Thursday 30 September 2010

Throw me a bone!

Calling all dog breeders! What EXACTLY is the difference between a pit bull terrier and a Staffordshire terrier? I've given a lot of thought to this.

Is it that a Staffie will chew your baby 36 times before swallowing it?

I give up. I don't think there is one. Throw me a bone!

Monday 27 September 2010

Spin Unspun

Spin is no longer our conscious attempt to doctor reality, but has become the prism through which we observe it. It’s no longer enough to sum it up as "Don't worry if we cock it up now: we can always spin it up later".

It's worse. We now so far conflate substance and message that we often give scant attention to getting things right in the first place. Ironically, spin has become so normalised that we are becoming oblivious to how we present things. Far from conning others, we're starting to con ourselves.

It’s a bit like editing a mail-order catalogue: you spend so much time checking and rechecking the tiny details that you miss the fact that this year’s edition is still dated ‘2008’. (And my goodness: now that I'm looking - so was last year’s!)

Here are some examples. Both the county councils I’ve worked for – and they aren’t alone - have an 'Anti-Social Behaviour Coordinator'. The one I’m with at the moment not only "offers support for domestic abuse" but will soon appoint a 'Drugs and Alcohol Champion'. And only today I saw a notice strapped to a lamp post: Caution: Police Crime Operation in Progress. (I'll ignore the use of “in progress” as this is tackled with brutal finality in my post of 29th August.)

You’ll immediately have spotted what links these examples. Just in case you haven’t, it’s this: the forms of words used are ridiculous, but weren’t picked up by those best qualified to do so, namely the organisations themselves.

To take the first: at the simplest level, what should we expect an 'Anti-Social Behaviour Coordinator' to do? Of course (it’s in the job title, stoopid!): coordinate anti-social behaviour. How? Here’s an example.

In my village there is a small gang of pensioners who terrorise local youths at the bus-stop opposite our new branch of Sunset Retirement Homes. I know this, by the way, because there is a road sign just before you get there. It reads Danger: Old People. Oh yes it does.

At the other end of town is a loose collection of former nuns who dropped out of The Good Shepherd Convent last year and have recently discovered the pleasures of cider, only to have been barred from The Good Shepherd public house on account of it. They accost passers-by for money, leave empty bottles in the park and sometimes urinate into open-top sports cars, but because they are drunk most of the time they rarely leave the area, which has become something of a home to them.

The two groups – the pensioners and the ex-nuns - never mix.

I telephone the Anti-Social Behaviour Coordinator. He (sorry, but we need a He in this tough, demanding role) is soon On The Case. Above all, he is concerned that there is no contact - let alone coordination - between the two groups, their members going about their daily predations upon the society that sustains them as if the others didn’t even exist.

We must coordinate their activities! Our man is no slouch. He promptly organises a meeting between them, rounding up for good measure a number of people who sleep rough in the woods and never make contact with anyone unless it is to direct wolf-like and other eerie noises at primary school children on their way home in the afternoons.

Alone these people are mere nuisances; but together, under the stern but benevolent eye of our Anti-Social Behaviour Coordinator, they have at least the chance to become a formidable drain upon the resources and will of a whole community. And we thought social solidarity was dead!

But serious questions remain: there are no signs either that the pensioners drink to excess or that the nuns have yet developed a crack cocaine habit that might induce them to assault and rob those from whom they currently merely solicit money. And the sleepers in the woods are, so far as we can tell, ‘clean’.

So, because he really takes his job seriously and does not want simply to tick his own boxes, the Anti-Social Behaviour Coordinator networks for partners.

Who is first on his list? Why of course, the Drugs and Alcohol Champion!

(As for the Police Crime Operation, well at least they’re up front about it these days, whether or not it is yet in progress.)

Friday 17 September 2010

On Richard Strauss: a Good European

Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen has one movement, is scored for 23 strings and lasts for only a few minutes longer, unless you are Otto Klemperer. He finished it weeks before the end of the Second World War. By then, much of Dresden, Munich, Hamburg and many other great German cities had been destroyed by Allied bombs.

Strauss wrote it in memory of a great artistic culture whose legacy had been first traduced by the Nazis and then blown to pieces by the Allies, and whose rebirth he could neither foresee nor perhaps even imagine. Few people knew or loved that culture better than he did. It must have been terrible to try to put its loss into music without falling into despair. He didn't, and the result is one of the noblest, most moving things I have ever heard.

For despite its subject, Metamorphosen is a positive work, never melancholic and never sentimental. Its sadness is great but is seeded with hope. The culture Strauss celebrates and the loss he laments are all of ours. Allied bombs and Nazi genocide; western culture devouring its innocent children: the grief is shared, not personal, and just as the tools for such destruction were immanent in the western tradition, so are the means for redemption. Strauss portrays neither the bombs nor the horror but a state of mind in the face of them.

Metamorphosen begins quietly, gently and elegiacally. There are allusions to Wagner and Beethoven. After the wild firestorm of the middle part the music calms but then swells again, gloriously reworking and re-layering earlier themes picked now from the rubble. It closes quietly, neither in anguish nor banal optimism, or even in repose, but as if Strauss had gently laid it down for us to pick up again - but only if we will. It is the sleep not of death but of Brünnhilde, or of Arthur.

This weak bridge carries me to thoughts about why I can't separate how I see Metamorphosen from how we see Strauss, ‘we’ being those other and often reluctant heirs to our wonderful European cultural heritage, the Brits. Assuming that we are bothered to think about Strauss and Metamorphosen at all these days, here is how our default cultural setting, which selectively seduces people across the political spectrum, might encourage us to see them:

Strauss is suspect; he makes for a good ‘Other’. He was German, bourgeois, liked money and wrote a lot of big, bombastic, often tiresome, almost Meatloafean, tone poems. He accepted the post of President of the Nazis' Reichsmusikkammer, even though he never joined the party and was always a bit contrary. He was, in short, ‘one of them’, or at best one of those Germans who kept quiet; and ‘they’ - all of them - got what they deserved, or at least what had to be done. This is losers’ art and, since losers don’t write history, as our greatest wartime leader said, why should they creep in through the back door with their music?

It’s time we moved on. This loser can teach us something and, as all good art should, Metamorphosen may make us look at ourselves too. Strauss was a good European. We could be better ones and should embrace the baby he laid on our doorstep.

Friday 10 September 2010

On burning Korans and denying Holocausts

To Muslims, both Jews and Christians are 'people of the book'. This makes Pastor Terry Jones's chest-pumping all the more depressing. And at least Berlusconi runs a country.

How sad, too, that all books will soon be online. It may solve problems like that created by Pastor Jones's wanting to burn one, since publicly deleting computer files doesn't quite have the same style. But it would create another one: now bigots everywhere will have to return to burning other things, like people. I'll bet they can't wait.

Anyway, about burning the Koran:

  • Pastor Terry Jones and those like him are unpleasant, dangerous people who abuse the spirit if not the laws of democracy, and are cowards because they use its laws as cover for that abuse. Jones encourages other bigots, including Islamic ones, to do the same and worse. He should not burn the Koran or encourage others to do it. He should shut up.
  • The American government's response, which is to discourage rather than prohibit his words and actions, is the right and noble one, and in keeping with the spirit that Jones so crassly offends, even if it sits ill with its foreign policy and may be the death of many of us some day soon (I'm thinking by the end of the next decade here and I have decided to move to west Wales, which is upwind of most catastrophes I can foresee).

Reporting the controversy, the BBC today contrasted the American response with what European countries might do in the same situation and noted that denying the existence of the Holocaust is illegal in 16 of them.

But I don't think it should be illegal to deny the Holocaust, any more than it should be illegal for Pastor Jones to be a nasty man and offend people, whether they want to be offended or not.

Having a vile, self-serving or pecuniary motive for holding an opinion does not invalidate it; sound contrary evidence does. If someone thinks they can prove that the Holocaust didn't happen, or happened differently, they should be free to say why they think so. Their evidence can then be weighed against the opposing evidence.

Governments should foster respect for truth above falsehood, and open debate in a spirit of good will is a fine way to go about it. If Holocaust deniers are wrong - and I presume the governments of all the 16 European states believe this; as, by the way, do I - it's better if people see that they're wrong than not, and better to have their views in the open than underground. If they're right, or if their evidence causes some revision of what we believe to be true, well, we'll just have to deal with that.

I recently went to an education conference on 'valuing people' - or some other publicly funded, recession-proofed gagfest; they tend to blur into each other - where 'not valuing people' rapidly came to be epitomised by the British National Party rather than our own petty inadequacies, which would have been much more pertinent. By this means, 'not valuing people' was somehow blithely equated with a return to Nazism, Apartheid and segregation in the deep South. The hall was stuffed with teachers; perhaps some were history teachers, although I hope not, because their silence wouldn't have said much in their favour.

I commented that the connections being made weren't just historically and culturally illiterate but played into the BNP's hands: that odious party benefits because both national and local governments see the issues it exploits as outside the compass of open and reasoned debate. More silence, except for one or two groans and the sound of urgent scribbling by the head of my organisation in her notebook.

Are governments really scared of racists, anti-semites, religious bigots and homophobes, or of what they assume is our stupidity when confronted by them?

Let them, and others, speak.