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…]