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Wednesday After Work in the Park with Richard

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An evidently confused woman walked up to me une fois in the centre of Dublin and asked me something in French with what sounded like ‘cherche’ and ‘GPO’ in it.

Now she might just have been asking ‘Vous cherchez le GPO, n’est pas?’, in which case the answer would have been ‘Sí (it’s true, it’s proper grammar and everything, look it up), je suis pas Joseph Connolly et nous ne sommes pas dans l’an 1916’. I evidemment presumed that she was asking me where the General Post Office (which was about 20 yards behind us) was, so I told her immediately. By pointing.

My French has become much better now, danke schön very much. As for other foreign languages: I can do every word in Chinese except for tree, politics and, er, word, and I will hopefully soon very much impress my girlfriend during our Mystery Holiday in Berlin next month (NB: THAT BIT MEANS I CAN SPEAK GERMAN – R. Willmsen 22/03/07); I can speak almost as much Spanish as every other smug fucker out there who just happens to speak fucking Spanish. Oh yes, and I am also learning Italian. Very, very slowly.

More significantly, I speak better Portuguese than José Saramago, and will one day have a job to prove it. Which is partly why, in Battersea Park on the Hottest Day Ever (does that mean it’s going to start getting colder now?!), sparsely surrounded by lots of people speaking the less passionate, more bored-sounding variety of the Portuguese language, on seeing a young black family walking towards me along the path, I, thinking that they may well be Angolan or maybe Portuguese or something, thought that I might say to them in a smiley fashion ‘Fala-se português por aqui!’ (they speak Portuguese round here).

I didn’t say anything, thereby soundly killing off any possibility that I might a) the same day become the subject of an entertaining ‘This sweaty guy we didn’t know said something to us in a language we didn’t understand!’ anecdote or b) become the firmest of friends with some people for about 2 minutes.

About sixteen seconds later another young black family walked past me, speaking Portuguese. In the treasured words of Alanis Morissette: You live, you learn.

Incidentally, has anyone else in the imperial capital noticed that every single cafe in the centre of London (with the honourable exception of ‘Brasil By Kilo’) is suddenly run by Portuguese people?! They’re everywhere all of a sudden, especially around here. Especially since I, you know, moved house. Quite a lot less Bangladeshi people too. That is not why I moved, by the way. I wonder if, one day, ‘the Portuguese cuisine’ will enjoy the same elevated position in our gastronomic hierachy as does that of our Polish communities. But as for competing with the Bengalis for a larger share of the cheaper end of the restaurant market…nem pensar!

Will China one day become a global cultural superpower?

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Another profoundly idiotic, craven and predictable article by Martin Jacques in the Guardian about the inevitable and glorious rise of China gave birth to an interesting thought.

In contrast to five years ago, the likely identity of the next superpower has become crystal clear. It is no longer just a possibility that it will be China; on the contrary, the probability is extremely high, if not yet a racing certainty. Nor does the timescale of this change have us peering into the distant future as it did five years ago. China is already beginning to acquire some of the interests and motivations of a superpower, and even a little of the demeanour. Beijing feels like a parallel universe to the US, and certainly Europe. There is an expansive mood about the place. China is growing in self-confidence by the day.

And with good reason. There is no sign of China’s economic growth abating, and it is this that lies behind its growing confidence. The massive contrasts between China and the US, both socially and economically, are enjoined in the argument over America’s trade deficit with the China. The latter is deeply aware that its future prospects depend on the continuation of its economic growth and this remains its priority. But no longer to the exclusion of all else: China is beginning to widen its range of concerns and interests.

So far so predictable: China is growing at an exponential rate and is beginning to challenge the global power of the US. My idea concerns this parallel between Chinese and American power, but at the level of culture.

It’s clear that the US as a global cultural superpower foments opposition to itself by crushing or buying off any attempts at cultural independence, so that you increasingly see the same films advertised at the same time in the centres of cities all around the globe, for example, and so many people’s free time is spent watching films from Blockbuster video, not to mention eating at McDonalds and shopping at Wal-Mart and so on. This makes the United States a very obvious target for anger against injustice and inequality.

China, on the other hand, has almost no cultural influence on this level, give or take the occasional martial arts epic, which is itself effectively a product of the Hollywood system. There are no global Chinese music stars, and very few if any recent global household names in any field. There is, thankfully, no global Chinese equivalent to McDonalds or Pizza Hut; in fact, the brands most beloved of young Chinese people seem to be American or European ones – NBA, KFC, the Champions’ League etc. Aside from a few satellite Chinese speaking parts of the world, China has little or virtually no cultural influence to match its growing economic clout.

Doesn’t this mean, then, that its increasing international economic power will attract less notice and therefore less opposition? I’m thinking in terms of other developing countries, specifically Africa, the Middle East and South America, where the locally damaging effects of China’s involvement are becoming more and more unavoidable (I wrote about some aspects of this here), as well as the catastrophic effects on the environment if every Chinese peasant did ever get to live the Chinese Dream. What China lacks, though, is anything like the very clear focus for opprobrium that US cultural products and brands represent.

I don’t know if there will come a point where China will need to start marketing its cultural products to a non-Chinese audience. There is certainly a long way to go before the country that brings us CCTV will be able to produce convincing English language films, for example. But I don’t think in fifty years’ time we’ll all be speaking Mandarin either, as China Outside China – the current expansion, rather than the results of past emigration – is very much an English-speaking project. I’m just interested in what happens when, as we’re beginning to see now in some African countries, political opposition to Chinese economic influence starts to deepen and widen. What form will it take? Will people just turn on their local Chinese shopkeepers, as has happened a few times in Indonesia in the last couple of years?

Many young people around the world grow up hating McDonalds and Tom Cruise’s face almost by instinct, on their way to developing more informed and complex oppositional ideas about the world. Certain faces and symbols have come to represent the worst excesses of American power. Will there come a point at which individual symbols and faces represent what we hate and fear about the economic power of China? Or will we at some point start to witness a reaction that targets Chinese people, rather than the symbols that have, whether they like it or not, come to represent them?

One of the comments posted in the discussion following the Martin Jacques piece stated baldly ‘The Chinese have little regard for freedom, justice or human life for that matter.’ Not, it should be noted, the Chinese Government, but The Chinese themselves. I have a feeling that five, ten or twenty years from now this kind of racist attitude will be commonplace – and it will come as quite a comfort to the Chinese Government, which would far rather see the anger of the world at its expansionist policies targeted at the Chinese people rather than at itself.

How to help the USA beat the world at football

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A good few months ago I posted a profoundly provocative anti-football rant, cunningly disguised as a 5-part autobiography of the last seven years of my life, or vice-versa, or something, in which I wrote the following:

There is something about football that I haven’t mentioned yet, and it is something that these days gets very little attention. It concerns women and football.

Now there are many reasons why lots of women watch football. Some for the same reasons that men do – to see the occasional bit of spectacle that the sport offers, or because watching and following the game is usually a social thing. Some, it has to be said, are Uncle Toms, showing or developing an interest in it in order to please men.

Some women play football too, but like women’s boxing the professional game exists as a side-effect of men’s football. We don’t see it on TV, and it’s no accident that the best known player is the ex-wife of one of football’s leading men. And, like boxing, when it does get some coverage it is often just for the titillation of men. Women footballers, unlike their male counterparts, have no visibility and no power.

The fact remains; football, in terms of the sport we see on TV, the thing that is so often cited as one thing that unites all the people and peoples of the world, does not involve women at any level.

Among the many people keen to prove that I was, you know, as I so often am, wrong, were a couple of posters who pointed out that actually, in the United States the women’s game has a lot more prominence than the men’s sport, and that most American people would be more likely to be able to name a female player than a male one. It seems that in the land of the freeandthebrave, ‘soccer’ is something of a girl’s game.

Which is presumably why the all-male US team have not quite swept all before them in the Soccerball World Series so far. But it did give me something of an idea, which might stealthily transform the sport into one that actually involves women at some level:

Very simply, the USA should be allowed to field an all-female team in the – until now – exclusively male World Cup. This would increase the appeal of football back home, and would even things out a little in terms of fairness. It would reduce the chance of the world’s greatest superpower being humiliated quite so hilariously by their global rivals, and it might, without wishing to offend anyone here, make what is ultimately a fairly boring spectacle into one which is actually fun to watch.

There is of course a potential nightmare scenario, in that they might become so successful they actually win the thing; I have a feeling that if this were ever to come to pass, the sport of football would very quickly lose a lot of its appeal for most of the world’s population. But for the moment I think it’s definitely an idea worth exploring. Go Team USA!

The Moral Saliva of Don Pepe

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Thanks to Wikipedia I have acquired a new hero: José Figueres Ferrer, aka ‘Don Pepe’, the Costa Rican President in the 1940s-50s, who certainly achieved a great deal more progressive change in his nine years of power than Tony Blair has: in his first term in office he nationalised the banks, gave women and illiterate people the right to vote and abolished the army. This last move is of course absolutely laudable – it is difficult, let’s say, to imagine Blair or even Gordon Brown doing the same – but it led to short-term problems during the, ahem, war with Nicaragua seven years later.

In 1958 the then vice-president of the US, Richard Nixon, was spat at by a crowd in Caracas, Venezuela while visiting on a goodwill tour. An inquiry was held to attempt to ascertain the causes of the incident, and Ferrer was asked to speak before the Congress in Washington. The wonderful speech he gave reminded me of one of something I posted last year on the politics of spitting, actually my second favourite thing I’ve wrote here, in which I typed:

One of the other potential uses of staring, spitting and other generally anti-social behaviour is in the field of International Relations. A logical and non-violent way of resolving the territorial disputes of the world is in the same way that cats do – if Saddam Hussein had had the foresight to piss all over Kuwait in 1990, the Americans would have been understandably less keen to go in and remove him. Similarly , if Mao Zedong had sent all those young Chinese soldiers to North Korea in 1950 armed only with the simple order to stand on the border and spit, maybe one million lives could have been saved.

Somehow I’ve always managed to restrain myself from adopting expectoration as a form of direct action, although the constant vigil outside the Marie Stopes Centre in Ealing next to where I work presents quite a challenge to this. In the speech Ferrer explicitly cites spitting as a form of resistance against imperial power, against what he calls the ‘moral spitting’ of the powerful. It is well worth reading the whole thing; it is a rousing piece of rhetoric, which may just make you want to, regardless of the potentially drastic consequences, run up to the gates of the nearest American embassy and let fly:

“As a citizen of the hemisphere, as a man who has dedicated his public life to promoting inter-American comprehension, as an educated man who knows and appreciates the United States and who has never tried to hide that appreciation to anyone, no matter how hostile he was, I deplore that the people of the Latin America, represented by a fistful of overexcited Venezuelans, have spat on a worthy public officer who represents the greatest nation of our time. But I must speak frankly and even rudely, because I am convinced that the situation demands it: the people cannot spit on a foreign policy, which was what they tried to do. But when they have exhausted all other means of trying to make themselves understood, the only thing left to do is spit.

“With all due respect to Vice-President Nixon, and with all my admiration towards his conduct, which was, during the events, heroic and ultimately noble, I have no choice but to say that the act of spitting, however vulgar it is, lacks a substitute in our language to express certain emotions… If you’re going to speak of human dignity in Russia, why is it so hard to speak of human dignity in the Dominican Republic? Where is intervention and where is non-intervention? Is it that a simple threat, a potential one, to your liberties, is, essentially, more serious that the kidnapping of our liberties?

“Of course you have made certain investments in the (Latin) American dictatorships. The aluminum companies extract bauxite almost for free. Your generals, your admirals, your public officers and your businessmen are treated there like royalty.

“Like your Senate verified yesterday, there are people who bribe the reigning dynasties with millions, to enjoy the privilege of hunting in their lands. They deduct the money from the taxes they pay in the US, but it returns to the country and, when it arrives to Hollywood, becomes extravagant furs and cars that bring down the fragile virtue of female stars. And, meanwhile, our women are kidnapped by gangsters, our men are castrated in the torture chambers and our illustrious professors disappear, lugubriously, from the halls of the University of Columbia, in New York. When one of your lawmakers calls this “collaboration to fight communism,” 180 million Latin Americans feel the need to spit.

“Spitting is a despicable custom, if done physically. But what about moral spitting? When your government invited Pedro Estrada, the Himmler of the Western Hemisphere, to be honored in Washington, didn’t you spit upon the face of all democrats in (Latin) America? … I can assure you that, when it comes to international economic policy, the United States seems to be willing to repeat certain errors of domestic policy that inflicted much damage in the past, including, of course, the ones that led to the great crisis of 1929.

“We, the Latin Americans, are tired of pointing to these mistakes; especially, the lack of interest in the prices of our products. Every time we suggest a plan to stabilize prices at a fair level you answer with economic slogans, like “the law of supply and demand” or “the free market system,” or with insults like “Aren’t we paying you enough money now?” We don’t beg, except in emergencies. We’re not people who will spit for money. We’ve inherited all the flaws of the Spanish character, but also some of its virtues.

“Our poverty does not diminish our pride. We have our dignity. What we want is to be paid a fair price for the sweat of our people, for the impoverishment of our land, when we provide a product needed by another country. That would be enough to live, to raise our own capital and to carry on with our own development.”

Isn’t that great?! Costa Rica sounds like a jolly nice place. Personally I’m hoping for los costarricenses against my beloved Angola in the World Cup final, and a tournament largely free of regrettable spitting incidents. Let everyone save up their ‘moral saliva’ for those who really deserve it!

Come on Deutschland!

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My New Favourite Person, Matthias Matussek, a journalist for Der Spiegel magazine, wrote recently in the Guardian’s Germany special:

It was after repeated futile complaints about the primitive image of Germany cultivated by the English (as Nazis and frozen-faced engineers), that a plan was hatched by a group of German politicians and diplomats, among them my brother, Thomas, who was, until March, German envoy to Britain. What if they flew in a few English history teachers and wined and dined them like little potentates at the government’s expense? If, after their stay, the teachers knew more about Heine’s poems, Claudia Schiffer’s golden tresses, Beethoven’s symphonies, Humboldt’s adventures, Willy Brandt’s biography and, ja, if we must, notorious “pop idol” judge Dieter Bohlen (Germany’s answer to Simon Cowell) – the good news would gradually filter down to the pupils.

Nearly two dozen teachers were invited to Berlin, Dresden and Bonn. They resided in five-star hotels, attended the opera, sauntered around the Reichstag, and – as emissaries of not just England but Britain – exchanged platitudes with representatives of the German nation. This red-carpet treatment cost German taxpayers some €52,000 (£35,000).

And what did the rotters do? They spurned all the attention as though it were some kind of indecent proposition. “It wasn’t a great experience,” a paper quoted one teacher, Peter Liddell, as saying. At the opera, the woman next to him nodded off, he reported. They went along for the ride. But that wouldn’t change the curriculum, which – after all – calls for Hitler, Hitler and more Hitler. A colleague summed it up for the record: “Nazis are sexy. Evil is fascinating.”

There are three simple lessons here. One: the British have zero interest in the new Germany. Two: the British have zero interest in the old Germany. Three: the British are interested only in Nazi Germany.

And that, I would say, is not a German problem, but a British one.

Gut gesagt! I’d imagine that in the Rwanda-Somalia-Cultural Revolution style chaos of the British Secondary School Classroom, amidst the shouting and the stabbing and the smoke, the teacher is comforted by the fact that there is always a magic word which will make the students shut up, sit down and pay attention. That word is ‘Hitler’.

If you denken daran it, many of our most common popular cultural references are about the war and not liking Germans – Fawlty Towers, Alo Alo, that episode of Monty Python and so weiter. Which is why the Guardian chose to illustate the Speziell about the New Germany with pictures from Fawlty Towers, Alo Alo. etc. There was a very interesting snippet about how Lederhosen are only ever worn in Munich for Speziell(e?) Occasions – which apparently have nothing whatsoever to do with Kristelnacht (which is not German for Christmas, as I once thought). The front page had a lovely picture of a couple wearing – Lederhosen.

The best thing about the article is that he makes absolutely no apology for being German, but tells us what he, after a couple of years living here, actually thinks of the place:

Nothing can reinflate the downtrodden British spirit more swiftly than the implication that it is an empire. That Germany is now faring badly affords momentary relief. As does the fact that Britain is doing so splendidly – if you ignore filthy, life-threatening hospitals, derailed trains, teenage alcoholism, impoverished senior citizens and absurd per-capita debt, of course. So splendidly, in fact, that it has adopted the same smug self-righteousness we saw in the Germany of the 1950s, the era of the economic miracle.

With their daily diet of car and homebuyer shows on the telly and Better Cooking, Better Living, Better Shopping programmes, the British, after long years of frugality, are now imitating the inane German Mercedes drivers and hungover boozers of caricaturist infamy from the reconstruction years.

Ah, das schmeckt sehr gut. Und now … unsere Weltmeisterschaft!

Anyone up for burning some flags?

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Provocative funnyman Charlie Brooker just took the words right outta my mouth and wrote something about the current fashion for hoisting the England flag out of car windows:

Imagine the outcry if government passed a law requiring the nation’s dimbos to wear dunce’s caps in public. No one would stand for it. There’d be acres of newsprint comparing Blair and co to the Nazis. We’d see rioting in the streets – badly organised rioting with a lot of mis-spelled placards, but rioting nonetheless.

Those protesters who burn flags outside embassies have got the right idea – but they shouldn’t be burning them because they disagree with something the country in question has done. They should be burning flags just because they’re flags. And flags are rubbish.

I’m not sure if I dislike flags as such, although I certainly share some of this writer’s concern about recent displays of my country’s emblem:

Is it just me, or is anyone else slightly worried about the number of St George’s flags flying from road vehicles right now? Of course, these displays of patriotism are to be expected in the build-up to next month’s World Cup – which England enters with more confidence than at any time since 1970. This time, though, the flags seem to be on show earlier than ever.

In fact, they started appearing the day after the local elections on May 4. Apart from the Labour meltdown and the Tories getting their first respectable vote for 14 years, the big story of the election was the rise of the British National party, which gained 28 seats, nearly 20 in London alone. Could it be that many of the England flag-wavers are in fact supporters of this racist party, glorying in their “victory” and celebrating their racial pride?

I agree with both articles in that I think that the only reason anyone would want to buy and display their country’s flag is because they are either right-wing or a little bit thick – or possibly, in a tiny minority of cases of course, both. Taking pride in the place where you happen to have been born is, in my humble onion, akin to holding up a piece of paper with ‘MY MUM’S BETTER THAN YOUR MUM’ written on it. At the same time, it is true to say that there have been a lot of people who aren’t white proudly displaying the flag, so it may well be that we are witnessing one of those ‘look at me I’m queer!’ reclaiming-abusive-words-and-symbols-from-the-right-wing moments. I sincerely hope so.

In the meantime, if we do have to distinguish different parts of the world with colours and images on a piece of cloth there is a sound argument for changing that image every couple of months or weeks. I think one representative image of our country over the last few months would be a photo of some people sitting on a tube train on the Hammersmith & City Line looking very, very pissed off. Either that or Damien Hirst cut in half and stuck in a formaldehyde tank. You could have a competition, and the winner could spend a couple of weeks somewhere nice. In a completely different country, for example – like where most flag-waving England fans choose to spend their annual holidays every single year.

I digress. Personally the only reason I’d consider buying a flag is to burn the thing. I really enjoy watching people burn flags; if there was a satellite TV channel dedicated solely to live coverage and classic footage of people burning flags I’d give up my stupid job and spend the entire week glued to it. I genuinely believe that it is one of the most uplifting sights that the human soul can behold.

Of course there’ll be no end of flags on display all over the world in a couple of weeks, which I don’t mind much, not really. As long as they don’t have ‘OLDHAM BNP’ written on them, like some of the ones I saw during the Euro 2004 thing in Lisbon a couple of years ago. I’m certainly not going to be grabbing them out of people’s hands and setting light to them, that’s for sure. The conviviality that attends these events almost makes the spectacle of a ninety minute game of football less spectacularly dull. According to legend, people actually start conversations with strangers on the tube! I can hardly wait.

Not that I’ll be watching all the matches – I’m thinking of organising a flag-burning ceremony in Hyde Park to coincide with the first England match. Anyone care to join me?

The Enemy Within

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George Orwell, in his book ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, describes in detail the physical hell that Britain’s coal miners had to endure in return for a living wage:

Most of the things one imagines in hell are in there – heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire, for there is no fire down there except the feeble beams of Davy lamps and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the clouds of coal dust.

The miner’s job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand National … by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.

This strength that the miners exhibited, invisibly, underground had to have some counterpart on the surface. And so the National Union of Mineworkers fought on their behalf to defend their safety and their livelihoods.

Sixty years later Guardian journalist Seamus Milne, in his book ‘The Enemy Within: Thatcher’s Secret War Against the Miners’, detailed how the vendetta that Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s Conservative government held against the NUM. Margaret Thatcher regarded the miners, with their collective recourse to industrial action to defend their jobs, their wages and the safety regulations that kept them alive, as ‘the enemy within’. The Chancellor Nigel Lawson felt that the Government had a duty to confront and destroy the miner’s industrial power akin to facing ‘the threat of Hitler in the late 1930s’. The bitter strike which resulted lasted for almost a year and was lost, narrowly, by the miners.

The consequences for the Labour movement were, just as the Tories had calculated, catastrophic. Membership of trade unions has almost halved since Thatcher and Co. began their all out assault on trade union power in 1979, and had already diminished considerably by 1992, when the Government announced that it was to close a third of Britain’s coal pits, with the loss of 31,000 jobs. There were huge protests against the closures but the NUM itself had already lost a great deal of members and a lot of the support which had sustained it through the strike eight years earlier. The Labour Party, which was in the process of concluding that if it was ever to regain power it would have to abandon most of its founding principles, offered no support whatsoever and the battle was lost.

Now what pits survive in Britain are in private hands, employing a tiny amount of people in very unsafe conditions. The communities that came into being because of the mines are now some of Europe’s poorest towns, suffering from high levels of long-term unemployment and heroin addiction. Not that the world has no need of coal, or that its production is not profitable; the regular news reports from China about tragic accidents show us where and how it is obtained, and at what price.

There is a hidden story of the miner’s strike of 1984-5, and particularly of what happened six years later. On 5 March 1990 the Daily Mirror published a front-page attack against the leaders of the miners’ union, backed by an investigative programme on TV the same night, claiming that not only had money been received during the year long dispute from the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi, at the time reviled as a sponsor of terrorism, but that the cash had subsequently been used not to ease the hardship of strikers but to pay off the mortgages of officials. The leaders of the union, in particular Arthur Scargill, were vilified and disgraced.

Within a short space of time, after vigorous investigation and campaigning by the few groups on the left who stood by Scargill, the Mirror’s story was revealed to be a complete fabrication. Neither of the officials in question even had mortgages. A subsequent inquiry into the Union’s affairs cleared them of any wrongdoing whatsoever.

Seamus Milne’s book set out to discover who was behind the fake story, and came up with some astonishing revelations if its own.

The union official who instigated the fund-raising trip to Libya was the Chief Executive, Roger Windsor. He had his photograph taken with Gaddafi; its publication in the newspapers, at a time when, as Thatcher later admitted, it looked as though the miners might actually win the strike, can’t have done wonders for their cause.

At the time he was the highest non-elected official at the NUM. He was ideally placed, then, to provide the Daily Mirror with evidence against Scargill six years later; for which the newspaper paid him the sum of £80,000.

Following evidence provided by the Labour MP Tam Dalyell, Seamus Milne looked into the links between Roger Windsor and the British secret services and found that the man behind the allegations, the man who had tried to smear and discredit Scargill, the NUM and by extension the entire Labour movement, had in fact been working all along for MI5.

It is quite possible that if had not been for the damaging impact of the Mirror’s allegations, the Tories would not have been able to push through the mass pit closures they would announce two years later. A certain amount of mud stuck, and the prominence that the newspapers gave to their retractions of the story did not, of course, match in any sense the publicity that the lying revelations had received. It would be twelve years before the Mirror’s editor would make a public apology for his actions.

No-one else involved in the campaign seems to have done so. One of the main promoters of the story, the then Mirror owner Robert Maxwell, would kill himself in 1991, shortly before it was revealed that he himself had been funding his business adventures by stealing from the pension fund of the newspaper. In the course of a lifetime of gargantuan self-promotion and deceit, he himself had had his own fair share of dealings with the secret services, and was described by the Mirror’s then editor as ‘the world’s most intrusive proprietor’.

The role of the Labour Party in the strike was pretty treacherous; they were already coming to the conclusion that in order to regain power they would have to try to abandon most of their core beliefs, and adopt an agenda more akin to the philosophy of their political enemies. The Miners’ Strike would propel them further along the path that lead to Blairism and New Labour.

I first read Seamus Milne’s book when it was published in 1995, since which time a question has been slowly forming in my consciousness; it is only recently that I have become aware of what its implications might, erm, imply: if the secret services in the 1980s would go to such lengths as to plant people among the leadership of the union branch of the Labour movement, what moves would they be prepared to take to divest the political wing of the Labour movement of its popular force and ingrained ideology – that is to say, the Labour Party?

Ni shuo zhongwen ma?

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I’ve always found it a bit puzzling that people pay (often lots of) money to sit in a class and practise speaking foreign languages. Everyone on earth already has at least one language at their disposal and it’s not too hard to track down someone who wants to learn that language and in return will help you as your try your hardest to make yourself understood in their language. It’s just a case of tracking down that someone, which these days, what with the gumtree and whatnot, is not a very difficult task at all.

Of course occasionally you may, especially if you’re a woman, meet people with ulterior motives, or who are actually just really boring, or who laugh pitilessly every time you try and put a sentence together – or in the case of Mandarin Chinese, look at you with such puzzlement that you’d think you’d just told them there was something wrong with the Communist Party, whereas in fact you were simply trying to let them know that you come from Sheffield and you prefer broccoli to spinach. But on the whole it’s preferable to and a lot more effective than, say, paying €50 a month to some unscrupulous bastards who will continue fleecing your bank account long after the school has gone bankrupt and the teacher has fucked off back to London in poverty, or, if you’re Brazilian, will stick you in a tiny classroom on Oxford Street with eighteen of your compatriots so you end up speaking less English than you would back home.

Now I come to think of it, language teachers spend so much time trying to make their students pretend that they are not actually in a classroom at all that it really makes you question the point of being there in the first place.

Whateva. After I’d put an ad on the gumtree for people to practise my own rudimentary polygoticism with, I exchanged a couple of emails with someone who said they could help me with my Chinese, which would be nice, although somebody helping me with my Chinese is a bit like teaching my great-great German grandmother to speak Brazilian Portuguese, because my Chinese is hen bu hao. I was a bit busy at the time what with holidays, work and the problems on the Hammersmith & City Line to deal with, so I didn’t reply for ages, but when I did I realised that he must have been a very interesting guy to talk to, because he happened to mention that he had come to Britain to study in 1967.

Now obviously 1967 was the Summer of Love in the West, but in China, if anything I’ve ever read about that era is true, gangs of young people in uniforms roamed around the country kicking people to death simply because they had been known to wear glasses from time to time. Jung Chang, the writer of ‘Wild Swans’ and ‘Mao: The Untold Story’ was only allowed to leave in 1978 after extensive political preparation. Whoever this guy was, it was fairly clear that his eyesight, not to mention his devotion to the Party, must have impressed the Red Guards a hell of a lot in order to be allowed to escape the fate that befell millions of his contemporaries; sent away from the cities to harvest stones in the backwoods of absolutely nowhere for the greater glory of the Great Helmsman.

He must have had some experiences along the way which caused him to at least question Party rule. One of the guys I live with is I think quite typical of more recent generations of overseas Chinese in that he doesn’t particularly want to live in China but doesn’t think the Party is doing a bad job and sees Mao as generally one of the good guys. I haven’t met anyone who dissents from this point of view, or at least if I have they’ve had no good reason to tell me about it – although I did once have a short conversation with Harry Wu about teddy bears, and I mentioned my first shameful encounter with a Chinese political dissident here. I would really like to have the opportunity to meet some Chinese people who are explicitly not happy about how their country is run, and am wondering how to go about it.

I don’t want to just march up to the protestors outside the Chinese Embassy and offer my services to the Falun Gong, which seems to be the most prominent organised political opposition outside China. I have no great wish to set myself on fire in Tiananmen Square. But I guess if I can’t make contact with Chinese dissidents in London, then where can I? Does anyone have Wei Jingsheng’s email address?

‘José Saramago in the Land of the Blind’, by me

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In the course of José Saramago’s ‘Blindness’, a euphorically pessimistic novel about a sudden and unexplained epidemic of blindness in an unnamed city and country, he makes some remarks about blind people which, in the context of a plague which has left all but one individual without sight, make a lot of sense. His essential argument has to do with solidarity making human society possible, so it seems reasonable to speculate that in a situation where nobody could actually see the Other, human feelings would take second place to a feral need to survive at any cost, which is what we witness throughout the novel.

There are, however, a couple of moments in the book where he seems keen to take it a little bit further and actually state quite baldly that the only reason that blind people have any feelings at all is because we are there to help them out. Which seems a little harsh, and perhaps a bit rich seeing as he himself wears a particularly thick pair of spectacles.

I don’t know if many blind people have read the novel. I did find one comment from a ‘visually impaired’ person who felt that ‘blindness operates in his text as both an intertextual sign and as a referent’, which is of course helpful, but may as far as I know not actually mean very much. Anyhoo. For it to be read widely in the, ahem, ‘blind community’ it would have to be published in Braille, and I don’t think it has been. Maybe, if it ever is, he might one day face a Salman Rushdie-style Fatwah, with copies of his and probably other books being burnt in obviously carefully controlled environments and our TV screens filled with the faces of angry blind people holding up photos of camels and Paris Hilton and proclaiming with fury ‘THIS MAN MUST DIE!’.

I digress. Here, in all it’s not-really-worth-reading-if-you-haven’t-read-the-book entirety is an essay I recently wrote about the novel, upon reading of the which (?!) they agreed to let me back into University, which is where I’ll be from October and hopefully up until the end of my life in, ooh, dozens of years’ time. I would particularly appreciate hearing any constructive comments from any blind readers out there, but unfortunately my experimentary attempts to make it easier for them by simply writing have sadly proved as fruitless as, erm, my daily diet.

Alors je me tais.

Would you consider H.G. Wells’ dictum, “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” an appropriate epigraph to ‘Blindness’ by Jose Saramago?

The mock-biblical quote with which Saramago chooses to open ”Blindness’ is instructive and ambiguous: ‘If you can look, see. If you can see, observe’. The verb he chooses to employ, ‘reparar’, has two meanings: both to take note of something and to remedy it. The conflation of seeing and understanding is one deeply embedded in our languages and our cultures, and Saramago makes it even more explicit on the final page of the book:

‘I think we didn’t go blind, I think we are blind, Blind people who can see, Blind people who can see without seeing.’

Saramago is very fond of aphorisms and sayings, of what ‘someone once said’. At two points in the book HG Well’s quote is mentioned: one of the internees’ attempts to apply it to the world in which they find themselves is rejected by one of his companions:

‘Someone once said that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, Forget about what someone once said, This is different, Here not even people with one eye would be saved.’

Also, towards the end of the book the doctor’s wife, the only person who retains her sight throught the epidemic, herself claims that she is neither the King nor the Queen of this ‘land of the blind’:

‘None of you know, none of you can know what it is to have eyes in a world of blind people, I’m no queen, no, I’m simply the one who was born to witness the horror.’

The initial structure of ‘Ensaio sobre a cegueira’ reflects that of several other Saramago books in which unexplained cataclysmic events give birth to a crisis of government and a social breakdown. In ”The Stone Raft’ Portugal and Spain become detached from the rest of Europe and float off into the Atlantic. In ‘Seeing’ a political crisis is engendered by a sudden and unexplained surge in the number of blank votes at a general election, leading to Government panic and martial law; and in his new book death ceases to kill, and once again the authorities are forced into desperate and hollow measures.

In ‘Blindness’, as with the aforementioned two books, the story is set in an unnamed country with characters known only by the descriptive epithets ascribed to them on their first appearance. Several of the characters comment that ‘blind people need no name’. It is also unclear if in Saramago’s novel he is talking about a ‘land’ of the blind or about an epidemic that infects all humanity across the world.

It is clear, however, that the ‘white blindness’ that keeps them from seeing is not conventional blindness. Something is profoundly wrong and in depriving all but one of his characters of vision, Saramago enacts a metamorphisis which inverts that of both Franz Kafka in ‘Metamorphisis’ and of James Kelman in ‘How Late it was, How Late’.

The vision of the world he wants the reader to witness is profoundly troubling and, insofar as it can be seen as an allegory, deeply pessimistic. In an interview with the magazine ‘Visão’ in 2002 he expressed the belief that ‘the world conjuncture at present is absolutely terrifying’. His intention is to make us ‘re-see’ the world; he told the Observer in May 2006:

“The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens. As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved, it’s the citizen who changes things. I can’t imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I’m a writer, but I live in this world and my writing doesn’t exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits.”

His books, then, have a very clear political point to make, a vision of the world we share which is intensely politicised. He told another interviewer in Spring 2002 that ‘I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn’t know how to write essays.’

The powers-that-be in his books are shown to be wanting. The authorities in ‘Blindness’ – as in both ‘Seeing’, ‘The Stone Raft’ and his latest novel – are hapless, cynical and ultimately unable to deal with the situation. They are seen trying to deal with the latest developments in the crisis and to save their own positions by immediately turning to the most authoritarian measures without thinking of the possible consequences:

‘Where are we going to put all these people, We’ll sort it out, occupy all the dormitory wards (in the asylum), If we do that the contaminated will come into direct contact with the blind, They’ll probably, sooner or later, go blind anyway, And what shall we do with the drivers of the buses, Just stick them in there too.’

A concern of the novel is the question of how the blind can organise themselves. As soon as those infected arrive in the asylum, attempts are made at organisation but the one person capable of establishing and maintaining order must hide the truth from her companions because, as her husband puts it, ‘they will probably turn you into their slave’. The repeated appeal for organisation goes largely unheeded.

When all order breaks down in the asylum, some of the internees attempt to establish their own authoritarian order. This, it is eventually revealed, is mainly due to the presence of someone who was formerly blind – not, of course, a one-eyed man, but someone with an obvious advantage:

‘Lucky so-and-sos…they can use him as a guide, a trained blind person is worth his weight in gold.’

The rule of these bullies is horrifyingly brutal but short-lived. When the central group of characters manage to leave the asylum, the doctor’s wife is able to find shelter and food, but the world that greets her eyes is one in which ‘time is ending, the rot is spreading, diseases find the door wide open, the water is running out and the food is turning into poison’. Here the central character is the only seeing person in a world entirely populated by the blind.

The characters have to try to survive in a world where ordinary day-to-day life has become impossible. Part of that day-to-day-life is based upon notions of paid work, private property, the commercial distribution of food, public provision of transport, health care, and the utilities and the maintanance of law and order. Also essential to our way of life is a belief that things are improving and will continue to improve in the future. The problem the novel poses is what happens when we can no longer depend on all of these things. This is part of the novel where the allegory with our present times is particularly precise and intense; the account of what the doctor’s wife sees is reminiscent of recent newspaper reports from parts of the world devastated by war, man-made famine or environmental cataclysm. Saramago urges us to confront the question of what alternative sources of authority we might look to in a world where our political leadership has utterly failed us.

One possible answer is that religion might provide a refuge, or at least some comfort, in desperate times. But the scene in the church, where all the icons and images are revealed to be blindfolded, is possibly the centrepiece of Saramago’s vision, of a world he exhorts us to ‘reparar’. God, he tells us ‘doesn’t deserve to see’ what we have witnessed. It is possible to see the preceding scene, in which the doctor’s wife sees the dancing flames from the supermarket basement and smells the burning bodies of those trapped below, as a vision of hell. The remaining humans are blind, burning in a subterranean hell, and there is no God to witness or to save them. Is it this realisation, and the fact that ‘the streets were looking worse and worse with each hour that passed’ – simply that things cannot possibly get any worse – that causes the epidemic to suddenly end?

In the HG Wells story the visitor to the ‘Land of the Blind’ sees a land where the inhabitants have managed to adapt and live without sight, but in Saramago’s much darker story a lack of vision is only compensated for by solidarity. At the start of the epidemic the first blind man is told by his rescuer ‘today it’s you, tomorrow it might be me’, and this sentiment is echoed throughout the book, for example when the doctor’s wife tells her husband:

‘Today is today, tomorrow is tomorrow, it’s today that I have the responsability (…) What responsibility, The responsibility that comes with having eyes when others have lost them, You can neither guide nor feed all the blind people in the world, I should.’

It is no accident that Saramago chooses a woman as his central protaganist. He seems to suggest that women are more capable of ‘seeing’ other people, whereas men tend to resort to brutality and attempts to exploit others. Often this selflessness on behalf of his female characters grates somewhat, but then his archetypal characters are rarely granted complex sentiments, instead exhibiting a certain naivety, particularly in the case of the men. When it has become clear to the reader that the man who helped the first blind man to his house has taken his car keys in order to steal his car, the latter remarks:

‘He probably just forgot, took them without realising.’

To some extent Saramago is setting his hapless protaganists up for a fall, for the moment when it will become clear that the powers-that-be have betrayed and abandoned them, and that all they have to depend on is each other.

Saramago believes artists share the responsibilty of all citizens, a responsibility to remedy the wrongs that we see around us. In another popular Portuguese proverb that he choses not to use in the novel (‘Eyes that don’t see, heart that doesn’t feel’) this common blindness prevents people not only from seeing, but also from feeling. In the land of the blind, people leave their houses and are unable to find them again, lose contact with their families, are forced to live a feral existence which precludes human sympathies. For Saramago, unlike in the story by HG Wells, it is impossible for human beings to live without the power of sight, but the central argument of his essay about blindness is that mutual understanding and a sense of solidarity with one another is what makes us human.

Damien Hirst: “F*ck all there at the end of the day”

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A Dead Shark Isn’t Art, Stuckism International 2003
In addition to being worth over £100 million, Damien Hirst is, according to today’s Observer, the most powerful figure in the art world today. His new work will cost between £8-£10 million to produce, but when it is complete it will be worth a hell of a lot more:

Damien Hirst’s work in progress is a small, delicate object: a life-size human skull. Not just any skull, mind, but one cast in platinum and encased entirely in diamonds – some 8,500 in all. It will be the most expensive work of art ever created, costing between £8m and £10m.

‘I just want to celebrate life by saying to hell with death,’ said the artist, ‘What better way of saying that than by taking the ultimate symbol of death and covering it in the ultimate symbol of luxury, desire and decadence? The only part of the original skull that will remain will be the teeth. You need that grotesque element for it to work as a piece of art. God is in the details and all that.’

Of course, diamonds are, for some people, as both Kanye West and Miss Dynamite have been keen to tell us, more than just a symbol of ‘luxury, desire and decadence’:

In many African countries, including Angola, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) diamonds have been, and continue to be linked to terrible human rights abuses either by insurgent groups to fuel conflict and carry out atrocities against innocent civilians or by unscrupulous government who are equally brutal.

In addition concerns have mounted over links between conflict diamonds and money laundering by groups like Al-Qaeda. While the Kimberley Process marks a positive step towards protecting the legitimate diamond industry and consumers from purchasing tainted stones, much reform is needed. KP’s narrow definition of conflict diamonds does not include polished stones and jewelry and could exclude diamonds originating from recognized governments such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. (from Amnesty International‘s website).

Hirst doesn’t seem to be aware of this. As for ‘sticking two fingers up to death’, the writer Saul Bellow once remarked that ‘death is the solid backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything’. He was of course a lot older and nearer death than Damien Hirst, and may have been less inclined to insult that which loomed much larger and darker in his mirror than it does in Hirst’s presumably diamond-encrusted one. Oddly enough, the title of Hirst’s most famous (and inevitably most expensive) work was ‘The Physical Impossibility Of Death In the Mind Of Someone Living’.

That work was his dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde, in case you were wondering. Not that I want to patronise anyone here, it’s just that most people, myself included, tend to remember the work itself rather than the name. It’s not clear whether the name is particularly important, given that Hirst once wrote of his own works:

“They’re bright and they’re zany – but there’s fuck all there at the end of the day.”

What strikes me about Hirst’s works is that, although he’s constantly cited as one of the world’s most successful artists, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of this in anything other than commmercial terms. I’ve never heard anyone mention his shark piece in any context beyond the fact that it exists and that it cost a lot of money. There is never any indication that it has any meaning for anyone, let alone the artist himself. It has no resonance, it simply does not register in any discourse about art or about the world. Could that not be one mark of failure for an artist?

Maybe his next work should be a huge white diamond-encrusted elephant. He could get those French blokes to help him put it together. Then when they’ve finished we could all read in the newspapers about how fucking expensive the whole thing has been.