Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Tony Blair: the last days
So, the guitar and all the other bits of glitz are leaving Number Ten. Greyer, no wiser, and underlining his status as a populist Prime Minister, Tony exchanged his last major PM photo-calls and sound bytes with Arnie Schwarzenegger. No doubt they discussed their respective roles in the Terminator films and how closely life has borrowed from art. The differences, after all, between the first five years of his tenure and the second have been quite striking. In his central role in Terminator One, Tony represented hope. If he could prevent the forces of global technological darkness sweeping over us and the horror of a future without Britain as a leading player in the world, he had to stop Arnie’s robot from snuffing him out.
However, in Terminator 2, he, Arnie and their producer decided, amusingly, that they should swap roles and moralities. In this sequel Tony played the quantum bio-killer, sent from the future to assassinate a child who will grow up to save humanity.
Ten years ago, when he first came to light as a young actor, we saw Tony as a piece of raw political material, refreshingly young and apparently solidly human. Gradually, over time, he acquired the ability to be the slinky, fluid shape-changer he is now.
Listening to the wireless this morning I was struck by how much speakers were yearning for solid unspun politics, a PM who cannot change his shape and someone who actually bases his decisions on evidence, made transparent to us all.
Times have suddenly changed. David Cameron, in basing his persona on Tony’s role in Terminator 2, is out of touch. Another film is hitting our screens. The hero is going to be serious and a damn sight more ethical.
We hope…….
So, the guitar and all the other bits of glitz are leaving Number Ten. Greyer, no wiser, and underlining his status as a populist Prime Minister, Tony exchanged his last major PM photo-calls and sound bytes with Arnie Schwarzenegger. No doubt they discussed their respective roles in the Terminator films and how closely life has borrowed from art. The differences, after all, between the first five years of his tenure and the second have been quite striking. In his central role in Terminator One, Tony represented hope. If he could prevent the forces of global technological darkness sweeping over us and the horror of a future without Britain as a leading player in the world, he had to stop Arnie’s robot from snuffing him out.
However, in Terminator 2, he, Arnie and their producer decided, amusingly, that they should swap roles and moralities. In this sequel Tony played the quantum bio-killer, sent from the future to assassinate a child who will grow up to save humanity.
Ten years ago, when he first came to light as a young actor, we saw Tony as a piece of raw political material, refreshingly young and apparently solidly human. Gradually, over time, he acquired the ability to be the slinky, fluid shape-changer he is now.
Listening to the wireless this morning I was struck by how much speakers were yearning for solid unspun politics, a PM who cannot change his shape and someone who actually bases his decisions on evidence, made transparent to us all.
Times have suddenly changed. David Cameron, in basing his persona on Tony’s role in Terminator 2, is out of touch. Another film is hitting our screens. The hero is going to be serious and a damn sight more ethical.
We hope…….
Friday, June 22, 2007
Brasyl
On a lighter but much happier note, I’d like to recommend a book to all readers of this blog! Brasyl is science fiction and high literature and contains pleasing explorations of quantum physics, parallel universes, many selves and three narrative timelines. Ian MacDonald should be revered here because, as in his last book, Rivers of God, this Northern Irish author brings Joycean word play to his compelling storytelling, powerful characterisation to his depictions of other cultures and an imagination that risks all. He is magical! This book should top all fiction’s best sellers, never mind sci fi. If you buy it or order it from your library, it would help!
Labels: A great read...
Is the Pope a Catholic?
No more than Tony Blair, apparently. Our almost late Prime Minister has been genuflecting in public and then private for maybe thirty years. Why didn’t he make it a public talking point? After all he does that with most things, doesn't he? Actually, no. I remember now. He uses every means to conceal, selectively promote, distort and refute anything that detracts from the Blair Story. In this case he knew that being a Catholic is just not on in British politics at the highest level. No Royal can be one. No prime minister in God knows how long has been one. Better not risk public anger and stay an Anglican. You may have gathered if you read these blogs regularly that I don’t have any truck with religion in government. I don’t want an administration with the slightest contamination of zealotry. But something about his behaviour makes even an agnostic like me rise, scandalised and cobra-like at this news.
This means that Mr Blair has put his career before his religion. Live now, pray later. Lie now, come clean later. It means he has gone to war, sent British men and women to their deaths, helped account for the 100,000 plus Iraqi civilians who have died during the invasion and, in the mean time, has been having ‘private audiences’ with a priest who has been helping him prepare for religious conversion, once this moral crusade was over.
There was a series of clips of him recently, milestone sound bites, so to speak. On at least two occasions he said, more or less, “Whatever you might say about me, I am not a liar.” Does he suffer from a psychological condition which insulates himself from his actions? Of course not. He’s a Catholic! Think the obscenities committed by the priesthood. Think Nazi sympathisers. Think The Inquisition.
He started his premiership with big speeches about ethical government. He ends his ten years with more big speeches – now shorn of the morality we had all hoped for.
No more than Tony Blair, apparently. Our almost late Prime Minister has been genuflecting in public and then private for maybe thirty years. Why didn’t he make it a public talking point? After all he does that with most things, doesn't he? Actually, no. I remember now. He uses every means to conceal, selectively promote, distort and refute anything that detracts from the Blair Story. In this case he knew that being a Catholic is just not on in British politics at the highest level. No Royal can be one. No prime minister in God knows how long has been one. Better not risk public anger and stay an Anglican. You may have gathered if you read these blogs regularly that I don’t have any truck with religion in government. I don’t want an administration with the slightest contamination of zealotry. But something about his behaviour makes even an agnostic like me rise, scandalised and cobra-like at this news.
This means that Mr Blair has put his career before his religion. Live now, pray later. Lie now, come clean later. It means he has gone to war, sent British men and women to their deaths, helped account for the 100,000 plus Iraqi civilians who have died during the invasion and, in the mean time, has been having ‘private audiences’ with a priest who has been helping him prepare for religious conversion, once this moral crusade was over.
There was a series of clips of him recently, milestone sound bites, so to speak. On at least two occasions he said, more or less, “Whatever you might say about me, I am not a liar.” Does he suffer from a psychological condition which insulates himself from his actions? Of course not. He’s a Catholic! Think the obscenities committed by the priesthood. Think Nazi sympathisers. Think The Inquisition.
He started his premiership with big speeches about ethical government. He ends his ten years with more big speeches – now shorn of the morality we had all hoped for.
Labels: The road to perdition...
Monday, June 18, 2007
The operation was a success but the patient died...
The chances of becoming more diseased in UK hospitals has increased, according to hospital self-assessments released today. MRSA and its fearsome ilk propagate virulently, in unwashed corners of wards, equipment and hands. Why?
It goes like this. Once, hygiene was recognised as the major combatant against diseases spreading. Bugs could be, literally, washed down the plughole. Medical staff and home-based carers didn’t need to think twice about it. But there has been a revolution in perceptions and attitudes.
First, death has become so taboo that until it collides with us, suddenly excising those closest in our lives, we avoid contact and thought about it. We don’t take simple steps to delay it in case we might be accused of superstition. We prefer the fantasy of immunity and immortality until we go, screaming into the night.
The constant, drip-feed publicising of the miracles of technology has made people think that, somehow, medical science will have the answer to whatever might afflict us – particularly those things that occur because of personal neglect. Miracle remissions hold sway in our consciousness. A few bogey-diseases rupture this artifice of personal security – the pervasive flood of cancers or genetic malfunctions that erupt into physical or mental disorder. But, since they have all the incomprehensible power of an alien invasion, we suppress our fears and hope for the best.
Underpinning this wilful evasion of thoughts about our mortality, is the increasing alienation a growing part of the population experience between themselves and the stuff of life around them. They succumb to advertising that increases the hygiene-glitz of their houses, thus allowing their children no capacity to build immunities. Nature, itself, has become a packaged genre of TV programming. Meat exists, pinkly, in plastic trays. Trees loom above the unseeing on city streets. Simple physical environmental jobs involve bringing in ‘someone who knows’. People are losing the sense of their interrelatedness with everything that exists. They are hardly connected to much except virtual projections of what is ‘out there’.
Finally, as an earlier blog suggests in some detail, people are becoming more vulnerable to personal and social entropy. The way they do their jobs has an attendant lack of personal monitoring that is needed for those jobs to be done consistently well.
In other words, they have a growing capacity to be inept.
Taking all this into account, is it any wonder doctors, nurses, administrators, cleaners and visitors ignore the disinfectant gel by the ward door? They hardly see it. It does not exist within their sphere of self or public interest.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Simone Signoret: Smoker
I was struck by a photograph of Simone Signoret by Jane Bown in the Observer this morning. She reminded me of my Auntie Eva at a particular point in her life. Signoret is smoking. She is not smoking in a post-modern way. The cigarette is planted sternly between her lips, firm, part of her face. There is no diffident concern about possible harm. It is as though the cigarette exemplifies an intellectual requirement, a concentrated focus upon the serious matter of being alive.
Since those days in the late sixties smoking styles have become more and more ambiguous, trumpeting the fact that the cigarette is a troubling social act, no longer essential to deep reflection or a flaming spear that helps the smoker burn a passage through the chaotic wilderness of existence. The cigarette has become loosely attached to male lips as though emphasising a disparagement of anything serious, almost a denial that the act is taking place. As Magritte would say, "Ce n'est pas une cigarette!" For women, smoking has begun to revolve around oral moments of entry and re-entry, underlining the pretence that an overt sensual symbolism is fulfilling needs and desires far removed from a crude addiction to nicotine. The cigarette can never be left in the mouth. It embellishes the fingers like another jewel.
Animal research has shown that birds and beasts at times imbibe rotting fruit or hallucinatory plants. It is suggested they do it to clear their brains. A kind of MOT. Video footage shows them begin to feast with a concentration as stern and focused as Simone Signoret.
Some of us smoke to aid the transportations of our art. Some out of a need to quell life’s deep dissatisfactions and failures. The very way we take our drugs by drinking, swallowing, injecting or smoking, publicises in non verbal images, what it means to us to be connected to the world via a chemical... But smoking is a great example.
I was struck by a photograph of Simone Signoret by Jane Bown in the Observer this morning. She reminded me of my Auntie Eva at a particular point in her life. Signoret is smoking. She is not smoking in a post-modern way. The cigarette is planted sternly between her lips, firm, part of her face. There is no diffident concern about possible harm. It is as though the cigarette exemplifies an intellectual requirement, a concentrated focus upon the serious matter of being alive.
Since those days in the late sixties smoking styles have become more and more ambiguous, trumpeting the fact that the cigarette is a troubling social act, no longer essential to deep reflection or a flaming spear that helps the smoker burn a passage through the chaotic wilderness of existence. The cigarette has become loosely attached to male lips as though emphasising a disparagement of anything serious, almost a denial that the act is taking place. As Magritte would say, "Ce n'est pas une cigarette!" For women, smoking has begun to revolve around oral moments of entry and re-entry, underlining the pretence that an overt sensual symbolism is fulfilling needs and desires far removed from a crude addiction to nicotine. The cigarette can never be left in the mouth. It embellishes the fingers like another jewel.
Animal research has shown that birds and beasts at times imbibe rotting fruit or hallucinatory plants. It is suggested they do it to clear their brains. A kind of MOT. Video footage shows them begin to feast with a concentration as stern and focused as Simone Signoret.
Some of us smoke to aid the transportations of our art. Some out of a need to quell life’s deep dissatisfactions and failures. The very way we take our drugs by drinking, swallowing, injecting or smoking, publicises in non verbal images, what it means to us to be connected to the world via a chemical... But smoking is a great example.
Labels: I smoke therefore I am....
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Four legs good, two legs better.
Watching a satirical programme the other night about Britain’s new anti-terror and public order laws brought home to me how insidiously they creep into the legislation. It is as if the Government is trying to validate the whole premise of George Orwell’s 1984, voted this week as the book that best sums up the last century. Shots of Tony Blair in 2002 defending free speech, by smarmily upholding people’s rights to scream abuse at him were juxtaposed with a young woman being bundled into a police van for wearing a Bollocks to Blair tee shirt, in 2007. The old fellow who shouted ‘nonsense’ during a Jack Straw speech at a Labour Party Conference and was then roughly handled by heavies, was among those that figured in an alarming hour. The fact that it wasn’t a particularly well-made programme somehow added to the sense of gloom and doom on this side of the screen. There were middle class women who marched for Peace too close to the Houses of Parliament and were very unpeacefully jostled about and the odd man or two who had uttered the F or some other word in public fora. Like some historical pageant in a play by Shakespeare, I saw Aldermaston Marchers, Suffragettes, Trade Unionists, the Jarrow Marchers, Greenham Commoners and on and on and, as a one-time supporter of the Labour Party, asked myself the obvious question. “Didn’t the Labour Party come into being and gain nurture from just such public dissent? Has it now become, as in Orwell’s other masterpiece, Animal Farm, a case of the Pigs taking over and desecrating the memory of ordinary folks’ protestations at bad government, by epitomising exactly that?
9/11 and 7/7 were contingent consequences of pathologically bad interventions in the Middle East, US vested interests in Israel, the criminal negligence of the people of Palestine and heinous interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The laws that have recently been introduced must be seen as attempts to vindicate, post hoc, all that went before. Having delivered us into a world of fear by their actions, the Government is now shoring up its credibility in managing the 'state of terror', by harsh legislation. Shame on them all. They lack integrity, humanity and moral intelligence.
PS
The young woman on Big Brother who tried to demonstrate her cool symbiosis with a black fellow contestant, calling her the N word, has not been arrested under any of the new laws. Oh really, there's a surprise.
Friday, June 01, 2007
Invasion of the body snatchers…
In the first decades of my lifespan people listened to the wireless and went to films. Also, they read books. Certainly they gazed at art. And then they became enraptured by the early days of television. Even at that point it didn’t change much. What? Oh, sorry! The distance. The distance was that palpable membrane which separated people from what they viewed, read or heard.
It seems, in retrospect, as though it was a solid, reassuring distance. They, the media people, knew what they were doing. We, the audience knew what was required of us. Even when we edged, a little shame-facedly, across the gap by reading articles in the Radio Times, weekly comics like Radio Fun and Film Fun and those Christmas-time film annuals, hoping to discover what went on over there, in their exotic land, we realised absolutely the difference between our own world and theirs.
We did, of course, identify, fixate, romanticise, swoon, obsess. But it didn't feel unhealthy because we knew each emotion for what it was and the objects of our desire were unattainable. It all had a sort of gentle, self-inflicted irony.
Now, with virtual communities like Second Life developing all over the Internet, so many people become involved in huge, interactive fantasy worlds. Their daydreaming is not the wistful momentary passing of self-aware hallucination but contains passages of time when illusion matters more and appears more real than their physical every day universe. It takes precedence.
This month, an every day, pretty, female US pole vaulter has been transmogrified by hungry web users into a sex object, her image repeated endlessly and comments added from the laconic to the lewdly distasteful. Like the mythical native Indian who felt his soul had been taken by the camera when he saw his photograph, her sense of self is daily being wrenched from her, as the virtual wolves tear at her relatively innocent being and reconstruct her how they will.
In other words, the membrane between audiences and their media is hardly there at all. They intermingle. Big Brother, talk shows and the rest of the unnerving and deeply unsatisfactory business of ‘reality media’ is eroding the very edges of people’s being. These edges are the bits we have to fight for because they tell us where we stop and others begin. And, if people don’t maintain their boundaries and their roles, then, as our mothers always told us; “It will all end in tears”. And it does. Lose your sense of being in the here and now and you live only in la la land.
On the other side of the disappearing membrane are barely controlled, foraging alter egos leaving their physical selves as vaguely shaped personalities that can exist in anything from a blank torpor through to carrying guns and knives on the streets.
Give us our bodies back!
Labels: How to live a lie.....