Green Unpleasant Land

The Green Zone is the second movie I’ve seen this year set against the Iraq War, coming not long after The Hurt Locker. The latter was accomplished; the former breathless. It’s not bad in its attempts to make sense of the whole Iraq mess, turning a conspiracy theory into roller-coaster thriller!

It has a Bourne-like quality, hardly surprising with Matt Damon in the lead! Sorry, I’m being disingenuous; it has a Bourne-like quality because it follows the same formula, a formula that those familiar with the Bourne movies will recognise - a maverick agent working against malevolent forces on his own side, except this time Bourne/Damon is in uniform.

The Green Zone, directed by Paul Greengrass stars Damon as Roy Millar, a warrant officer in the US Army Special Forces whose unit is charged with the search for those legendary and mythical weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Yes, indeed, mythical WMDs, because that’s the whole point of the movie: Millar’s search is continually fruitless. His unit takes casualties, though, in their empty task. In his frustration Millar questions the intelligence on which his quest is based. But he is told to keep quiet by his superiors, who insist that it is all good.

Behaving in a way that no officer would; behaving, though, in the way that Jason Bourne would, Millar sets off on his own quest to unravel the truth, a quest that leads to conflict with one Clark Poundhouse, played by Greg Kinnear, of Pentagon Special Intelligence. Puoundhouse, it seems to me, is clearly based on the character of Paul Bremer, the American diplomat who effectively ruled Iraq as a kind of viceroy after the invasion, a man who found chaos and created catastrophe!

Bit by bit the story becomes clear, especially after Millar makes contact with one General Al-Rawi, played by Yigal Naor, a senior officer in the old Iraqi army and an informant who goes by the code-name of ‘Magellan.’ Well, it turns out there were no WMDs, there hadn’t been since the First Gulf War, information that had been given to Poundstone, who hid it from his superiors to allow the invasion to go ahead anyway.

So, there you have it: the invasion of Iraq was based not on miscalculation but manipulation! The Green Zone is a reasonably competent war movie come political thriller with all sorts of adrenalin rushes scattered along the way. Just don’t take the message too seriously.

Fire up the Quattro

In a new propaganda poster Labour has depicted David Cameron as Gene Hunt, the TV detective played by Philip Glenister in Life on Mars and its sequel Ashes to Ashes. There he is, Dave himself, a tough, rakish-looking guy, wearing snakeskin boats and sitting on top of his Audi Quattro, the car made famous by the series, all beside a slogan saying Don’t let him take Britain back to the Eighties.

Labour really has lost the plot. First the howler over their national insurance jobs tax and now this, this wonderful gift to the Tory Party, a propagandist’s dream! The poster itself was designed by one Jacob Quagliozzi, a twenty-four year old Labour supporter from St Albans, who came out top in a competition organised by Saatchi and Saatchi, the party’s advertising agency. It’s being launched by David Miliband, that geek Banana Man himself, who says that it will be a “powerful reminder of the damage which the Tories did to Britain in the 80s”

What rot; it will be nothing of the kind! The Tories are so pleased by this altogether flattering image of their leader that they have produced the very same poster with a different slogan –Fire up the Quattro. It’s time for a change. Why, have they done this? Well, anyone who is familiar with the show – as Millie Banana clearly is not - will know exactly why.

Gene Hunt, you see, is a no-nonsense, tough-as-all-hell, get things done kind of cop as one can imagine. More than that, he is a walking, talking rebuttal to all forms of fashionable political correctness. He gets results by breaking the rules, cutting through all bureaucracy and established procedure. He is the kind of guy who may not go down all that well at an Islington dinner party, but if one were in a tight spot one could wish for no better companion. He is the type of guy who is completely out of place in New Labour Britain, completely out of place in the elf ‘n’ safety and 'yuman rights culture that has been thrust upon us from the dinner tables of Islington.

To give Cameron this image shows just how out of touch Labour is with the people of this country, just how out of touch it is with popular culture. It makes David look super cool, and who would have thought that possible! Conservative bloggers have responded with a Gordon Brown version, not at all flattering, showing him in some really naff clothes beside a really naff car, all under the caption Back to debt, decline and the 1970s with Gordon Brown.

Well done, Jacob; the cheque’s in the post!

Sex and the Victorian Girl

When it came to sex Victorian women just lay back and thought of England, so the common preconception goes. It’s always rather surprised me this, as indeed has the image of Queen Victoria herself as an avatar of prudish disapproval when it came to matters of sexual pleasure. After all, we know that when she was young she took great pleasure from the physical side of her marriage to Prince Albert, something she is none to coy about in her letters to Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister of the day!

It’s good to have further evidence, then, that women were just as expressive in sexual matters in the Victorian and Edwardian age as they are now. Details of nineteenth and early twentieth century bedroom habits have come to light in a sex survey, one of the earliest of its kind, begun some fifty years before Kinsey, which lay for decades unread in a university archive.

The work of Dr Celia Duel Mosher, the survey, carried out between 1892 and 1920, took the form of an intimate questionnaire completed by some forty-five American women, mostly middle-class college and university graduates, asking for details of their experience of sex, marriage and contraception. Though public discussion of sexual experience was still subject to a social taboo, when it came to private experiences the respondents were expressive and candid.

The comments in the report I read are refreshingly uninhibited. Thirty-five of the sample said that they desired intercourse and twenty-four said that mutual pleasure was the reason for making love. One woman wrote “The highest devotion is based upon it, a very beautiful thing, and I’m glad nature gave it to us”, while another said she and her husband enjoyed “intercourse for its own sake…we wish it for ourselves and spiritually miss it.” Spiritually?! :-))

Though most of them knew nothing at all, or almost nothing about sex before marriage, they were quick to learn. Some even got to the point of being less than pleased by their husband’s performance, one going so far as to say that she thought that men had not been properly trained! I find this all so beguiling because I came across an old sex manual in a second-hand bookshop not so long ago, published in the early 1900s, I think, in which the author –a man, of course –wrote that women were not expected to derive any pleasure at all from physical love!

This fascinating insight into the appetites of an age gone was deposited in the archives of Stanford University in California, where it lay in an unmarked file after Dr Mosher’s death in 1940. It was rediscovered by chance in 1973 and has now been brought to wider attention by an article in the Stanford Magazine.

Ana in Paris

Paris really is lovely at this time of year. I spent the Easter weekend in the city, the second time I’ve been in as many weeks. I’ve been so often now that the city might be thought to have lost its capacity to charm, surprise and delight. Not so; even walking down familiar paths is a comfort and a reassurance.

I went this time with my boyfriend, playing out all of the old romantic clichés of young lovers in spring-time Paris, hand-in-hand along the banks of the Seine, lunching in little out of the way restaurants on the left bank, sitting in the chestnut groves of Versailles. It’s a welcoming city; the stones are welcoming, the broad boulevards and the little hidden squares; a city for lovers; a city for dreamers.

The one thing I often do when in the city is to visit the Conciergirie, the old royal castle that was used a prison during the Revolution of 1789, the place where Marie Antoinette lived prior to her execution in October, 1793. It’s possible to see a reconstruction of her cell, a place that fills me with poignant sadness, with thoughts of prisoner 280, as she was known. There is perhaps no figure in history that comes closest to fulfilling my sense of high and tragic romance than the beautiful Austrian princess, the wonderful, incomparable Marie Antoinette. I pass in silent tribute, wearing my blue fleur de lys scarf.

Travels to Tikal

In one of the earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon poems the author wanders among ruins of Roman Bath, finding it difficult to conceive that these structures could have been left behind by ordinary human beings, believing some greater force or ‘weird’ must have been involved. I had exactly the same feeling wandering around the Mayan remains at Tikal in Guatemala!

I visited Guatemala just before going up to university, part of my gap-year globe trotting. Actually, I only went quite by chance. I was in Mexico where I met a couple from the States, people of Guatemalan descent, on an excursion to the pre-Aztec remains at Teotihuacan, while we were resting near the top of the Pyramid of the Moon, to be exact!

We lunched afterwards and I explained that I really would have liked to see the Mayan sites, but that the advice of my government was that Guatemala was a dangerous place to visit because of the levels of organised crime. On their assurance that this hardly ever affected tourists, coupled with some very sound travel tips, I decided to take the risk. I’m so glad I did.

Teotihuacan and the other Mesoamerican sites I visited in Mexico certainly impressed me but Tikal is something else all together, those fantastic pyramids emerging here and there from the canopy of the surrounding forest, so out of this world, so futuristic-looking that George Lucas even used them for a setting in the Star Wars movies. Tikal in reality was the capital of one of the most powerful of the ancient Mayan kingdoms, a place that reached its height during the Mesoamerican classical period between 200 and 900AD.

I could have spent days exploring these magnificent structures, wandering in the footsteps of the Maya, but I only had a few hours before flying back to Guatemala City in the late afternoon. I hope to go back later this year, not just to spend more time here but also to visit the Mayan sites in Honduras.

Oh, one small snippet of quite irrelevant information I have to add here. Mel Gibson came to Tikal when shooting some of the scenes for Apocalypto. While waiting for our flight we talked with the lady who runs the airport bar. She pointed out a picture of herself standing beside him, obviously quite proud to be seen with a celebrity. What amused me was that she was quite small and Gibson only a head or so taller, which, by my estimation, makes him smaller than me. He looks so big on the screen!

A little touch of Annis in the night

Black Annis, sometimes known as Black Agnes, Black Anna or Cat Anna, is the Hag of the Dane Hills near Leicester in England who most frequently appears as a blue-faced crone with long claws and yellow fangs but also as a cat demon. In some ways she might be said to be an English version of Baba Yaga, the fearsome Russian witch. Her home was a cave known as Black Annis' Bower that she herself carved out of the rock. The cave itself, long a local feature, was almost completely filled with earth by the nineteenth century. It’s now covered by a housing estate built just after the First World War.

According to legend Black Annis eats any children who stray into the Dane Hills after dark, skinning them first and then scattering their bones. The skins were then hung on the trees to dry. When she is particularly hungry Annis goes hunting, either taking the lambs from the fields or climbing through windows to take babies from their cradles.

In the form of Cat Anna, she has powerful associations with cats, occasionally taking the form of a huge black forest cat. Until as late as the eighteenth century a mock hunt was held annually during which a dead cat soaked in aniseed was dragged from her cave through the streets of Leicester to the mayor's house. The symbolism here is now lost but aniseed is traditionally used as protection against malevolent spirits.

By some accounts Annis is a form of the ancient Celtic goddesses Anu or Danaan. There are also resemblances between Annis and the mother of Grendal, the monster from the poem Beowulf, also identified as a ketta or cat spirit.

Though the story has been enriched in folklore, Annis, it has been suggested, has possible historical origins, rooted in the lives of two fifteenth century women. The first is Agnes Scott, a Dominican nun and anchorite. Draped in the long black habit of her order she was described as the ‘hermit of the forest.’ Agnes, who died in 1455, also managed a leper colony and supposedly lived in a cave near the Dane Hills. The connection between her and Black Annis was first made by Robert Graves, the poet and writer.

The second, much more tenuous candidate, is a local witch or wise woman who is said to have forewarned Richard III of his coming death as he rode through Leicester on his way to meet the army of the invading Henry Tudor at Bosworth. Alas, this is one of those tales where history and legend draw close to one another though, as always, never quite managing to meet!

History has condemned you

If people hoped that things could only get better in Cuba after that communist dinosaur Fidel Castro give way to his brother Raul, a little further ahead in the scale of evolution, they must be disappointed by the results. The real question with these people, in this nepotistic dictatorship, is not when will things get better, no, it’s could they conceivably get any worse? The answer to that is simple, yes, they most certainly can.

Cuba was once an island with a thriving agricultural economy. Not any longer; now food shortages are a regular feature of daily live. This is not North Korea- yet-, there is still the endless monotony of beans and rice to keep people away from the frontier of starvation, but other basics like bread and milk are disappearing from supermarket shelves for weeks on end.

Again it’s the same old same old when the state tries to manage the economy. The worst part of state socialism was always the collectivisation of agriculture. Cuba is no different here from the old Soviet Union. Its state farms are massively inefficient, now producing no more than 20% of the country’s needs. Such private enterprise as the state allows is stymied by a system of central supply and transport totally inelastic in responding to market demands. Last year the whole of a bumper tomato crop rotted, as The Economist reports, because government trucks failed to collect it on time. This style of economic mismanagement means that Cuba has to buy a good part of its food from foreign suppliers, using up limited amounts of hard currency.

History will absolve me, Fidel once declared, appealing to exactly the same court that Adolf Hitler once did, using much the same hyperbolic language. But history is already passing its verdict on the failure of socialism in Cuba, the failure of the whole wasteful Castro experiment, one which effectively destroyed a rich and productive nation. After this remove of time even Batista, the former dictator, looks good. I know from my contacts in Havana that more and more people are looking for the kind of closure that only time, and mortality, can bring.