Captain, my Captain

Köpenick's memorial to its Captain

Picture this.  In 1906 a man named Wilhelm Voigt, a life-long petty criminal, was released from his latest term of imprisonment.  Now in his late fifties he’s had enough of his former life.  He wants to go straight.  He wants a job.  He wants a place to live.  But Wilhelm Voigt is invisible.  He has no identity papers.  Without identity papers he cannot get a residence permit.  Without a residence permit he cannot get a job.  Without a job he cannot get a residence permit, and so on in an endless vortex.  He is lost, a little like the Flying Dutchman, seemingly doomed forever to be tossed around on waves of bureaucratic idiocy. 

In one final attempt to break to break the bars of the prison outside prison, he dons a military uniform, that of a captain.  As if by magic he ceases to be invisible.  The clothes have made the man.  He orders some passing troops to fall in, marching them to the town hall, hoping to trace his missing papers.   

On the way he stops at the police station, there ordering the officers to ‘care for law and order’ by preventing all telephone calls to the capital for the next hour.  In the town hall both the mayor and the treasurer are arrested for ‘crooked bookkeeping’.  The Captain orders the safe to be opened.  When the mayor asks for a warrant he points to the bayonets of his soldiers, saying ‘These are my authority’, a line in any other country in the world that would have exposed him as a fake.  The safe is opened and the mayor relieved of a fairly large amount of cash.  A receipt is provided, of course.  After all, this is a society built of paper. 

I know this seems like a fairy story but it really happened.  You may very well have guessed where from the name of the Captain.  Yes, this is Germany, the Germany of Kaiser Bill, Prussia, to be precise, a place obsessed with uniforms and tied tight in regulations, a place where to hear is to obey, a place where everyone only obeys orders.  The little drama took place in the town of Köpenick to the east of Berlin, from which Voigt was ever after known as the Captain of Köpenick. 

He was caught and faced another lengthy term in prison.  But his exploit captured the imagination of a people not generally noted for their sense of humour.  Bit by bit he was transformed in to a German version of Robin Hood, and as such he is still celebrated today.  Even the Kaiser was amused, later pardoning Voigt as an ‘amiable scoundrel.’  But Bill was not a subtle man; the irony and absurdity of the incident and all that it told of the Second Reich was lost on him.  He was pleased, rather, by the obvious reverence that a military uniform carried among the people at large.

A quarter of a century later Carl Zuckmayer, a playwright, wrote Der Hauptmann von Köpenick – The Captain of Köpenick -, a satire based on the incident.  First performed in Berlin in 1931, it was a commentary on contemporary society as much as the past, a commentary and a warning.  Two years later it was banned and Zuckmayer went into exile.  The Kaiser, unsubtle or not, had a sense of humor.  Hitler had none.

The Captain of Köpenick is a play not that well-known outside Germany.  I don’t suppose there is any great surprise in this, in that the humour does not travel that well, or German humor, to say the least, tends to be a little bit on the heavy side.  But it has made one of its rare foreign excursions to London’s National Theatre, which is where I saw it at the weekend. 

In a new English language version by Ron Hutchison and directed by Adrian Noble, it stars Anthony Sher as the eponymous anti-hero.  It was a commendable performance, just as I have come to expect from Sher, an actor of range and depth.  Here he could embrace comedy and pathos with equal ease, as he was transformed from a real nobody into a fake somebody, the talented Herr Voigt! 

Set in the National’s Olivier Theatre, the play made good use of all the technical wizardry at the director’s fingertips, allowing for rapid scene changes, including some wonderful expressionist-cum-cubist Berlin cityscapes in the style of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. 

The Captain of Köpenick is as relevant today as it was when first performed.  The continual flow of bureaucratic absurdity from Brussels is sufficient proof of that.  I could only wish that it had been handled with greater skill.  I found Hutchison’s updated version irksome and silly at points rather than funny, descending now and again into outright vulgarity.  More than that, Zuckmayer’s message is obvious enough, the satire biting enough, without the need for the continual reminders, and certainly without the need for the climatic “hysterical Dance of Death.”

This is a play, as I wrote above, that does not travel well.  It might have travelled better with a little more discipline, a little less reverence and a lot less Teutonic stodge!  Still, Sher, along with some of the supporting cast, makes the experience all worthwhile.  If you are in London, and minded to go, the Captain will be goose-stepping around until 4 April. 

Love in the Shadows

I didn’t watch this year’s Oscar ceremony; I very rarely watch it any other year; the hype and the razzmatazz is just too much for me, no matter how much I love cinema.  I knew that Daniel Day-Lewis had won best actor for his performance in Lincoln, but that’s really about it.  So far as the general field is concerned, I had seen Brave, Anna Karenina and Django Unchained.  I also saw The Beasts of the Southern Wild recently, though I can’t say I was hugely impressed by this confused and misdirected piece of cinematic hype.  What I had not seen - what I had not even heard of - was a French movie called Amour, which won the Academy Award for the best foreign film. 

Thanks to another blogger I finally caught up with this movie.  I am so glad that I did.  It’s a marvel, an intelligent, thoughtful, perceptive and well-crafted piece of cinema.  It’s a movie for grown-ups, different in every way from the usual hyperactive adolescent nonsense that English-language producers largely prefer.  I was on the point of writing that I don’t think a movie like Amour could ever have been made in the Anglo-Saxon orbit – it simply would not have attracted sufficient commercial support – when it occurred to me that in some ways it resembles Iris, the 2001 biopic about the novelist Irish Murdoch.  Amour deals with the same themes of love and loss as Iris, though in a far less glossy manner.

Written and directed by the Austrian film-maker Michael Haneke, Amour, by coincidence, is the second movie of his that I’ve seen within a fairly short space of time.  The first was Das weiße Band – The White Ribbon – a German language film shown recently on the BBC’s catch up service.  This concerns a rural community in Germany on the eve of the First World War, a place beset by a growing sense of menace.  The menace is also present in Amour; the menace here is death, an opponent that wins every battle, though often victory is claimed slowly, claimed, moreover, with sadistic relish. 

Amour – Love – is a story of disentanglement, of a relationship being slowly unwoven after a life-time; it’s about the disintegration, if anything, of love and of life.  It’s a story set in the twilight days of Anne and Georges Laurent, two elderly former music teachers, wonderfully played by Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant.  The action takes place mostly in their well-appointed Parisian apartment, which here serves the purpose of a theatre. 

The movie begins, pre-credits, with the police breaking in to the apartment, there to discover the body of an elderly woman, her head surrounded with flowers.  Then it’s a journey back into the recent past, starting, post credits, with an elderly couple attending a piano recital.  Afterwards they return to their apartment, a sanctuary replete with objects and haunted by memories, only to discover that the door has been damaged in an attempted break-in by some unknown stranger.  Puzzled and unsettled, they arrange to have the door fixed, but the stranger, in a sense, never really goes away.  Something cold and unsympathetic has entered their lives and made a home.

It’s almost impossible to review this film without writing one big spoiler.  But what is important is not so much the story of Anne’s descent into debilitating dementia, the outcome of successive strokes, and Georges’ attempts to cope – a simple enough tale in itself – as the sparkling personal interplay between the two characters.  Everyone else seems like an intruder, even their own daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert).  The old couple now live in the midst of lengthening shadows.  Is love enough?  No, it is not.  For Georges it is replaced by fear, as he sees Anne slip through his fingers like sand, with nothing substantial to hang on to.  This is a chamber piece with no music, only the sounds of silence, sounds arising from the shadows. 

In the dead of night Georges hears the doorbell.  He opens but there is nobody there.  Walking down the hall, he finds that he is wadding ever deeper in water.  A hand clamps over his mouth from behind; his eyes fill with panic and fear.  He is drowning.  Then he wakes.  It’s only a nightmare.  But it’s not.  He is being suffocated by Anne’s decline.  

The suffocation serves as a metaphor, but it also prefigures Anne’s final demise - Georges smothers her with a pillow.  But this is no mercy killing; there is nothing premeditated about it; he kills her in a rush of passion, angered by her refusal to eat.  We are left to assume that Georges own death follows, but with the mystery now complete we simply do not know; he is just no longer there.  The apartment and its shadows are left to Eva

I read an article by one Peter Saunders describing Amour as a “dangerously seductive piece of pro-euthanasia propaganda.”  He goes on to compare it to Ich Klage An – I Accuse -, a movie made in 1941 under the auspices of Josef Goebbels, intended to make the public more supportive of the Nazi state’s euthanasia programme.  There is even a hint at the end that Amour deserves to be banned, just as Ich Klage An was by the Allies after the War.

I find it difficult to cope with this kind of fearful stupidity, the assumption that movies must inevitably carry some message or other, some generalised desiderata that we are all meant to absorb uncritically, that our emotions, childlike in their innocence, can be corrupted and manipulated by ‘propaganda’. 

Amour is no more an argument for euthanasia than it is an advertisement for book-lined Parisian apartments.  It’s a story, that’s all; a story of two particular people and their particular existential anguish.  Other people could have produced another story, another director might have told the tale differently, with less poignancy and less restraint than Haneke.  He does it so well, asking some of the hardest questions of all, chiefly what is the right way to behave when faced with huge and personal changes in one’s life?  I certainly do not know the answer.  More than that, I do not think there is an answer.  We come to life’s dilemmas, each and everyone of us, in our own unique ways; we find our own paths, even in the midst of loneliness and despair.  In the end love may not be enough but at least it makes life worth living, even in the lengthening shadows. 

Time has transfigures them into 
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Ding, dong, Hugo is Dead, Horrible Hugo is Dead!

Bye, bye

“Chavez Vive!”, the red-shirted chavs are shouting on the streets of Caracas, the capital of Venezuela.  No, he is not – Chavez Muerto!   Thank goodness that the world is rid of another petty demagogue, a corrupt and degraded icon of the left. It's a measure of just how degenerate left wing thinking has become when a creature like this is celebrated.  Rather have no more heroes anymore than a hero like Horrible Hugo. 

By his friends shall ye know him, and lamentations are coming from the likes of Syria’s Basher Bashar al-Assad and our very own Ken Livingstone, King Newt himself. Diane Abbott, that fat thick black racist, said that his death was a ‘tragedy’ for South America. Imam George Galloway described him as ‘Spartacus.’  I wish that the Romans had got to him sooner.  “He’s Spartacus”, I would gleefully have shouted. 

Obsequies are also coming from Iran’s President Mahmoud Amadinejad.  Apparently Saint Hugo will rise from the dead, reappearing among us in the wake of Shia Islam’s long awaited Twelfth Imam, which means, of course, it will be the twelfth of never, which will be a long, long time.  Then there is the mass outpouring of woe from the readership of the Guardian, a paper, ironically, that would never have survived in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.  Hmm...maybe there is something to be said for Chavez after all. 

We go now to another delusional tyranny; we go to Cuba.  There two days of national mourning has been announced, a period of “deep and excruciating sorrow”.  It will indeed be deep and excruciating for the Castro mafia if a post-Chavez government cuts off the oil transfusions which have kept their shabby regime afloat for the past few years. 

Meanwhile, back in Caracas, the red shirts wail. Oh, woe is them.  Vice President Nicolas Maduro led the lamentations.  There he is, flailing around the place, blaming shadowy right wing and foreign forces for Chavez’ premature demise.  Apparently his cancer might have been plotted from ‘outside.’   Yes, indeed, a successful attack, code named Operation Crab! 

Not everyone is as deluded as Maduro and the hysterical canaille in Caracas.  There are those in the country who are courageously prepared to speak the truth.  “Hate and division was the only thing that he spread”, one man said.  “He did a lot of harm because there are no institutions, there is no justice.  He mistreated everyone who disagreed with his government.” 

Even so the mourning extends, yea, even so far as the United States, that is to say, even so far as the actor Sean Penn.  Apparently Chavez’ death is the hardest thing he has had to endure since trying to watch all of ex-wife Robin Wright’s series House of Cards on Netflix.  He plans to honour his late buddy by making life a ‘living hell’ for his fellow Americans.  I guess he won’t have to do very much then; his mere presence among them should be more than enough.  Penn’s counter-attack on the Great Satan will include chain-smoking, which may mean that Operation Crab will soon claim another victim.  In that sad event I expect the scenes of hysteria on the streets of Los Angeles greatly to exceed those in Caracas.

Elsewhere there is a lot of pious hand-wring, the usual guff that follows the departure of leaders like this, hated while they were alive, loved now that they are dead.  William Hague, our own Foreign Secretary, claims to have been ‘saddened’ by the event.  Personally I prefer my hypocrisy in extremely small doses.  Evo Morales, Bolivia’s indigenous and semi-literate president, said that Chavez is “more alive than ever.”  Actually he’s more dead than ever.  Amado Boudou, Argentina’s vice-President, tweeted that “one of the best has left us; you will always be with us.”  Never mind the contradiction here.  Perhaps he might like to go and find him?  I would advise him to hold his nose in the process. 

Amidst the guff there is a nugget or two of sanity. The best, I think, comes from Ed Royce, Chairman of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs.  “Hugo Chavez was a tyrant," he said “who forced the Venezuelan people to live in fear.  His death dents the alliance of anti-US leftist leaders in South America.  Good riddance to this dictator.”  Venceremos, Comrade Royce! 

The simple fact is that for all of his left-wing credentials, or rather because of his leftist credentials,  Hugo Chavez was nothing but a bully and a thug, a fascist by any other name, who did much to destroy the economy of Venezuela for the greater good of...of what, exactly?  Why, of himself and his venal, money-grubbing family.  Is there anything at all to be said in his favour?  There is this much: he over-fulfilled, Stalin-style, aspects of his own five year plan – Venezuela’s murder and inflation rates are now among the highest in the world. 

My, how it delights me to speak ill of the dead; how it delights me that Chavez has been swept off to the deepest circle of hell, where he can dance forever with the likes of the late Kim Jon-il.

The world will not record their having been there;
Heaven's mercy and its justice turn from them.
Let's not discuss them; look and pass them by...

Shitting on Haiti

Haiti is a young nation, which is to say that it is a nation of the young. Growing old here without mishap is something of an achievement. If history in the widest sense is no more than a form of collective memory, then there are not many still alive who remember the days of Baby Doc Duvalier, the former dictator. The son of the infamous Papa Doc, Baby Doc ruled the country from his father’s death in 1971 until he was ousted in 1986 by a military coup.

After many years in exile he returned home in 2011. Some remembered. Some even celebrated his return, seeing his rule in a positive light, a measure of just how miserable things were in the country after the previous year’s devastating earthquake. Others were less enthused. Baby Doc’s apology to those who “rightly feel were the victims” did little to dispel the blacker memories. A legal action was mounted on behalf of a few dozen people, the survivors of the past, calling him to account for the tortures, disappearances and murders that took place under his regime.

Last year a court ruled that too much time had elapsed since the alleged crimes were committed. For most people this is a past that is simply too far away. Although the case is being appealed, very little is happening in the face of Baby Doc’s obduracy (he has boycotted all hearings) and the weakness of the Haitian justice system.

The United Nations (UN) is outraged. Towards the end of last month the organisation issued a statement, urging the judicial authorities in the country to act on their responsibilities. “Such systematic violations of rights must not remain unaddressed”, lectured Navi Pillay, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights. So far as she is concerned there can be no statute of limitations when it comes to the kind of grave abuses that were such a feature of the Duvalier regime.

I have no information on the point but I would be surprised if that many Haitians, beyond the alleged victims, care overmuch about past injustices. As I say, this is a young country. The past is far less important than the present; the crimes of Baby Doc far less relevant than the crimes of...the UN. Yes, indeed, if misery was not misery enough in this country the UN introduced even more; it reintroduced cholera, a disease that had been absent from Haiti for over a hundred years.

After the 2010 quake UN teams arrived bringing all sorts of aid. Unfortunately for Haiti they also brought a lot of shit. Human beings are human beings and waste is waste; there is really not an awful lot one can do about that. But the one thing that should not be done is the dumping of a lot of untreated faecal matter into local rivers, sources of bathing and drinking water. Jonathan Katz describes what he saw, and smelt, in The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Behind a Disaster, his recently published book;

Young men from the village were standing in front of the gate wearing backpacks and ball caps. Evens greeted them, approaching with open arms. "We heard someone dumped kaka in the river. Know anything about that?"

Heads nodded.

"Can you show us where?"

At once they turned and walked toward the base. We followed. Nepalese soldiers in green-and-brown camouflage and sky-blue helmets watched us from a guard tower. Just before the gate, the young men turned right and walked to the back of the base, where only a steep narrow slope of mud and rock separated the compound from the river. As we neared, they covered their noses and mouths. A second later, I realised why. The stench of rotting human filth was debilitating. We held our breath and crossed a concrete embankment along the ridge.

The result was a mass outbreak of cholera, a dreadful water-borne disease, which so far has killed over 8000 people and infected a further 640,000. The disease is now endemic, predicted to kill as many as 1000 people every year. In the end the fatalities are likely to exceed those of the 2010 quake many times over.

Yes, it is a dreadful condition. The body becomes like a burst dam, water evacuated out copiously from both ends of the alimentary system, in uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhoea. This extreme evacuation is accompanied by high fever and terrible intestinal pain, as if one had eaten a stick of thorns, so some have described. Death, when it comes, is by dehydration. There is no liquid left.

Now just imagine if a private company, by a singular act of negligence, was responsible for such devastation. Inevitably it would face all sorts of penalties - in compensation payments, in legal costs and in damage limitation. Just remember the case of BP and the Gulf oil disaster. But BP is a legal entity; it’s a public corporation and it can be sued by the public. The UN is above all that. The UN is divine in the sense that its acts are like the acts of God, beyond all human retribution.

The very same day that Navi Pillay chose fit to lecture Haitians on human rights, the office of Bi Ki-moon, the Secretary General, issued a statement dismissing the claims for compensation involving 5000 people. The action was, to use the jargon, “not receivable” because of the UN’s privileges and immunities. In other words, the UN is above all national law; there is simply no basis for legal action against this organisation. Writing to the lawyers acting for the claimants, the UN’s legal office said “...consideration of these claims would necessarily involve a review of political and policy matters.”

So, yes; dumping faeces in clean rivers would seem to be a matter of UN policy. Dealing with the consequences is not. The callousness, the arrogance and the high-handedness here is quite simply stunning. Compared with the irresponsible actions of a body that behaves a little like an international pirate the crimes of Baby Doc seem almost irrelevant. Clearly, when it comes to human rights, all cases are equal, but some cases are more equal than others.

King Henri’s Head

Royal reconstruction is rather the fashion at the present.  First we had England’s Richard III, discovered illegally parked in Leicester, now we have France’s Henri IV, the other king who lost his head during the Revolution!  

Buried in the Basilica of Saint Denis, along with the other monarchs of France, his body was dug up by revolutionaries in 1793 and thrown into a mass grave, though some mystery admirer managed to make off with the head.  It finally turned up, after a two century gap, in the attic of a retired tax inspector, or so it is claimed. 

Henri, who was assassinated in May 1610 by a deranged religious fanatic, was one of France’s better kings.  The first in the Bourbon line, he converted from Calvinism to Catholicism, thus ending the Wars of Religion that had troubled France for a good bit of the sixteenth century.  Paris was worth a mass, he famously said, just as famously promising the French people the means to have a chicken in the pot every Sunday. 

The reconstruction, carried out by Philippe Froesch, a craniofacial expert linked to Barcelona University, certainly looks convincing, resembling the king’s portraits in life, though the addition of the hair,  the beard and the ruff has certainly helped!  Identification was apparently aided by a gash near the nose, as well as a beauty spot and a pierced ear along with other key features.  But, alas and alack, Good King Henri has been the cause of a new civil war between France’s squabbling royals.  Yes, they are still around.

The head comes, you see, at the head of a new book – Henri IV, The Mystery of the Headless King by Stéphane Gabet and Philippe Charlier.  “Oh, yes it is”, they say.  “Oh, no it isn’t”, the critics reply.  The brain was still in place, they say, though that would have been removed after death by the royal embalmers. 

The royals have weighed in, the Bourbons on the pro side and their Orleanist cousins on the anti.  Prince Louis Bourbon, a banker and Henri’s distant descendant, says that the head is genuine.  There is no question of it, he explained to journalists Le Figaro, “It is both highly moving and a great responsibility.”  Well, I suppose it would be, coming face to face with a face from the past.  In the other corner there is Henri d'Orléans, Count of Paris and Duke of France, described the book as a "pseudo inquiry". "This affair seems closer to a novel than scientific or historic truth," he told French journalists. "What are we supposed to see from this supposed facial reconstitution – that he had a Bourbon nose?"

Yes, I suppose he has the point, by a nose at least.  Support here has come from Oliver Pascal, president of the French Institute of Genetic Testing, who told Figaro that there is no conclusive proof that the head is Henri’s.  “The information would not stand up in a court of law”, he added. 

Meanwhile the head that may or may not have been that of the king sits in a bank vault, ironically enough, in the Bastille district of Paris.  The mystery of the head looks set to intrude into French testimonials for some time to come, rather like that of King Charles, which continually troubled poor Mister Dick. 

‘Do you recollect the date,’ said Mr. Dick, looking earnestly at me, and taking up his pen to note it down, ‘when King Charles the First had his head cut off?’   I said I believed it happened in the year sixteen hundred and forty-nine.

” ‘Well,’ returned Mr. Dick, scratching his ear with his pen, and looking dubiously at me. ‘So the books say; but I don’t see how that can be. Because, if it was so long ago, how could the people about him have made that mistake of putting some of the trouble out of his head, after it was taken off, into mine?

Oh, well, long live the King’s Head! 

Vaffa!

I’m going to ask you to imagine that we have just had a general election.  I’m going to do more than that: I want you to imagine that the Monster Raving Looney Party has emerged as the strongest force in Parliament.  Impossible, you say; such a thing is beyond imagination.  Oh, no, it is not; at least it’s not in Italy.  Following the recent election Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement attracted a quarter of the vote.  It now has 108 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house, and 54 in the Senate.

Who’s Beppe Grillo, you ask?  He’s a comedian, that’s who he is, part of a long tradition of Italian funny men.  Where people once chanted ‘Du-ce!’ ‘Du-ce!’ then now chant ‘Bep-pe! Bep-pe!’ His story is remarkable, even more remarkable in some ways than that of Mussolini.  Turning from jokes to political activism, Il Beppe founded the MoVimento 5 Stelle (M5S) – the Five Star movement – in Milan in October, 2009, the very same city, incidentally, where life was first breathed into Fascism in 1919.  The capital V in the party title – well, not so much a party as a movement – stands for Vaffa!, the leader’s own signature, which roughly translates as Fuck off! 

And how Grillo wants so much in Italian life, particularly to Italian politics, to, well, Vaffa!  Ever since 2005, when he started his blog, now the most popular in Italy, he has gathered a large following among the disaffected, chiefly from the young.  Many of his new MPs and Senators only just scrape past the minimum 25 age limit for entering Parliament.  These are the people for whom, in their disgust, Vaffa! has become the watchword; these are the people who have been the devotees of Beppe’s Vaffa! Day, or V Day, set up in 2007.

All politicians are crooks, says Beppe, apart from his own, of course, a line that echoes all the way back to 1919.  He’s now had his very own, and rather remarkable, March on Rome.  The Economist, that maiden aunt of political journalism, is tut tutting its disapproval in the latest issue.  Send in the clowns, the old dear trumpets across her front cover, with an additional How Italy’s disastrous election threatens the future of the euro.  Inside the humourless dowager drones on about those naughty Italian children, determined as they are to avoid reality.  It’s not just the future of the euro that is threatened, she witters on, but the future of Italy itself.

Dear, oh dear, there is Beppe and Silvio Berlusconi, the other clown who made a reasonably good showing, moving ever forward while “...Mario Monti, the reform-minded technocrat who has led Italy for the past 15 months and restored much of its battered credibility, got a measly 10%”  Really, there is only one word for that and the word is...Vaffa! 

Democracy would be all right if it wasn’t for the voters.  That’s the reality of the European Union, a reality clearly endorsed by the Economist.  The people did not want Monti; Monti was imposed upon them.  Now the people, rather inconveniently, have spoken, exposing the fraudulent politics of Europe with a bold finger gesture.  Me ne freggo! – I don’t give a damn - , now there is another decent slogan worth reviving. 

The inconclusive result of the election is conclusive on one point at least: Italians do not want to be ruled by the technocrats, either of the Brussels or the local variety.  Monti was imposed on them in 2011 without elections by the Eurocrats.  Charles Moore puts the point very well in his Spectator Notes.  Just imagine (sorry, I hope I’m not overtaxing you here!) if David Cameron was kicked out of office by the European Central Bank, which decreed that Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, the chairman of the Financial Services Authority, was elevated in his place.  Yes, I too would support any British Beppe who came along, Ken Dodd or whoever, rather than the cat’s paw of the European banking-bureaucracy complex.

People can only be pushed so far before they start to get angry.  Our own anger was shown in a small way during the recent Eastleigh by-election, which saw the United Kingdom Independence Party pushing the Conservatives into a humiliating third place.  ‘It’s only a protest vote’, the Tory apparatchiks wailed, ‘The masses will return in 2015.’ Oh, really, will they?  Only, I think, if they are in a gay mood, as Cameron hopes.  But the anger over Europe, over the highhandedness of the dreadful European tyranny, grows by the day.  The Long March of UKIP is by no means over.

And then there is the onward march of Beppe.  His politics are not my politics; he is far too left-wing and statist for that, far too, ahem, fascist!  Still, he is a symptom of a growing disgust across the whole of Europe with Europe, with those who make a mockery of democracy because it does not suit their technocratic ends.  “We are all young”, the sixty-four-year old Beppe says on his blog. “We’re a movement of many people who are uniting from the bottom up.  We don’t have structures, hierarchies, bosses, secretaries...No one gives us orders.”  Yes, I am young. I turn to Brussels and I really only have one word – Vaffa!  

Let Them Eat Crap

You obviously will know about the horsey in the national diet if you are British, on the assumption that you have not been away on Mars for the past few weeks.  For the rest of the world, those who are blissfully ignorant of these shores, let me just say that the British public, or the poorer part of it, was being fed horse meat pretending to be beef. 

Shocking! Shocking!  Mind you, I’m not convinced that those who buy tripe (possibly?) like Findus’ or Tesco’s deep frozen lasagne really know or care what they are eating, so long as it has a meaty taste.  Then there are the burgers.  Lord alone knows what’s in those.  Actually, we do know – udders, guts, sexual parts, all rendered down; revolting enough, even when it is not horse. 

There was a readers’ poll in the Daily Telegraph recently arising from the horse meat scandal. The question was simple: do you think it acceptable to eat horse meat or not?  I voted no, because I would no more eat horse than I would eat cat or rat.  Rat, yes, this is something I will come on to in a bit or a bite.  The result of the poll - revealed after one had voted - was almost neck and neck, the antis winning by a mere nose.  So, whether or not the pros actually eat horse burgers they do not think there is anything wrong in principle here.

Oh, but there is.  First of all the issue is about honesty.  I know one virtually has to have a PhD now to make sense of the labelling on food products, but at the most basic level people have a right to know if they are eating beef or dog meat.  If they have a preference for dog that’s fine, just as long as they understand what it is they are buying.  I say dog, knowing full well that the Telegraph poll would have produced a far clearer result if that had been the product in question, though there are some places in the world where dog is considered tasty and nutritious. 

The real issue, the issue that is beyond the comprehension of the unimaginative, is that of adulteration; of the corruption of food, a corruption born of the drive to feed the masses with the cheapest product available.  “Let them eat cake”, Marie Antoinette is falsely alleged to have said.  But that is positively benign compared with the “Let them eat crap” of the modern food Tsars.

The adulteration of food was big issue in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both in England and the United States.  The problem got worse with industrialisation, when cheap food was a necessary corollary of low wages.  In the States it got so bad that the New York Evening Post published a parody of a well-known nursery rhyme;

Mary had a little lamb,
And when she saw it sicken,
She shipped it off to Packingtown,
And now it's labeled chicken.

Upton Sinclair caught the mood in The Jungle, a novel published in 1906, which described the dreadful conditions in the meat packing industry.  But sick lamb pretending to be chicken was not enough for him; oh, no.  He went that step further, claiming that the workers who had the misfortune to fall into the rendering tanks were ground up and sold with the rest as Durham’s Pure Beef Lard! 

We have come a long way since then, with legislation and inspection aimed at reducing corruption (meat) and corruption (human).  No we have not.  If anything the situation is getting worse.  Corruption, in one form or another, is the name of a pretty dirty game; and when it comes to meat things can get an awful lot dirtier.  It’s not really that long since England was beset by the BSE crisis, when it was discovered that rendered meat products was being fed to cattle, with disastrous human results.  We learned from that that we clearly learned nothing.  For now horse is in the stakes and the steaks.

Keep your eye on that horse; keep your eye on the one named Profit, the odds on favourite; for that is what it’s all about.  We have enough pasture in England to produce all of the lamb and beef we need, with pork and chicken not far behind.  But we have become a link in a longer and longer international food chain.  The more extended it gets the greater the opportunity for criminal intervention.  Writing in the New Statesman (Meat Market, 22 February), Colin Tudge rightly asked “If crooks along the tortuous food chain can add horse to our meat products, why not dog, or rat, or cat?”  Yes, why not?  He raises some additional pertinent questions;

Given that the world trade in bushmeat is now vast, why not add bush fat of baboon?  What’s to keep out the meat that has been assigned for pet food?  Why not meat that has been condemned?  What guarantees can be given? 

None, it would appear, though we have had a Food Standards Agency in England for the past twelve years, a guarantor that clearly guarantees nothing.  Then there are the supermarket chains like Findus and Tesco, who have singularly failed to investigate their suppliers.  Then there are the politicians, who assure us that our meat is ‘safe’ when they know full well that, as a member of the European Union, we as a country have no proper control over the product that comes from the Continent.  Horse meat today; cat or rat tomorrow. 

I think there is a strong element of cynicism here.  As I say, the horse to watch is Profit.  The poor - and it is the poor - are the principle victims of our two for one deep frozen food culture.  In the wake of the horse fiasco, super market chiefs are saying that their products are likely to become more expensive, that the days of cheap food are over.  This suggests to me that they already knew that there was something fishy, make that horsey, about the stuff they were selling, that or they simply did not ask too many pertinent questions.  Get ‘beef’ from Mexico or Bulgaria rather than local suppliers – why not?  It’s cheap and goes very well in burgers and lasagne.

This is a story, as Tudge says, that might turn nastier yet.  The world food chain is out of control, or falling in to the control of unscrupulous profiteers, pirates of all sorts, the sort of people who only care about Profit, the one horse they do not want to see fall.  Inevitably the scandal will settle down as cosmetic changes are made, as politicians issue further assurances and standards are supposedly raised, as the public’s fickle attention turns to some other tale of woe.  Those who have become veggies, fearful of eating horse, will return to meat.  The pendulum will swing the other way in this best of all possible worlds.  At least until it is discovered that the benighted public have been eating something a lot less benign than horse.  In the meantime I would strongly urge you to avoid Durham’s Pure Beef Lard.