Thursday, February 25, 2010
Robbing Banks
There was a time when I was a lad, running wild through the fields of Durham, building dams and shooting at birds – with no success – that my father was paid cash in a small brown envelope with holes in it, each week. I don’t know at what point it happened, probably in the sixties, that his money came into his bank account. He never disclosed what he was paid to my mother in either case. She was given her house-keeping and a bit extra for clothes if she asked for it. I became a student and my first student grants were in the form of postal orders and it was when I started teaching in 1963 that I had my first bank account. At the time the bank was another version of the counter at the post office. It was irritating to discover that I had to have a bank account and that my wages went into it and the bank charged me for the pleasure.
The gun I used in those early days was, I think, a Webley slug gun. It was black and cold metal. To cock it you had to press the inner barrel on something hard so that it retracted. When you fired the inner barrel jumped out and the slug sped away.
It never occurred to me to stick up a bank, even in play, although I was a gunslinger some of the time.
Reading the news on the internet, I see that there is an outlaw, based in Britain, who is robbing banks in Latvia. Using twitter, he is disclosing more and more information on bankers to the Latvian public, showing how they have been receiving government bail-outs but meanwhile, living it large and pretending they have been taking cuts to their salaries. Where once I was a tracker, hunting my prey physically through hill and dale, this fellow is a hacker, hunting his prey virtually through data mountains.
He is being chased by Latvian police. What he is doing is illegal. The bankers are versions of my father. They don’t want their power and authority undermined by people knowing what’s inside their accounts or their little brown envelopes with holes.
There was a time when I was a lad, running wild through the fields of Durham, building dams and shooting at birds – with no success – that my father was paid cash in a small brown envelope with holes in it, each week. I don’t know at what point it happened, probably in the sixties, that his money came into his bank account. He never disclosed what he was paid to my mother in either case. She was given her house-keeping and a bit extra for clothes if she asked for it. I became a student and my first student grants were in the form of postal orders and it was when I started teaching in 1963 that I had my first bank account. At the time the bank was another version of the counter at the post office. It was irritating to discover that I had to have a bank account and that my wages went into it and the bank charged me for the pleasure.
The gun I used in those early days was, I think, a Webley slug gun. It was black and cold metal. To cock it you had to press the inner barrel on something hard so that it retracted. When you fired the inner barrel jumped out and the slug sped away.
It never occurred to me to stick up a bank, even in play, although I was a gunslinger some of the time.
Reading the news on the internet, I see that there is an outlaw, based in Britain, who is robbing banks in Latvia. Using twitter, he is disclosing more and more information on bankers to the Latvian public, showing how they have been receiving government bail-outs but meanwhile, living it large and pretending they have been taking cuts to their salaries. Where once I was a tracker, hunting my prey physically through hill and dale, this fellow is a hacker, hunting his prey virtually through data mountains.
He is being chased by Latvian police. What he is doing is illegal. The bankers are versions of my father. They don’t want their power and authority undermined by people knowing what’s inside their accounts or their little brown envelopes with holes.
Monday, February 22, 2010
The sin of Anger
The media have been full of the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown’s anger tantrums for the last few days. I even saw a clip of him saying that he had never hit anyone in his life. It’s all a storm in a thrown teacup one suspects. What the press are saying is that he is regarded as a bully. Well, I have worked with many Chief Executives in my life and very few, I’d conjecture, would get away with an unblemished record on this score. One person’s strong and confident leadership can easily be another person’s aggressive bogeyman. If Brown showed no inclination to demand his own way, the press would quickly have him down as a weak PM. Nothing worse in the public's eyes.
And it’s not just a matter of style. There comes many a point in every week if you are at the top of the tree, when you have to make tough decisions. They can be about a range of issues from individual performance to strategic change. You may have to make people redundant or close a unit. The better you are at it, the more you appear as Attila the Hun, to many. As you will know from these columns, I have not found an organisation without its fair share of entropy. That is, staff underperforming, making mistakes, working at snail’s pace, taking the mickey and all the rest of it. British Airways, for example, is sinking into deeper debt. The most obvious recourse for management is to cut staff, as this is always the biggest single cost to an organisation. The cabin staff have shown an inclination to strike, thereby maybe ending the life of the airline and their own jobs. Postings have flown across the multi-faceted features of Facebook and each accuses the other of bullying. Gordon Brown and every Prime Minister before and after him, has to handle excessively controversial issues. Like all PMs he wants the best research, the best strategies, the best communication, the best decisions. At most what he will get will be patchy because that’s what people are like. He will stamp and shout in those circumstances where he can’t contain himself any longer.
Anglo Saxons have big hang-ups when it comes to displays of passion. I doubt whether Italians or French would bat an eyelid at their Presidents or PMs having a hissy fit. And what does it say about the so-called bullied staff? Why don’t they stand up to the yelling and accusations of incompetence? Or are their fragile egos unable to cope with the heat of the governmental kitchen? Worse, are they claiming to be bullied because they know they don’t measure up and can’t bear the criticism?
We have to be realistic about human beings. In the main we can run our companies and departments using charm, reason and sets of protocols and procedures. We can stamp our authority where and when it matters. But, occasionally, if the heat is really on, we can end up stamping our feet and letting rip with one of the seven deadly sins. Anger.
The media have been full of the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown’s anger tantrums for the last few days. I even saw a clip of him saying that he had never hit anyone in his life. It’s all a storm in a thrown teacup one suspects. What the press are saying is that he is regarded as a bully. Well, I have worked with many Chief Executives in my life and very few, I’d conjecture, would get away with an unblemished record on this score. One person’s strong and confident leadership can easily be another person’s aggressive bogeyman. If Brown showed no inclination to demand his own way, the press would quickly have him down as a weak PM. Nothing worse in the public's eyes.
And it’s not just a matter of style. There comes many a point in every week if you are at the top of the tree, when you have to make tough decisions. They can be about a range of issues from individual performance to strategic change. You may have to make people redundant or close a unit. The better you are at it, the more you appear as Attila the Hun, to many. As you will know from these columns, I have not found an organisation without its fair share of entropy. That is, staff underperforming, making mistakes, working at snail’s pace, taking the mickey and all the rest of it. British Airways, for example, is sinking into deeper debt. The most obvious recourse for management is to cut staff, as this is always the biggest single cost to an organisation. The cabin staff have shown an inclination to strike, thereby maybe ending the life of the airline and their own jobs. Postings have flown across the multi-faceted features of Facebook and each accuses the other of bullying. Gordon Brown and every Prime Minister before and after him, has to handle excessively controversial issues. Like all PMs he wants the best research, the best strategies, the best communication, the best decisions. At most what he will get will be patchy because that’s what people are like. He will stamp and shout in those circumstances where he can’t contain himself any longer.
Anglo Saxons have big hang-ups when it comes to displays of passion. I doubt whether Italians or French would bat an eyelid at their Presidents or PMs having a hissy fit. And what does it say about the so-called bullied staff? Why don’t they stand up to the yelling and accusations of incompetence? Or are their fragile egos unable to cope with the heat of the governmental kitchen? Worse, are they claiming to be bullied because they know they don’t measure up and can’t bear the criticism?
We have to be realistic about human beings. In the main we can run our companies and departments using charm, reason and sets of protocols and procedures. We can stamp our authority where and when it matters. But, occasionally, if the heat is really on, we can end up stamping our feet and letting rip with one of the seven deadly sins. Anger.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
A Rough Guide to TV Social Anthropology
I suppose I am a well seasoned traveller, having worked in over 20 countries in Europe, North America, Russia and Central Asia. Now, here I am in West Africa. This is Ghana, which most UK institutions seem to think is an annex of Nigeria and, therefore, a credit card pariah of the world of personal finance. Despite having British bank accounts, if I try to use the cards on the internet that these banks doll out like confetti, I get blocks put on them, immediately. I am suddenly a high risk, scam merchant. The nastiness of it allows me to mouth off my displeasure at these intuitions as I pay for expensive phone calls to them so I can buy and trade in a less virtual way for books on Amazon or whatever.
Working in countries that are foreign to your place of birth brings home certain truths that cannot be gleaned from holidaying, no matter how rucksacked, sandalled and low spending you might be. Travellers, in general, follow the grooves in the vinyl that they have bought into. If young, they tell each other where to go and rarely strike out into environments that The Rough Guide and The Lonely Planet regard as too lonely, dangerous or unpropitious to give them a kick (or a hit). If older, then there is always Michael Palin and assorted other comedians such as Stephen Fry and Paul Merton to provide a route across the world. In fact, their programmes are advertised here in Ghana llike tour guides for the better off. 'Thousands now walk in their footsteps', says the bleating advert. no doubt expecting to see the cultural anomalies that attract their rather lame, look-at -those –native- people- doing –silly- things, humour. And lame they are. There is nothing to compare to Ray Mears in the outback or this fellow Bruce Parry who fronts Tribe on the Discovery Channel. I haven’t a soft spot for him because he is occasionally too gigglingly hyper and intent on going native with those he is travelling among, to be authentically a social anthropologist. But he tries. He does what the tribes do and it makes I’m a Celebrity Get me Out of Here programmes look even more gratuitously superficial.
Last night I was viewing his latest hosts who live in rather splendid wood and thatch houses on very high stilts because in the past local head-hunters came a-calling. He went with them to kill boar, had his arm tattooed in the most painful way imaginable and ate sago yeast, chopped from trees and pulped. It was so dry he could hardly swallow. But the worst was yet to come. In these tree boles live sago pupae, like extra-terrestrial maggots in Michelin suits. The native tribesmen put one in our traveller’s ear to eat out the wax. To see a close up of poor Bruce’s ear, with this white bulbous thing waving a yellow head or butt – it was never explained – from it, didn’t help my supper go down. Then he was also requested to eat one. His face, unlike the comedians I mentioned above, was a perfect mix of respect for his hosts (who were chewing them like gourmet Cheshire cheese balls) and sheer disgusted agony. They were all stomach-creasingly merry at the whole business but what was very fine was that we had no idea whether the tribe were having a laugh at Bruce or not. Bruce, as the perfect visitor he is, laughed too. Out of respect.
In a way he was working with them, which corroborates my first point, that working alongside is the way to understand culture not being there as part of an extreme version of 18-31, or Saga Holidays.
I suppose I am a well seasoned traveller, having worked in over 20 countries in Europe, North America, Russia and Central Asia. Now, here I am in West Africa. This is Ghana, which most UK institutions seem to think is an annex of Nigeria and, therefore, a credit card pariah of the world of personal finance. Despite having British bank accounts, if I try to use the cards on the internet that these banks doll out like confetti, I get blocks put on them, immediately. I am suddenly a high risk, scam merchant. The nastiness of it allows me to mouth off my displeasure at these intuitions as I pay for expensive phone calls to them so I can buy and trade in a less virtual way for books on Amazon or whatever.
Working in countries that are foreign to your place of birth brings home certain truths that cannot be gleaned from holidaying, no matter how rucksacked, sandalled and low spending you might be. Travellers, in general, follow the grooves in the vinyl that they have bought into. If young, they tell each other where to go and rarely strike out into environments that The Rough Guide and The Lonely Planet regard as too lonely, dangerous or unpropitious to give them a kick (or a hit). If older, then there is always Michael Palin and assorted other comedians such as Stephen Fry and Paul Merton to provide a route across the world. In fact, their programmes are advertised here in Ghana llike tour guides for the better off. 'Thousands now walk in their footsteps', says the bleating advert. no doubt expecting to see the cultural anomalies that attract their rather lame, look-at -those –native- people- doing –silly- things, humour. And lame they are. There is nothing to compare to Ray Mears in the outback or this fellow Bruce Parry who fronts Tribe on the Discovery Channel. I haven’t a soft spot for him because he is occasionally too gigglingly hyper and intent on going native with those he is travelling among, to be authentically a social anthropologist. But he tries. He does what the tribes do and it makes I’m a Celebrity Get me Out of Here programmes look even more gratuitously superficial.
Last night I was viewing his latest hosts who live in rather splendid wood and thatch houses on very high stilts because in the past local head-hunters came a-calling. He went with them to kill boar, had his arm tattooed in the most painful way imaginable and ate sago yeast, chopped from trees and pulped. It was so dry he could hardly swallow. But the worst was yet to come. In these tree boles live sago pupae, like extra-terrestrial maggots in Michelin suits. The native tribesmen put one in our traveller’s ear to eat out the wax. To see a close up of poor Bruce’s ear, with this white bulbous thing waving a yellow head or butt – it was never explained – from it, didn’t help my supper go down. Then he was also requested to eat one. His face, unlike the comedians I mentioned above, was a perfect mix of respect for his hosts (who were chewing them like gourmet Cheshire cheese balls) and sheer disgusted agony. They were all stomach-creasingly merry at the whole business but what was very fine was that we had no idea whether the tribe were having a laugh at Bruce or not. Bruce, as the perfect visitor he is, laughed too. Out of respect.
In a way he was working with them, which corroborates my first point, that working alongside is the way to understand culture not being there as part of an extreme version of 18-31, or Saga Holidays.
Labels: Maggots. Michael Palin. Bruce Parry. Jungle. Anthropology.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
“You Dirty Rat”!
Seems like we are having more and more difficulties as a species in developing an agreed ethics when it comes to animals. On the British TV Channel, ITV, is a programme devoted to putting minor celebrities in the ‘jungle’ and asking them to survive a series of challenges to their capacity to stay calm under duress: (eating insects, walking in a pit of snakes, spiders and whatever). Probably the idea came from a Japanese quasi-documentary series a couple of decades ago where competitors had to suffer extremes of torture until the last person standing took a sizeable prize. A scene shown on some comedy programme I watched had the competitors up to their necks in sand, their heads liberally gunked with honey and then a nest full of ants let loose, not poisonous, of course, but thousands of them niggling and itching...
Anyway, on this programme competitors had to catch, kill, skin and eat a rat. ITV were fined for cruelty. The rat took 90 seconds to die and squealed for some of that time. The RSPCA filed the complaint.
Now, probably, most people have a sneaking empathy with Animal Liberationist when they are revealing cruelty in poultry houses or zoos or science laboratories - if the latter’s guinea pigs are nice creatures such as Beagles or chimps ... (confusing metaphor...!). They lose most of our sympathies if they try to intervene in our pleasures of the flesh (pork, beef, goat, chicken, ostrich, kangaroo) providing the creatures have not been maltreated. We even make national heroes of animals that escape abattoirs or the culling of a foot and mouth diseased herd. Like our shifting moralities regarding sex, homicide, parenting, religious observance and death, to name some of the more obvious examples, we have no consistent approach to animal rights. As long as there is plenty to go round, we can afford to construct cases of cruelty as in the aforementioned rat instance. And people can have jobs seeing to it that animals get a fair shake of the dice.
But if there is no food, as in Haiti and ice-frozen Mongolia or many parts of Africa here, there is no organisation around to take you to court for eating a rat and saving your life. Funny that!
Come the Apocalypse, when we can’t all stowaway on Noah’s new vessel, it may well be a couple of celebrities who survive, eating their rats, waving to the departing ark and wondering why the dead and dying around them are making such a fuss. Each of them will hunker down with a club in his hands over a hole in the skirting and say what James Cagney actually said in Taxi: 'Come out and take it, you dirty, yellow-bellied rat.'
Seems like we are having more and more difficulties as a species in developing an agreed ethics when it comes to animals. On the British TV Channel, ITV, is a programme devoted to putting minor celebrities in the ‘jungle’ and asking them to survive a series of challenges to their capacity to stay calm under duress: (eating insects, walking in a pit of snakes, spiders and whatever). Probably the idea came from a Japanese quasi-documentary series a couple of decades ago where competitors had to suffer extremes of torture until the last person standing took a sizeable prize. A scene shown on some comedy programme I watched had the competitors up to their necks in sand, their heads liberally gunked with honey and then a nest full of ants let loose, not poisonous, of course, but thousands of them niggling and itching...
Anyway, on this programme competitors had to catch, kill, skin and eat a rat. ITV were fined for cruelty. The rat took 90 seconds to die and squealed for some of that time. The RSPCA filed the complaint.
Now, probably, most people have a sneaking empathy with Animal Liberationist when they are revealing cruelty in poultry houses or zoos or science laboratories - if the latter’s guinea pigs are nice creatures such as Beagles or chimps ... (confusing metaphor...!). They lose most of our sympathies if they try to intervene in our pleasures of the flesh (pork, beef, goat, chicken, ostrich, kangaroo) providing the creatures have not been maltreated. We even make national heroes of animals that escape abattoirs or the culling of a foot and mouth diseased herd. Like our shifting moralities regarding sex, homicide, parenting, religious observance and death, to name some of the more obvious examples, we have no consistent approach to animal rights. As long as there is plenty to go round, we can afford to construct cases of cruelty as in the aforementioned rat instance. And people can have jobs seeing to it that animals get a fair shake of the dice.
But if there is no food, as in Haiti and ice-frozen Mongolia or many parts of Africa here, there is no organisation around to take you to court for eating a rat and saving your life. Funny that!
Come the Apocalypse, when we can’t all stowaway on Noah’s new vessel, it may well be a couple of celebrities who survive, eating their rats, waving to the departing ark and wondering why the dead and dying around them are making such a fuss. Each of them will hunker down with a club in his hands over a hole in the skirting and say what James Cagney actually said in Taxi: 'Come out and take it, you dirty, yellow-bellied rat.'
Friday, February 05, 2010
Open wide. Say Arrgh!
Of course, most Ghanaians never see a dentist. Until recently their teeth weren’t subjected to processed foods with all that sugar and, anyway, apart from having a tooth wrenched out, there would be no thought given to any other treatment. It would be too costly.
I paid my first visit to a dental surgery for many years, here in Accra. Having seen my father have all his teeth removed, most of them healthy when still in middle age because in the nineteen fifties dentists were paid per extraction, a form of piece work, I have an abhorrence for a glass tumbler by the bed with magnified, grinning dentures. So I have opted for an expensive implant to replace what my Ghanaian dentist took away.
Back to the chronology of the visit. I registered and went into the surgery. The little theatre was very sparse compared with UK environs. I always remember the Monty Python sketch where doctors were clustered around a machine that went ‘ping’, their newest gadget. No-one had the slightest idea about what it did beyond making that impressive, technological noise. Well here there were no superfluous machines. I was screened off from the noisy patient next door who was making a noisy fuss. My dentist was most agreeable. He gave me a book on management leadership to read. He sang a South African traditional song as he skipped between patients. He murmured ‘sorry, sorry, sorry’ as he put the needle in various places that did not want to receive it. He told me how brave I was which made me feel as I did as a child when refusing to make any sound as bullies tried to Chinese burn my wrists into a torturous intensity.
Feeling the tooth coming out seemed to tell my brain that it was painful as I could visualise and isolate fibres and flesh and bone giving way. But, actually, it was tolerable. Then, amusingly, he asked me if I wanted the spare body part, showing me the tooth I had nursed for its last fifteen years. I declined the monster. It looked like an asteroid, pitted by a thousand encounters with space debris. But it left my body with a feeling of time passing and a nostalgia for those far off days when milk teeth had just popped out under pressure from the real thing. Funnily enough, while I had been waiting to go in to the surgery, I struck up a conversation with a pretty, eighteen year old student. She was having milk teeth removed because they didn’t want to give way to their elders and betters.
It is easy to feel isolated and mortally vulnerable, three thousand miles from a true national health system. You could spend all your time out here being an anxious hypochondriac. What is driven home to me is that in the west the whole of medicine is focused on the reduction of pain and any intimacy with it. Once, even in my lifetime, you would have expected some pain to be borne. Enough, not to fear it unduly. Enough to know that, once over, the body forgets almost immediately.
Today, people use anaesthetics to obviate pain: Cesarean sections, pills for sleeping. People become obese and a prey to disease and more anaesthetics as much because they don’t want the hurt of exercise as because they over consume junk food in the first place. It is all too painful to feel the heart pumping, the wracked lungs, the painful limbs when they can wallow in a painless hell of over indulgence.
I liked the dentist experience. It was man to man. It was pared down to essentials. I had to endure enough pain to act as a momentary epitaph at the end of my tooth’s life. But no more than that.
Labels: Dentist. Ghana. Accra. Pain
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
In Flagrente Delicto
For those of you who are not aware – and there are readers in Mexico, Russia, and in Indonesia, say, for whom it may not be of any interest (they may not like football) – the Captain of the current English football team is one John Terry and he has been discovered to have had an affair with the girlfriend at the time of his club and English team mate, Wayne Bridge. Much has been made of the similarities with the Tiger Woods case in that both men have squeezed the last drops (cents and pennies) from their image rights in advertisements as men of true probity. Jacob Zuma, the South African President has transgressed the same fateful boundary in that he has apparently impregnated a friend’s daughter, though I am not sure what his image was when running in the recent election..
The boundary between acceptability and unacceptability has its no man’s land in the courts when an injunction is served to prevent disclosure of an individual’s personal life by the media. The judge ruled in the case of Terry that his income was partially derived from his use of a (false) image of the family man for whom no transgression was possible. Live by the claim of purity, die by the stain of discovery.
Generally people do not follow the biblical injunction to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In fact hypocrisy is part and parcel of the multitude’s character (if one can cluster the human herd into a singular mind like this). Regardless of what they may do in the privacy of their own homes or the anonymity of the groups with whom they run, they develop a piousness towards others' trangressions that would make a priest think twice. In some countries there is less breast beating, though no less breast caressing, and it goes without saying that in Ghana, for example, it would be no great brake on a man’s progress in his career. For women here there is the usual universal condemnation of anything they might do that is illicit. In France, the funeral of a president can be publicly attended by both wife and mistress.
But sport is the new politics and in some weird and wonderful way it is becoming a theatrical sublimation of national and international conflict. The stars of a football pitch are known the world over in a way that politicians can only dream of and what they do exercises moral dispute in a far more exacting and flesh and blood way, as a consequence. In industry if you sleep with the boss’s wife you might find the shortest route between your desk and the exit but, in general, Terry’s behaviour would not result in a disciplinary. It usually comes down to your ability. Would you rather have a sexually profligate research scientist who invents products that make you great profits or a mob of staff who are straight jacketed fundamentalists, wielding their moral compasses?
Like most people I cannot escape the reaction that it serves them right, these paragons of sudden ill repute. Hoist with their own petard. The latter saying comes from Shakespeare and briefly means that you are blown up by the bomb you are placing at the gates of your enemy. Terry, Woods and, Zuma, the latter in an Africa where religion grasps the short and curlies, were all planting holier than thou bombs against the other side of the screens in our living rooms. It’s no wonder we stare smugly back with the grim satisfaction of knowing schadendfreude when we see it detonate before our very eyes..
Labels: John Terry. Jacob Zuma. Morality., Tiger Woods. Addiction to sex. Psychoilogy.