk.  By the way, if any of you are thinking that it’s our fault, historians’ fault, that you don’t know Britain already has a Bill of Rights—that we sit in Ivory Towers staring up our own bottoms instead of communicating our knowledge to others—then I can tell you the whole Bill of Rights thing has been explained by Simon Schama, David Starkey, and many others in numerous radio and TV programmes and perfectly readable best-selling spin-off books.  If you haven’t heard or seen the numerous radio and TV programmes or read the perfectly readable best-selling spin-off books, that’s fair enough.  But don’t blame us.

Anyway, in that spirit, briefly, here’s the thing.  James, Duke of York came to the throne as King James II at the death of his brother, Charles II, in 1685.  Even before then, “Whigs” had opposed James being crowned because he was suspected of believing in the divine right of kings and absolute monarchy, and because he was a Catholic, though many thought the religion was not unrelated to the politics.  His actions in his reign seemed to confirm these fears, and, after a son was born in the summer of 1688, offering the prospect of a whole new dynasty of tyrannical Catholic Stuart kings, leading parliamentarians decided to act.  They invited William of Orange, the arch-enemy of absolutist King Louis XIV of France, the European champion of Protestantism, and the husband of Mary, James’s daughter, to invade Britain and sort James out.  William landed at Torbay on 5 November, James went to meet and resist the new would-be William the Conqueror, but then bottled it and legged it, leaving the country by Christmas-time.  After that Parliament reformed as a Convention, declared that James had abdicated the throne, and declared William III and Mary II King and Queen.  The Convention also passed a Declaration of Rights that listed the misdeeds of James, set out specific limits on monarchical power, and set out the basic political rights of the English (later British) Parliament and people.  The declaration was passed into law by Parliament as a Bill of Rights on 16 December 1689.  So there you go: the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 and the Bill of Rights of 1689.

Below is a link to the English Bill of Rights from the Yale University Law School Avalon Project that digitizes “Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy”.  Below that is a link to the US Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution, also from the Avalon Project.  The US Bill of Rights was adopted on 15 December 1791, 102 years minus one day after the English one.  Read the two and you'll see many similarities and that the latter was influenced by the former.   

Below all that is a link to a Sunday Times article from 2005 reporting on The Buerk attacking some studio newsreaders for being autocue-reading “lame brains”, and even attacking one of them for being a “complete dumbo”.  (The Buerk read the BBC One o’clock News from 1986 to 2003, the Nine o’clock News from 1988 to 2000, and the Ten o’clock News from 2000 to 2003.)  The Buerk reckons proper journalists ought to be able to write their own scripts, so we can assume he wrote the script for his preview of The Moral Maze.  In which he said that maybe Britain should have its own Bill of Rights, perhaps modeled on the American one.  The article shows that John Humphreys agrees, saying that newsreading requires “no brain”.  (John Humphreys read the BBC Nine o’clock News from 1981 to 1987.)  The Sunday Times then invites readers to send in their views on the question of whether newsreaders are “the voice of authority or highly trained, autocue-reading monkeys?”    

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/england.asp

                  

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rights1.asp

                       

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article530705.ece

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.