On Marche?

As cures for populism go, the French one is already looking a bit, well, homeopathique. 

Is anyone really that convinced by the whole insider-outsider ploy? Only in France perhaps, where acting all superior is actually a valid variant of the common touch. 

Frenchness and middle of la rue, centrist, fence-sitting politics are such an absurdly unlikely match-up, that Macron's novel movement En Marche! has almost inevitably achieved the sort of rebel cachet that most establishment rearguard actions could only dream of. 

The trouble is I think that most jubilant market commentators, especially in the US, have failed to brush up on the French constitutional system, which differs from the American model in at least one important respect: the executive and legislature cannot function properly unless driven by the same basic political tendency. 

So Macron, a candidate whose would-be party currently has a grand total of zero MPs, will have some work to do prior to the June parliamentary elections and most probably throughout any term as Le President. 

Just because people are prepared to vote for him to keep Le Pen out of the Élysée Palace does not mean that constituency voters will behave quite so tactically. 

As James Fenby observed in this week’s Spectator: ‘A movement that came from nowhere could all too easily dissolve like snowflakes in the sun’. 

Media Bias

The snap election campaign is but a day or two old and already the Corbynites are pre-emptively calling out media bias. I can see this getting as tedious as listening to the Special One whingeing about alleged unfair treatment from referees; often before the match has even been played. .

Readers from outside the UK might be wondering what all the fuss is about. Even before we were all formally walled off inside our social media silos, bias was pretty much what the media was supposed to be about. But in over in Blighty we have a national broadcaster tasked with a state-sponsored mission to at least appear impartial: Aunty, aka the BBC.

This provides both sides with a perennial opportunity to act out their inner Mourinho. Naturally, they never accuse the Beeb of being absurdly partisan AGAINST their political opponents.

In the good old days when the polarities of British politics primarily involved progressive vs conservative sensibilities, the BBC could make a decent enough show of balance. But cripes, nowadays it’s all urban vs rural, educated vs unlettered, cosmopolitan vs nationalist, expert vs fuckwit etc. So an organisation such as the BBC — at its core urban, educated, cosmopolitan and (usually) expert — is basically up a gum tree. Even if we were only talking about inclusive vs narrow, it would surely be hard to be balanced and narrow at the same time.

Anyway, bias as used by the Left is in some ways the equivalent of division as employed by the Right — revealing how they would all prefer it if their messages could, if at all possible, arrive unfiltered at the trough where the cattle are to imbibe them.

Jaloux

Feeling kind of envious of the Froggies for (possibly) having found a way to stick one to the existing political order without simultaneously appearing half-witted...

Forked Paths

Self-consciously classless America is possibly the worst place imaginable to be leading the global cascading revolt against elites.

Classes are the headline acts in complex social ecosystems, but instead the US chooses to engage a set of stereotypical tableaux which it constantly plays back to itself through the sovereign medium of its cultural specula.

On my very first visit to America at 13 years of age I found myself within days of my arrival at that elite gathering - brunch at the Boca Ratón Club - which authentically featured a tuxedo'd string quartet playing The Hunt (K458) by Mozart. (Granted, in the Hollywood version of this scene, it is invariably Vivaldi providing the gilt-edged muzak.)

In that self-mythologising land, the person entering such a dining space with no clue about which sort of fork to use with which dish is a de facto social hero or heroine.

You can bang on until the vets with PTSD come home about the underlying radicalism of the American Revolution, but it was essentially a non-comformity of individuals who didn’t know which fork to use.

And this rebellion has never been far below the surface of American small-d democracy and freedumb. Hence the current incumbent of the White House - who looks like a member of the elite to any bien-pensant euro-chattereur, but on the other side of the pond has just the requisite number of chips on his shoulder to stand out as an insurgent.

Buscando una pinche procesión...

Cucuruchos Enojados?  Seen a few of them around.

How cool would it be to shoot a spoof of this making use of some of the purple people? 

On the Spectrum

So the Dortmund pipe-bomber was 'on the Islamist spectrum'. What other contemporary spectra are out there? 

The Ayn Rand spectrum? La Glow is on that one for sure. 

Then there's the Wenger Out spectrum, the Corbynite (or ista) spectrum and of course the Hitler Wasn't So Bad spectrum. 

Plus the From Russia With Love spectrum...

United...

At what point in the life of a so-called civilised society does it become permissable for a company to treat its paying customers the way that United treated that doctor? If airport security is supposed to be the early warning indicator of how our governments would really like to treat us most of the time, then the treatment we get once we make it through to the departure lounge and then on to the plane may be an indicator of how corporations would like us to submit to them. And anglophone administrations and airline corporations have only just recently combined to dream up some nonsense about exploding laptops and tablets that will help the latter compete unfairly against Middle Eastern and Asian airlines hailing from nations where an entrenched tradition of hospitality and basic civility appear to persist.

White Elephants

Anyone who has spent any time living in and around this city must have speculated why there are so many essentially empty gated communities in the area. 

A visit to Google Earth can be instructive.

You might have already supposed that these would-be condominios are part of the wider phenomenon of over-exploitation of an actually limited economic opportunity that characterises so much of the 'entrepreneurial' exertions of La Antigua. 

We've seen it with cyber cafés, then spas and now taco joints. 

Or you could speculate that the relative returns from exploiting land for domestic real estate compared to say coffee cultivation are now so evident that speculators have been sucked into this marginal space somewhat feverishly. 

But the truth is that a significant number of these walled compounds have been tellingly situated beside roads which line the edges of the big estates. 

It's not that the big coffee fincas of DOC La Antigua are no longer able to make money from the bean. The sheer number of helicopters in the air around here at the weekends suggests otherwise. It's that advances in modern infrastructure over the past few decades have conspired to complicate their security issues. 

And so the finqueros either sell off the land on the edge of their estates or elect to 'develop' these outlying terrenos themselves. The idea being that weekending capitalinos or gullible gringos can be unwittingly co-opted into the role of wachimen. 

Even if nobody bites, they get a wall and a 24-hour guarida, which they have deemed sufficient deterrent to the incursive sort. 

The Absence

God knows that if he were to show himself he would cease to exist. He himself has never claimed to exist. He allows himself to be sensed only so that the problem of his existence may be posed > Jean Baudrillard

Indeed, God functions primarily as an absence for believer and non-believer alike. 

If humanity were to stumble across credible evidence for His existence, both would find themselves immediately out of business, and so too, to a large extent would God. 

Burning the candle at both ends

Thanks to David Goodhart we have a new way of bifurcating entire complex societies into separate polarised tendencies: the somewheres and the anywheres.

Over-simplified of course, but let’s run with it...

Right now the revolt of the somewheres against free trade, free movement, free bathroom choice and so on is in full flow.

And it appears to be posing a significant threat to democratic life in the developed world — precisely because it is taking place through the medium of democratic institutions.

But before we had the revolt of the somewheres, we had the underhand, barely visible machinations of the anywheres, which had (and continue to have) as much potential for disrupting democracy — precisely because they deliberately bypass the medium of democratic institutions.

How you respond to Theresa May's notorious remark that  “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere”, depends to a large extent on which of these two anti-democratic tendencies is currently causing you the most anxiety. 

Plain Sight

When I first got involved with proactive Internet communications in the early to mid-90s (largely in the context of Usenet groups), it occurred to me that the age of the cover-up was almost over: if the security services wanted to do anything outrageous they could hide it in plain sight amidst other manufactured narratives. Online audiences would lose the ability (or just the will...) to probe below the surface in order to distinguish between fact and fabrication. 

It seemed to be then that the CIA might already be doing this, but nowadays the Russians and the Chinese appear to be leading the way. 

The crest of a slump...

Iain Sinclair explores 'endgame London' in the current edition of the London Review of Books...

"That impulse towards wiping the slate clean and starting over. ‘London was, but is no more.’ John Evelyn writing, after the Great Fire, with such relish in his plain statement of fact. ‘London was, but is no more.’ It reminds me of hearing Ian Holloway, the manager of Queen’s Park Rangers, on the radio. He’s got a nice West Country burr, very soothing for his employers. He was talking about his club’s horrible run of form when he said, with disarming optimism, ‘I think we’re right on the crest of a slump.’ And that’s where the current last London seems to be: riding the crest of a slump. That madness of quitting Europe, burning our bridges, starving hospitals of funds, is part of a suicide-note delirium. When the worst is coming straight at you at a thousand miles a minute, embrace it."

Triggeration Day

Today the nation of my birth began a process which can be characterised as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. 

This is beyond contention I believe. What is certainly worth disputing is just how much baby and how much bathwater might be involved. 

And I have friends and family whose perspicacity is largely beyond reproach who are convinced that the baby is dead or at least dying anyway. 

I have to acknowledge that my own perspective on this has educational and generational bias. 

In the 80s I took advantage on several occasions of the Inter-Rail programme and travelled freely around what we Brits call 'the continent', including those parts still under the sway of communist autocracies, plus two visits to the pre-Glasnost USSR. 

Then in the early 90s I helped build a new business situated at the intersection of the then wild west frontiers of fabulous opportunity - digial communications and the economies of the newly-liberated states of Central and Eastern Europe. 

There seemed to be plenty of baby to cherish there, but more recent contemplation sees me admitting that in the end there was also a good deal more bathwater than at first anticipated. 

This appears to be true of all the babies one might choose to cherish, but those above and below me in age seem strangely unwilling to acknowledge the need for compromise these days. 

I bought into both the soi-disant 'European Dream' and the 'Digital Revolution' because both not only promised great things, in their early phases the delivery was also indubitable.  (And because in the case of the dream, there was just enough of the nightmare still visible to spur one on.)

How much of my remaining commitment to these ideals is nostalgia? 

I ask myself the same thing when I return to some of the haunts of my early travels in Central America. Some of them have been transformed from unspoiled, almost dreamlike loci of youthful potentiality into solid modern urban environments with all the sell-outs and trade-offs such an expansion requires. 

And yet anyone who had ever followed my observations about destinations such as Playa del Carmen over the years will know that I have come to accept its corruption over time, just as I accept my own. 

Boom to Bust

The post-Brexit boom in overseas tourism (driven largely by a deflating Pound) 
was all going to plan...until last week. 

The day after the Westminster attack Avianca sent out a promotional email to all its subscribers here in Guatemala peddling a return flight to London at the discounted rate of $569. 

Now, twice in 2016 I took advantage of sub-$500 fares between Central America and Paris. 

Let's just say these prices did not reflect a sudden surge of interest in the French capital on the part of North American would-be tourists...

Primitive Dialogue?

This could be something along the lines of what Daniel Dennet means when he refers to proto-verbal memes. I somehow think I'd rather be seated beside a bedouin with a Macbook than someone grunting incoherently! 

Quality of life improvement klaxon...

The Bodegona has started stocking Marie Sharp's (and not just the bog standard strength). 

Also, in case anyone has failed to notice, it's the cantaloupe melon season. 

In the Flesh

I cannot say that I have had the privilege to rub shoulders with many notable individuals  — those with some sort of valid claim to historical transcendence. 

At what was an impressionable age I did come into contact with a plethora of really quite minor celebrities through my father’s business, then familiar faces from the broadcasting milieu and the middle orders of the small screen acting profession. 

If I were to be put into cryogenic stasis for a century or so and then, on emerging, attempt to impress my new contemporaries with these acquaintances, nobody would have any idea who I was talking about. 

However, there is a tiny trio of names which might still be worth dropping. Individuals with whom I am very pleased to exchanged a few words: Douglas Adams, Stephen Hawking and Carlos Fuentes. 

And I suppose - minus the few words part - I might add Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (alias Lenin). 

For such was our encounter in his Red Square mausoleum in 1984 (appropriately enough) that it felt unmistakeably ‘in the flesh’. 

In Lenin the Dictator, An Intimate Portrait Victor Sebestyen describes Vlad as...

‘The kind of demagogue familiar to us in western democracies, as well as in dictatorships. In his quest for power, he promised people anything and everything. He offered simple solutions to complex problems. He lied unashamedly. He identified a scapegoat he could later label ‘enemies of the people’. He justified himself on the basis that winning meant everything…. Lenin was the godfather of what commentators a century after his time call ‘post-truth politics’. 

Contemporary Amokism

The Malay culture has a name for an enduring phenomenon: amok, as in running...

It encapsulates how a certain kind of disaffected male, invariably the sort who considers himself superior in some way — yet frustratingly unrecognised as such by wider society — elects to go on a marauding rampage to set the record straight.

His victims can be members of another race or another gender, but even more commonly a despised peer group or other reasonably well-defined demographic that he feels is impinging upon him.

Amok-style mass casualty events have become increasingly common in our modern world, especially in the United States, where the free availability of assault weapons clearly facilitates the phenomenon, yet cannot really be said to lie at the root of it.

Take away the guns and the attacks still happen, as we saw this week in Westminster. In this there is more than a grain of truth in the ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ mantra disseminated by the NRA.

In the case of extreme Islamism we see a ready-made ideology which can be said to nurture and expand the potential of the underlying syndrome, whilst globalisation means that one’s hated fellow ‘citizens’ can actually reside several thousand miles away.

But if we are looking for a real underlying source for contemporary amokism, it is not religion or any other justification per se, but developments in digital technology which have permitted highly-amplified sociability and resentment-exchange between dangerous, sociopathic loners.

Escape to reality...

A good deal of fairly afflictive insight in this article by Lydia Smears.

But I suppose social media no more make one stupid than travel broadens one's horizons. (I do believe I have come across more narrow-minded globetrotters on my travels than their opposite. Trump's Tripadvisor map must have pins all over the place.)

I have removed FB from my iPad, but not Instagram. I persist in operating my smartphone as if it were a dumbphone, although the wifi at home undermines this intention somewhat.

I have always made sure there are set times of the day reserved for reading actual books. Interestingly, during the increasingly limited periods where I allow myself a drink, I tend to read less, but use social media more.

Yet it could also be said of me that I am already engaged in an escape from reality or at least living in an alternative one of my own fabrication, so to some extent social media apps have the reverse utility for me.

Yes

Was Trump an idiot before he started watching Fox News?

I listened to an interview with Daniel Dennett yesterday in which he quipped that the answer to all chicken and egg questions is 'Yes'. 

Ho ho. It's an explanatory dodge of enormous utility that I recall from my years as a history undergraduate.

In Dennett's case it allows him to slip Darwinian selection into almost any process he cares to. Just don't let the man anywhere near the French Revolution.