Smile 2 (2024)

The biggest surprise I had here was learning, after watching the end credits, that Naomi Scott is a Londoner. 

 

 

 

 

The reviews all go on about the 'jump scares' and yet I can't really remember a single one. This movie didn't really 'scare' me at all, and yet it was thrilling.

Much of that has to do with Scott's central performance, surely one of the best ever by a female lead in the genre (all the better perhaps as I now know she was also performing an accent throughout) - as a pop diva, already pursued by her inner demons, but unfortunately also acquiring another rather more substantial and outer one early on in the story.

 

Prior to that moment I was struggling to recall the first film and its basic mechanism, but then I started to see how Finn Parker was skillfully and entertainingly blending the tropes of Horror with those of the performing arts, and this became so fascinating, along with the star's psychological disintegration, that I stopped fretting about the conceit carried over from the original.

 

Inverted Transgressives

Earlier this year I read John Gray’s somewhat scattershot polemic, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Now that we have been through the US election it does seem to me that Gray was hitting the mark more than I perhaps imagined at time.

It was thanks to one specific chapter that I undertook to read Dostoevsky’s Demons, a novel I had previously been deterred from approaching by an article I had read about all the supposedly worthy books in the canon which some people don’t actually find all that worth the effort after all.

I have been very pleasantly surprised by the sarky tone of the narration, having perhaps expected something a lot ‘heavier’. (To be fair The Devils/Demons/Possessed does not particularly suggest a glib-toned read.)

Anyway, Gray recommends the novel with an important caveat: we are not to bother ourselves with all the crazy, toxic nonsense Dostoevsky himself signed up for, but rather with the way he sends up the pretensions of the self-styled rationalists he detested. And with this statement, he reinforces a notion we sometimes lose sight of: both sides of any cultural argument can be talking out of their backsides.

The problem with unbelievers, Dostoevsky concluded, is that they often espouse a form of atheism that is in a sense a flight from a godless world, where apparently rationalist or humanist ideals are made to fill the void left by religious bunkum.

One of the eponymous demons of the story is a young man utterly convinced of his own independence of mind, who spends a lot of time spouting recycled claptrap.

The key delusion of these Russian ‘nihilists’ (so called because they believed that nothing mattered except science) was the commitment to totally free themselves from all constraints (history, custom, biology even) embarking on a programme of self-creation, from scratch, and this is surely one of the main reasons that this novel is so relevant to the liberal (or 'after’ liberal) discourse of our own time.

Ten days after Trump’s win, Silicon Valley behemoth Peter Thiel gave an interview in which he touched on some of the same themes, alluding to what he saw as the main reasons for a 'preference cascade' against the Democrats and their progressive project...

"The left became like Imperial Stormtroopers — identical, programmed, no individual thought." 

Remember, acknowledging that he could be right about this, is not the same thing as feeling obliged to endorse his own political vision.

One difference I have noted in my reading of both Gray and Dostoevsky in 2024 is that the ‘free thinkers’ of the late nineteenth century loved nothing more than being called out for being ‘transgressive’ — boy did they wallow in the notoriety — whereas our own contemporary variety seem to like nothing more than ostracising anyone who opposes them as a dangerous, hate-filled crank. This time it is they who are the ‘normals’, and everyone else is somehow weird and defective.

This is perhaps a sub-plot to the more general observation that can be made of their speech: the more the hyper-liberals talk, the more of what they say becomes a kind of inversion of what the majority are likely to regard as factual.

And the majority have started to make use of that condition and its democratic authority to respond to the bullying and intellectual disdain that they have been treated to. 

 

The Echo

The first story in the Paul Bowles anthology and the first I read, maybe sixteen years ago — before I had personal experience of its setting — and the one that has stayed with me the most.

It oozes with almost excruciating tension and much of the author-composer's famous nastiness, though as I re-read it this week, I realised that I had misremembered the ending as actually even nastier than it turns out to be. 

Bowles has been at least partially cancelled by the snowflakes, and it is not hard to see why. 

In a recent post on this platform, I noted how we should practice representing the world as it OUGHT TO BE in our political discourse, but in fiction the reverse is usually the case — and yet  many so-called progressives balk at this, and it would seem that Bowls has lately been found culpable of being a white man in the tropics who often depicted the locals doing startlingly weird and sometimes sinister things to the detriment of his own kind — and specifically when penning tales set in North Africa, also apparently guilty of a crime later to be properly defined by a sharp-suited ‘refugee’: Orientalism.

Yet this story works somewhat differently to the Bowles mean, set over here in a hot country that I am now personally more familiar with. And although there is indeed one ‘native’ within it who performs an act of prickly hostility, the otherness here otherwise remains essentially a backdrop to a dysfunctionality which already prevails within the white people relationships.

There are in a sense four main characters: three American women, mother, daughter, and the mother’s abrasive lesbian lover, and a cantilevered house. 

The location is a spectacular (and spectacularly symbolic) gorge located a short mule ride from a made up Colombian village called Jamonocal, itself a not so short boat and train journey from Barranquilla. 

The fundamental tensions in the relationships are revealed from the start — in a deliciously show don’t tell kind of way — via a letter from mother to daughter, read by the latter as she approaches via plane from Panama. After that, every interaction yanks it up yet further —  even the surrounding vegetation puts in a proper shift in this respect as well.

I was reminded a bit of an Argie film we saw recently, Marea Alta (2020). In native Latin American treatments of these kind of situations ‘otherness’ typically comes into the lives of the blithely affluent and ‘modern’ via the home help — though in Verónica Chen’s movie it was a team of builders.

Bowles makes one or two telling references to the cantilevered house’s staff contingent, but they are less important dramatically than the disconnect between how the American ex-pats envisage their situation and how it actually is.

Bowles’s Guatemalan one-time protégé Rodrigo Rey Rosa — these days also residing in Tangiers — has made a pretty successful career out of writing novellas and stories with a similar sort of bite to them, but I guess that — given his background — he is rather less likely to be censured for it.

Meanwhile…Chispitas here suffered maternal abandonment, and so is very much plot-adjacent to The Echo. 

If he is looking a bit ‘licked’ in pic #1 it is because Eclipse, a juvenile male also ditched by his mum after only a few days — entirely probably the very same mum — has stepped in to handle all the parts of keeping a tiny kitten alive and socialised in a manner beyond what we ourselves could possibly achieve — which is truly a wonder to behold.

Communications and outcomes

One way, perhaps, to encourage better outcomes in the Middle East is to promote greater discipline in the manner that those of us outside the region habitually communicate about it. Though many of these recommendations should also apply to more direct participants.

If you genuinely want peace, then everything you say or do relating to the conflict should be heavily geared towards that objective, and in the main loaded with positive suggestions for how we might get there, rather than say, agonised gripes about present circumstances. (This especially applies to international organisations with formal responsibilities, like the UN.)

If, on the other hand, you don't wish for peace, but instead emphatically desire one side to achieve a definitive, overwhelming victory, then you are in effect hoping for a consummate humanitarian calamity (?) — and this is frankly not really a pill that can be sugared by any quantity of righteous or progressive propaganda.

And yet this 'not peace...really' sentiment in effect bifurcates into two separate options, because at present only one side is remotely capable of achieving something resembling a victory, however genocidal and pyrrhic.

So when the other side goes around chanting 'From the river to the sea' this is only a call to genocide on the theoretical level, for in practice it is far more like a call to perpetual war (or bloody-minded resistance, if one were inclined to be charitable). 

So there you have your three options...

a) Peace

b) Definitive nationhood disappointment and possible elimination for at least one side

c) Perpetual war.

And thus, if you are going to offer opinions to the world about this conflict or comment on the current circumstances, it would indeed be most helpful to the rest of us if you flag up first which of the camps you belong to. (I'm in the peace camp, by the way.)

Having an underlying intent of a) but mouthing off along the lines of either b) or c) is unhelpful in the extreme. 

It seems to me, and I may be wrong about this — though I can't see how — that the only valid path towards a form of peace is a treaty based on some kind of partition and/or sharing agreement — with built in security guarantees for all parties — plus some proper buy-in from the wider international community. 

 

So again, if it is peace you desire, either individually, organisationally or nationally, then your actions and statements should make this abundantly clear. (Hello Belize.)

There's a further triumvirate of distinctions which also need to be considered here.

1) Statements about situations and events which are more or less deliberately misleading e.g. "The West Bank is illegally occupied."

2) Statements about situations and events that are starkly factual e.g. "the West Bank is part of the sovereign territory of Israel according to international law.”

3) Statements about situations and events which favour 'ought to be' over 'is' — or at least show an understanding of this rather crucial distinction e.g. "the West Bank, or at least most of it, should become part of the sovereign territory of a new state called Palestine."

See, not so hard, is it? 

If 3) were to become the default mode, not only of international commentators with no direct connection to the conflict, but also of international bodies with a seemingly more substantive connection to it, then it strikes me that it is far more likely to spread over to those who are actually embedded within it.

 

Disruptor

Trump’s primary qualities as an electoral disruptor are very personal to him. They permit him to form two unlikely coalitions, one for and one against.

On the FOR side, alongside the GOP faithful, people adhere to him who would not usually be receptive to the Republican idiom, in fact they might not typically engage at all with mainstream political discourse or even turn up to vote.

On the AGAINST side a range of more or less progressive positions seemingly come together, Left Socialist, Left Elite, the Woke elements to both and much of the Centre too. They are unified by their conviction that Trump is unfit to govern, and probably also one of the worst kind of human beings out there, and the strength of this conviction disguises its true weakness as a form of electoral outreach:  a lack of substance, sometimes ad hominem in the purest form.

When this coalition fails in its opposition to the other, it comes apart very quickly and a lot of finger-pointing ensues.

Brits had seen a less steroid-pumped version of this with Brexit, both during the Referendum and the rise of Boris, but love for Europe was never as intense and unifying as loathing for the Donald.

Indeed elements of the Left Socialist (and somewhat antisemitic) component were always lukewarm about the EU, globalists and cosmopolitans in general, and there may be an element of that too in Trump’s ability to siphon away support from the Democratic Party.

(And in the US of course, there is a more or less explicit underlay of religious dingbattery.)

Firebird

My first American girlfriend (my second serious girlfriend) possessed a Pontiac Firebird.

It was red, and the doors didn't open for some reason, so getting in and out felt authentically 'Dukes of Hazard'…though this was Long Island. 

I think perhaps that I now regret that I was too busy responding to the curiosity of the people around me - the 'Englishman in New York' circus act - to have fully applied my own curiosity to the milieux.

However, 80s New York did write itself into my consciousness in important ways, and much like 80s Moscow, has taken its place as one of those destinations I have chalked off, but can never return to.

A protracted groan...and not from the WC.

I had my second-most terrifying mid-air emergency experience on one of these in December 1989, returning from what had been my second trip to Central America. 

Shortly after take-off there occurred what the captain described as a “full hydraulics failure”, which means that all the bits meant to move on the exterior of the plane, flaps and so on, weren’t really moving.

We were over the Atlantic, quite deep into darkness. We spent maybe forty minutes dumping fuel. All the while the air-frame groaned and our passage was anything but smooth. It was not an especially full flight, but everyone I could see around me was kind of frozen in their thoughts.

Coming back into Miami it became clear that the pilot could not tell if his landing gear was down, so we made two low passes beside the control tower, so that the personnel inside could determine if a safe landing would be possible.

It was.

We were then deposited by the same gate and told to await further updates, which we did, for hours, into the early hours in fact. The consistent message was that the status of our DC-10 was being reviewed, but of course absolutely nobody desired to get back on it.

Just when it seemed that we would be spending the entire night there, a threshold was passed, that of the hours any crew might be permitted to operate, and so at last we were collected and deposited into fairly awful ‘hotels’ close to the airport.

The next morning the plane remained doggedly un-fly-able. I was duly transferred onto a Pan Am flight to London, which would turn out to be the last time I was a passenger on that illustrious airline.

One year earlier I had missed the Lockerbie flight by one day. The rest of the Syracuse University contingent had been on my flight. 

Much sex was had in the rear toilets.

 

Pogrom?

Referring to events in Amsterdam this week as a ‘pogrom’ is, on significant levels, not that much different to referring to events in Gaza as a ‘genocide’. 

Hyperbolic use of analogues does a massive disservice to historical victims. 

That said, one also needs to maintain a keen eye on the qualitative differences. 

If Maccabi fans acted like football hooligans, in terms of chants and small to medium-scale property damage, accompanied by tribalist aggression, this does not justify an escalation to the next level, i.e. mob targeting of a specific cultural-ethnic group — any more than anything about the ‘context’ somehow justified October 7 — or indeed anything about the way the war has been conducted, retroactively. 

‘Football’ contains, sublimates even, many of our worst masculine instincts, but there are certain things that it should never be allowed to provide sanctuary for, under any circumstances.

Hear me out...

This may indeed be one of those posts requiring that prefix.

Four more years of Trump might just be what America needs to end the cycle of ideological escalation between Left and Right.

Particularly, these four years, which are almost certainly finite, and which have arrived on the back of an unlikely coalition between pretty much all of America’s distinguishable groups, except the affluent urban classes who have signed up for the nonsense emanating out of the ‘progressive’ extreme.

Trump may be more inclined to juggle this time around. On the previous occasion he had gained a somewhat sneaky win, losing the popular vote and only getting to the Oval Office by stirring up the deplorables.

Obama, meanwhile, was widely regarded as having ushered in an era when the traditional Republican messages would be forever on a losing demographic wicket, as more and more non-whites adhered to the less self-reliant, more identity-obsessed message of the Democrats. To have any hope of power in this new America, the Right had to go all in with the non-traditional media and the more niche forms of worldview...shall we say.

Trump didn’t refrain from repeating this, of course. But as a somewhat more domesticated figure within the GOP establishment, and spurred on by the sheer mediocrity of Biden’s presidency, he opened new salients amidst more mainstream populations.

 

Whether he understands this or not, the party around him will have twigged that this new majority, popular vote and all, is the way forward for their side and that holding it together has to be a priority given the Trump-less reset coming down the line in 2028. 

 

As for the Democrats, they obviously believed that defeating Trump once without completely burying him would be enough. This led to complacency, indecision at the top and ideological over-exuberance below. Surely now the lessons have to be learned, and they need to re-seat themselves within a discourse that is meaningful to more than just the inhabitants of Manhattan and a thin coastal strip on the western seaboard. 

 

If Harris had won on Tuesday I think the auto-catalytic development of almost hysterical (and authoritarian-tending) extremes would likely have continued. I think now there is at least a possibility that both parties will reconsolidate in the common sense zone. 

 

You may not particularly care for centrist politics, but it is surely dangerous for democracy in America when each main party construes the election in apocalyptic terms, presenting their opponents as the epitome of evil. This has been a race to the bottom for both of them. 

 

Trump may of course not get this at all, and thus spend the whole term like a papal exorcist in a fiend-infested nunnery. 

 

And there is no question that his return has already generated a sense of empowerment amongst his most diabolical followers. Will he try to do just enough of the neo-fascist shtick to keep them on side, or will he gradually lean towards the altogether wealthier (and potentially more valuable) deplorables of Silicon Valley who would be important for Vance, should he pick up the baton in 2028.

Just as it became clear to Republicans that they would again be the party of the majority without close to half of the minority vote, so it must now be clear to the Democrats that their own sometimes divisive, counter-factual and screechy positions have become shibboleths, eroding confidence in their capacity to rule. 

 

Trump of course has no interest in a Democratic party that sounds sensible. Almost as soon as Harris conceded he singled out California and its Governor for his online vitriol because a) he sees that as one of the most likely fronts for the Democratic counter-attack b) he knows that most of the people who voted for him tend to recoil from the California vibe, which in part did for Kamala and c) he has become deft at the wind-up, which is one of the ways he has long prevented his opponents from adopting a more introspective approach. 

 

The first big test will be the mass deportations. Leaving aside the economic cost of removing migrant workers, the process cost (detention, legal to-ings and fro-ings, deportation) is said to amount to $11,000 per person. Vance says they will start with 1m illegals, so that’s $11bn to kick things off. 

 

Trump’s new Hispanic voters appear to believe that this initial tranche, less than 10% of the 11m total of undocumented people in the US, will largely be made up of the rogue element, not families who have bought into the American dream. But the new regime will need this measure to have a degree of showbiz appeal. After all, Biden deported more people than Trump 1.0, and nobody really noticed or cared. So in order to be seen to be following through with the campaign promises, this White House is likely to go after the real low hanging fruit, many of whom may be less deserving of the outcome.

This in turn will provoke anger from the Left, which the Right needs to some extent, but in manageable quantities, otherwise we’ll quickly be back where we were, in ideological Armageddon.

It would not just be the counter-productive ideological turbine thus set to spin ever faster. The economies of Central America depend heavily on remittances sent home by migrant workers. Greater hardship down here, coupled with the growing climate emergency, which Trump will clearly do nothing to address, may fuel ever greater levels of migration northwards, no matter how ‘closed’ the US government can make the southern border appear to be.

 

 

Thinking Positive

More silver linings, beyond the fact that we won’t have to endure another contested US election, which would probably have destabilised American democracy more than anything Trump can do from inside the White House, especially with the Senate providing 'guard rails' as its Republican leader put it this morning…

Unless Trump decides to go full South American, there’s a natural 4-year term limit to how much more of his nonsense we will have to endure. (Complemented by the age factor.)

This gives the Dems a significant full reset opportunity in 2028, and they will need to take full advantage of the preparation time that they seemingly lacked this time around.

Whatever one thinks of the domestication of the Donald by the GOP, he came into this campaign less as an outsider surrounded by genuinely fringe and toxic Alt-Right ideologues. In fact, in spite of all the lying he continues to do, it’s the Dems’ base that has looked the more detached from factual reality at times.

The Republicans might have shifted to a a Trump alternative, Trump-lite, still focussing on the key populist issues and the economy and still won yesterday. That would have set up something looking more like a pencilled-in 8-year period in the wilderness for the progressive agenda.

Instead, as of today, the clock starts to tick towards a definitive conclusion and even if Donald does deliver on some of his ‘winning’ promises, we know that much of this Presidency will have the appearance of a shit show. And with any luck, by 2028 the Dems will have finally learned how to take advantage of this without relying exclusively on ad hominem attacks and fear mongering.

Vance has obvious limitations. Elon? Eek.

Harris did not improve on Biden’s performance in a single country across the country. Small percentage drop-offs everywhere amounted to an apparently substantial shift overall. Great care must be taken by the Dems in three years, but ideally sooner, in identifying the candidate and message combination which will likely reverse these losses amongst key ethnic and demographic groups. They need to show a much better understanding of the sensibilities driving these groups relative to the proposition they pump out.

Meanwhile, the next four years could turn out to be truly pivotal in European history, for Trump has now assumed the role of crash test dummy. If he delivers back home in a way that satisfies the instincts of his voters, especially the newer ones, this could empower political movements across the old continent, for whom border control would be their political battering ram. If he fails, or at least disappoints, surrounding himself in unbearable chaos, then the European centre might yet hold.

 

Careless Killings, Careless Language

There seems to be a pall of confusion settling over the nature of Genocide, an often rather perverse muddle. 

This is what it looked like in early 80s Guatemala. Some regions saw sharp population declines of over 15%, the majority of the deaths occurring in very specific, geographically constrained, ethno-cultural communities. 

This was almost entirely deliberate state action targeting civilian populations, not collateral damage from careless conflict between armed groups. Mass executions, mass graves. Infants burned, bayoneted etc. Orders from above, not rogue units, or random callousness. 

Now Gaza. Up until the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 the territory was occupied by Egypt, not Israel. Their defeat led to a bit of an exodus, such that the population declined by around 1% per year up to 1970. EVERY year since, including 2005 when all the Jews left, and this past twelve months which has seen heavy casualties to both militants and civilians, the population has expanded overall, by around 2% in fact October 2023 to October 2024. 

Thus, however you feel about this war and about the way it is being conducted, no genocide has occurred and no genocide is in the process of occurring. 

Mis-use of this term not only does a significant disservice to the people of Gaza (by shrouding their plight in the idioms of partisan propaganda) it does an even greater disservice to the populations that have experienced verifiable genocide in the past — such as the Ixil Maya, who fought long and hard for formal legal recognition of the crime committed against them — and one specific population who suffered the worst genocide in human history, whose global numbers have yet to fully recover from it over eighty years later. 

When that disservice is done deliberately, especially when the intent is shrouded by the semiology of political or religious righteousness, something truly repugnant is occurring.

Orwell’s concern was for the use of euphemisms — imprecision where precision would have been more lucid. But here we have the contemporary alternative: bogus precision, to the point of inversion. The relationship between fact and linguistic camouflage remains broadly the same. 

El Fiambre is Kosher!

Last week I came across an article online which described Guatemala's traditional Day of the Dead dish, el fiambre, as "Arabe", at least in part.

Note: if they had said Spanish, this would undoubtedly make it a 'colonial' delicacy, but because it was pegged as Arab, it should of course be considered 'de-colonial', or even 'reclaimed' (...from those pesky Mayan indigenes.)

 

There are essentially two main ways that culinary techniques that one might describe as Arab, either correctly or misleadingly, could have arrived in Guatemala.

 

1) Between the Visigoths and the Reconquista there was an extended Islamic interlude on the Iberian peninsula, at first a Caliphate and then a patchwork of successor states. 

 

While some Arabic was spoken, the people running this show were Moors, e.g. native North Africans (such as Berbers) who had never been anywhere near the Middle East, and many of the people making up the show thus being run were forced converts from various ethnic groups who had been around since before Roman times. 

 

And so indeed, we find a Moorish precursor to el fiambre called Cachir, which involved copious quantities of cow meat and choice embutidos such as mortadella, a version of which is still prepared in Algeria. 

 

Bright sparks may already have twigged that Cachir is a 're-claimed' version of an earlier Hebrew word, Kosher, which means 'apt for consumption'. (You may recall that de-colonisation in the Levant involves taking the Hebrew names of places, converting them into Arabic and then claiming — or re-claiming — that these are now officially the originals.)

 

2) Sometimes one comes across a very distinct syncretic cuisine in Central America and the Caribbean, of a kind which most of us gringos would describe as Lebanese, but which the locals sometimes refer to as 'Arabe'.(Such as the pita/pan arabe in Guatemalan supermarkets.) 

 

This would be a much later arrival than the partly-remembered Moorish traditions that tagged along with the Castilians. And although these recipes would have long been passed down via the medium of the Arabic language, the the Lebanese diaspora on this side of the pond has been made up largely of Orthodox Christians who later converted to Catholicism (like Shakira's lot), and their reason for being here was related to running away from Islam, or at least its pricklier aspects — from the mid-nineteenth century onward. 

 

Resistance is Futile

The instant the people under the care of UNRWA wholeheartedly embrace peaceful coexistence and a broadly secular form of nationhood, a version of this state will almost immediately appear, as if by miracle.

Ceasefires are not peace, they are an obstacle towards that end, for all they do is force a reset of the terms of on-going resistance to any mutually-viable settlement. 

Those who choose to ignore or even deny this are either being very naïve or extremely disingenuous.

Other than a decisive, irreversible victory for either one of the 'sides', with all the horrors that would entail, the only way this conflict ever concludes is with a peace deal. Resistance is little more than perpetuation without any kind of reasoned objective in the medium or long terms.

And whenever I hear ‘resistance’ to describe the often un-tempered hostility of one set of combatants, I point out the bigger picture historically, which is this. The people of the Levant have spent the past millennium and a half resisting enforced Islamicisation from various external ethnic representatives of that faith. First Arabs, then Turks and now it seems, Persians as well, though up to now largely via surrogates.

This pressure was only briefly interrupted by a counter surge from the West, involving Germans and French-speaking Scandinavians in the main, and their rather stop-start attempts to forcibly re-Christianise the same region.

1500 years of war and oppression, sandwiched between these two self-regarding and enveloping civilisations. THAT is a story of resistance which has the scale which makes it worthy of primary consideration today, and not the one which is little more than a lasting expression of UN guilt for its ham-fisted attempts to break the cycle in the last century. 

 

 

Failures of Imagination

Nations are ‘imagined communities’, some imagined rather better than others, and as we have seen during this US election cycle, there are both superior and inferior imaginations in the mix. 

So, the nation state is not any kind of absolute good. Why should it be? But together they make up our current international order which, if not optimal, is itself superior to many of the alternatives. 

History has an interesting and somewhat overlooked lesson for us here. Incipient nations which consciously reject a clear opportunity to add the suffix “-hood” when the opportunity first arises, pay a very heavy price. To wit, Cuba and Palestine. 

There is an element of near mythological original sin in each of these refusals. And both have since tried to over-compensate by donning the hair shirt of Marxist victimhood in a not particularly convincing manner. 

Cuba might have gained independence at the same time as the other Spanish possessions in the Americas, such as Guatemala. But it was one of the most terrible of enslavement-based economies and the criollos, Cubans of Spanish descent, feared what would happen if they were left without a rescuer of last resort. 

So they chose to pass on self-determination. Later, when the matter seemed more feasible and urgent, they were easy prey for that anti-colonial coloniser just a short raft-trip away. 

And so they paid the price. Freedom came at a far bigger cost and most of their efforts to re-define it on their own terms have had the appearance of ideological self-harm. 

Palestine also had the chance to embrace nationhood. Not just in 1948 in fact, for the carrot has been dangled repeatedly, but the temptation has never been able to outweigh the urge to continue the 1500-year-old project of forcibly Islamicising the entire Levant, by which I mean not only what the UN considers to be Israel, but also Lebanon. 

It’s as if they ‘imagine’ themselves incapable of enjoying this formalised upgrade in status should any of the other ‘dhimmis’ of the medieval caliphate also be to enjoy it. 

Like those Cuban criollos with their African slaves. The hold on to the delusion that the new order would have to encompass the old one.

Mythological Goggles

 

Had a small chuckle today when I encountered an article in an American journal which referred to the ancient Arabs who had established a settlement in Italy as ‘immigrants’. It didn’t say if they arrived in small boats.

The important thing is that in American academic discourse, they can never be referred to as invaders or colonisers. (Made me wonder if Antigua might be usefully rebranded from ‘La Ciudad Colonial’ to ‘La Ciudad Inmigrante’?!)

Anyway, on a mildly separate note, I recently came across this highlighted passage in my copy of God’s War by Christopher Tyerman.

“Crusading reflected a social mentality grounded in war as a central force of protection, arbitration, social discipline, political expression and material gain. The crusades confirmed a communal identity comprising aggression, paranoia, nostalgia, wishful thinking and invented history.”

 

What is perhaps so remarkable about this observation is how true it is of all the combatants in the perpetual holy wars waged in and around the Levant, both then and now. (And the blathering academics and intellectuals in their baggage train.)

 

And there is a monstrous lack of collective self-awareness. Each imagines that it is the other who is beholden to a toxic delusion.

For 1500 years the Levant has been plagued by ideologies which are essentially non-native yet which insist that their ground zero is a certain spot in the city of Jerusalem. This sense of ownership in largely grounded in fabrications, fairy-tales.

 

This has been true of Norman crusaders —  ultimately Scandinavian, and so non-local in the extreme —  or Arabian Muslims or Turks in the past and now Persians. Each brings an obsession which underpins meddling in a region that they have no real business to meddle in. 

It is also true of a certain group of extreme Zionists, originating in the US but also prevalent here in Guatemala, who are not even Jewish, but instead evangelical Christians.

The absolutist perspectives, which for the crusaders were grounded in the spiritual/apocalyptic —  and in fact geographically transferable —  notion of the Holy City on the hill, still prevent anyone who has signed up to these 'visions' from seeing reason today, because these groups have in effect  constructed their communal identities and the sense of how to live their everyday lives around these stark obsessions.

One of the greater absurdities in the western side of this discourse is that the Radical Left appears to have concluded that Zionism is the only form of formalised false consciousness impacting on the conflicts in the Levant during modern times.

This POV represents almost the most outrageous pair of mythological goggles worn by anyone, arguably comparable with those worn by the Islamic fundamentalists: a prescription which pares down reality to a rigidly thematicised, 'anti-colonial' conceptualisation of history.

And as I wrote here the other day, UN institutions like UNRWA have started to operate like the Society of Jesus in the early modern period, a self-serving order which maintains a bizarre, hypocritical, extra-legal operation in the region, which ultimately works against integration and the establishment of stable, peaceful, collaborative societies which operate within the international order as it now stands.

 

 

 

Marea Alta (2020)

Really enjoyed this, but it's one of those which I perceive might not be for everyone, and what was extremely prickly for me, could be almost stultifying for others. 

 

 

I'm fond of saying that some of my favourite novels are those which would be extremely hard to turn into movies, and the reverse is also true. Anyone with only Verónica Chen's screenplay to hand would likely make a very different film to the one she made - for the silences work hard here and one of the most interesting things about her storytelling in Marea Alta/High Tide is the way she shows us things without explicit comment or explanation, techniques that are hard for any author to achieve so effectively.

I liked the way it opened, cutting straight to the chase, so to speak, making the audience thirsty for the context, some of which is either added later or needs to be intuited. The way the narrative works on you is going to be subjective, inevitably. It's 'about' class, race and gender, but not in the most obvious, accountable ways.

Laura is an artist, yet inhabits a second home on the coast which is an absolute nullity from a taste perspective. it's low season in Mar de las Pampas, in Buenos Aires province, a location where those pines that always tend to appear in violent films run right up to the shore. She's there to work, but also to oversee a small construction project being undertaken by a contractor called Weisman and his two Guarani workers.

Laura and Weisman go to bed together, in a series of scenes where the dynamics are immediately a bit uncomfortable. It ends with her saying she will call in a way he finds dismissive, but then HE doesn't call or indeed turn up the next day and she is left to try to impose some sort of increasingly leaky authority over 'Hueso' and Toto who find ever more creative ways to test and then violate the boundaries.

I found this in Netflix's 'Understated Spanish-language films bucket. The most understated thing about it, other than the aforementioned silent scenes and the interior design, is the violence, and this is, in the end, an extremely violent film, but you may not be quite so aware of this in the moment , as you would be during the course of more well-trodden Halloween-week programming. Nor, I can assure you, is it the violence you might have anticipated.

One thing did make me ponder: the rather haphazard tattoos on Laura's body. Do these appear as a coincidence deriving from the casting of Gloria Carrá, or are they an additional element of Chen's storytelling? The actress was forty nine when the movie was shot and I imagined that the director might have been using these ink drawings to encourage us to imagine what sort of person Laura had been at a younger age, prior to marriage and children, and the shade of this earlier presence seemed to me to feed into the thematic murkiness with regards to social and gender interactions.

Open Air Prisons

Gaza is often described rather loosely as an 'open air prison', notably by David Cameron.

What is far more resembles however is one of the great Jesuit missions set up during the early seventeenth centuries within the amorphous border zone between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. 

Rather than being taught the violin, agriculture and how to sing in a choir, UNRWA, the modern equivalent of the Society of Jesus, appear to mainly want to pass on a form of cosmic grievance and hatred, but the effect is the same for the Gazans as it was for the Guaraní: total dependency.

They are forced to live within an artificial, anomalous legal bubble in which they are utterly infantilised, and thereby absolved of all responsibility for their own actions, and attitudes. 

And UNRWA, just like the Jesuit order, defends the permanency of this state of tutelage for largely self-serving reasons.

Their ‘protected’ community needs more external aid than any other human population on Earth because, how else could they even exist? 

They have to be comforted that theirs is not the ordinary lot of citizens, the task of building a prosperous secular society. UNRWA feeds them, not just with actual victuals paid for by outsiders, but also with an existential fantasy, a vision of a promised land, a world without the evil of Israel, without Jews and other infidels, a return to how things were before all the sins were committed, and these will of course all be forgiven. 

One interesting difference however. The Jesuit missions resulted in a form of genocide. The Guaraní were incapable of adapting to their physical and spiritual cage, and thus died off rather rapidly.

Meanwhile in Gaza, in spite of a reported 40,000+ casualties of this recent war, the population has increased by a further 2% October to October.

It may be relevant that the Jesuits chose to immerse a ferocious people (Guaraní means war) in a permanent condition of peace, whereas UNRWA...

 

 

 

 

 

'Missing Context'

Marxism is a dialectical system, which on some levels means that it is more interested in where we have been and where we are going than where we are at now. (Sometimes emphatically so.)

For this reason, perhaps a little counter-intuitively, when I was starting out as an undergrad, it had lately been at its most invasive and sometimes rather damaging when applied to the period (supposedly) prior to capitalism, slavery etc. 

 

Central to this were a group of French historians who operated under the banner of the Annales School, which included Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. Duby, Braudel and Le Goff also became key figures.

By the mid-80s the discipline as a whole had seemingly put them back in their boîte, extracting useful research and insights, but no longer permitting their like to run riot around the past, particularly the late medieval and early modern past. 

 

Each new intake of historians at Cambridge was immediately notified who the ‘enemy’ were: those academics who would try to apply grand theoretical structures to reality, suppressing pesky facts and events wherever necessary.

Such thematic obsessions might be all right for the Anthropology department, but we would fight tooth and nail to keep them out of our faculty.

Back then we had the sense that the battle had been won, that we were the mop up operation. The irony is that the left-wing ultra-theoretical approach is now arguably more endemic within English-speaking academia than it ever was in the French, and thus — with apologies — more international. 

 

This has to have occurred in part because the USA has always had an antagonistic relationship with big, complex history (#oldworldroblems) and the surrounding popular culture relentlessly works to turn this into bite-sized, easily digestible chunks for local consumption, which in practice involves a lot of seepage into the wider world. 

 

Mass-market historical narratives are the perfect fodder for Marxists, because the peskier facts often come pre-suppressed. They work their peculiar magic, and suddenly the dead and the unborn appear to have greater 'rights' than the living, and one can feel absolved of the need for anything resembling a viable (and humane) plan for the here and now. 

 

And this fosters an environment where non-experts are actively encouraged to shout down (and shut down) people who bring deeper, more multidimensional perspectives to the table.

'Missing Context' is just the start of it.

 

 

Monster (2023)

Kore-eda Hirokazu is my favourite director working in world cinema today, and all the finest qualities of his work, particularly when working in Japan and and with child actors, are on display here.

 

But not his writing, because the screenplay was produced by Yûji Sakamoto, most noted for his plays, television scripts and song lyrics.

Its episodic structure, featuring three re-treads of the same temporal ground, will have people reaching for their Rashōmon comparisons, but these are not three separate, subjective interpretations, but rather alternatively-skewed re-tellings, blending some things we've seen with things we haven't, with an adjusted mix of protagonists, central and support, seemingly with an objective of adding a bit more murk even as some clarity gradually emerges.

Within this tripartite structure, the narrative is a little disjointed with perceptible gaps that deliberately disrupt the experience of flow between scenes.

All this means that, on some levels, Monster feels a bit like hard work. 

It certainly didn't help that in the version we watched, the hard-coded subtitles were a little off. It wasn't so much that the language was inaccurate, just that the way it was rendered came across as mechanical and affectless, and I'd imagine that the precision and tone are very important to this Cannes Best Screenplay winner. (It also took the Queer Palm in 2023.) 

We also felt there were a few cultural references that went flying past us, and the ambience of urgent unfamiliarity was perhaps accentuated by the setting, around Lake Suwa (in Nagano prefecture), characteristic of a form of Japan one rarely comes across in the movies.

Freed from the need to tell the story with words, Kore-eda is conspicuously devoting himself to the visuals. He calibrates the colour palette in a manner I've not seen done before, which is both fun and a little distracting (one has a sense of being bombarded with details, foreground and background) and some of the scenes have that exquisite, ethereal quality which one tends to associate with the hand-drawn animations of Miyazaki — complemented by the equally diaphanous final score of the late Ryuchi Sakamoto.

Is Monster worth all the heightened attention (and sensibility) it appears to require? Resoundingly yes, I would say. 

(For the record, one reviewer on IMDB commented that the 'monster' of the title is Japanese society and its mores. This is very much NOT a horror movie, but there does seem to be an underlying premise at work in the story that this society can sometimes function as a hall of mirrors, making it that much harder to make observations without perceiving malformations which are not really there.)