Taking a leak
I have been watching Hilary Clinton and the apparatchiks of the White House for the last two or three days in increasing amusement tinged with not a little disgust. The leaking internet is pouring their urine back over their heads and they are attempting to put up the sanctimonious umbrella of victimhood as though the world they live in is devoid of deceit and wrong-doing. A bit like Watergate in the early days. Diplomacy is being undermined, they thunder, through the fluttering eyelashes of denial. We cannot get on with our work of protecting democracies throughout the world.
At the same time, Sep Blatter and his corrupt cronies on the FIFA Panel are saying, more or less openly, that The Sunday Times and BBC exposures of vote-rigging for money (plenty of it) will mean that England will not host a World Cup.
The way the world is means that the virtuous cannot inherit the earth. These powerful groups within their establishments have got to their lofty positions precisely because they operate within what they call realpolitik. Like Putin the self-confessed alphadog, they claw and stamp their way to the top with sweeteners and threats their tools of the trade. And they expect the world to genuflect to their missions and admire them for it.
I once did some work for the Home Office in the UK, developing case studies on public order and the like, to help train police recruits to understand ‘complexity’. At the time, some branch of the secret service was tailing vicars, landowners and any proles who were supporting a campaign to stop nuclear waste dumping in Lincolnshire. I interviewed individuals who swore they were beaten up, cars trashed and whatever, as the then UK Government sought to further its democratic vision of a subservient and ignorant public. Is it any wonder we, the voters, who are normally excluded from the whispering corridors of power, feel duped and disenfranchised? The Unites States has a history of dirty deeds in the name of spreading democracy, undermining and toppling regimes it does not like. We swore it was going on and it always denied it. So we sit back and grin at the schadenfreude and sick sanctimony, scrabbling to find a way of presenting their incredibly expensive diplomatic machine as though it was a misunderstood and much maligned force for good. The fact is, reading some of the transcripts, they disgrace the name of democracy, are little more than the bilge of bigots and have as much cultural sensitivity as a whole legion of Prince Philips.
They don’t want us to know. Vive L’Internet!
The Right Royal Caper
There was a curious anomaly the other day. Research is needed. Nobody bought clothes for about 9 hours. You see, my partner runs a woman’s e-commerce business and sells all the clothes outside Ghana. High quality, classically designed and drawing 500 plus visits every day. Sales are great, even during these hard times. Then, at roughly 11-00 am one fateful morning last week, everything ceased, as if we were in a science fiction movie – you know, when everybody wakes up and discovers they have lost nine hours of their lives, checking their bodies for undulating movement under the skin. Kate and William announced they were to be married.
One assumes it was this and not something even more bizarre like a trial run of the virus that will end the world as we know it, that was the cause. What happened belied the science of statistics. Look at the patterns of buyer activity on any day and you have hot spots and cooler periods but you don’t have no activity for nine hours!
Now, the full royal machine is running on its well-oiled cogs. The right wing press is oohing and aahing. This is going to be a wedding for everyone! You are all invited. Westminster Abbey. 2000 guests. Everyone? Have an extra day’s holiday, businesses won’t mind paying the wages, the PAYE.
It feels like after the nine hours I woke up to discover that I had passed on the other side of the looking glass. Wars, famine, disease, nuclear bombs, killer viruses, Armageddon had all been left behind. Never mind all that, let’s have a nice cup of tea and watch the bluebloods at play. That’s the reality. And the royal confidantes have been on-screen warn us in their cut glass accents that the Windsors will have to be careful and make the wedding seem not too glitzy like the Charles and Diana do because the poor people won’t like it, you know, they are suffering a recession….
For me, for what it’s worth (not much, I know), having a royal family is having a keystone in the arch of a largely corrupt and iniquitous establishment. If you are a top stone, everything is fine. But the rest of us hold them up, unable to move because of the weight of their wealth and vested interests.
From Beatniks to Vandals
The Government in the UK have introduced higher tuition fees for university students. For the priciest courses the fees for a three year course can amount to nearly £40,000 or $60,000. It is a far cry from the free education of my beatnik youth and the reaction to it is very different from the heady days of 1968.
There I was in the heart of the French-led student revolt, in Paris, in Brussels and in Geneva, making the odd incoherent speech but not about education being a mortgage for life but about transparency of student records, open, critical debate, democracy. It was tied up with what was then called the counter-culture, West Coast American hippy idealism, flower power, the end of war and time to make love. Of course it all looks naïve and simplistic today but it wasn’t then. We were touched by idealism and wanted to change society and change the way that society thought about itself and its young. It was the inevitable politicising of rock and roll. OUR music.
Watching some students in London smash their way through glass panes in Conservative party Headquarters, there was none of that. It was all about money. In fact the multitude that marched peaceably did so about fees alone, as far as I understood it from the media and my armchair in Ghana. I don’t know where our idealism got society when our descendants, now at university, can only think in those terms. They were not talking about the quality of education only the price of it. Meanwhile the inevitable University Chancellors were doing their interviews, wanting more money for the trough in order to ‘compete with the elite universities across the world’. What a travesty of the truth. Over the last decades, university senior managers have become well off at the expense of education. Larger classes, lectures to hundreds and falling standards of teaching and research are the true indicators of what has been happening among our ‘elite’, together with tie-ups to multi-nationals in the private sector. In my time I have ‘saved’ PhD students from Oxbridge colleges who never saw their supervisors and were referred in their vivas. And the fee for a year’s work in helping turn these students round? £100. This was only a short while ago. The students in question were being charged £8000 PER YEAR. Academics are as greedy as bankers, in the main. Greedy to pursue their own careers by publication, greedy for status and about as altruistic as panhandlers in a river of gold.
Decades of education have not raised critical consciousness in the UK or American society any higher than it was in the fifties. Everyone has bought in to capitalism and acquisitiveness. The vital energies of the young are chanelled into intellectual and creative dead ends. It would have been remarkable if the march in London had signalled the beginning of a philosophy of a new world order but it was more about students feeling that they were being priced out of consumerism.
Me greedy, you dead
We’re heading for another global crisis. It is another banking crisis, too. Not money this time but fat laid down around midriffs, bottoms and thighs. The OECD has just released a report showing that developing countries, as soon as their populations begin to join the middle classes, adopt western lifestyles. This means processed foods with transfats, sugars, salts and the rest. It means increased diabetes, heart attacks, early senility and many conditions where the correlations have not yet been done. Going into Accra Mall at the weekend provides you with plenty of evidence for this. Fast food, western style outlets buzz and waistlines increase. The Ghanaian middle classes are not eating a balanced diet. The Daily Graphic today was lamenting the fact that Ghana, which has wonderful potential for feeding itself and exporting far more food to the rest of Africa, was developing a cultural dislike for home grown rice and other commodities.
Meanwhile, watching a programme about the human body, it turns out that if we eat less than 2000 calories a day, we can rejuvenate our hearts and make them 15 years younger! Dieting rats outlive those who can eat whatever they like by up to 33%. That’s a lot. Now we can stuff ourselves like junkies with food that is bad for us and go down with our flags flying, in a hospital bed for months, saying that we preferred fewer years of life but stuffed full of crisps, pizzas, burgers, pre-prepared meals, chips, restaurant meals and the like or we can live many years longer on raw stuff we buy and cook for ourselves.
At the same time, food and water will be what is fought over in the decades to come and western lifestyles and protectionism will increase, exponentially, famine and disease elsewhere. When I overeat, another anonymous person dies.
On the same programme I saw a man who survived seventy odd days in the ocean by eating fish only. If he had been eating, as usual, as a westerner, he would have been dead in days but his brain overwrote his wiring and made him suddenly desire the eyes, liver, kidneys and other bits of the fish carcass that we routinely throw away. All the fish vitamins. The lesson in this was that if we change our eating habits, eat properly but far less, there will be more food for everyone. We would develop a taste for new, healthier foods that we chuck away (currently one third of all food bought in the UK ends up in the bin) or never buy. The body is a chemical machine, not an altar to greed. We need to learn to control it but it is a lifelong discipline.
Peanuts in Space
I was watching the British Prime Minister yesterday talking persuasively about his mission to create a big society to be the senior partner of a much reduced government. At the same time the attack on the poor and ill-educated goes on. They will bear the brunt of the losses incurred by banking gamblers. But then, the poor, who make up a fairly big proportion of the big society have little going their way when it comes to influencing governmental thinking, so it was obviously not them to which he was alluding. For example, they wouldn’t be passing a bill to pick up litter in order to get their unemployment benefit would they?
We know that it is only at election time that would-be politicians genuflect to the wishes of the public, often fabricating what these might be to suit their ideologies, so, now in power, Cameron’s rhetoric is beginning to unravel in the way of all politicians. Under the urbane and much cosmeticised exterior (his photographer has now a paid post in the civil service) there beats a heart that is indistinguishable from those of Tories through the Ages.
It led me to wonder, as I have done before in these blogs, what alternatives there are to having Oxbridge boys, silver-spoon fed and chubbily self-important, running the country. I won’t pursue this, having done it before but what I did not discuss then, was the matter of their intelligence. Now, I have worked in delight and despair with people from all walks of life for decades, finding high intelligence randomly distributed across all the social divides. Yet, when I see and hear politicians, I find a low correlation with the world outside Whitehall. There is a level of articulation that passes the demands of media questioning but I have never sat back, shocked into serious thought, by anything a politician has ever said, as I have been by an artist or a philosopher or a scientist. It appears that only those who will never achieve the highest levels in intellectual and creative fields turn to politics. We put our countries in the hands of people who we could not elevate elsewhere.
The picture from the BBC science site shows what I mean. It is my metaphor for politicians, worldwide (with obvious exceptions such as Mandela, Ghandi et al). It is an asteroid, mostly ice yet with its own jet exhaust and comes into public view once in a while. It is a space peanut and does nothing for the rest of its universal kind and has been there from the beginnings of time. Sound familiar?
Labels: Asteroids. David Cameron. Political intelligence. Ideology.
If we were more like eels…
A while back I wrote an adoring blog about a meal I had in Paris which began with smoked eel, a rarer delicacy in England than France. Now I discover that the creature is, like too many species of animal, plant, fish and bird suffering huge losses in its numbers. What to do? My life seems to have spanned a post-war delirium of open fields, wild flowers, clean water and every bird and animal on the doorstep through to today’s dereliction of human duty to the environment.
First, let me persuade you that the eel, a creature that ties your fishing line into knots and covers your hands with slime, should be a symbol of the extraordinary, a true miracle in mucous. Eels were not born, according to the great Izaak Walton, they sprang from the "action of sunlight on dewdrops". Actually they are born in the Sargasso Sea and stay there as ‘yellow eels‘, feeding and growing and swelling and darkening, for perhaps 7 years if they decide to become a male, and 12 if they're female. (It’s always harder, being a lass.) But there you are. It’s the future for us, too. Soon, all humans will be making similar choices, in order to save ourselves and the planet. The Chinese are doing it under State edict. More and more people are choosing the gender of their children as a design statement. Not for long. Necessity will triumph.
The eel forgets about the need for genitals until procreation becomes a possibility. That is why Walton became so poetical about its apparent spontaneous combustion into life. Perhaps we would all be better if we grew genitalia later. No more prudery about the naked form. We’d be as blank down there as Angels in a fresco (in the pictures I have seen!). Maybe we’d only cover up later when we are about to procreate with our newly grown appendages. That would be the difference between ‘parents’ and those who have no children.
Eels can live undisturbed in forgotten pools for 25, 30, even 40 years. They are Zen creatures meditating on the meaning of existence, uninterested in sex, drugs and rock and roll. Then (read the BBC science blog) one dark night, usually in September or October, usually after rain and when the moon's overcast, they get the call. No one knows why. They turn a kind of mottled green-black on top, silver underneath. They head downstream on the flood, and swim 3,000 miles back to the Sargasso Sea. Then they spawn, and die.
There must be a sense of completion in this mass sexual encounter at the end of days. Who would not feel ‘closure’ as the current cliché has it? Wouldn’t our lives be richer and more meaningful, if we ended them on an equivalent social high note?