Category: Uncategorized

On Saturday night, WotN and I took ourselves off to see Django Unchained. I wanted to see it partly because my interest had been aroused by what I’d read, and partly because friends had recommended it – though I should add, in view of what follows, that I went on my own responsibility and no one else’s.

Well, I nearly liked it, but I ended up hating it. I nearly liked it because there’s a lot that’s good about it: the style of the opening recalls a hundred and more Westerns; some of the main performances – by Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson – are first-rate; there is good crisp, and often funny, dialogue; there’s a most enjoyable scene in which the masks of the Ku Klux Klan are brilliantly satirized; and the film delivers a certain kind of catharsis as Django and Dr King Schultz (the Foxx and Waltz characters) send various evildoers implicated in the horrors of slavery into well-deserved oblivion.

But by the end I couldn’t wait to get out of the cinema. At 165 minutes the movie is too long, but that’s not so uncommon these days. I don’t even know if I can make a persuasive case against it. All I can do is describe my own reactions. It was the relentlessness and the excess of the violence that did for me. I don’t have an especially low threshold in this matter, so what was it that got to me? It was something about the particular combination in that violence. Most of what was meted out by Django and Dr King Schultz – the dispatching of the bad guys, so to speak – was cartoon violence of the ‘Zap’ and ‘Kpow’ variety and for that reason, though very bloody, not difficult to sit through. But the violence against the slaves wasn’t cartoon at all and it was sickening: a man being torn apart by dogs (albeit mostly off camera), repeated whippings, two men forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of onlookers, until one of them is thrown a large hammer with which to ‘finish it’ – something you don’t see but you do hear – and more.

Defenders of Tarantino and the movie might well say here that this violence has to be sickening, rather than of the Zap-and-Kpow type, because he needs to show what a terrible thing slavery was. Maybe. But I was put off by it nonetheless. I don’t know that you have to show such things lingeringly to make the necessary points. I am reminded of comments by Claude Lanzmann regarding Shoah and why he chose to let the witnesses speak rather than trying to ‘reproduce’ the horrors that occurred. And I also wonder about the combination to which I’ve referred: cartoon violence alongside the representation of violence that was anything but. Is this supposed to be an entertainment or what? On one level, that’s manifestly what it is. Not that you cannot educate people in entertaining them. You certainly can. But for me the way the two things – cruelty and fun – are put together in Django left a bad taste. That’s the best I can explain it.

It’s not enough for them that they were RIGHT about Iraq; they want it also that they won the battle for democratic opinion – even though they didn’t. This weekend there was a strange, though muted, echo of the views of Sam Parker, Owen Jones, Laurie Penny and Andrew Murray about the state of British political opinion when Britain went to war in Iraq. The echo came from Sir Menzies Campbell who wrote towards the end of a column in the Independent:

No PM could now venture to go to war without the endorsement of a vote in the Commons, as British involvement in Libya showed.

I call this strange because of course Tony Blair had the endorsement of a vote in the Commons. Scroll back up the column, however, and you will find this (in case you missed it):

For all his brilliance, Tony Blair could not get the wholehearted support of his own party in the division lobby. Nor could he carry public opinion with him.

I’ll say no more than I have already about the state of opinion in late March 2003, but what about that first point, about Blair not getting ‘the wholehearted support of his own party’? Is this a new move, to follow sovereignty being assigned to street demonstrations and/or opinion polls? Should it lie with the wholehearted support of the Labour Party, or of the governing party?

Campbell at least thinks that Iraq changed ‘the political imperative’ for the better, a view not shared by all those who’ve been telling us that a whole generation – the marchers who were ignored etc – has felt betrayed, being turned off democratic politics. Stuart Fox now subjects this claim to empirical testing. Here are some of his conclusions:

It is clear that the events of 2003 had virtually no effect on the perceived political effectiveness of young people, or indeed the rest of the electorate.
…..
In 2001, 58% of young people were satisfied with British democracy; by 2005, the election immediately following the Iraq war, this figure rose to 61%, and reached 66% by 2010.
…..
There is no evidence at all that an entire generation has been politically scarred for life by the invasion of Iraq or the events that surrounded it.

Karen of Cornflower Books begins a new series today in which ‘writers tell us something about where they work’. Her very first guest is none other than Adèle Geras. Adèle talks about her desk, her way of working and sundry other matters. She advises aspiring writers, ‘Hang on in there and don’t lose heart.’

In similar territory, here is John Banville on John Gray, and it’s all (yet once more): the world is without meaning, it’s not a teleology, we’re going precisely nowhere, progress is a deluded myth, and so on.

I can’t. Not again. I can’t spend time arguing that you don’t have to think of progress in this way, as inexorable and governed by a grand purpose; that you can draw attention nonetheless to actual improvements there have been to human existence; that you can observe the fact that there seems to be a simple human impulse to try to do things better than they were done before.

One fresh thought does occur to me, however. Imagine the Johns, Gray and Banville, rising in the morning and really behaving as if the idea of progress was to be eschewed in the non-metaphysical, non-teleological, non-religious, non-inevitabilistic meaning that a lot of us would want to give it – the meaning, that is, of just trying to make the world a better place to the extent that you can, whether by small personal acts, by charitable giving, by supporting meliorative reforms, by acting against injustice, or what have you. If you dismiss all that, what then? You get up and hit someone or hurt their feelings? You argue for social ills to be left as they are? You mock those who are suffering? You recommend new lies, the commission of new wrongs? You support murder and oppression?

I don’t think so.

I don’t want to put a downer on your weekend or anything, but here’s Bill McGuire, Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London, writing about that exploding meteorite in Russia (£):

[A]t some point our world will, without doubt, be struck again by a massive asteroid on the scale of the dinosaur-killer 65 million years ago. Similarly, a colossal volcanic super-eruption, big enough to bring about a volcanic winter and destruction of the global harvest, is indisputable. It really is just a matter of time; Armageddon is not cancelled – just postponed.

Oh well. Better get on with my day.

A reminder might be useful – ‘5 million people are alive today because of it’; ‘a titanic force for good over the past decade’; and ‘Bush still enjoy[ing] high popularity ratings in Africa’ – though I have posted about it before.

I suppose it was inevitable that those words would be flying every which way with the 10th anniversary of the great Iraq war debate and division of world opinion now upon us. As I long ago (October 2006) decided that I had been wrong to support the war, setting out my reasons for having come to that conclusion, I don’t intend to rehearse the issue again here. My reasons were clear enough – that the human costs of the war had been too great, indeed disastrous. But these reasons did not include the thesis that there had, after all, been no moral case for the war. There was a powerful moral case for it; so much so that in October 2006 I still insisted that nothing could have got me, even had I not supported the war, to march against it. Nothing could have, because I would not lend my efforts towards helping to save the Baathist regime. I would have butted out, that’s all. My view hasn’t changed since. So, for all those who want the admission – wrong. Yet with the clear specification: there was a moral case for the war. Those who resolutely deny that there was are either morally obtuse or in the way of sanctimony.

However, the voices now crying out how right they’ve been shown to be seem anxious, and in numbers, that their rightness about the likely outcome of the prospective intervention should extend to the question of whether the war had democratic legitimacy in one of the countries about to embark on it, namely, this one – the United Kingdom. According to many, it didn’t. Why it didn’t is that majority opinion was against the war. We have seen this claim lately either stated or implied by Sam Parker, Owen Jones and Laurie Penny, and today it gets another outing from Andrew Murray, who writes:

British democracy took a body blow too. The shadow of the largest demonstration in British history – an estimated attendance of 2 million was supported by two independent opinion polls taken the following week – still hangs over democratic politics.

I could repeat (as in fact I do) that in a parliamentary democracy, government is neither by street demonstration nor by opinion poll. But I will add to this an observation by Tom Clark in reporting on the latest Guardian/ICM poll, which shows an ‘approximately two-to-one balance of opinion against the Iraq war’… now. As Clark also notes:

The public was sceptical about the Iraq war in advance, and the marchers claimed to speak for the country, but what is often forgotten is that by the eve of hostilities, on 20 March 2003, a more belligerent mood was taking hold.

More than 20 polls were carried out between 18 March and September 2003, and every one found a plurality supporting the war.

Yes, often forgotten. And it shouldn’t be. One might say, accurately, that at the time of the London demo, polls were showing a majority against the war; but after the debate in Parliament on 18 March, they no longer did. And if marches and other forms of public protest are a quite proper part of representative democracy, as they are, then so too, obviously, is parliamentary debate and decision. To freeze the state of opinion as it was in February 2003 is no better than a polemical ruse. What we know, if we’re honest, is that opinion was radically divided and somewhat fluctuating; and at the time hostilities began there was not a clear majority against the war. Even if you thought the Iraq war should not have happened, therefore, it wasn’t a blow against the state of democratic opinion, or democracy itself, in this country. So wrong in that respect.

You might try to present the two-to-one division against the war today as somehow relevant to its alleged democratic illegitimacy then, but that’s a manifest anachronism; political decisions aren’t made on the basis of how opinion will divide later on. Or you might say that our lot should have listened to your lot, whatever the division of opinion, because of what your lot got right. But that’s the same deal as before. When opinions are as deeply divided as they were over Iraq, both sides think, or at least hope, they’re getting things right. The putatively wrong don’t know in advance that the putatively right are in fact right. If they did, there’d be no division of opinion. Democracy isn’t just following you guys because you’re right; it allows the articulation of opposing points of view. And the point of view that the world would be better off without Saddam is one of which nobody need be ashamed.

Twice in the last few days I’ve drawn attention to an idea said to be held by many young people – that if you go on a big demo this should settle the issue politically. Now along comes Laurie Penny to moan about a life-changing sense of betrayal for her generation. Fortunately, I don’t need to go into it again. Alex says what needs to be said.

I’ve already said my bit on those Steve Bell and Gerald Scarfe cartoons. But I cannot pass up the opportunity offered by a column of Hadley Freeman’s to put on display the way in which legitimate worries about the use of traditional anti-Semitic themes and imagery get swept aside.

Freeman is of the view, articulated in just two stray sentences, that the Scarfe cartoon was anti-Netanyahu rather than anti-Semitic. ‘Griping’ about it, as she puts this, does little to combat anti-Semitism. The interesting thing is that this opinion of hers is stuck inside a piece devoted to taking a critical view of sexism in the media. Sexism includes not only ‘viciously misogynistic elements’ but also ‘more insidious tropes’. Such as? Such as ‘describing any female celebrity as “flaunting her legs/curves/body”‘; or as describing an ‘unmarried, unmothered woman over 30… as “brave” for which read: pitiable, for which read: tragic’. OK, you’ll know how that works – demeaning or otherwise prejudicial stereotypes.

But for some reason, unexplained, while Freeman can see that the application to a particular woman of a general theme involves more than a comment on that woman, because it mobilizes a prejudice about women, she can’t see, or doesn’t want to, how showing a Jewish politician using the blood of Palestinians to cement a wall recalls a tradition of anti-Jewish hatred, associated with the ‘blood libel’, in which Jews take the blood of others for their own dubious purposes. Of course, Scarfe may only have had Netanyahu, and not Jews, in mind. There’s no reason not to believe his own assurances on that score. But it isn’t only about his mind, it’s about – to repeat Freeman’s own term – insidious tropes.

So, why are some insidious tropes more equal than others? Because some you consent to see, and others you don’t. These less equal others are denied entry into the republic of tropes that are acknowledged to have a malign history. It’s the Caryl Churchill two-step: she wasn’t meaning all Jews, just some Jews. It is the strange fate of anti-Jewish tropes in some quarters today to have cast off all their generality and to be only ever about THIS.

Allan Massie is reflecting on the attractions of pipe-smoking, something (that is, pipe-smoking) I have never done, not even in the days, way, way back, when I was a smoker. His reflections are prompted by this:

[T]he BBC, in its wisdom, or in thrall to its own addiction – which is to political correctness – has chosen to play down [Harold] Wilson’s pipe in its five-hour tribute to be shown on BBC Parliament.

His former political adviser, Lord Donoughue, says this is “Stalinist”. Wilson’s pipe is to be frozen out, just as fallen members of the Soviet Politburo were removed from photographs. I call it pathetic.

‘Stalinist’ may seem a bit strong, but if the story is accurate, then ‘pathetic’ is certainly apt. Never mind about historical accuracy, hey; somebody might see Wilson smoking his pipe and be influenced to try it. Well, how about we put out information on the dangers of tobacco and show and allow to be shown, in movies and on TV, that smoking used to be much more common than it is now, and let people get on with it, using both the one kind of information and the other? Too damned permissive. Don’t let them see, don’t let them see.