Palin, Voldemort 2012

Joy almost unconfined when I read then news this morning. Hope at last! Big rally in Washington held by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert – the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. For once a halt to all those endless reports about mad hatters at tea parties, with Sarah Palin as a malevolent Alice, and Fox TV talking up the ‘patriots’, giving their events and issues attention they’d never normally have achieved. Maybe it’s not accidental that it’s been hard to pick up on sane America in the UK because we have to put up with the Murdoch Times, Murdoch Sunday Times, Murdoch Sun…with other natural tea party supporters in the Mail and Telegraph.

This suddenly is the America we remember from the Obama campaign and inauguration, that doesn’t get reported – and been there all the time. They’re disappointed, yes , that more hasn’t happened, critical of banks, health reforms (too much or too little), Afghan policy and much more, but aware that the American way shouldn’t involve all that confrontation and nastiness, opposition to any compromise or middle ground, the hatred of opponents… The Tea Party is a legit movement, but it’s got out of control.

‘Palin, Voldemort 2012’ was the slogan of the rally. A few more (courtesy of the BBC):

I’m a little annoyed but I’ll get over it

Somewhat irritated about extreme outrage

I’m pretty content actually

We have nothing to fear but fear itself and spiders

A few more:

Hyperbole is the antichrist

Obama – re-open NY subway toilets now

One nation under Aqua Buddha

Fox keeps fear alive. (Shades of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox and all those chickens.)

Aqua Buddha…. being interested in Buddhism I thought I’d check this out. Tea Party senate candidate Rand Paul, son of Ron, apparently ‘kidnapped’ a girl back in his college days and took her off to be inducted into the Aqua Buddha sect…all very unChristian, and Paul has had a lot of flak for it. Now we all want to know more about Aqua Buddha.

Stewart at the end of the rally:

We live in hard times not end times….. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing…. We hear every damned day about how fragile our community is – on the brink of catastrophe. We work together to get things done every damn day.

The last comment prompted the loudest cheer of the day, reports the Beeb.  And it is the best. The simplest of messages but with all the screaming going on around you the easiest to forget. They scream, you scream, we all scream. Ted Kennedy and John Macain had a better way when in the Senate of not long ago they worked together if the occasion demanded.

Obama is not up for re-election next week, but he might as well be as the crazy US electoral system could well impose a Republican Congress upon him, or at least a Republican House of Representatives. All we read is about the disillusioned masses, Tea Parties, Main Street rebelling against Pennsylvania Avenue and Wall Street. (Who would be a road these days?) It’s crazy to blame Obama for the crash and the housing crisis, but it goes deeper – it’s seen as battle for America’s soul, and Fox TV and others have tried to ensure that race and parentage cast Obama outside the pale of true Americans. It’s all been pretty vicious stuff, and I’m not certain I’d enjoy being out on Main Street listening to all the anger and vituperation.

The sad thing is – Obama is still Obama. The guy who wrote Audacity of Hope, who bared his soul in Dreams From My Father, hasn’t changed. His ability to do what he wants has been terribly constrained by the crisis, and a social liberal is not going to endear himself to the Sarah Palin right, and, well, the heathcare bill was always going to be massively divisive.

Out on the left of the Democrats we have people who wanted more, and blame Obama for that. By holding back their support they will get less instead. Strange how people’s political psyches work. 

On the right, if we had only an inkling before of what the backwoods were capable if we know better now. I can relate to the small town, the backwoods mentality. I want the state off my back. Give me a stretch of the backwoods and maybe a view out over the canopy, and a log cabin, comfy bed(!) and log fire I’d be happy, for a while at least. But there’s a real global world out there, and unless we get on board in both political and economic terms we’ve had it.  It’s the old argument: if you’re on board you can change things. (Likewise over here with Europe.) . If you’re not, they pass you by, and you’re left waving for the train to stop, and if you’re  lucky they’ll pull you up on to the last coach…

So get out all you Democrats, all you undecideds, students, anyone who looks beyond the small-town palisade – and VOTE.

Wish I could, but I guess I’m quite happy being English.  Less stressful ….

Walking in the October sunlight, in Richmond Park, the colours hardly changing, still the banks of green woodland as backdrop to sparkling water. A time of peace, which I then seek to analyse. It’s as if I am asking myself – what are the component parts of this peace? There is harmony of colour and form, but whence comes our appreciation of such harmony? At such times we feel good toward others, good without any prior motivation, so whence comes this altruism?  It was as if I must understand what I saw and heard before me, before I could appreciate it fully, and as I did I emptied out not all but some of the beauty. 

I then concluded I was over-analysing. Did Wordsworth do this in the Lake District two centuries ago, or Bach fifty and more years before that, or Yeats in all the turmoil of the Troubles?  No, they knew where they stood in relation to their world, they avoided self-consciousness,  and found a higher form of expression not least because they didn’t analyse.

Best on such autumn days just to enjoy the knowledge beyond words. The words will come in their own time. 

** 

The greatest art comes when societies are shaking off bonds and discovering their identities, Bach born thirty years after the Thirty Years War, Wordsworth reacting intensely against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and Yeats embodying that remarkable self-discovery that marked the Ireland of a hundred years ago. What have we in our own times? Less than 50% of Americans now believe in the American dream, we have a sense of a broken not a big society in our own land, we find identity in football not in any sense of our own creativity. So it’s not surprising that our art is valueless, and mimics the absence of identity and substance it finds around it. Arguably, in that sense it’s successful, but is success which merely confirms the disjunction we see all around us really worthy of the name?

And yet, taking this same fractured society, if we were only to view it, ourselves, and others, in a different way, see what binds rather than destroys, we might find we were living in a golden age.

Thinking books, and the future of books, a subject as reader and publisher that’s dear to my heart. Something we should all be thinking about. How will we read in future – smartphone, iPad or similar, PC, or even an old-fashioned book?

There’s a big, big debate going on out there, and new platforms and approaches emerging all the time. A snippet from that debate…

Bestselling (so I’m told) author Sean Godin has decided to dispense with his publisher, Penguin in the USA, and go direct to his readers, because he  believes he has through his blog (readership in the several  hundreds of thousands he tells us) identified his readership.  He writes: It’s been years since I woke up in the morning saying, “I need to write a book, I wonder what it should be about.” Instead, my mission is to figure out who the audience is, and take them where they want and need to go, in whatever format works, even if it’s not a traditionally published book.

Do I want an author out there figuring where I want to go and having him or her take me there? What a crazy, insulting notion.

I want an author to write because he has a great idea, has something to say, believes in something. I’ll follow him there if I want to, become a fan if I want to.

We’re in a world which claims to be the new democracy, where we all can have a say, and in many cases that happens, and it’s quite a breakthrough. But it’s also a world which crowds our every reading and watching and listening moment, where CCTV watches us, credit agencies check us, direct marketers profile us, and now authors suss us out and write what we want to read.

Seth Godin’s approach is better suited to running a grocery shop than writing books.

Just what has Charles Saatchi given to the nation? A unwanted present of highly ephemeral art, art which at best belongs to the moment and at worst has no place in time or art. Art which once it’s achieved the shock it was aiming for has no other value, and yet, it’s now ours, glorified as the Museum of Contemporary Art, London, God help us,  in the hope that we will be condemned to remember it.

Financially it has huge value, but for how long? How long before it all crumbles? Duchamp didn’t want his art to survive but we’ve made certain it did. In our time Hurst and Emin may want their output to survive, but I’m sure future generations, museums notwithstanding, will make certain it doesn’t.

Only art which goes beyond political and cultural boundaries, and defines in some way what it means to be human, can survive.  Art that shocks is hardly art, and only curiosity will keep it alive.

Saatchi’s pseudo-museum can only have value if it endlessly chucks out the old and replenishes with the new. But it’s all tied to the values Saatchi represents and the monetary value he put on each item, so he won’t want to see them replaced, and thereby devalued. If ever a museum was tied to money, this is it, if ever in time a museum was destined to fail it is this.

If I’m wrong… well. I can’t be wrong. If I’m wrong, it will be a measure of our times, and how we’ve sold out to the ephemeral, and put anything of lasting value well behind us. That may indeed be the world to which were headed, a world of soundbites and snippits, easily accessed, easy to move on from, ever-changing, and ultimately worthless.

How we hold on to values in our modern world is a major concern. Saatchi may yet triumph. Inception as a new movie is all about inhabiting minds. Maybe our minds are already inhabited…

One final thought. Does the nation exist as a disembodied entity to which items can be given? I think not, and thank God for that. The nation as the state? ‘No charges,’ we are told, ‘will fall to the state.’ Which is just as well.

We’ve been worried about Michael Gove. In a government of pragmatists (in most of the senior positions) he stands out as a zealot. We thought though that he’d be reined in. It looks as if we were wrong. Quoting him from last Monday (5th July):

’The Building Schools for the Future scheme has been responsible for about one third of all this department’s capital spending. But throughout its life it has been characterised by massive overspends, tragic delays, botched construction projects and needless bureaucracy …. dysfunctional.’

It’s bad enough to cancel, but the language has all the hallmarks of Tory right-wing true believers, a partisan bunch with their own agenda and few supporters among teachers.

Gove is overlooking how much people have been engaged with this process, and how it gave schools an opportunity to escape from decaying buildings into decent learning environments. They are now told in effect that it was a worthless process, was misconceived and didn’t deliver. It was as everyone knows seriously flawed: too much money focused on too few schools (rebuilding all schools by 2023 was always a pipedream), too ambitious for each chosen school, too time-consuming, bureaucratic, always overspending and likely to continue to do so.

But it was a programme. And now there’s none.

It needed to be re-thought, reconfigured so the benefits were spread more widely and in the current climate slowed down, but not abandoned. It’s one thing to reduce spending, another to take out spending altogether, to take out hope, and you don’t take out hope where children are concerned.

My hunch is that Gove’s actions are terminal to his hopes are transforming the school system on a wider scale. Who will countenance money spent on gimmicky new schools when existing schools are denied any funding for new build, and forced to exist in structures crumbling around them for at least another ten years?

By actions and language Gove has foolishly engendered so much hostility that the educational world, already inclined not to take him seriously, though fearful of where his ideas might go, will now be very disinclined to pick up on any initiatives where they’ve not already bought into the ideas.

He’s made life very difficult for the Lib Dems as coalition partners, and for his PM too. Cameron has been clever in avoiding some of the hostility he might have expected, taking care not to go out on a limb. By giving Gove his head he’s done himself damage. He needs a radical in the cabinet to keep his right-wing happy, but put simply he’s cut his education minister too much slack and he’ll regret it.

Language and attitude do Gove no credit. We don’t like his language and even fewer of us will want his policies now.

I look around my study and wish I had more space for all the variegated spines and odd sizes, all the colour and fun of a well-organised book collection. Space is one problem, the other is the internet. Without the internet, I’d have been more ruthless, spent more time in moving out some of the older books, the memories, the must-read-sometimes, and made certain I had in here the essential reference, all those reliable vade mecums which you know will give you the hard information – on a politician or poet, an idea, a simple fact – that these days you can get online.

What you gain with the internet is serendipity, there’s always something to surprise you, or make you think differently. What you lose is a sense of order, as you build a library as an extension of your ideas and interests, pieces in a jigsaw mirroring the jigsaw in your mind. Not one that’s ever remotely completed, sometimes hardly started, but there is a sense of order and indeed development there and for just that reason what you think or write makes better sense.

Ah, but the internet is free, you say. My rejoinder: you’ve a choice between what I could call bright happy chaos, that doesn’t cost you a sou, and something of more substance, with your library the mirror of your mind, your study the fulcrum. Make the internet your mirror and you may briefly be happy, but you’re lost.

The Sublime in Art (Tate Britain from May 2010): an exhibition that takes us beyond ‘art is what I like’ to asking why it is we like it. Like it or not, we’re into aesthetics. 

Discussions of the Sublime in art usually start with Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (punchy title), and the Tate in this case does just that. 

Turner’s storms and shipwrecks and de Loutherberg’s avalanches, Francis Danby’s biblical flood, Joseph Ward’s Gordale Scar and John Martin’s Last Judgement, they all take us to the edge – to a dramatic point where (in imagination) we fear for our very existence. The walls of Gordale Scar are unnaturally, threateningly high. The imploding earth at the Day of Reckoning is terminal. Awe also belongs to the Sublime, and Martin’s plains of heaven take the breath away. 

But the exhibition loses its way a little. 

John Collier’s North-West Passage focuses on Hudson adrift in his boat, Richard Dadd’s Return From Egypt pushes the boundaries of sanity (his own), Millais’s Dew-Drenched Furze and Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix celebrate love in very different ways. Any connection with the Sublime is tenuous.  All are mid-19^th century or later, and we’re stretching definitions and timeframes here.

We’re closer with William Blake’s Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils. (Some title.) Hogarth has Satan and Death confronting each other, separated only by Sin. Two paintings bringing the Bible and Paradise Lost frighteningly to life. But even here there’s not the identification with experience that the Sublime needs really to make an impact. Blake and Hogarth’s are descriptive paintings, whereas we can imagine ourselves caught up in Danby’s flood or de Loutherberg’s avalanche. 

What about Orpen’s desolate World War I landscape, Zonnebeke. Sublime? 

Arguably it would have been better to have stayed closer to 18^th century definitions, when Beauty, with its focus on form, the Sublime and the Picturesque came to define aesthetic sensibility. We’d have then had a real contribution to an understanding of the Sublime in art, rather than a catch-all from the Tate’s collection. Even if we define it as Romantic art, the net is still cast too wide.

I loved the paintings and the juxtapositions ask important questions. But as an exhibition on the Sublime as a movement, a period, a sensibility – well, to me it doesn’t quite work.

Caricature has been alive and well since the 17th century and especially since Hogarth’s time. That’s a message that comes over loud and clear in the Tate’s Rude Britannia exhibition (June 2010). There’s an attempt to divide into sections – bawdy, absurd, political, social satire – but the simpler characterisation is political and social.

Punch defined a century of British life (I loved Charles Spencelayh’s Laughing Parson, chuckling over his copy of Punch), and Lee Baxendale lampooned all our schooldays brilliantly with the Bash Street kinds. Viz took us places where DC Thomson no longer could.

But even Viz, thirty years on, seems quite gentle and playful. Political caricature isn’t. Buttocks and wind featured large for Gillray and Rowlandson, with royalty the very literal butt of their humour. Nothing quite so blatant these days. Spitting Image, Scarfe and Steadman stand out. Martin Rowson too. Tony Blair is a godsend: few have fallen so far, and few have a smile and a gauntness that gives so much help.

On the downside there are sketchy contributions from the likes of David Shrigley which are for the most part facile and tell us nothing. Sarah Lucas has a depressing self-assurance, and short films try patience. Caricature is all about immediacy. As with satire there’s a strong intelligence that characterises the best, a relevance and impact, a stretching of truth that nonetheless never loses touch with reality.

Talking of stretching – there’s Major’s stretched underpants, Blair’s stretched smile, Robert Walpole’s stretched buttocks. You don’t have to stretch to much, a nose here, a jawline there, and that’s enough. Scarfe and Steadman went further of course, but they’re exceptions.  For both satire and caricature it’s the little push, the little stretch that pays the biggest dividend.

There’s a lot of heat and not too much light in the debate about the public sector at the moment.  What we don’t get is balance – the pros and cons. I’m less worried about entitlements, more concerned to establish what a sensible limit to the public sector should be.

One current shibboleth: public sector workers are overpaid and over-pensioned.  The truth: some are, some senior execs are, most aren’t, most get by. They’ve accepted long years of being relatively underpaid (though with the prospect of a good pension) and now pay is better they find themselves pilloried – with a broad perception that they’re a) parasitical and b) doing work that’s dispensable.  

Another: hit the management hard, protect the front line. There’s a perception out there that you can get rid of the support staff and managers and leave the front line untouched. Maybe, but then the nurses will have much less time for patients, and teachers for pupils.

And a third: the private sector should take on public sector roles. In the health service, schools, defence? Some areas the state does much much better.

Let’s think for a moment about what everyone does in the private sector. Technology and efficiencies and outsourcing mean there are many fewer productive, fewer manufacturing jobs in the private sector these days.  Jobs are in the service sector, maybe (maybe not) add to the quality of life, but aren’t productive in the ordinary sense of the word. Now, wouldn’t it be better if we were paying a little more into schools and NHS budget (if wisely spent) – and less buying new fridges or a gourmet meal or even a Big Mac twice a week? We need a productive, value-adding base to the economy but it simply can’t be the size it used to be. Just what are the private-sector jobs that everyone will be doing if we have public expenditure down to 40% of GDP – and full(ish) employment? Will they be jobs worth doing? And conversely, easily shaken out as soon as the economy turns down?

All the talk is about work and employment, but the reality is as it has been for decades that most of us have more and more leisure on our hands. We’ve sidelined a debate that goes back to Veblen, and has an immediate relevance.

Back to the public sector. Hit it too hard and we do a lot of damage. We’re in a world of portfolio workers, short-term contracts, outsourcing, a world where loyalty, trust and commitment are much harder to find. That may be inevitable for the private sector these days, but must it be for the public sector, with all its public-facing roles?  We must make certain it isn’t.

And a concomitant: if we’re not showing loyalty and commitment in our working lives, what chance our lives in our local community? We’re in danger of losing the habit – if we even still have it – of getting out there. The big society looks increasingly like a graft that won’t take.

The public sector isn’t sacrosanct. Staffing levels and pensions will and should take a hit. But for all our sakes we should tread carefully.