“Fly me to the moon…”

                

#23

   The average distance from down here in the South London Bus Lane to the Sea of Tranquillity doubtless remains the best part of 384,403 kilometres[1]. Getting there takes around 1.26 seconds if you are a beam of light[2] – rather longer if you’re a mammal. Let’s say it took a million years to get the first human to the moon and it’s now been 39 years since we left[3]. Life goes on.

   There was a time, not so very long ago, when the flight into Earth orbit of NASA’s Space Shuttle would have been headline news around the world from lift-off to touch-down. Last week Atlantis – the last shuttle to fly – glided into retirement with little more than its rolling sonic booms disturbing the Florida dawn. If you’d blinked in London, you’d have missed it entirely.

   With the Shuttle finally retired, can we of the Baby Boomer generation be far behind? For many of those born between 1945 and 1950 it’s probably high time we were grounded anyway. We came of age with the Space Programme (that’s ‘program’ for our American reader). I’d only recently developed acne and become aware of dandruff when, in May 1961, President Kennedy made a speech to Congress which included a commitment to land a man on the moon (and return him safely to Earth) by the end of that decade. JFK needed to generate some positive headlines after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and NASA were eager to capitalise on American fears that the Russians were ahead in – yes -  “rocket science”.

   As a nation, they had been spooked by the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and more recently by Yuri Gagarin’s space-flight in April ’61. They need not have worried. In the long run, the Americans’ Germans were far more accomplished plumbers than the Russians. A Project Mercury capsule (‘Freedom 7’) made Al Shepard[4] the first American in space in May 1961 and then in February 1962 John Glenn became the first American to go into orbit.

   I remember hankering after a pair of basketball boots like John Glenn’s. There was a photo of him relaxing on the deck of the USS Noa shortly after it had plucked his Friendship 7 capsule from the Atlantic Ocean[5]. He was leaning back in a chair and resting his boots on the ship’s rail; the epitome of action-man cool. Glenn went on to become a Democratic Senator for Ohio and returned to space 35 years later at the age of 77 on board the shuttle Discovery[6]. His mission: to investigate the physiology of the aging process. Way to go, John Boy!

   And that Al Shepard was an interesting guy too. He played golf on the moon during his Apollo 14 mission in February 1971 and was famously the originator of what became known to aviators as ‘Shepard’s prayer’[7]. My favourite among his observations came during an interview when he was asked to describe the sensations he felt during space flight. The interviewer was doubtless hoping for something movingly poetic or devil-may-care thrilling. Shepard, a test pilot to his finger tips, answered, “It’s a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realise that one’s safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.”

   The period of the moon landings, 1969 – 72, also marked the pinnacle in the career of Wernher (“I aim at the stars but sometimes I hit London.”) von Braun. A member of the Nazi Party from 1933 and an SS Sturmbannfürher, von Braun[8] designed the V2 rockets which Hitler fired at London and the Saturn 5 booster rocket which made the Apollo missions possible. Tom Lehrer probably gave von Braun his best lines:

“My job iz to make the rockets to go up. Where zey are coming down, zat iz not my department.”

Mind you, dear old Wernher was not without humour himself; “Research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.” That was one of his.

   From the V2 onwards, the imperative behind The Space Race was always military. We knew that. The guidance systems, the satellites, the boosters were all part of the arms race. Looking back, with the Cold War now only of blessed memory, it was a very expensive way to enable countless shopping and porn channels to proliferate on satellite television and to give the world the non-stick frying pan. The collapse of the Soviet Union did away with NASA’s leverage to secure a budget measured in mega-bucks. In future either the Russians or commercial sub-contractors will have to provide a taxi service for astronauts visiting the International Space Station.

  NASA’s last feint hope is the deep-space Altair-Orion project which could one day mutate into a lunar or even a Mars lander - unless the Tea Party gets its way and returns America to the eighteenth century. Any further lunar landings organised by NASA are clearly out of the question for the foreseeable - and will remain so unless…unless…unless we can convince Sarah Palin that Al-Qaeda is holding Elvis captive on the moon…what are the chances? [You read it here first].

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[1] That’s 238,857 miles in old money. I use the average because the actual distance varies due to the moon’s elliptical orbit.

[2] Fly me to the moon. Lyrics: Webster & Burke. Music: Bart Howard 1954. Definitive recording: Frank Sinatra with The Count Basie Orchestra, 1964

[3] Eugene Cernan, Commander of Apollo 17, 14 December 1972.

[4] Alan Shepard 1923-1998

[5] In those days, in fact for the whole of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes, returning astronauts splashed-down (literally) into either the Atlantic or Pacific oceans. That’s why the re-usable Shuttle was such an innovation.

[6] In October 1998 Glenn spent 9 days in orbit as a ‘Payload Specialist’ on board Discovery. His 1962 orbital flight had lasted less than 5 hours.

[7] “Oh Lord, please don’t let me fuck-up.” Shepard uttered these words – or words very much to this effect - shortly before the launch of Freedom 7 on 5 May 1961.

[8] Wernher von Braun, 1912-1977. Lifelong enthusiast for space exploration and specialist in delivery systems for WMD.

                                                        

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

#22

We posted our Blog (Life in the Bus Lane, #21) at 07.32 on Thursday 7th July, last. In it we criticised the phone-hacking scandal which then centred on The News of The World (NoW). By 17.15 that same day James Murdoch was announcing the imminent closure of the NoW, with the issue on the following Sunday to be its last. ‘Back of the net!’ as they say on the terraces…Bow to the awesome power of The Bus Lane! ‘Look on my works, ye mighty and despair!’[1]

Post hoc ergo propter hoc, ‘after this therefore because of this’… ah the transitory joys of the supreme logical fallacy. For a moment back there we thought The Bus Lane had hit the big time in terms of our power and influence on events. But, come to think of it, if for “Ozymandias” you read Murdoch in Shelley’s sonnet, then there’s a whole other connection to be made anyway.

Meanwhile - back to reality – we would not have wanted to bring about the closure of The News of the World even supposing that we could. The fact that Rupert Murdoch ordered its closure perfectly illustrates the core of the problem. As far as he is concerned, what gets published is what he wants published and what would he care if – to save his imperial arse - four hundred people are suddenly sent down the road? Murdoch’s solution to the NoW problem was characteristically that of a New York Mafia boss – Where is Luca Brasi? -“He sleeps with the fishes.”[2]  

If our Press Complaints Commission had any gumption, any backbone or any sense of purpose it would have refused to allow the closure of a financially viable national newspaper and insisted that publication resume just as soon as ownership and control had been transferred to a collective of the people who work there. The problem was not the newspaper; it was the owner and the executive creeps he sent out from Manhattan to do his bidding. Murdoch wants you to believe that it’s all about rotten apples. Once Rupert’s been through the head-count and chucked out the bad apples he thinks he can go back to business as usual. Well he can’t. It’s not just a few rotten apples. It’s the barrel, stupid!

The late Dennis Potter[3] named the pancreatic cancer that eventually killed him, “Rupert”. In a piece to camera he did for ‘Opinions’ on Channel Four Television in 1993, Potter said: “I’m going to get down there in the gutter where so many journalists crawl…What I’m about to do is to make a provenly vindictive and extremely powerful enemy…the enemy in question is that drivel-merchant, global huckster and so-to-speak media psychopath, Rupert Murdoch…Hannibal the Cannibal…”[4]

In March 1993, Potter gave a last interview to Melvyn Bragg which was also broadcast on Channel Four. In it, Potter said of Rupert Murdoch, “There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press, and the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life…”[5]

If we knew, nearly twenty years ago, that Murdoch brought a malignancy first to journalism, then to politics and eventually to televised-sport, why is it only now that our political elite have found the courage to stand-up to him? Here in The Bus Lane, we have conducted a boycott of the Murdoch Empire ever since The Times and The Sunday Times fell into his grasp. Not buying The Sun was never difficult but we have missed thousands of hours of Test Cricket and Premiership Football because of our refusal to subscribe to Sky Sports. Murdoch will not have missed our paltry shillings, but it would have been a joy to shout I told you so! – if only we had not just discovered that The Dirty Digger also owns our favourite box sets: The Sopranos, The Wire and Madmen. God-dammit! As Count Arthur Strong might have warned; “His testicles are everywhere…”[6]

Rupert Murdoch’s genius lay in spotting that in the likes of Tony Blair, Boris Bullingdon and ‘call me Dave’ Cameron (and many, many, others) we had the best, most venal, most opportunistic and most self-obsessed political class that money could buy. So he bought them. Once he had shown them the power of his media interests he knew that he had them by the balls and such was their ambition and their gullibility that their hearts and minds soon followed. And having pocketed his politicians, why would any of our senior police or sports administrators hold out against him? They could plainly see that he owned a majority in the House of Commons; lock, stock and rotten barrel.

So when the Serjeant-at-arms hauls the Murdochs – father & son - into the dock in front of the Commons Culture, Media & Sport Committee next Tuesday, let’s not beat about the bush. Let’s go Aussie and call a spade a bloody shovel. And let’s hear someone demanding to know what they’re offering by way of compensation for our corrupted politics, corrupted cops, corrupted sport …oh, and corrupted journalism.

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[1] Ozymandias. Percy Bysshe Shelley. 1818

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

[2] The Godfather. Mario Puzo. 1969

[3] Dennis Potter, English journalist, television producer, playwright and author. 1935-1994.

[4] Quoted by Craig Brown in the (Murdoch-owned) Sunday Times. 28 March 1993.

[5] Dennis Potter – interview with Melvyn Bragg 15 March 1994. Broadcast on Channel 4, 5 April 1994. Transcript available at www.guardian.co.uk – News – Great Interviews.

[6] Count Arthur Strong’s Radio Show. Steve Delaney. BBC Radio 4. 2005ff.

… things that rats won’t do

# 21

   About the time of his 1991 movie ‘Hook’, Steven Spielberg used to suggest that scientists were increasingly using lawyers instead of rats for experiments in behavioural psychology. He gave several reasons why this might be so. It helped that lawyers were becoming more plentiful than rats in Hollywood and that laboratory technicians didn’t get so attached to them. The clincher, though, where the lawyers won hands down, was that there are some things that rats just won’t do…

   Nowadays the lawyers face stiff competition from bankers and journalists; all vying with one another to prove their profession the most dishonest, the most disreputable, the most amoral, the least concerned with the interests of anyone but themselves. You have to wonder what is going wrong in a society where standards of professional integrity melt faster than ice-cream on a summer day. Can it all just be down to money?

   Historically, the ownership of newspapers has attracted some outstanding scallywags. In recent years we might make mention of Conrad Black at the Telegraph and Robert Maxwell at the Mirror. Publishing newspapers is a basic right but owning them and controlling them is a privilege. I don’t believe that people like Rupert Murdoch own newspapers for philanthropic reasons. But nor is their interest entirely driven by profit. They could almost certainly become even richer if they disposed of their newspaper holdings and invested the cash in something else. But they don’t do that because they crave the power and influence press ownership brings.

   Does anyone seriously believe that Rupert Murdoch leaves the running of his papers entirely to his editors, while he relaxes on his sun-lounger and waits to see the bottom line? Mr Murdoch has an agenda which courses through the veins of his media empire and affects the decisions made by his executives. Tony Blair and David Cameron both assiduously courted Murdoch. It wasn’t just for his magnetic personality, his sparkling wit and his affable Aussie charm. They were convinced that to achieve their own political ambitions they needed the active endorsement of his media empire – “IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT”[1]. And that is why we are entitled to enquire whether Mr Murdoch is a fit and proper person to wield such power.

   It’s an issue close to the heart of our claim to a democracy. Rupert Murdoch is Chairman of News Corp which, according to Wikipedia, is second only to Disney as a global media conglomerate. How worrying is that? Very, I’d say, but I was cheered a little last night by some subversive newsreader on the radio describing Murdoch as now ‘the Head of News Corpse’.

   I remember once, a long time ago – say, 1957 or thereabouts – my primary school teacher wanted to introduce our class to the idea of newspapers. To begin, he asked pupils to name a newspaper their parents read. I answered ‘Daily Express’ because I’d seen it at home and liked the image of the medieval knight it used as its logo. Then another boy piped up with, ‘News of the World, sir!’

   “Damn my useless parents,” I thought, registering a ten-year old’s disappointment that there was this paper containing all the news from all the world and my stupid family didn’t have the nous to buy it. When I got home that afternoon I announced to Mum and Dad that there was now a paper carrying all the news in the world and why didn’t they buy it? Oh how they chortled! They laughed then as we all should surely laugh now at the preposterous title Murdoch retains for his pathetic rag. “News of the World”? Leave it out.

    “Reality,” sa molesworth 2, “is so unspeakably sordid it make me shudder.”[2]

   Somebody on the television news last night was wondering where to draw the “moral line” in British journalism. The line has always been there. It doesn’t need drawing but it does need holding. The Press Complaints Commission has a voluntary Code of Practice under which the print media are supposed to regulate themselves. The Code is clear and probably laudable. However, when it comes to enforcement, the PCC has, kindly, been described as “toothless” and, more unkindly, as being “about as much us as a chocolate teapot”.

   The Chair of the PCC is Baroness Buscombe. She was reported in The Independent [3] to be “indescribably angry at being misled”. The revelation that journalists were capable of telling lies apparently caused her to swoon. Well, that’s how much of a grip she has on the situation. Journalist tells porky! Shock! Horror! Etc.

   The Express Group of newspapers walked away from the PCC earlier this year and seems no better nor worse as a result. You could try replacing the PCC with a statutory body with real teeth in the form of financial penalties and similar sanctions. That would solve one problem but risk creating another in the form of what would be, to all intents and purposes, an official censor. Maybe that’s what we deserve? Maybe that’s what the ambitions of clan-Murdoch have brought us to? As with its police force, perhaps a nation gets the newspapers it deserves. But who then shall guard us from the guardians?

   I would prefer to pin whatever feint hopes I still retain on the notion of ‘fit and proper persons.’ You will have guessed by now that I am not persuaded Rupert Murdoch qualifies in this regard. Nor does his notorious acolyte, Rebekah (sic) Brooks (nee Wade); famed for her ability to rise without trace and for her constant bad-hair day. The PCC should be able to adjudicate robustly and pillory those who fail to follow its Code. Name them and shame them. Name the individual journalists, name their editors and name their proprietors. Establish a clear link between ownership and the Code – fail to follow the Code and they certainly forfeit the right to extend their media empire to fresh titles.

   The people who hacked their way into the private telephone messages of murdered children and their families knew what they were doing was wrong. The editors who used that information may, briefly, when facing an imminent deadline, have not asked sufficient questions about its provenance. But after twenty-four hours or a night’s sleep, or when they had sobered-up – then they surely knew the answer – and that was when they needed to display some basic integrity. That was when they needed to screw their courage to the max and blow the whistle, pull the plug or do whatever was necessary to bring the house of cards tumbling down. The fact that they didn’t is rightfully now their downfall. That was when they failed to be ‘fit and proper persons’; failed to be professionals, revealed themselves as mere mercenaries.

   We don’t need a Judicial Enquiry or a Royal Commission composed of the great and the good to draw lines around what journalists can and can’t do because ultimately that will put the mother of all super-injunctions on us, proscribing what can and can’t be written. Publish and be damned – but first be damned sure that what you are publishing and how you came by it, can be squared with your conscience and not just with your employer’s prejudices and/or bank balance. At present, everyone is pointing at someone else and all are shouting, “Round up the usual suspects!”

   The origins of the word profession can be found in Latin with words literally meaning ‘publicly to confess’. A person who writes for a living should ultimately be prepared, when challenged, to defend and justify their research and their words openly and in public. It doesn’t matter if they’ve got it wrong. Coming to the wrong conclusion is not what matters. We can all do that. We’ve all told a few porkies, ducked and dived, invented this and not checked that. Yes, these are sins, but they are venial sins. The sins committed at the News of the World were mortal. They were not excusable, not justifiable and cannot be pardoned or washed away by an apology or retraction. Off with their headlines if not their heads!

You wouldn’t even want to wrap your chips in a Murdoch paper, would you? Let alone read it…

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[1] Front Page Headline, The Sun, 11 April 1992.

[2] Whizz for Atomms. 1956. Geoffrey Willans & Ronald Searle

[3] 5 July 2011

Les Parapluies du Cinéma

#20

   For Fathers’ Day last weekend I received from Charlie, my eldest son, a card he had made using a fragment of dialogue from the film ‘No Country for Old Men’[1].  Two lawmen survey the scene of a shoot-out in the desert where an illicit drugs deal has gone badly wrong. All those involved have been killed; bodies lie scattered in and around their cars and pick-up trucks.

Deputy Wendell: “It’s a mess ain’t it Sheriff?”

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell: “If it ain’t, it’ll do ’til the mess gets here.”

   Charlie is a graphic designer and has a special interest in typography. The words on the card were beautifully typeset. He knew I had enjoyed this exchange in the film and how the dry humour of the ageing Sheriff serves periodically to restore some element of hope and humanity against the prevailing menace and mayhem.

   “…it’ll do ‘til the mess gets here,” pretty much summarises this past week. Locally, it rained all over mid-summer’s day and although I may aspire to being stoical, I remain a glass half-empty person at the best of times. And these are not the best of times. I have a persistent foreboding that the light at the end of the tunnel is probably a train coming the other way. Despair is the easy option and difficult to avoid. Yesterday, for instance, I switched on the car radio for company only to hear some top man in the military talking blithely of “the fighting season” in Afghanistan. Give me strength; it’s a bloody war, not a game of cricket! Do the Afghans have different seasons set aside for each of their other traditional pastimes? Are there particular months for corruption, the oppression of women and unconstrained religious bigotry?  It’s enlightenment they really need not more guns and bullets.

   Meanwhile, in Syria and in Libya other armies continue to oppress the people they should be protecting. It’s long past time for someone to remind the world that, for crimes against humanity, “I was only obeying orders” is not an acceptable defence. The burden of guilt for the Holocaust lay not just with the camp guards and the SS who herded terrified families into cattle-trucks. Auschwitz could not have functioned for more than a fortnight if there had been no one willing to drive the trains, or set the points, or alter the railway signals to “Go”…

   But it’s not easy to refuse or disobey. Ai Weiwei could testify to that. Like you, I was glad to hear that he had been released on bail after - what is it now? – Eighty one days? He will have “confessed”, we can assume, to a necessary catalogue of crimes and misdemeanours dictated by the Chinese authorities. Knowing he has an artist’s imagination makes him the more vulnerable. Even Beijing’s dumbest cop can’t have needed eighty days to take him on a guided tour of the torments they have available. It would have been enough to show him a print of something like Hieronymus Bosch’s Image of Hell [2], then it’s “case solved”. But hang-on, what’s this? – Surprise! - The release of Ai Weiwei coincides neatly with the visit to Europe of senior Chinese Numpty Wen Jiabao. Stone me, what are the chances of that?

   Let’s go back to Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and Charlie’s typeset card. What do we do until the big mess gets here? For me, one broad avenue of distraction is cinema. Watching a movie is like standing under an umbrella on a rainy day. The deluge persists down all around but you don’t get a soaking yourself. And I saw a good example last week…

   First, imagine they had made a sequel to Belle de Jour[3]. The icy Séverine might have been bulked-up by self-indulgence and dutiful childbearing. Then she would require sedation beneath mind-numbing doses of Nembutal and Prozac. And by 1977 she could be jogging through the woods transformed into Suzanne, the perfect bourgeois ‘trophy wife’.

   In François Ozon’s new movie Potiche[4] an un-reconstructed ‘real’ man of the 1970s has reduced the previously unattainable Belle de Jour to his very own bland, domesticated, Belle de bric-a-brac. She has become the ‘potiche’ of the film’s title - literally an ornamental vase intended for display purposes only.

   Potiche – hopefully still showing at a cinema near you – also has strange echoes of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1972 film ‘Tout va Bien’. In both, a factory manager is held captive while everyone’s political, social, sexual and economic relationships go into crisis. The Godard film was, as you might expect, altogether more inaccessible than the mainstream Potiche. Jean-Luc, preferring analysis to narrative, relied heavily on talking heads. Regrettably, this produced mainly nodding heads in the audience. Ozon, by contrast, has chosen to parody Romantic Comedy and adopts the style and pace typical of the genre. Both films go for a fantastical climax. Godard used a seemingly endless tracking shot to reveal a riot developing at the checkouts of some vast hypermarket. Ozon glides the made-over Suzanne into an extraordinary musical number; suggesting that something very bizarre is afoot in the domestic politics of the Fifth Republic.

   Godard, ever the determined cineaste, had earlier tracked his camera across a set depicting the sausage factory in a cut-away section. (More recently, Wes Anderson did something similar with the good-ship ‘Belafonte’ in The Life Aquatic[5]). Different characters and their dilemmas are seen simultaneously but always isolated from one another in separate rooms on the various floors of the building. A voice describes the roles of various trades which contribute to the output of the factory; along the lines of “Engineers – engineer, plumbers – plumb…” The list continues until we come to the bourgeoisie. If the role of the workers is, essentially, to work, what then is the role of the bourgeoisie? Simple really; what the bourgeoisie do is to bourgeois. And in Potiche Catherine Deneuve, as Suzanne Pujol, does her bourgeois-ing to perfection.

   The film opens with Suzanne busy being the sweetly vacant, suburban bourgeois housewife. She flits through her days writing saccharine verses about squirrels and fawns. All her domestic and conjugal duties were long ago sub-contracted out. She has a Spanish couple to cook and clean, her husband’s secretary labours under him as mistress and confidante, the lethargic sex-workers at Club Badaboum satisfy his negligible cultural needs.

   Madame’s supposed idyll of domestic bliss continues until her appalling husband finally drives the workers in the umbrella factory to rebellion and himself to cardiac arrest. Suzanne, liberated by this awakening, seems suddenly to remember just who she might have been without him. Deneuve then sails majestically and comically to the rescue of the factory, her husband and the family fortune. Along the way, she casts off the vacuity of her previous existence and the burden of her loveless marriage. Negotiating with the factory workers, she briefly re-ignites an old flame, the Communist heavy-weight, Babin, played by the appropriately massive Gérard Depardieu. Babin was the truck-driver involved in Suzanne’s earlier, secret, infidelity and has now become the local Mayor and MP. He turns out to be at least as possessive and manipulative as her husband ever was. The problem is his gender – stupid; not the politics he espouses.

   The colours, décor, fashions and hairstyles of the 1970s are all lavishly recreated for the film, but Deneuve and Depardieu perform independently of such contrivances. In the role of Suzanne Pujol, Catherine Deneuve is enchanting, statuesque and happily timeless. She also retains that special gaze of unspoken bewilderment she first invented for Belle de Jour.

   The title No Country for Old Men was taken from the first line of a poem by W. B. Yeats[6]. The last three lines of that same poem might, at a stretch, belong to Mlle Deneuve, transformed into a new fantasy, de nos jours, as La Belle des Parapluies:

…set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.[7]

What does it all mean? I clearly have absolutely no idea but I loved every minute of it – the Yeats and the film. But come; let us join Catherine, under her brolly, watching the rain. That’s what the movies are for…

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[1] No Country for Old Men. Ethan Coen & Joel Coen. 2007

[2] Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) The Garden of Earthly Delights. Triptych, 1490-1510. Prado Museum, Madrid.

[3] Belle de Jour. Dir. Luis Buñuel. 1967

[4] Potiche. Dir. François Ozon. 2010

[5] The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Dir. Wes Anderson. 2004

[6] Sailing to Byzantium W. B. Yeats. 1928

[7] Ibid.

Easing the Spring

#19

‘They call it easing the Spring’. The phrase comes from a poem written in 1941 by Henry Reed[1]. Confined to a military classroom, World War II army conscripts are being drilled in the mysteries of the bolt-action rifle. While the instructor drones on about upper and lower sling swivels and opening the breech and sliding the bolt rapidly backwards and forwards, Reed’s attention wanders to the Japonica in the neighbouring gardens where he imagines a different droning;

The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:

     They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy

If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,

And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,

Which in our case we have not got; and the almond blossom

Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,

      For to-day we have naming of parts.

The poem uses two contrasting voices. The first tediously reciting the deadly anatomy of the standard issue .303 Enfield rifle, the second celebrating springtime in the natural world. And the ’spring’ being eased is both the season of awakening and the mechanical linkage by which the bolt opens the breech, thereby loading the next round from the ammunition-clip below.

I hear again this poem whenever ‘The Arab Spring’ gets mentioned – and that, at the moment – is practically every hour, on the hour. If only any of us knew how easing the Arab Spring might be achieved. Use of the term ‘spring’ is more than a convenient marker for the time of year. For me, it carries an intentional reference back to the Prague Spring of 1968 - when it first became possible to imagine that the Stalinist hegemony over Eastern Europe might one day be repudiated by the collective discontent of the people who lived under it.

When my children were much younger, they played with a deceptively simple device which consisted of a helical spring that could stretch and bounce. Our house – then as now - seems to consist mainly of stairs and the spring could be made to progress down a long flight of stairs, tumbling end-over-end with a seemingly unstoppable deliberation. You could hear its slightly chilling rattle as the pent-up steel coils stretched, lunged and then re-formed themselves entirely with the aid of gravity and their own impounded energy. That long-lost spring knew only one direction of travel, once released it could not be made to reverse.

The ‘Arab Spring’ – aka ‘The Jasmine Revolution’ – began with the suicide of a single Tunisian street-trader in December 2010. This led to a protest demonstration, which was broken-up by the police, and then another and another… The Arab Spring and our lost toy both seem to gain momentum from one place and let it carry them to another. Events are suddenly able to bounce across borders impelled by the idea that authority can be challenged by sheer weight of numbers. Our toy was reliant upon gravity to travel down a flight of stairs. Long established dictators in Tunisia, then Libya, then Egypt, then Bahrain, then Syria and Yemen have sought to defy gravity with results we are still seeing. The agonies are particularly prolonged because ‘opposition’ parties have been cruelly suppressed for so long.

One crystal clear advantage of the parliamentary democracies is that they have, in waiting, an alternative government ready to take power when the incumbents are removed. If – like Libya, Egypt, Syria etcetera – a country has a regime which for decades has stunned, silenced, murdered, imprisoned, tortured, exiled or ‘disappeared’ its opponents then, when the regime totters, there is only a cauldron of revenge into which it can fall. What happens after the unspeakable Gaddafi and the chinless but aptly named Basher al-Assad is anyone’s guess. This weekend, tanks of the Syrian army are boldly saving the people of Jisr al-Shughour from – err – the – err – people of - err - Jisr al-Shughour… and blowing away any dissident crops, cattle or olive groves that try to resist.

A few days ago I heard on Radio 4 the words of ‘Abu Sham’, (surely not his real name) a Syrian protestor talking on a cell-phone after Friday prayers. With a voice of despair Abu was saying, “We are afraid to speak even to ourselves”. It could be that he spoke those words at the lowest trough in the waves of protest. Since then, the oppression has continued but now it is possible that a tipping-point may have been reached. Repression by the Syrian regime has been so harsh, so brutal and has continued for so long that it has paradoxically strengthened the resistance rather than crushing it. Dare we believe that oppression only succeeds in the short run? Apart from the grim recognition that in the long run we are all dead, is it possible that the spring will be eased for Abu Sham before much longer?

Most countries suffer from a dearth of wisdom in their public life and nowhere suffers more than the Middle East. Wise men have been in notably short supply in the politics of that region ever since a certain fabled trio of publicity-happy star-gazers wandered through about two thousand years ago. We wouldn't call them 'Wisemen' [or Wisewomen] would we, if they were the norm? They are scarce, but not entirely unknown. One sadly-missed soothsayer was the late Abba Eban. He was not an Arab; he was a Jew – a South African by birth and an Israeli citizen by choice. He is sometimes remembered for his 1973 observation at a failed – (obviously!) - Peace Conference in Geneva:

‘Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’.

This clever remark might now more usefully be re-written as;

‘Authoritarian Governments never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’

Eban is also remembered for what he said at the time of the Six-Day war in 1967. When the prospects for peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis were at least as bleak as they are today, Eban remained confident that one day a lasting peace would be achieved. As he put it:

“Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.”

This applies to all of us, not just the Palestinians and the Israelis. No one is exempt. Al-Assad is busy exhausting the alternatives. For the sake of the Syrians, we have to hope that wisdom will descend upon their country sooner rather than never. And if a blinding light should illuminate a humble Bus Lane on the road to Damascus, who knows where it might lead?

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[1]  ‘Lessons of the War, 1. NAMING OF PARTS’ by Henry Reed from A Map of Verona, Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1946.

The buck passes downwards

#18

Not one speck of volcanic ash from Iceland has been spotted in the Bus Lane so far this week. Our test vehicles, probing as far north as Watford, have reported no instances of volcanic ash sand-blasting their windscreens or choking their air-filters. We therefore press on regardless, adopting the maxim learned from Ry*n A*r[1] that: It’s safe to go until somebody crashes. Then it isn’t. That’s how we’ll know.

President Harry S. Truman[2] famously had on his desk in the White House a plaque bearing the inscription “The Buck Stops Here”. Was he, I wonder, the last senior executive to believe that? Throughout all the financial upheavals afflicting the western economies since 2008 I cannot immediately recollect any government minister or regulator – any where – who stepped forward to take the blame or simply resigned as a way of accepting their share of responsibility. Quite a few may have been sacked, but that’s hardly the same thing.

In the United Kingdom we assume we have a convention under which government ministers carry individual and collective responsibility. Considering all the many failures of both policy and administration that have befallen various British governments in recent times – and excluding cases where dubious personal conduct has come to light or individual probity has been questioned - I am hard put to think of a single instance where a minister has accepted responsibility to the point of actually resigning from office. The last example that springs to mind is that of Lord Carrington who resigned from the Foreign Office when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982. This was an honourable decision. The invasion wasn’t his fault, personally, but he was the man in charge. The invasion happened, as they say, ‘on his watch’ and Peter Carrington dutifully carried the can.

The more modern approach seems to have become to pass the buck back down the chain of command whenever possible. This observation dates from at least the mid-1970s and possibly earlier. I first heard it from a bright young spark named Simon Elliott (where is he now, I wonder?). In the organization for which we both then worked, Simon noted that whenever a junior member of staff was given an administrative task to perform their superiors gave them about 50% of the information they would need if they were to complete the job without appearing to be a total prat. By working diligently, an astute junior could hope to piece together most of the missing details. But the final, crucial, 5% of withheld information would only reach you at exactly the same moment as the buck, descending from on high at a very considerable rate of knots, smacked the unfortunate junior firmly across the back of their head.

When the RMS Titanic hit the iceberg in 1912, Captain Edward J. Smith was not the lookout on duty at the masthead nor was he the helmsman at the wheel on the bridge. He was probably at dinner with the wealthiest of his passengers and quite possibly discussing how soon the unsinkable liner, currently steaming full-ahead, might traverse the ice-field and dock at New York. Captain Smith did not appear at any of the subsequent inquiries, anxious to maintain that the disaster had not been his fault. Nor was he sacked by his employers. In the honourable maritime tradition, Captain Edward had gone down with his ship.

Not so Sir John Cope, commander of the Hanoverian army defeated by the Jacobites at the 1745 Battle of Prestonpans. Despite living more than 150 years before Captain Smith, Cope was so much more the modern executive. Legend has it that he was the first to gallop back to the safety of Berwick-upon-Tweed bearing news of his own defeat.

In 2007, the then Director of Children’s Services for the London Borough of Haringey did not cause the death of 17-month old Peter Connelly. Movingly known as Baby Peter, this child was failed by practically every adult he encountered during his brief life. Every one of them either added to his distress or failed to take steps to rescue him. In addition to the three who are rightly serving time for causing his death, there may have been as many as 100 adults who were, in varying degrees, culpable for what befell that child. And yes, let there be no doubt, we are all our brother’s keeper[3]. You don’t need to be a Believer to benefit from the wisdom in the Bible.

Sharon Shoesmith has brought a court action claiming wrongful dismissal. But she was the person in charge; she was the captain of the ship. For all I know she was paid a very considerable salary (was it in six figures?) to take responsibility for the conduct of children’s services in that Borough. If you are paid to take responsibility then, when the unthinkable happens, responsibility is what you have to take and the honourable course of action is to resign. It is not to think of reasons why I’m not to blame, why I can’t be held to account, why I couldn’t have known, why I wasn’t told, etc etc.

The biggest mistake Shoesmith made was to wait until she was fired. Send not to ask where the buck stops, Sharon, it stops with thee.

Take comfort, if you can, from the words of John Donne (1572-1631) a sometime resident of our neighbouring town of Mitcham, just a little further down the bus lane from here:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”[4]

Compensation, Sharon? I wouldn’t give you more than the cost of the first class stamp you should have used when you posted your letter of resignation.

Next week: Cheer up, chaps; Zebedee looks at the Arab spring.

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[1] No relation to Ry*n G*ggs, we trust.

[2] 33^rd President of the United States, 1945-53.

[3] Genesis IV:9  -  And the Lord said unto Cain, where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?

[4] John Donne ‘Devotions upon emergent occasions and several steps in my sickness’ – Meditation XVII, 1624.

Happy Birthday, Bob!

#17

Update of The Week:

Ai Weiwei has – at last - been visited in prison. He does not seem to have been charged yet or brought before a court. No worries about ‘habeas corpus’ in the People’s Republic, then Mr Hu? It looks like they are going after him for ‘economic crimes’ – possibly tax evasion. I find it hard to believe that he is the ‘Mr Big’ of Chinese tax-dodgers even if he has evaded some taxes. The million or two top-ranking, heavy-duty, tax cheats in China probably had the good sense not to stick their heads above the parapet by going public with criticisms of the regime’s human rights record. The authorities will probably bring him before a court when they’ve “found” enough evidence to send him down. Is that the Chinese way, Mr Hu Jintao? Bust the guy first, then go looking for the evidence to justify his arrest? Not so much ‘Innocent until proven guilty’, more a case of ‘Arrested until proven guilty.’

Twit of the Week:

“Mr CTB” wants to take on Twitter (an economic entity incorporated in the state of California) for insufficient cleansing of gossip among the Twats who use it as a platform. I find it difficult to grasp how an American corporation can reasonably be held accountable for breaches by others of an injunction issued by an English court. Contempt of Court is a serious business and, difficult ‘though it may be, I do encourage you to conceal your contempt for super-injunctions and the courts that issue them.

I neither know nor care who Mr CTB might be. Whatever happened to the convention of calling the egregiously shy ‘Mr A’ or ‘Miss X’? My hearing is not what it once was and I’m easily confused these days. For a while I thought they were calling him ‘Mr TCB’. Down here in the South London ‘hood, TCB means ‘taking care of business’ - the nicest interpretation of which might be taken to mean ‘get a job’. Other interpretaions tend to involve violence against the person.

Quote of the Week:

In a trailer for BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Review programme (21.5.11) apropos Tracey Emin’s show ‘Love is what you want’ at the Hayward gallery, Tom Sutcliffe was heard to ask, “…When will she overcome her chronic shyness?”

Admission £12. The show runs until 29 August.

I just checked my diary. Imagine my disappointment – I don’t have a window until Tuesday, 30^th Aug. Hey ho, never mind eh.

Joke of the Week:

Bloke goes into a pub with a parrot on his shoulder. The barman looks up, clearly amazed. “That’s fantastic,” says the barman. “Where did you get it?”

“China,” says the parrot. “There’s millions of them.”

Next week: Norman is an island entire of himself…[1]

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[1] With apologies to John Donne, 1572-1631