The Echo of Coriolanus

I shared rooms as an undergraduate with a girl from Beecroft in New South Wales. Quite often late at night in her homesickness she would listen to an online broadcast from Sydney, a sort of comedy talk show, earthy harmless stuff hosted by a man and a woman.

Unfortunately I can’t remember their names or the name of the show, but I’m now beginning to wonder if it was Mel Grieg and Michael Christian, the two radio hosts responsible for the prank call to Edward VII Hospital last week, asking about the health of the Duchess of Cambridge. If it was them I can only say that they are about as far removed from ‘shock jocks’ as is possible to imagine. The latter – I’m thinking of some American presenters - are really nasty, usually indulging in vicious political invective verging on total character assassination.

The nurse business is truly tragic. Who could not feel sorry for Jacinth Saldanha and her family? But the reaction to her ‘apparent’ suicide – this word keeps being stressed – I find shockingly out of proportion. It was a childish prank but childish pranks have been the small change of radio and television for years. What is Candid Camera, or more recently Fonejacker, but a series of childish pranks?

This one, which was directed at the Royal Family, not the nurse, went horribly wrong but the vicious mob calling for the immolation of the two presenters quite frankly disgusts me. I imagine it includes lots who took delight in previous pranks, laughing at one moment, snarling at the next.  These are the canaille, the people that Mark Antony manipulated from one state of mind to another with consummate ease.  In their stupidity they shock me far more than any shock jock. 

It wasn’t the paparazzi who drove Princess Diana to her death but those who lapped up publicity, no matter how the story and the pictures were obtained.  I was only eleven years old when Diana died but even then I felt disquiet that evening her body returned to London, a grim procession through the dark, punctuated by the flash of countless cameras.  There is nothing, absolutely nothing more ghastly than the passions of the mob.  

You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
as the dead carcases of unburied men
That do corrupt the air - I banish you...

Only Two Weeks Left

I read recently that a global poll conducted earlier this year by Ipsos Mori, one of England’s leading market research companies, found that as many as ten per cent of the world’s population believe that the end is nigh. That’s right: get your affairs in order, for everything comes to a full stop in two weeks time. Two weeks, that’s all we’ve got; two weeks that’s not a lot!

What’s the source of this fear? I think that one would have to be an ancient Mayan not to know – it’s the Mayan Long Count Calendar, which reaches the end of its cycle on 21 December. If you don’t know this you really should have paid attention to 2012, the 2009 Hollywood blockbuster which gave lavish details of the coming apocalypse. “We were warned”, said the movies tagline, a point emphasised by one of the characters who said “The Mayans saw this coming thousands of years ago.”

Hey, let’s step back a little. Let’s ask one key question: what exactly did the Mayans see? Nothing, nothing at all; that’s the short answer. You can scour the ancient Mayan texts as much as you like and you will find no support at all for the end of civilization as we know it scenario. It’s all rather boring really. We will, by their calculations, simply see the turn of the thirteenth Bak’tun, a sub-period in the Long Count.

It’s all happened before, the shift from one period to another. There have been several ‘rolling over’ periods in the history of Mayan time, none of which is associated with any destructive or cataclysmic event. I know, I know; it’s just too boring. Better have a bang!

I feel sure that some people will remember all of the dire predictions just before our calendar rolled over from 1999 to 2000, computers crashing, airplanes falling out of the sky and on and on. What happened? You know what happened – nothing. The thing is, you see, it is we who are obsessed with the apocalypse. We have been anticipating the millennia for millennia. Not so the Mayans, far more phlegmatic and pragmatic in every sense.

According to Matthew Restall, a Mayan specialist at Pennsylvania State University, the pre-Columbian Maya had virtually no interest in the apocalypse – “You have to look very hard to see any kind of concern with the end of the world. There are certain creation mythologies but not a lot about the world ending.” The truth is that the cataclysmic mood was imported into the New World, like measles, by the Spanish and other European settlers. In other words, it’s our tradition, not theirs.

We have our own long and short count; it’s come and passed time after time. Who can forget that Judgement Day was guaranteed for 21 May of last year, a rapturous event warmly anticipated by Harold Camping and the delightful Family Radio Worldwide? It was all foretold, Camping informed his happy campers; it was all in the Bible, and the Bible, as we know, is the literal truth.

Oh these literal truths that turn out not to be true at all. As I say, we’ve been here before. I remember reading about a certain Christine Darg, another American evangelist, who was convinced that Jesus would make his reappearance on earth at the Golden Gate in Jerusalem. Certain of the time and the date, she even set up a webcam to record this earth-shattering event. Time passed. Jesus did not come. No Jesus, just lots of profane mooners, anxious to record their asses for posterity. It was the appearance of everyone but Jesus, all those bare backsides, which caused the camera to be removed just as quickly as it was put up.

You see we, in our anxiety, just latched on to the Maya as the most advanced of the pre-Columbian civilizations, reading in to their culture aspects of our culture, importing our obsessions which were not their obsessions. They have no ends or ends, if I can put it like that.

I admire the Maya. I’ve been to Tikal in Guatemala, looking out over the forest canopy, punctuated here and there by those marvellous and mysterious pyramids. Who could not admire their civilization after seeing that? A lot of people think that the Maya disappeared into the mists of time, that they had their own unrecorded apocalypse. But they did not. They are still with us, communities in southern Mexico and Guatemala. For them 2012 is a boom without a boom. What a party they are anticipating on 21 December!

In Praise of William and Kate; in Praise of Monarchy

There was a post on Blog Catalogue congratulating William and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, on the forthcoming birth of their first child, good news for them in particular and for the British monarchy in general, the succession now secured far into the future.  I added my own congratulations but the post also attracted ignorant comment from people who should know better but don’t. 

One American described our monarchy as a ‘travesty’ and an Australian pompously went on about what an anachronism it was in the modern world to have an inherited head of state.  This was supported by arrant nonsense about philosophers and political thinkers in the seventeenth century being “more modern and more rational.”  It demanded a response and response I gave, highlighting the importance of monarchy in history.  This is my broadside on ignorance.  It’s been slightly adapted and expanded. 

I’m not sure who the ‘more modern and more rational’ seventeenth century political thinkers were alluded to here. It just so happens that the seventeenth century is my speciality, a period of intense political upheaval in the history of England. It was the one time that we got rid of our monarchy, albeit for a brief period.

It was a period when the gentle authoritarianism of King Charles I was replaced by the military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell and the dire Puritanism of the Major Generals. In the end the people had enough of Protectors, Republics and Confusion, calling Charles II home from exile. Since then the institution has gone from strength to strength, gently devolving its former prerogatives and powers to Parliament and People.

There is an acute historical irony here.  The monarchy, it might be said, is an institution in evolution.  It evolves now just as it has in the past.  In the eighteenth century the Americans rebelled against the perceived ‘tyranny’ of George III, eventually creating a monarchical republic.  As George and his descendents continued to devolve power to Parliament, an imperial presidency arose in the States.  Presidents as varied as Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt exercised forms of prerogative power that even Charles I would have found shocking.

Looking further afield, consider the history of France, where a monarchy was replaced by ‘rational’ forms of terror, mass murder and dictatorship. Look at the history of the last century, conceivably the most terrible in human history, where in place of traditional monarchies in Russia and Germany we had murderous tyranny; instead of Nicholas II we had Stalin; instead of Wilhelm II we had Hitler.

Bringing the story up to date, the most politically advanced, stable and culturally tolerant countries in Europe are all monarchies. Apart from my own country there is the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It was the monarchy in Spain that acted as the midwife to a modern democracy after years of dictatorship.

I do wish people would think a little more deeply before they use words like travesty or before they waffle on about anachronism and rationality.

Anyway, well done William and Kate, two more charming people I find difficult to imagine.  They will make splendid parents just as one day they will make a splendid King and Queen.  

The not so strange death of Liberal England

I’ve been looking at developments oop north, Rotherham in South Yorkshire, to be precise.  Politically it’s a socialist redoubt, held for years by the Labour Party.  It’s the kind of territory where if a red rosette was pinned on a chimp it would be returned to Parliament. 

Come to think of it Denis MacShane, the previous incumbent, is a bit of a chimp; a chump anyway.  I shall be even more unparliamentarily in saying that he is little better than a crook, forced to resign the seat over expense claims that were ‘plainly intended to deceive.’  That’s the parliamentary phrase! 

Anyway, Rotherham has turned into a bit of a graveyard – a graveyard for Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats.  It’s also become a graveyard for toleration and the birthplace of something altogether more sinister.

 I’ll come to the latter in a bit but first I need to do a spot of crowing.  Caw, caw, I call; my, how I delight in the decline and decline of the Limp Dumbs.  Can it be, can it possibly be that they will turn in ever decreasing circles to the point of complete extinction, the Incredible Shrinking Party?  Let it be, she sings; oh, let it be. 

The Northern Folk, you see, had a by-election last week in the wake of MacShane’s disgrace and forced resignation.  They got rid of Labour and – guess what? – they got Labour.  The vote is dead; long live the vote!  They voted for another chimp, one Sarah Champion, memorable for being completely unmemorable. 

But the election itself was memorable for other reasons, not least of which was the disastrous showing of the Clegg gang, who slumped to eighth place in the poll, behind the British National Party, behind the English Democrats and behind George Galloway’s Respect. 

Incidentally, the Respect candidate was a certain Yvonne Ridley, a journalist of a sort once held captive by the Taliban in Afghanistan.  She enjoyed the experience so much that she subsequently converted to Islam.  She is also something of an obsessive, vowing to hunt down Zionists wherever they are to be found, yea, even so far as the ranks of Respect, which must be a bit like hunting for a vegetarian among cannibals. Her anti-Zionist credentials are doubtless why she was chosen to stand in Rotherham, that well-known Zionist stronghold.

Sorry for the diversion.  Let me get back to the Liberal Democrats, now in deep mourning.  I dare say they are falling back on the usual guff about not getting their message across.  I rather think the Rotherhamites got a message across to them.  Polling pundits are saying that no major political party has ever performed so poorly in a Westminster by-election.  Eighth place and a mere two per cent of the vote; that is the message they have to bear!

The thing about the Liberal Democrats is that they had no clear idea of what they are and what they represent.  Oh, yes, they were desperate for power, but power has its penalties, most of all on a movement that was really just a collective gripe.  Out of power for generations, the Liberals and subsequently the Liberal Democrats turned into a protest party, embracing every politically fashionable cause, from windmills to gay marriage.  It was a movement for socialists who could not quite define themselves as socialists, progressives who progressed in whatever direction the wind blew.  In the end power was their Inchcape Rock, upon which their fragile vessel shattered.

I suppose the really interesting thing about Rotherham is that the onward march of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has not been halted.  With over twenty-one percent of the vote, they came second behind Labour, well ahead of the Tories, to whom they must now be considered as a serious rival on the right, following the Corby result earlier in the month

Rotherham’s Ministry of Love, sorry, make that Social Services Department, must be seriously concerned by this trend.  I expect they are already scouring their foster register just in case any children have been placed in the care of UKIP supporters.  After all, one’s political views have a clear bearing on one’s suitability as a parent.  The Labour-controlled Rotherham Borough Council certainly believes so, having previously removed three children, including a baby, in the care of a UKIP-supporting family. 

The great crime of these people was their opposition to multiculturalism, which in the eyes of Rotherham’s KGB-trained social workers makes them ‘racist.’  The older children, who called the people in question mum and dad, are said to be traumatised by the whole experience. Apparently in true KGB-style the social service apparatchiks descended on the family after an anonymous tip off.  Here come a candle to light you to bed; here comes a chopper to chop off your head.  Yes, we become more like Airstrip One with every passing day. 

So it’s pretty dangerous to be a supporter of UKIP in Rotherham, especially if one wants to be a parent.  It’s reasonably safe, though, to be a member of a predominantly Asian gang trafficking underage white girls for sex.  Big Sister in the shape of Joyce Thacker, Rotherham’s social services director, goes around the place defending her dawn raid, all the time ignoring that her department was one of those singled out earlier in the year for its negligence over the pimping issue.  If only the perpetrators had been members of UKIP.  That surely would have made all the difference.  

Thacker Speaks

Light in the Dark

Last week saw a sad anniversary in the Ukraine.  It’s eighty years since the beginning of the Holodomor, literally meaning ‘extermination by hunger’, a Stalin-made catastrophe that is thought to have been responsible for the death of up to seven million people in the years 1932 and 1933. 

It marks the first great moral nadir of communism.  It was a period of forced requisitions, a period when corn, even seed corn, was taken by the thugs of the NKVD, the state security apparatus, and other politically-inspired gangsters.  It was a period when food was marked ‘for export’ while men, women and children dropped dead in the streets.  For some it is comparable to the Holocaust.  While that is probably a step too far, in that there was no discernible racial motive involved, it shows a comparable callousness.

This tragedy is still not widely known outside the Ukraine.  The reason for this is simple enough: it was hushed up at the time by Western journalists who were little better than the stooges and dupes of Stalin.  The greatest stooge of all was Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who received a Pulitzer Prize for the ‘honesty’ of his reporting from the USSR, which might be a good indication of the true value of this benighted award. 

To the cowards and wretches like Duranty there is one honourable exception – Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist and former aid to David Lloyd George, whose reporting of the famine had him banned from the USSR.  He was later murdered in Mongolia, aged only twenty-nine, in circumstances that have never been fully explained.

It was only after the Ukraine achieved its independence that the Holodomor was accorded official recognition after years of enforced silence. Viktor Yuschenko, the former president, initiated a Holodomor Remembrance Day in 2006, marked every 25 November.  There is now a candle shaped memorial in Kiev, the capital, and a Holodomor Museum. 

Things change.  Yuschenko and the Orange Revolution are, like the Holodomor itself, in the past.  Viktor Yanukovich, the current president, started to backtrack almost as soon as he got into office.  The whole thing has been diluted, with the terror hunger now officially viewed as “a common tragedy of the Soviet people.”  There is politics here, of course; there is always politics, even in death.  The former president pursued a distinctly nationalist and anti-Russian line.  Yanukovich, in contrast, is closer to Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and Putin is close to the ghost of Stalin. 

The commemorations went ahead anyway, even with the absence of state support.  People were able to taste dishes made out of tree bark or leaves, something the desperate took to in the days of famine, a forlorn attempt to assuage hunger and cheat death.  The occasion was also marked by various symbolic events like the “uncelebrated weddings” and the “unrealised talents”, a commemoration of loss. 

Up to 2000 people gathered at the Holodomor Museum, observing a moment’s silence at 4pm precisely in memory of the dead.  Across the Ukraine lit candles were placed in windows, little stars of light flickering into history’s great darkness.  

My Expectations

A Dickens of a year draws to a close.  We’ve had a lengthy party, celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of one of our most cherished writers.  It’s been marked in all manner of ways: in commemoration, in lectures, in biography (a very good one by Claire Tomalin) and in fresh adaptations of some of his books for television and cinema. 

In fact the year has been bookended by visual adaptations of Great Expectations, a novel that might be said to have put the mellow in drama, the first a three part BBC series screened last December, and now a new cinema version directed by Mike Newell, which I saw on Friday, the day it went on general release in England. 

Who needs this?, you might ask; after all it’s been done so many times, most notably in the David Lean version of 1946, starring John Mills as Pip and Finlay Currie as Abel Magwitch, the standard against which all others tend to be judged. 

Who needs it?  I do, that’s the answer; I needed Newell’s honest and imaginative recreation, Great Expectations as Dickens would have expected but presented afresh for modern eyes, carrying overtones of the director’s previous encounter with the Harry Potter franchise, lovely little touches of Gothic humour.  It may be sacrilege to say so but the Lean version is dating, and in some ways not dating that well.  It’s just a little too stiff in parts.  Oh, I simply can’t resist the sacrilegious! 

Great Expectations, if you are not familiar with the book, is a riddle, wrapped up in an enigma, inside a mystery.  It begins with a terrifying encounter in a graveyard on bleak Kentish marshland between Pip Pirrip (Toby Irvine), the novel’s narrator, then a child, and Abel Magwitch, an escaped convict who, by his appearance, might very well have escaped from hell.  Ralph Fiennes – keep those Harry Potter parallels rolling! – was a superb growling Magwitch, hungry not just for food and drink, but hungry, too, as it turns out, for human charity, the keystone, really, of the whole book. 

David Nichols’ screenplay is excellent because – in contrast to the TV version – he gives Magwitch’s speech to the six-year-old Pip word for word;

You bring me, tomorrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do it and you never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your having seen such a person as me, or any person sumever, and you shall be let to live. You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no matter how small it is, and your heart and liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate. Now, I ain't alone, as you may think I am. There's a young man hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young man. A boy may lock his doors, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up, may draw the clothes over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but that young man will softly creep his way to him and tear him open. I am keeping that young man from harming you at the present moment, but with great difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young man off of your inside. Now, what do you say?’

Oh, that young man, laid on thick in only the way that Dickens can lay on thick!  It’s all rather ridiculous, terrifying enough from a child’s point of view, as George Orwell noted in his brilliant essay on Charles Dickens, but a wholly inaccurate depiction of Magwitch the man, who is not a bat out of hell at all but something of a holy innocent, quite childish, as we later discover, in his exaggerated sense of gratitude. 

Pip’s next big encounter is with the eccentric Miss Havisham, a bat who lives like a bat among the ruins of a long dead wedding feast.  She is a jilted bride, played here by Helena Bonham Carter, a ghostly and Gothic presence.  I could not help but recall The Corpse Bride, an animation directed by her husband Tim Burton, where she voices Emily, the title character.  It’s in Miss Havisham’s crumbling mansion that Pip is introduced to Estella (Helena Barlow), her ward, a contrast in class and manners that is destined to have a great impact on the boy’s life.  The ghost bride is a puppet master, with Pip and Estella as her leading marionettes. 

All in all the cast were first class, minor and major.  Jason Fleming was a super Joe Gargery, Pip’s blacksmith brother-in-law, mentor and legal guardian.  Sally Hawkins was amusing enough as Pip’s older sister and Joe’s shrewish wife, though she hammed up the shrewishness to the point of excess.  In the minor roles David Williams was an excellent Uncle Pumbelchook, just as I imagine him. 

The laurel wreath I award to Robbie Coltrane (Harry Potter again!) as the evasive and self serving lawyer Jaggers.  It is he who comes to the blacksmith’s forge to tell Pip, now grown up and played by Jeremy Irvine (Toby’s big brother), that he has come into money, that he is to leave his lowly life and become a gentleman in London; that he has ‘great expectations.’

Where these expectations come from and who is Pip’s mystery benefactor is the device upon which the rest of the story turns.  He believes that it’s Miss Havisham, an illusion she does nothing to disabuse, just as she does nothing to disabuse him that it is all part of a plan for him to marry Estella.  It isn’t; Estella is intended as a weapon, a heartless missile, Miss Havisham’s revenge on the whole male world. Pip’s real benefactor when he comes – yes, a he - comes as a shock, though it should be no shock to you even if you are not familiar with the story.  After all, I’ve already given it away.

So, then, Pip is magically transformed from an honest blacksmith into a ‘gentleman’ which in essence means someone who has nothing to do but waste time and waste money, a shiftless fop and a snob, evidenced in his conduct towards Joe when he comes to visit.  As a snob he moves only in the ‘best society’, and the ‘best society’ here is the Finch Club, headed by Bentley Drummel (Ben Lloyd-Hughes), a collection of unprepossessing boors and loud mouths whose idea of fun is food fights.  I simply refuse to accept that there was no Bullingdon Club reference here!  But in the end Pip comes good, losing pretence and gaining himself in acts of benevolence and charity, a counterpoint to his forced charity in the graveyard. 

As a love story Newell’s movie does not work; there is simply not enough screen time between the mature Pip and Estella, played in adulthood by Holliday Granger.  But as a tribute to Dickens it does, to all the twists and turns in which he delighted as a story-teller.  The set design and the period details are all first class, with London looking even more frightening at points than those Kentish marshes.  Yes, it has been modernised without being updated and reinterpreted, something I personally loathe.  Of this movie I had great expectations.  These expectations were not disappointed. 

So, I bid a premature farewell to 2012; a farewell to the year of Dickens.  

Publish and be Damned

The law is an ass, an idiot, so said Charles Dickens’ Mister Bumble the Beadle in Oliver Twist.  I think we can maybe refine that just a little: it’s not the law that is an ass and an idiot but Lord Justice Leveson, who last week produced his report recommending, as anticipated, statutory regulation of the press. 

His conclusion has been welcomed by other asses, not least of whom is Nick Clegg, the Limp Dumb Deputy Prime Minister, a man who could play Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with no need for the ears. 

David Cameron, now twisting on the horns of yet another dilemma, only has himself to blame for his discomfort.  There was no need, as I have said, for this expensive farce in the first place. Breaches of the law by journalists in News International should have been dealt with as breaches of the law, nothing more.  Instead we have this stupid lawyer and his equally stupid acolytes mounting a challenge to press freedom, a freedom upon which all others might be said to hang. 

What irony there is here.  Our democracy is dying anyway, hurried along to extinction by the European politburo in Brussels.  Now if Leveson has his way we can forget about Milton and Wilkes and Orwell; we can forget about all those who defended a free press as an essential adjutant to free speech.  State regulation is the beginning of the end. 

It’s gratifying to see that not all in the present government are as terminally stupid as the insufferable Corporal Clegg.  William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, warned Cameron that statutory press regulation would be warmly welcomed by Vladimir Putin and other petty tyrants around the globe.  According to one insider, Hague said that “…Britain demonstrating that we have a free press is part of our ability to say that we believe in democracy…if we announced statutory regulation this would be used by the Russians to justify all sorts of behaviour.  It is a fundamental part of British foreign policy to have a free press.”

It’s a point of view echoed by Jethro Goko of the Daily News, Zimbabwe’s biggest independent newspaper.  He said that the rest of the world looked to Britain as a model of press freedom and that the phone hacking scandal should not be used as an excuse for government interference.  If Leveson has his way it will be “manna from heaven” for the likes of Robert Mugabe and his kind.  Goko should know.  His own paper was shut down for seven years and only publishes now under state licence.

Here the Spectator, my favourite political weekly, has openly announced in the latest issue that it will not cooperate with any regulatory structure mandated by the state.  Fraser Nelson, the editor, writes that the publication will not attend meetings, pay fines or heed menaces. 

“To do so would be to betray everything The Spectator has stood for since 1828.”  So far as he is concerned Leveson is a no-brainer.  “…our archives [show] how we have been implacably opposed to the principle of state regulation of the press – not because it protects the press, but because it protects the public.” He added that the magazine has a long history of standing up to politicians who want to restrict freedom of speech.

When I think of Leveson I think of one of those antediluvian fossils, the old judges who sit on the bench regularly having to seek enlightenment as lawyers present their cases because there is some aspect of modern life that they do not understand, from Wi-Fi to iPhones.  Leveson does not understand the internet.  A mere twelve of his almost two thousand page tome is devoted to its place in modern life. 

His is a scheme that is effectively twenty years or so out of date, completely ignoring the fact that more and more people get their news from the net, not from newspapers.  The Sun pointed out the absurdity here, saying that it and other papers could be stopped from publishing stories and pictures already seen by millions online. 

A gagged press is a dead press.  With circulation already in sharp decline I’m guessing that in twenty years or so we will no longer have published newspapers, the so-called ‘qualities’ like the Guardian being the first dinosaurs into Jurassic extinction.  Let its ridiculous editor reflect on that as defends Leveson’s attempt to “ensure decent standards.” 

Publish and be damned.  Be damned to state control of the press; be damned to Lord Leveson