Category: Uncategorized

Given the swamp of apologetics and obscurantism into which the Guardian newspaper has turned itself during the last decade, it may seem unfair to pick out one particular contributor to this ongoing journalistic enterprise as especially egregious. Over the years there have been so many voices to choose from in that regard: the Buntings, the Milnes, the Steeles, the Gopals; and then also all those occasionals who, just like the regulars, can’t wait to put together some soft piece of advocacy to the effect that we, the Western democracies, are just plain no good – though, having nothing better to offer for the time being themselves, these commentators make what effort they can to excuse regimes and movements for which no compelling case could be made by anyone of mature moral sensibility.

It has to be said nonetheless that the swamp has now acquired its own special low point, the name of which is Glenn Greenwald. When it was announced last summer that he’d be joining the Guardian I said I thought that Greenwald would fit right in there. And, my, but hasn’t he done that? No week passes without his letting us know, always most punctually, that however bad anyone else is we are the worst. The man is an almost bottomless pit of the genre.

I offer here a modest example of it, concentrating first on Greenwald’s standard of reasoning. In a later post, I may go on to focus on what is more murky than this, about his moral standpoint. The example of Greenwald’s logic comes from a week ago when he informed the readers of Comment is Free that Washington has now made it clear that its war on terror is permanent. Quoting officials from the Obama administration saying that the war might last another decade or more, Greenwald went on:

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war – justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism – that is the single greatest cause of that threat.

I shall leave for a later occasion Greenwald’s claim that the war on terror is endless because it is itself what fuels the terrorist threat (‘incapable of ending, since the war itself ironically ensures that there will never come a time when people stop wanting to bring violence back to the US’) – this is the murkier thing I have already signalled as due for separate treatment. However, do just dwell for a moment on the reasoning that precedes it: because the war on terror looks like being a long one, it has no purpose other than its own perpetuation, is not a means to any other end – this even though Greenwald himself manages to rise to the thought that it is ‘justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism‘ (my emphasis). To a person of greater intelligence it might have occurred at this point that the purpose of the war on terror is defeating the threat of jihadist terrorism, with which the world has been living for longer than it should. But Greenwald prefers not to think about that obvious possibility within the logical field, opting instead for the Orwellian resonances of war for its own sake.

Well, we’ll see. It is to be hoped – and I would certainly expect – the war on terror will one day be won. A movement with nothing to offer the world other than blowing people (Westerners or not) to pieces, eliminating music and such, may still do a lot of harm, but it can only incur the further contempt of humankind, at least that part of it not shaped in the Greenwald mould.

[At the University of Hong Kong, my friend Ian Holliday is staging an art exhibition, ‘Painting the transition: Contemporary art in Myanmar’. He sets the scene immediately below. – NG]

Coming in from the cold after 50 years of austere dictatorship, Myanmar is currently testing the boundaries of a raft of new freedoms. Rigid controls were not dismantled overnight, but a March 2011 switch from military junta to quasi-civilian rule has slowly created space for meaningful self-expression. Finally people can breathe a little.

More than two years on, activists routinely take to the streets of major cities to protest government policy, journalists pursue breaking stories up and down the land, hawkers beguile tourists with long banned symbols of opposition, and ordinary citizens daily raise their sights just a little higher.

Playing critical roles in this outpouring of human creativity and energy are artists and intellectuals never fully silenced by authoritarianism, but certainly forced for years to operate below probing security radars. Today, by contrast, writers give readings at literary festivals, musicians perform rap and hip hop in concert, and painters exhibit canvases that for decades could be shared only with trusted friends.

Growing links with the outside world, dating from the late junta period, were important enablers of this renaissance. The arrival of internet cafes in major cities in the mid-2000s was notably important. Above all, though, change was driven locally as isolated groups of individuals formed for mutual support in teashops and restaurants built integrated and confident networks when political reform gathered pace.

One significant consequence of Myanmar’s cultural rebirth is that a significant number of artists can now work on a full-time basis. For leading painters, the change has been dramatic. Although the state ruled by generals generated jobs in illustration, graphic design and commissioned pictures for a small tourist trade, few could give free rein to their talent. Today an expanding group does precisely that.

Still conditions are not ideal. Some commercial galleries continue to flirt with state censorship. The major professional association is unreconstructed. The ponderous National Museum is off limits for most contemporary artists. Selling sufficient work to make ends meet is often a challenge. Nevertheless, the range and quality of art now being produced by local painters is astounding.

Accessed from a chipped concrete staircase in a crumbling colonial building, Pansodan Gallery in downtown Yangon is the hub for many new artists. Launched by husband and wife team Aung Soe Min and Nance Cunningham in August 2008, the gallery works proactively to connect painters with each other, and with potential buyers. It is also trying to launch an independent artists’ association.

Within the emergent band of painters some are openly political, espousing membership of a broad opposition movement. For them, independence hero Aung San, democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, and monks participating in the 2007 saffron uprising, all taboo topics until very recently, are now standard subjects. So too are oblique references to government failings and social problems.

More common across the new cohort, though, is a dual desire first to connect with the cultural heritage of a major artistic tradition, and second to bring it squarely into the contemporary age of sweeping social and political change. Buddhist symbols and ritual thus feature strongly. Ethnic costume, music and dance are important themes. Customs and habits of village people in a still rural society are carefully represented. Changing rhythms of vibrant urban life are fully documented.

In these diverse ways, painters from Myanmar’s new generation of cultural and intellectual leaders provide nuanced and incisive commentary on a society embarking on what is certain to be a difficult journey. The start point was military dictatorship. The end point is unknown. Capturing twists and turns in the road is a network of accomplished artists emerging from a hermetic state. (Ian Holliday)

They just keep on coming: laments, regrets, doubts, about continued efforts or new initiatives in remembering this country’s part in the Second World War. Having expressed my misgivings about these attitudes on several earlier occasions, I could just shrug off the latest manifestation, which appeared in an editorial in last Friday’s Guardian. But, instead, I think I’ll take the discussion to a different level. I’ll endeavour to show how this ‘enough about WWII already’ trope reflects certain interpretative choices on the part of those who sponsor it and why these choices are wrong-headed.

The latest Guardian editorial on the theme in question doesn’t flat-out oppose continued memorializing of the war. But it notes that ‘Britain still nurses some deep official collective need to remember these epochal conflicts’, and then throws in a whole lot of questions regarding why remembering is needed. The general direction of these questions is adequately conveyed by the concluding trio:

Do we need any more memorials, plaques and statues? Can we not decide, maturely and respectfully, that enough is enough? Can we at last move on?

The question of whether we remember cannot be divorced from the questions of what and how we remember. For, of course, the Second World War was – as the piece says – epochal; it isn’t reducible to a single dimension or meaning. So what might we want to remember for? I shall suggest just three possibilities, though there could easily be more.

(1) Democracy versus Nazism and fascism. This is a central feature of WWII. It needs to be qualified, to be sure, since one of the major allies, the USSR, was not a democratic country and that fact cannot be spirited away. Nonetheless, one of the results of this war was immensely to strengthen the prospects of democratic political progress in Europe and the world (see here, penultimate paragraph), as compared with what a Nazi victory would have delivered.

(2) Human rights versus the triumph of barbarism. The outcome of that conflict was to give a great push forward to the idea and, in due course, the practice of human rights across the globe, though the speed of this should not be exaggerated or the still-existing limitations overlooked. But, in any case, the contrast with what a triumph of Nazism might have meant can hardly be overstated. WWII saved the world from something that had scarcely been thought possible up to then and which it had seen enough of in a few years of unsurpassed atrocity and inhumanity.

(3) War even though justified war. As against the above two ways of remembering 1939-1945, one must also recognize that the war fought by the Allies, like just about any war, wasn’t a wholly good war (see, for example, 1, 2, 3). What war is or could be? It’s war, not by far the most elevated of human activities or accomplishments. So we should not lose sight of or minimize the dark side of the Allied victory, despite everything of value that it achieved.

However – and here’s the crux – we make our own choices in how we remember, and we may choose to remember the Second World War for the giant barrier it ended in throwing up against the forces of political reaction and obscene cruelty that had covered Europe; may do so without in any way varnishing the bad aspects that were involved on our own side. Why not continue to remember and indeed to do this forever, or at least so long as it is necessary to remind ourselves of what we always stand to lose if such political forces should once more gain the upper hand? It is a mystery why anyone should think this effort of necessary memory has run its full course. After not even a hundred years.

Or perhaps it isn’t such a big mystery. Those so ready to move on in this matter tend towards the end of the political spectrum on which today’s sworn enemies of democracy and liberty and rights are thought of as deserving a little ‘liberal’ understanding, aggrieved about this, that and the other as they diddumsly are, and so should be met not by force and the drawing of firm lines but by seeing their point of view. In this particular book, war isn’t ever about democracy or rights, it’s only about warmongering – and ‘our’ warmongering at that. The perspective of the present warps the realities of the past and World War II becomes, in this light, a subject of political discomfort.

You can’t be too careful, you know. Way back, ooh seven years, as a still somewhat fresh-faced blogger, I had this idea that I’d figured out something quite clever. As follows:

Here is what can sometimes happen: one person wrongs another and doesn’t know how to come back from that. So they deepen the wrong. They add further or worse misdemeanours, falsehoods, calumnies or what have you to the original one. This is the dynamic: to reinforce the thought that the first wrong wasn’t one, anything which might diminish its recipient helps the offending party convince him or herself that the other must be a bad person, so that the first offence against them was somehow deserved. The deepening process is itself the symptom of a moral discomfort that cannot be squarely faced.

Well, then I learned that Tacitus had said the same thing more succinctly, and then that the divine Jane knew it too and, more lately, that so did Tolstoy. Now, in the book I just finished, The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout, one of her main characters says:

In case you haven’t noticed people get hard-hearted against the people they hurt. Because we can’t stand it. Literally. To think we did that to someone. I did that. So we think of all the reasons why it’s okay we did whatever we did.

It’s a common thought, see. Anyway, maybe I haven’t said it before: you’d do well to catch up with Elizabeth Strout if you don’t know her books already. WotN has written about her for the Writer’s Choice series here.

Isabelle Grey had a teenage crush on F. Scott Fitzgerald, followed by a deep attraction to the thrill of Watergate and the chutzpah of gonzo journalism. She became, first, a freelance journalist and non-fiction author, then a television screenwriter and novelist. Her second novel of psychological suspense, The Bad Mother, has just been published by Quercus. Below Isabelle discusses Joan Didion’s Where I Was From.

Isabelle Grey on Where I was From: A Memoir by Joan Didion

Where I was From was Joan Didion’s first memoir, published in 2003 and since eclipsed by The Year of Magical Thinking. It begins with her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother’s birth and ends with her mother’s death. ‘There is no real way,’ she writes, ‘to deal with everything we lose.’ What is lost in this book is her relationship to the place where she grew up – California. The book both enables the loss and charts it. It is a story of disillusion, disengagement, of ‘misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely’.

It is part nostalgia and part recantation (Didion made her name, after all, writing about a California she here disowns), and also typically fastidious. In addition to genealogy she enquires forensically into history, climate, immigration, state finance, cultural values and mythology. I read it soon after finishing Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, with which it dovetails in illuminating ways.

Didion collected her early magazine pieces about California (she was born in Sacramento and graduated from Berkeley) in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, published in 1968 when I was a schoolgirl. I was a precocious admirer of Watergate-era investigative reporting, gonzo journalism and what Tom Wolfe dubbed the New Journalism, and so was both intrigued by and jealous of her as the only woman in a male pantheon.

I’d been hooked by Wolfe’s notion that ‘it is possible to write journalism that would… read like a novel’, and since then have continued to follow how the way in which reporters put themselves at the heart of their narratives developed into new forms of memoir, biography and autobiography.

From Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood through Richard Holmes’s Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer to a variety of texts by W.G. Sebald, Suzannah Lessard, Hilton Als or Lisa Cohen, the notion that a writer’s relationship with his or her material can be negotiated differently, obliquely, in order to differentiate ‘truth’ from ‘fact’, to reveal the many ways in which facts can be untrue, has made for beguiling reading.

Within that canon, Where I Was From is both a revisionist text – a confession that Didion’s cherished beliefs about California simply don’t ‘add up’ – and a further development of the genre. Its interrogation of her ‘memory’ of the old California, of the frontier code taught by her grandfather that you kill every rattlesnake you see so it cannot bite the person who comes after you, also lays bare her ‘tenacious wish not to examine whatever it was I needed to believe’.

Didion told The Paris Review in 2006 that she had ‘started a book about California in the seventies… but I could never go anywhere with it for two reasons. One was that I still hadn’t figured out California. The other was that I didn’t want to figure out California because whatever I figured out would be different from the California my mother and father had told me about. I didn’t want to engage that.’ It is an admission that, in losing her ‘memory’ of California, she loses a part of herself; it is an assertion that the perpetuation of national myths may be to do with loyalty to family identity. When such myths are dispelled, what remains of us? ‘The past could be jettisoned,’ writes Didion, ‘… but seeds got carried.’

Forty years after Tom Wolfe’s claim that ‘it is possible to write journalism that would… read like a novel’, the question has to be asked whether fiction can in fact deal as effectively with such themes of identity and loss as these new narrative forms? What is the ‘real way to deal with everything we lose’?

Such ‘new memoir’ is a modernist endeavour, concerned with the nature of subjectivity, shifting perceptions, the existence of the self in relation to time and to the text. I have been a journalist and non-fiction author, and have written fiction, television drama and docu-drama. There are many ways to convey the ‘truth’ about people and events, just as there are many versions of the ‘I’ who writes them.

Where I Was From is about how places appear different when we change, about the ways in which we are changed when our perception of place is altered, about what it means to define ourselves in relation to time and place, and about how where we are from remains as shifting and insubstantial as where we are now.

I remain both jealous and intrigued.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

Given how long I’ve supported Manchester United – since 1967 – and given the great names that have been associated with the club in all that time, you might think I’d have difficulty picking a single favourite player. I don’t. It’s Paul Scholes, without a blink or a second thought. There’s a lovely piece on him by Matthew Syed in today’s Times. The Times paywall presents a problem; I found it so hard to pick out a single short section summing up the character of the man and the footballer. Every short section seems necessary. I solve the problem without either shame or, I hope, crossing any legal boundary beyond quotation for fair comment, by reproducing much of the piece (£):

It was a brief, almost perfunctory conversation between two men who have lived and breathed Manchester United for a combined period of almost five decades. It took place just outside the dressing room, in the corridor at Carrington, after training on a cold February morning.

“Next season, what do you think?” Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager who had dominated the club for 26½ years, said. Paul Scholes, one of his most trusty lieutenants, looked back, wrinkled his nose and shook his head. It was all Ferguson needed to see. “You are probably right,” Ferguson replied. “It’s time.”

In 12 simple words, the curtain had fallen on one of the most sublime careers in the history of English football. “We both knew,” Scholes says when we meet at the United training complex. “It was obvious to us both that I was off the pace. I knew it deep down and the boss could see it. We didn’t need a long, drawn-out conversation. There will be no comeback this time.”

Scholes has enjoyed more than half a lifetime at Old Trafford, winning trophies and plaudits in equal measure. His résumé includes 11 Premier League titles, three FA Cups, two League Cups, two European Cups and one Club World Cup. According to many of his most illustrious peers, he is the definitive midfielder of the past two decades.

But, when you meet the 38-year-old, his most striking characteristic is a glorious indifference to celebrity. Football is not, for him, a means to an end (stardom or riches). Rather, it is, to quote from Sartre, “the thing in itself”.

He finds meaning in the game he has graced for so long and is bemused by the contemporary obsession with limelight and superficial fame.

“I love football, have done since I first started kicking a ball as a boy,” he says. “But I am not interested in the things that go with it. For me, it is about the game, a way of playing. The pleasure of striking a ball or finding the right pass. It is not about having my name up in lights.

“I was pleased to retire when I did because I was overshadowed by bigger names bowing out at the same time. I got out under the radar.”

Scholes is a courteous person, too, making sure I am comfortable and offering to fetch a drink. Perhaps such characteristics shouldn’t need mentioning, but they are significant in a world where so many stars lose touch with the basics of human decency.

Perhaps Ferguson needs thanking for that, too, because grounding is a common attribute among United players. “It is difficult to run away with yourself here,” Scholes says with a smile. “You would quickly be brought back down to earth.”

I read to Scholes the eulogies that have been expressed by many of the top players of recent times.

Xavi Hernández: “In the last 15 to 20 years the best central midfielder that I have seen – the most complete – is Scholes.” Zinedine Zidane: “My toughest opponent? Scholes of Manchester. He is the complete midfielder.” Edgar Davids, while at the peak of his game: “I’m not the best, Paul Scholes is.” Pep Guardiola: “He is the best midfielder of his generation. I would have loved to have played alongside him.” Cristiano Ronaldo: “Scholes is the best I’ve played with and he helped me a lot when I was young. He’s amazing.” Wayne Rooney: “The best player I’ve played with or against.” And so it goes on.

Perhaps no player in the modern history of the English game has been so universally revered. When you ask the most storied and exotic names whom they most admire, they invariably plump for a ginger-haired, quietly spoken Coronation Street aficionado from Langley. As Pelé put it: “If he was playing with me, I would have scored so many more.”

Scholes smiles and shakes his head as he listens to the tributes. “It is very nice to hear, very flattering,” he says. “But I don’t really agree. These guys have won World Cups and European Championships. I think you have to do it on the biggest stage to be considered a true great. I haven’t done that.”

This humility is not for show. When I press Scholes on his own assessment of his place in history, he is more comfortable talking about his weaknesses (tackling) than his strengths. This is a genuinely self-effacing genius.

When I ask who is the finest player he has played against, he pauses, his inner computer making rapid assessments of the legion of opponents he has faced down the years. He laughs and shrugs. “So many brilliant players,” he says finally. “Xavi, Iniesta, Messi. Vieira was a fantastic player, too. But if I had to pick one, I would go with Zidane. He could do it all.”

When I ask about the finest player he has played with, he is rather more emphatic. “There are a lot of contenders, but only one clear winner,” he says. “The contenders include Keane, Robson, Cole, Yorke, Sheringham, Van Nistelroy, all unbelievable players. Nicky, Phil, David and Gary, of course. Brucey, Pally and Irwin were brilliant too. One of the great things about playing at this club has been the quality of my team-mates.

“But the best has to be Ryan Giggs. He is unreal. He can go past players, tackle players, and he can head a ball. He wants to make goals and he wants to score goals. The way he looks after himself is incredible. He is still one of the quickest and fittest players in the world, and he is almost 40. When Gary, Nicky, me and David came into the set-up, we idolised him. In some ways, I still do. He could go on for as long as he likes. He is in a league of his own.”

As we move on to his thoughts on the wider game, Scholes’s knowledge is profound. His off-the-record descriptions of team-mates – strengths, technical defects and observations on how they might improve – are encyclopaedic in their detail. It is obvious why many of his colleagues regard him as among the deepest thinkers in football.

When I put this to him, however, he smiles modestly once again. “That is because I don’t say much,” he says. “So when I do say something, people tend to sit up and listen.”

Sorely missed isn’t the half of it. I already miss him, in advance.

There’s some good advice from Daniel Dennett on ‘tools for thinking‘ here. I think my favourite is this one:

BEWARE OF DEEPITIES

A deepity (a term coined by the daughter of my late friend, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum) is a proposition that seems both important and true – and profound – but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading, it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading, it is true but trivial. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth from the second reading, and the devastating importance from the first reading, and thinks, Wow! That’s a deepity.

Here is an example (better sit down: this is heavy stuff): Love is just a word.

Oh wow! Cosmic. Mind-blowing, right? Wrong. On one reading, it is manifestly false. I’m not sure what love is – maybe an emotion or emotional attachment, maybe an interpersonal relationship, maybe the highest state a human mind can achieve – but we all know it isn’t a word. You can’t find love in the dictionary!

We can bring out the other reading by availing ourselves of a convention philosophers care mightily about: when we talk about a word, we put it in quotation marks, thus: “love” is just a word. “Cheeseburger” is just a word. “Word” is just a word. But this isn’t fair, you say. Whoever said that love is just a word meant something else, surely. No doubt, but they didn’t say it.

Not all deepities are quite so easily analysed.

Some deepities I have grown to love and laugh at are these. There’s no such thing as an enduring human nature. Oh, you reply, so human beings don’t need to eat or rest? There aren’t common abilities like the use of language and such? Comes back the reply: we didn’t mean that by human nature; we meant that not all humans are greedy, or power-loving, or interested in unlimited wealth. So it turns out that the denial of an enduring human nature amounts to some changeable or non-universal features of the human character not being unchangeable. What else is new?

In a tutorial I used to run on the Modern Political Thought course at Manchester, I would sometimes ask students if there are any biologically-based differences between men and women. You’d be surprised how many of them answered ‘No’. What?! How about the ability to bear children? Oh… we thought you meant differences like being cleverer or more fit to govern. So there are possible differences then? Yes, perhaps.

A more recent deepity, discussed many times on this blog and particularly associated with the name of Karen Armstrong, is the claim that religion isn’t really about beliefs; it’s about practices, rituals, and other such stuff. Scratch the surface of the claim and it always emerges that the underlying and trivial version of it is that religion is about other things as well as beliefs.

Otherwise known as: there’s the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back.

The links between cricket and the literary world are many and varied, but here’s one I wouldn’t have guessed:

What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

Stacks of books on cricket. I am fascinated by its history. It’s a story told in match statistics, but it’s also bred some stylish prose. My head is full of the ghosts of men in white playing games that were over before the Great War.

That shows a true depth of understanding about why it matters.

Since starting this blog in late July 2003, I have tried to update it regularly, my aim being to have something new most days and, ideally, more than one post a day. I have succeeded in meeting this objective for much of the time, though with exceptions: when following the Ashes in Australia during the 2006-7 series (a wonderful lifetime experience); on infrequent holidays; during the odd weekend busy seeing family or friends; and some days just because I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to blog about. However, a different obstacle has lately arisen for me, which explains some of the falling off readers may have noticed, and I’ve decided to make the reason for it public because I can no longer guarantee the same frequency of posting as before.

Since March of this year I have become ill. I was first diagnosed with early prostate cancer at the beginning of 2003, not long before starting normblog. Though my initial treatment failed to cure the condition, I have remained asymptomatic and in good health for 10 years under the first-rate care of Christie Hospital in Manchester and the treatments recommended and implemented there. But this decade of good fortune ran out for me at the end of February this year when I learned that the cancer had now spread and, simultaneously, I started to suffer the effects of that. For the last few days I’ve been not only ill but also in hospital – though I hope it won’t be for very long. I am now under the outstanding medical eye and hand of Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge. I will just say here, in passing, that my own personal experience of cancer and the treatment of it (as also of my diabetic condition, which is a more longstanding one still) have shown me nothing but the excellence of the NHS.

This is what I see from the window of my ward at Addenbrooke’s. Just before the sky begins, in the centre ground of the picture (courtesy of Adèle, about whom no words of loving gratitude for her support in every sense could be adequate to what I owe her) is a place called Nine Wells, not far from where we now live.

And, looking in from that window, had you been, this is the picture you might have seen of me yesterday (same hat-tip as before).

I mean to carry on blogging to the best of my ability for as long as I can. Blogging has become part of the work – or a kind of adjunct to it – and also of the play that are important in my life. But I can’t promise the same regularity as before. Sometimes I may manage it, but it will depend on the outcome of the treatments still available to me.

I don’t have the means to judge the comparative exercise reported on at the Washington Post; it’s about degrees of racial tolerance across the countries of the world. But I have to own up to liking this among its conclusions:

People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America.

At least until the finding is discredited, we don’t have to accept as the holy truth what is so often suggested to us by those parties according to whom ‘we’ are always the worst.