My year of living vicariously

# 62

   Looking back, I am surprised to discover that this will be the twenty-seventh blog to have trundled down The Bus Lane since #36 on 8 January, 2012. That one was about how New Year’s Resolutions have much in common with blogs. They share the “hopelessly optimistic … belief that there is something we could do – or some habit we could change - that would make things better…Most of us can cut through any problem provided we are sufficiently ignorant of its complexity. Trouble is, for a lasting resolution to problems in the real world, you probably have to unravel the knot, not just slice arbitrarily through the tangle.”

   If I’ve had an aim this year, it was to write, say, two blogs each calendar month, but with 2012 being a Leap Year and me an opinionated old git… lately retired…Well, the London Olympics and Paralympics did provide the subjects for three blogs (# 49, 50 & 51)…making blogs, I suppose, even more like London buses - nothing for what seems like ages and then three come along, all at once. Or perhaps only two, as was the case with Mr Abu Qatada. His tussles with Her Majesty’s Government apparently received two blogs (#40 in February and 58 in November). I have to say ‘apparently’ because these were – essentially – the same blog offered twice; with minor amendments. My excuse for this repetition is the similarity of the legal process to a set of revolving doors. To quote (yet again) from The Old Pretender’s Book of Travesties, Peculiars VI, Chapter 6, verse 26:

“26 And lo it came to pass, even as Theresa hath predicted, and in the morning she was again toast in all the papers. And then did The Dave gird up his loins one more time and comfort her saying, ‘Fear not, me old fruit, for the pathway of the righteous is clear before us, even though it be as bent as a scenic railway. Lo, the King of the Jordans is coming amongst us next week and I is well minded to get him on-side with a few of our surplus Harrier jumping jets and sundry other bits of impressive military kit. And in the meantime we is going to appeal the case of The Abu even unto the Court of The Three Wise Monkeys which I is even now inventing.’

Amen.

   On a happier note, but still on the fringes of the Islamic world, The Bus Lane’s free-ride for Good-Sports Personality of the Year, 2012, goes to Mother Rifle – Le Vieux Fusil – from Radu Mihaileanu’s film The Source (Blog #45 The Big Picture, 26 May):

   There is a lot of vitality and humour in this film, frequently involving the prodigious ‘Mother’ Rifle. We see her using a mobile phone while riding a donkey along a high mountain track. As the donkey ambles along she loses her signal and blames this on the animal, threatening to sell it in the souk[i]. Mother Rifle’s account of her own life reminded me of Brecht’s Mother Courage. At the age of fourteen she had been forced to marry an elderly widower for whom she eventually bore nineteen children, although few survived infancy. When her husband died she stamped on his grave with delight.

   Blog #45 turned out to be our only film review this year. The more recent blog #61 (The burden of bearing arms) was intended to be a review of Martin McDonagh’s movie Seven Psychopaths but was overtaken (overwhelmed?) by the shooting of infants at Sandy Hook School.

    Hollywood exports many versions of America to the world as entertainment and Seven Psychopaths is now among them. We are not encouraged to question whether the graphic portrayal of violence in movies (and in computer games) has any effect upon individual behaviour in real life. The advertising industry spends untold billions to put in front of our eyes fleeting movies entirely devised to influence our decisions and manipulate our behaviour. In the cinema, we happily watch major movies confident in the belief that what happens on the screen stays on the screen. Actors pull their triggers, people are ‘blown away’, and we persist in the belief that our collective values and our everyday behaviour are immune to all this.

   Four blogs (#s 41, 42, 49 & 56) were concerned with other aspects of the visual arts under the titles: On not taking tea with Picasso (11 March), O Brave New Wold (01 April), That Old Arcimboldo Question (19 July) and Polishing the piglet’s snout (25 October):

There are some tourists who arrive equipped to photograph everything they see and I sometimes wonder how much, in the end, they really do see. ‘Seeing’ is a first hand experience and in respect of many of the things tourists travel to see – paintings, sculptures, buildings, landscapes – the actual ‘seeing’ takes time. Hours, days, weeks; in some instances, a lifetime. So it is somewhat weird to see folk arrive (at often vast expense) in front of, say, Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi (1423) or Botticelli’s 1475 depiction of the epiphany –  take a surreptitious snap and, almost immediately, stroll on.

   Depressingly, at least eleven of this year’s blogs were directly concerned with politics - mostly in Britain but inevitably also in the United States. This was predictable given that 2012 was a Presidential Election year in America, a London Mayoral Election year at home and the year of Lord Leveson’s enquiry into the murky world of Murdoch & his feral chums. To quote from blog #60 (02 December):

If our precious freedom of speech depends on the phone hackers, the bad-hair woman, the two Murdochs, Paul Dacre or the Barclay brothers, then we’re well and truly mullered before we even start. The concentration of media ownership and control in so few secretive but grubby hands continues to be a far greater threat to freedom of expression than anything conjured by Leveson.

   To judge by the reaction of David Cameron and his friends at the Daily Mail, The Telegraph and The Sun, you might think that the problem we need to solve is one of self-serving politicians interfering with a free press. In fact it has been the other way round. Politically motivated and largely irresponsible media barons have shamelessly interfered with our democracy. It’s difficult to believe that the ‘significant’ press needs any protection from political interference when for thirty years (or more) editors and their proprietors have corrupted the ethics of our public realm, cheapened and dumbed-down public discourse and trashed both dissent and dissenters. Vaingloriously seeking to play the role of kingmaker they have alternately proffered and withheld their patronage and favours from a bunch of political pygmies. Blair, Brown, Cameron…need I go on?

   With our total readership clawing towards two-thousand, the single most successful blog in The Bus Lane this year was #54, All You Need is Gove. Posted on 20 September, this tilt at Education Minister Michael Gove’s derisory mis-handling of the school examinations crisis gained new readers - largely thanks to sharing by friends on Facebook;

   Gove feared (rightly) that if he consulted the teaching profession he would be swept away on a tsunami of pedagogic twaddle. He therefore plumped for the simplest and crudest solution available: he would replace an examination which too many students were passing with an old, discredited, test designed to ensure the majority of candidates would fail. This particularly delighted him because it illustrated so perfectly the neo-conservative maxim that ‘For a few to succeed, many must fail’ (otherwise, what’s the point?) 

…Before he finally melted away in the afterglow of his own self-proclaimed brilliance, Gove decreed that the new examination system was to be called the English Baccalaureate to commemorate the timeless beauty and lifetime achievements of Miss Lauren Bacall. This should not be confused with Laurel & Hardy, Kier Hardie, Michael O’Leary, Kiss me Hardy, Laurens of Arabia, Lauren Laverne, bacchanalia, back bacon or Buck Rogers (all of which - except Michael O’Leary - made far more sense).

Miss Lauren Bacall

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[i] Use Google to find the trailer for The Source on YouTube. The Algerian singer, dancer & actor Biyouna plays Mother Rifle.

The burden of bearing arms – A film review

# 61

   This piece began as a film review. We had been to our local Odeon to see ‘Seven Psychopaths’, the new film written and directed by Martin McDonagh – he of In Bruges fame. I had written a review and was about to post it online when I heard about the shooting of twenty infants and seven teachers at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut, USA. There is nothing about that news that doesn’t make you weep. President Obama did a lot better than I in controlling his emotions. He had to, I don’t. I just wanted to let rip at the awfulness, the horror, the utter pointless, inhuman, heartless evil of it all. Even now, just to think for even one moment about what happened in that school returns me to the edge of darkness. And there I was, about to offer my review of an intentionally graphic, intentionally comic movie about psychopaths using guns…

   ‘Seven Psychopaths’ – what does the title even mean? I’d come close to sharing the assumed joke; was it meant to be like Disney’s Snow White, but with Colin Farrell as the dozy innocent and seven psychos instead of seven dwarves? Was it an esoteric homage to Hollywood via a reprise of Sunset Boulevard? Was it a witty subversion of the classic Western genre - another fantasia on the frontier myth of ‘good people’ with guns versus ‘bad people’ with guns? If so, in which category – I must ask - would Hollywood put the mother of the Newtown gunman? She was, we are being told, shot by her own son using guns from her own collection. According to the ruthless logic of the gun lobby should she, perhaps, have shot him before he shot her?

   My abiding memory of the movie Seven Psychopaths will be that it opens with the giant letters of the ‘HOLLYWOOD’ sign, standing pristine white against their brown hillside, and ends with a scorched remnant of the Stars and Stripes flapping pitifully against the Los Angeles skyline. Between those two images, McDonagh conducts us through a series of bloody executions and shoot-outs which all take place in the unreality of a moral vacuum. The only creature Hollywood requires should be kept safe from harm is Bonny, a kidnapped Shih Tzu dog, whose collar-tag reads “Return to Charles Costello or you will fucking die”. Nice.

   A story about multiple psychopaths, gathered at random, was never going to be easy, was it? It soon becomes clear that Marty (Colin Farrell) and his associate Billy (Sam Rockwell) know little or nothing about psychopathology other than what they’ve absorbed from the movies of Quentin Tarantino and Sam Peckinpah. To gain a well-rounded introduction to the subject, these are plainly not the most reliable of sources. Zachariah (Tom Waits) turns up in response to Billy’s advert for psychopaths to come forward and tell their stories. Zac looks seriously disturbed by any normal standards, standing outside Billy’s house, fondling a white rabbit. Billy eyes him up and quickly concludes: “Okay, you seem normal. Come on in. I gotta get this dog off the street because it’s kidnapped from a maniac.”

   “Dandy,” replies Zac – who turns out to be a serial killer of serial killers. Does that make him one of the ‘good guys’? It is hard to say.

    Hollywood exports many versions of America to the world as entertainment and Seven Psychopaths is now among them. We are not encouraged to question whether the graphic portrayal of violence in movies (and in computer games) has any effect upon individual behaviour in real life. The advertising industry spends untold billions to put in front of our eyes fleeting movies entirely devised to influence our decisions and manipulate our behaviour. In the cinema, we happily watch major movies confident in the belief that what happens on the screen, stays on the screen. Actors pull their triggers, people are ‘blown away’, and we persist in the belief that our collective values and our everyday behaviour are immune to all this.

   Because of the economic and military power of the USA and also because of our shared history and common language, we in Britain follow events in the United States as closely as if they were happening here. The massacre at Newtown, like similar outrages of recent times, has revived the issue of gun control for America. Those who oppose controls on gun ownership build their case on the second amendment to The Constitution of the United States (1787). The first ten amendments are known collectively as The Bill of Rights. They date from 1791. The first amendment guarantees freedom of religion, of speech, of the press and of peaceable assembly. The second guarantees the right to keep and bear arms. The authors of the Bill considered the right to gun ownership was that important, second only to religious freedom, free speech and a free press. It is worth asking why this was so. Was it because they enjoyed some totemic devotion to the ‘Brown Bess’ 0.75 calibre flintlock musket[1] or was there a broader political reason behind the drafting of the second amendment? Looking at this as an outsider, it appears to me that the gun lobby has always wanted America to overlook the first thirteen words of the second amendment. These – crucially - established the context for the right to bear arms. In its entirety, Article II reads:

“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

   Anti-federalists among ‘the founding fathers’ feared the possibility of a military take-over of the federal government. For that reason they opposed allowing the federal government to maintain a standing army. In the eighteenth century, military power lay in having large numbers of foot-soldiers, each one armed with a musket. If the citizens could form themselves into a ‘well-regulated’ militia at short notice – like the famous ‘minutemen’ of Massachusetts – the federal government would have no excuse for maintaining a regular army. The militia – the citizens in arms – would suffice. You could argue that the Bill of Rights entitles every citizen to keep (and carry openly) a Brown Bess musket. It was never intended to include concealed weapons, semi-automatic pistols, assault rifles, machine guns or bazookas.

   Now, two hundred years later, the United States government controls the largest, most expensive and most destructively powerful military establishment the world has ever seen. It also still maintains a constitutional right for all citizens to keep unlimited numbers of firearms in their own homes. The voters of America spend, annually, $2,141 per capita (4.7% of their Gross Domestic Product) on the US Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and National Guard[2]. They do so in the belief that these are essential for the defence of the homeland. If Americans have any confidence whatsoever in the effectiveness of their armed forces, why oh why does the civilian population also need to be armed to the teeth?

   The origin of the ‘right to bear arms’ in both the United Kingdom and the United States stems from the (British) ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1689 when a Catholic king (James II) sought to disarm the more militant of his Protestant subjects. Over four hundred years later, in the twenty-first century, for anyone in the United States to continue to maintain that individual gun ownership is a ‘human right’ - on a par with freedom of speech and habeas corpus - is complete and utter nonsense. Psychotic, I’d call it; not unlike the parallel psychosis[3] that we call Hollywood.

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[1] The ‘Brown Bess’ British Land Pattern Musket was used by both sides in the War of Independence. It was the standard infantry weapon in Britain and America from 1722 until the 1830s. It was muzzle-loaded, had a 42 inch barrel and an effective range of less than 100 yards. With practice, it could be made to fire three or four rounds per minute.

[2] Stockholm International Peace Research Institute: Yearbook 2012.

[3] Psychosis, noun. A serious mental disorder characterised by eg illusions, delusions, hallucinations, mental confusion and a lack of insight on the part of the patient into his or her mental condition.

It’s still a case of ‘Publish and be damned’

# 60

   You can’t accuse Lord Justice Leveson of not being cautious, conciliatory or entirely affable. Otherwise, why did he take nearly two thousand pages distributed across four hefty volumes to lay before us the blindingly obvious? Please remember, it wasn’t an over-bearing, censorial or interfering politician who shut down the News of The World. No, it was that old incorrigible press baron Rupert Murdoch; a man who can be relied upon to be suitably “humble”, but only as a last resort and only after the shit has well and truly hit the proverbial. Formerly an Australian, currently an American for business purposes, Murdoch would willingly go Chinese or Martian if that was the price of access to the world’s fastest-growing market for satellite television. He was - and continues to be – subject to no obvious scrutiny, accountability or democratic control over here, over there or anywhere else on the planet.

   For at least the last twenty years – no, to be fair, let’s say ‘since the sacking of Harold Evans from The Times’ (and that was 1981-2) – Murdoch’s News International has employed any number of feral door-steppers, cynical careerists and outright media thugs, allowing each to masquerade as a journalist. Now that they have been exposed, this parcel of rogues seeks to claim an undeserved constitutional protection as members of The Fourth Estate. Leave it out!  If our precious freedom of speech depends on these phone hackers, that bad-hair-day woman, those two Murdochs, Paul Dacre or the Barclay brothers, then we’re well and truly mullered before we even start. The concentration of media ownership and control in so few, so secretive and such grubby hands continues to be a far greater threat to freedom of expression than anything conjured by Leveson.

   To judge by the reactions of David Cameron and his friends at The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and The Sun, you might think that the problem we need to solve is one of self-serving politicians interfering with a free press. In fact it has lately been the other way round. Politically motivated and largely irresponsible media barons have shamelessly interfered with our democracy. It’s difficult to believe that the ‘significant’ press needs any protection from political interference when for thirty years (or more) editors and their proprietors have corrupted the ethics of our public realm, cheapened and dumbed-down our public discourse and trashed both dissent and dissenters. Vaingloriously seeking to play the role of kingmaker they have alternately proffered and withheld their patronage and favours from a bunch of political pygmies. Blair/ Campbell, Brown / Balls, Cameron / Coulson…need I go on?

   Listening to Cameron’s hyperbole about ‘crossing the Rubicon’, you wouldn’t think that what we are talking about here is merely a complaints procedure. It’s not censorship, Dave. Even the Rubicon analogy is questionable. As Dave might know if he had remained on speaking terms with Boris, when Julius Caesar led his legions towards Rome in 49 BC, ‘crossing the Rubicon’ was the start of a military coup. The PM repeated that phrase so often in the Commons the other afternoon, it makes you wonder if he knows more – or, just possibly, less - than he’s letting on.

   An independent, trustworthy and reliable tribunal for dealing with complaints against the press is not censorship, nor is it a prelude to political interference. Self-regulation under the auspices of the Press Complaints Commission proved a dismal failure because it was not independent, not comprehensive and lacked statutory formulation. The McCanns and the Dowlers truly were victims of outrageous conduct by certain newspapers and journalists. To say that the conduct of the intruders and the phone hackers was illegal and that therefore all the victims had remedies at law is insufficient. Ordinary citizens, suddenly thrust into a media feeding-frenzy, are not ‘lawyered-up’ and ‘media-savvy’. They are traumatised and grieving. Even those with ‘celebrity status’ are not fully able to protect themselves from bullying, intrusion and criminality – even if they know that it is occurring. Famous or infamous, they are still citizens and they still have rights. They (and we) need to know that the press – all of them - are beholden to an agreed Code of Conduct which can and will be enforced. Importantly, that enforcement comes after the event, not before. It’s balance and redress we seek, not censorship and by now – post-Leveson – we should all be sufficiently well informed to know the difference.   As Polly Toynbee wrote in The Guardian today (Saturday, 01.12.12) “Law or no law, no one will remove Dacre’s right to be nasty.” On the same page, Simon Jenkins suggested, rather desperately I have to say, that “Leveson and his supporters seem to be converts to Sharia Law.”

   Pull your head in, Simon, if you can’t do better than that then the opposition to Leveson is clearly running on empty…

[Think of this blog as just 800 words to be added to Leveson’s millions…]

Having a word not taking the pith

#59

   A week or so ago I made an effort to sort out venal and venial once and for all. These two words aren’t in any way interchangeable and could be libellous when used as if they were; or – worse - not used at all because yours truly couldn’t remember the difference. You wouldn’t, for example, want to hear a politician described as venal when venial was what Silly-Sally B actually meant to say. We are none of us very far from a dictionary these days and so I tried to excavate a helpful mnemonic which might separate them permanently. Venal, I have it on good authority,[1] means open to bribery and comes from the Latin venalis, from venum, meaning ‘goods for sale’. Venial, on the other hand, means pardonable, excusable, permissible and derives from the Latin venia, meaning ‘pardon’. And there lay the mnemonic I sought – use the Latin root and then it’s plain that venial can’t come from venalis any more than venal could have come down to us from venia.

   Fair enough, I thought, and that’s plenty to be going on with until, a day or two later, when I stumbled upon a series of books called “I used to know that – stuff you forgot from school”[2]. Frightening - especially with the realisation that, despite the Herculean endeavours of Mrs Marten [English] and Messrs Quinn & Foot [Latin] between 1959 and 1963 I never did ‘used to know’ very much about the inner workings of our English grammar, let alone the more wondrous and abstruse mechanics of Latin. Quite why the word endings in Latin had to keep changing was a total mystery to me, aged 13; and is not a lot clearer even now.

   I particularly remember struggling with the declensions of the word for ‘table’. Tabula, tabulae – No, idiot, that’s a board or plank (seems appropriate). The proper Latin word for ‘table’ is mensa (isn’t it?). Mensa declines as mensa, mensa, mensam, mensae… err… mensarum? Mensis? (Whoops, no, you’ve slipped into the plurals) …give up. It mattered, apparently, whether I was speaking at the table, to the table or about the ruddy table. And then tables are, of course, feminine – aren’t they? Think ‘Old Mother Brown’ – now there’s a clue for another mnemonic… ‘Under the table you must go, E-I-E-I-E-I-O’[3]. (How does that help?) Nominative, Vocative, Accusative, Genitive… Cases? Don’t make laugh. Don’t make me cry.

   I still defy anyone to explain, convincingly, what is occurring when either the ‘dative’ or the ‘ablative’ come out to play. As my contemporary, John ‘Johnny’ Johnson [circa 1961], never tired of muttering darkly, “I seldom feel any need to speak to a table, don’t I sir?” And surely it was also about that time that Nigel Molesworth heroically annihilated all serious prospects for a study of Latin grammar by deploying, inter alia, his definitive ‘Private Life of the Gerund’[4]

 Molesworth n. ‘the curse of st custard’s’

   Grammar, as I think Mrs Marten once tried to explain to us (well, to Johnny & I), can be just like Meccano. You start with a box full of various pre-drilled units in red or green metal. These can be bolted together in many different ways to make all sorts of weird and wonderful contraptions. But, for all that they have moving parts and gears and pulleys, many creations will never appear to be more than an assemblage of bits of tin, in red or green. The skill is to make something that goes beyond being merely the sum of its parts; something that becomes the essence of “biplane” or “helicopter,” “auto-gyro” or “crane”. The problem with writing is the same, to go beyond the sum of the parts[5]. The point is to write well and not just grammatically. The solution, we agreed, the lovely Mrs Marten and I, was to read. To read and read and read, hoping that the way the language worked would stick somewhere in the midst of my little grey cells and become habit…or at least the basis for a decent standard of plagiarism.

   So lately, after all these years, I confess I’ve finally seen the point of studying Latin. Far too late of course. But now, as I struggle to remember which is which amongst pairs of similar-sounding words [inimical –v- inimitable, turbid –v- turgid or insidious –v- invidious] I try to first uncover[6], and then commit to memory, a Latin root for each. It helps to know that insidious [developing or advancing gradually and imperceptibly] comes from the Latin insidiae meaning ‘an ambush’ whereas invidious [likely to incur or provoke ill-will or resentment] stems cleanly from invidia meaning ‘envy’.

 Ashlyns School Staff – circa 1960

Mrs Marten, fourth from right in front row. Mr Quinn near centre of same row - next to 'The Beak'

   But beyond vocabulary and beyond the stew of declensions, nouns, verbs and adjectival what-nots, Mrs Marten – of Ashlyns School - it was, bless her, who first made me aware of the poetry of Shakespeare and of Yeats. One day she read to us The Lake Isle of Innisfree and suggested we copy it from the blackboard and learn it by heart for our homework.

   “By ‘art Miss?”

   “Yes, by heart.”

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.[7]

   If a good working knowledge of grammar was all we needed to write lines which soar from the page, demanding to be read aloud or learned by heart, then I would have no excuse for my continuing inability to distinguish with any certainty between a main clause and a subordinate clause; or to define a ‘participle’ with any degree of confidence. I have no idea how good at rote-learned grammar were William Shakespeare or William Butler Yeats. Clearly, they both drew upon something richer than a textbook knowledge of syntax, personal pronouns or the proper use of prepositional phrases.

Compare this;

When my luck has failed and no one likes me, I sit alone and cry about being a social outcast. My prayers to heaven go unheard.  I look in the mirror and swear about how life is treating me…[8]

With this;

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate…[9]

   Mrs Marten made me envy those who write with the thick-skinned confidence to leave pedantic grammarians reeling and cawing in their wake. In her quiet way she opened the gates to more, so much more. That’s the enduring point; she believed you just go on reading and learning. Learning and reading, reading and learning. And stuff where all the commas go. We can always learn more words and how to use them better. For imparting that simple truth a belated ‘thank you’ to all my teachers, thank you.

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[1] Dictionary definitions in this blog are taken from The Chambers Dictionary, Chambers Harrap, 2003

[2] I Used to Know That. ENGLISH by Patrick Scrivenor. Michael O’Mara Books Limited. London. 2010. Other books in the series (edited by Caroline Taggart) cover Geography, Maths, History and General Science. You have been warned.

[3] From Knees Up Mother Brown! – Traditional English drinking song.

[4] Chapter 3: ‘How to be topp in Latin’ from How to be Topp. Geoffrey Willans & Ronald Searle. Puffin Books. 1962

[5] Poem, poesy, poetry and poet all come to us via Latin from the Greek poiesis from poieein to make. So poetry is a form of making – I love that.

[6] Ah ha! A deliberately split infinitive. Gotcha!

[7] From The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W.B. Yeats, 1893.

[8] From any number of paraphrasings of Sonnet 29 available as ‘study guides’ on the internet. Why would they do that?

[9] First quatrain from Sonnet 29 by William Shakespeare.

Throwing the Book at Abu Qatada [Part 2]

#58

Recent events have turned our attention once more to an ancient copy of The Old Pretender’s Book of Travesties held by the Antiquarian Section of our Lost Property Department. Our reading resumes at Peculiars VI, Chapter 6, verse 6:

“ 6 And it came to pass that Abu Qatada al-Filistini, being greatly vexed in his own land, did fold away his tent in the night and journey by stealth into the land of the Angles and the Saxons.  There he did spew forth many intemperate harangues, which he did pass off as sermons, and great was the paranoia thereof. And it became known amongst the people of that land that he did big-up Osama Bin Laden and his brethren in the tribe of al-Qaeda, and the people were most assuredly not amused.

“ 7 And the scribes and scribblers of the Angles and of the Saxons were moved to denounce The Abu from their housetops and from their Redtops. And there began a mighty cacophony of voices crying, ‘Woe and thrice woe, for this Abu that has come amongst us is a foreigner who speaketh only foreign and weareth a  mighty foreign beard and, were that not bad enough, he is plainly also an ill-mannered sod to boot.’ And so it was that they did very soon bang him up in Belmarsh, according to their custom, and make as if they had thrown away the key.

“ 8 But then the friends of The Abu arose, saying, ‘Yeah, you is well out of order there, bro, and we is taking you to court so that we can habeas his corpus, in’it?’ And then did the leaders of the Tory-ites and the Labourites gird up their loins and speak unto the people saying, ‘This Abu, as thou well knowest, is a right pain in all our buttocks and any day now he will feel the force of our righteous size elevens upon his hind-quarters and be expelled forthwith unto the land of his forefathers which is in the Kingdom of Jordan.’

“ 9  But lo, an appeal was carried many leagues thence by an handmaiden of The Abu to the mighty Court of Human Rights which dwells beyond the Land of Nod in the Land of Euro. And the Eurocrats did demand that the Tory-ites do stay their heads, hands and feet for fear that The Abu might be delivered unto sundry wicked sons of bitches who would surely render his garments and water his board and apply their rods even unto his tender parts.

“10 And when this became known among the Angles and Saxons there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. For it was revealed also unto them that The Abu would receive great treasure of income support and housing benefit and be permitted a daily stroll even unto Pound Land, which is at the other end of the High Street.

“11 And Lo, signs and portents were made manifest in The Sky and darkness fell across the face of The Sun and even the dreaded Murdoch became but a humble shadow.

“12 And in those days there arose from amongst the Saxon host, one that was called Paul of Acre. And Paul was accompanied by a rushing wind of obscenities whenever he did pass about the City and the very ground did tremble beneath the wheels of his Roller. For he was  begat by Rothermere out of Northcliffe and did love to smite his breast mightily as he spake and to chastise the peoples of Euro land for being foreign and possibly French and sundry similar offences.

“13  And it came to pass that Paul of Acre did summon unto his presence  Young Cameron, leader of the Posh Boys; being the one that is called The Dave. And Paul spake unto The Dave saying, ‘It is an abomination in the sight of the people that The Euros is leaving us stuck with this undesirable foreign weirdo who hath broken all the Laws of Cricket. We know in our hearts that he should have been given ‘OUT’, leg-before if not caught-behind, and quite possibly off-side as well.’

“14 But The Dave was an oily man, and great was the smoothness thereof. And he did soothe Paul of Acre by saying unto him, ‘Give us this day our daily mail, even unto the seventh day. And know that I am on The Abu’s case both by day and by night. The twigs and twiglets of My Special Branch is all over him like a rash and we will soon have his sorry ass  bang-to-rights and show him the Red Card for handling the ball even within his own penalty area, no less.’

“15 But there were in that land others abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks. One of their number was called The Guardian of the Sheep and another was The Independent of the Goats. And they were sorely troubled and went amongst the people, saying, ‘The land of the Angles is a country of laws not of press Barons. The Eurocrats is right to have protected The Abu, despite our knowing that if he had his wicked way none of his nor our Human Righteousness would stand a snowball’s chance in Hell.  

“16 ‘Now therefore, let us give thanks that we dwell under the Convention of The Euro lands. For, verily, the right to be protected from torture is one that prevaileth at all times, irrespective of the victim’s conduct. Deprivation of rights is not a legitimate punishment for whosoever doth trespass or even seem to trespass against us.’

“17 And the shepherds and goatherds passed amongst their brethren, saying, ‘Get ye a grip, for all our sakes, thou bunch of silly-billies. We may not like it, but preaching offensive sermons doth not remove from The Abu all vestiges of human rights. For why else do we have courts?’

“18 And when news of this reached Paul of Acre he was filled with wrath and he saith unto The Dave in his private Chamber, ‘Yo, Rude Boy, we is being run by the distant Euros and their namby-pamby left-handed friends. It is a right stitch-up, I is telling you, which we are minded to abide no longer, in’it?’

“19 But lo, before The Dave could answer him, the door to the room bursteth open and in did stroll The Clegg, Prince among the Liberalites. Behind him lumbered Kenneth The Clerke but the girth of The Ken was too portly owing to great feasting on cakes and ale and he could not pass through the door.

“ 20 And The Ken did utter a mighty blast on his trumpet and another on his saxophone and he spake unto The Dave from outside, saying, ‘Cool it, Daddio, go man go, yeah! And now pray tell why it is that you is not listening to me and The Clegg concerning the Righteousness of the Euros? For am I not thine own annointed overseer of All Justice and stuff?’

“21 And then did The Dave smile his biggest smile and answered him, saying unto all that were gathered there, ‘Fear not, My Dear Old Things, for even as we do speak the Bless’ed Theresa in her Wing’ed Chariot is descending upon the Kingdom of Jordan to knock their simple towelled heads together and make plain unto them the error of their ways.

“22 ‘And hereafter shall only peace and justice fall upon our heads as the gentle rain falleth from Heaven; thanks be to Dawkins.’ And no sooner had The Ken and The Clegg gone upon their separate ways rejoicing than did The Dave scratcheth a note to self upon his tablet which did read thusly, ‘ Getteth The Ken away from the House of Justice at the earliest reshuffle for his feet are not well planted upon the stony ground of Toryism.’

“23 And in this manner and with sundry sleights, alarums, diversions and Olympian spectacles, The Dave did distract the hard-working families of the Angles and Saxons. And the readership of Acre fell once more into their complacent stupor, leaving only the aged Murdoch to lead as many as would follow him in a merry dance even unto the death.”

“24 And when all these things had come to pass, at the very last didst The Abu appeal even unto the Three Wise Men that is dwelling within the Special Immigration Appeals Commission and they did ponder the rights and wrongs of it all and scratch their buttocks for many a long month and twain. And lo they did finally relieve themselves of their judgement that the evidence extracted by sundry tortures even from the brethren of The Abu might still be held against his person and that therefore he could not rightfully be catapulted even unto the Kingdom of Jordan.

“25 And when the minions of the Home Office heard this they were sore afraid and did venture unto the Bless’ed Theresa with fear and trembling. And surely then the Bless’ed Theresa did let forth a mighty wail and did bang her head upon the wall and upon the floor and did foam at the mouth and did chew upon the carpet which covereth the floor of her chamber,  crying aloud, ‘Stone me and stone the bleedin’ crows! Verily, I is going to get a righteous roasting when I is breaking this news even unto the Host of The Smug Little Bercow which is called The Commons.’

“26 And lo it came to pass, even as Theresa hath predicted, and in the morning she was again toast in all the papers. And then did The Dave gird up his loins one more time and comfort her saying, ‘Fear not, my dear old fruit, for the pathway of the righteous is clear before us, even though it be as bent as a scenic railway. For Lo, the King of the Jordans is coming amongst us next week and I is well minded to get him on-side with a few of our surplus Harrier jumping jets and sundry other bits of impressive military kit. And in the meantime we is going to appeal the case of The Abu even unto the Court of The Three Wise Monkeys which I is even now inventing.’

“27 And at this did the Bless’ed Theresa fall upon his neck with kisses and did shout her hosannas loudly unto The Sky, for she knew in her heart that the Three Wise Monkeys would hear no evil, see no evil and could speak no evil. And thus was The Dave become, in her eyes at least, an operator of the highest order of smoothness.

“28 And at the going down of The Sun, and with even the once mighty ramparts of The Beeb crashing down about their ears, verily the peoples of the land of Angles and Saxons did weep copious tears into their pints and did enquire even of themselves and of any who would listen, just what the hell was going on.”

- May God help us all.

Amen

A dreamer of the day…

# 57

   I have been reading ‘HERO. The Life & Legend of Lawrence of Arabia’ by Michael Korda[1]. This engrossing biography describes how, ninety six winters ago, T.E. Lawrence - then a twenty-eight year old temporary 2^nd lieutenant and acting staff captain on the British army’s Cairo intelligence staff - went into Arabia in search of a leader for a revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The person he was seeking turned out to be himself. The burden of responsibility for the successes and failures of that leadership led to the lowly anonymity he sought after the 1919 Paris Peace Conference had failed to deliver on the promises previously made by the British to their Arab allies.

 

Lawrence with Feisal at the Paris Peace Conference. Lawrence, in uniform but wearing an Arab headdress stands in front of Feisal’s Sudanese slave & bodyguard.

   Tomorrow is Remembrance Sunday, falling for once, as it should, on November 11^th. Known to our grandparents’ generation as ‘Armistice Day’, the date was fixed long ago to commemorate the cease-fire on the Western Front in 1918 – at the 11^th hour, on the 11^th day of the 11^th month. As weeks go, this has not been an unusual one in the Middle East. Turkish troops are massing on their south-eastern border, the British prime minister has been touring the Arab Gulf States desperate to flog them expensive military hardware. Total sectarian gridlock has persisted in Iraq and the blood-letting of Syria’s civil war has continued unabated. The forces opposing the evil regime of Bashar al-Assad have met in Dohar and been pounded into some kind of interim unity by the Americans, the Saudis and others from the Arab League. Oh yes, and the Israeli prime minister has been disappointed not to see the incumbent US President deposed.

   It is one of the impenetrable ‘Ifs’ of history to speculate as to how different the Middle East might be today if Lawrence had been able to secure those wartime promises of independent Arab states. Different it certainly would have been, if only because Lawrence – unlike the generals and politicians who drew the maps for the eventual ‘peace settlement’ - was aware of the religious, cultural and ethnic divergences which have persisted within the region from that day to this. According to Korda, Lawrence also proposed joint Arab-Jewish governance of Palestine and opposed the kingship of Ibn Saud. Now there’s foresight!

 Lawrence photographed by Harry Chase at Aqaba, 1918

   Back in 1914, confronted by war with Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, the British began a web of mutually contradictory diplomatic agreements, treaties, declarations and ‘understandings’. These can be seen as either a series of colossal blunders or standard political gambits to ensnare and manipulate potential allies, regardless of the future consequences. Given Britain’s dire Imperial record, the contradictions were more probably the result of freelancing, stupidity, opportunism, poor communications and chauvinism than of any clever conspiracies or flawed 'master plan'.

   At that time, the British military and political leadership in Egypt was primarily concerned with the defence of the Suez Canal. That meant pushing the Turks – then dug-in between Gaza and Beersheba – as far north, and away from Sinai, as possible. A revolt by the Arabs of the Hejaz would tie down large numbers of Turkish troops and protect the right flank of the British advance. The Raj, on the other hand, operating from India and ruling over the single largest Muslim population in the world, feared that “Any attempt to ignite an Arab nationalist uprising in the Middle East could hardly fail to inspire Muslims in India to do the same.”[2] Unsurprisingly, throughout the war, Delhi was likely to be pursuing policies in Mesopotamia completely contrary to those espoused by the Arab Bureau in Cairo.

   As a result of McMahon’s exchange of letters with Sharif Hussein in 1915, the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 the British gave conflicting undertakings to the Arabs, to the French and to the Jews. They had, in short, promised more in the Middle East than they, or anyone else, could deliver. Based on his understanding of what had been offered, Lawrence prepared a map showing Syria as a huge arc from the Mediterranean to the Gulf and including what is now Jordan. He showed a smaller Iraq and an independent Kurdistan. He drew an Armenian state around Alexandretta [Iskenderun] and shaded-in a smaller Lebanon as a sop to the French.

Lawrence’s plan for the partition of the Ottoman Empire prepared by him for the War Cabinet, October 1918.

   At Paris in 1919, the British abandoned the Arabs and made a territorial deal with the French. Syria, then as now, was far too complicated for outsiders to resolve. None of the parties could even agree where ‘Syria’ began or ended. There were nomadic Bedouin to accommodate alongside city dwellers in Damascus and Jerusalem and the settled farmers and villagers of Palestine. And not everyone was a mainstream Muslim. There were Shia Muslims at odds with Sunnis. There were Druses, Circassians, Jews, Armenians and Kurds. The Christians were divided between Maronites, Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholics. Then there were the Algerians who had fled to the Levant from France’s colonial wars in Algeria. Down south, in the Hejaz, there were no cities equivalent to Jerusalem, Beirut, Aleppo, Homs, Hama or Damascus. Lawrence was optimistic that the Arabs and Jews might work together to develop Palestine but he would be dead before the exploitation of oil on the eastern periphery of Arabia made the least populated and most politically backward communities into the richest and most powerful. Oil was found in Iraq and all down the coast of the Persian Gulf, but not on the Mediterranean side, thereby ensuring that the more populous and more politically evolved territories like Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria have remained relatively poor.

   Korda mentions how Lawrence is frequently ‘credited’ with the invention of IEDs, roadside bombs and even suicide bombers. One of the stated aims of this biography is “to dispel the popular image of Lawrence as a guerrilla leader with romantic and impractical ideas.” But anecdotes, many of them humorous, and incidental details are not overlooked. After the war, Lawrence refused to accept any honours, titles or decorations; even those offered by King George V himself. As he explained to an earlier biographer, Robert Graves, Lawrence told the king “that the part he had played in the Arab Revolt was, to his judgement, dishonourable to himself and to his country and government. He had, by order fed the Arabs with false hopes and would be obliged if he were relieved of the obligation to accept honours for succeeding in this fraud.”[3] It seems that Lawrence promptly unpinned each decoration and handed it back as soon as the king had pinned it on him.

 

 1918: Lawrence’s Rolls-Royce armoured car [the Blue Mist] rolls into Damascus

   In 1920, Sir Herbert Samuel, a leading British Jew was appointed High Commissioner in Palestine. Winston Churchill came to visit him in Jerusalem and Lawrence took both men on a sight-seeing trip to Petra. Surrounded by a crowd of cheering Arabs, Churchill waved happily and asked Lawrence to translate what the men were chanting. “Death to the Jews,” answered Lawrence, quietly.

   George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte befriended Lawrence and Korda mentions that Michael Holroyd (Shaw’s biographer) believed GBS made use of Lawrence’s androgynous character and his irregular military career when writing Saint Joan. Both Lawrence and Jeanne d’Arc were small, homeless figures, “elected by the zeitgeist and picked out by the spotlight of history.” Korda remarks that GBS had a way of blending advice with abuse and quotes from one of Shaw’s letters to Lawrence; “Like all heroes, and I must add, all idiots, you greatly exaggerate your power of moulding the universe to your personal convictions… It is useless to protest that Lawrence is not your real name. That will not save you.”[4]

   In 1922, Lawrence attempted to enlist in the RAF under the assumed name of ‘John Hume Ross’. Even though he had prepared the ground by arrangement with the Chief of the Air Staff, Viscount Trenchard, when Lawrence arrived at the recruiting office, neither the Sergeant nor the interviewing officer liked the look of him. They were very suspicious that he had no copy of his birth certificate nor any reference from a previous employer. Deciding that he was most likely a criminal on the run from the law, they quickly showed him the door. The interviewing officer – it turns out - was none other than Flying Officer W.E. Johns who went on to write ninety-eight adventure stories about “Biggles”, a fictional RAF pilot hero

   Korda describes very fully how the war left Lawrence feeling stained. “In essence this was the feeling that would motivate him throughout the rest of his life: the belief not just that he had failed the Arabs by not getting them the state and the independence they had fought for, but that he was rendered, by what he had done, seen, and experienced, permanently unclean, unfit for the society of decent people, a kind of moral leper.”[5] As Lawrence wrote in his own story, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, “We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world they knew….We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.”[6]

   Korda acknowledges that no one has described his own genius better than Lawrence did himself and, after 699 pages, the book supplies Lawrence’s own words as his epitaph:

“…but the dreamers of the day are

dangerous men, for they may act their dream

with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.”

Aircraftsman T.E. Shaw

---

[1] Hero – The Life & Legend of Lawrence of Arabia. Michael Korda. Aurum Press Ltd., London 2012.

[2] Op cit. page 256

[3] Op cit. page 448

[4] Op cit page 573.

[5] Op cit. page 435

[6] As quoted by Korda, op cit. page 462.