Amateurs and Antis

There’s a beautiful kind of amateurism — the kind we saw in say The Detectorists on the Beeb — and a toxic kind, which is little more than ignorance on steroids, a clear perversion of professional perspectives. 

Technology has unleashed both kinds, inevitably, but this is one area where we tend to feel the poison all that more because of the ‘gentle’ nature of the benefits of the empowerment and the higher-viz nature of the nastier kind of crank. 

Such an imbalance surely existed prior to the age of technology. If one were to conduct a survey of medieval cranks, one would undoubtedly find that the wilder, more fundamentally unhinged members of this fraternity encountered the greater number of followers. (Oddly enough, 'charismatic' is often a euphemism for spiteful sociopath.)

Digital media were supposed to represent a shift away from the broadcast model, yet ended up simply democratising it, thus amplifying the massed voice of those more interested in the talking rather than the finding out aspects of their disciplines. 

(When I started working formally in digital media and comms one could already detect a bifurcation between the residual amateurs and a new breed of self-styled professionals and if you were looking for people who knew what they were on about the former remained your best bet.)

In this context, open-minded niceness becomes almost esoteric. 

Back at the start of this century Oliver Sacks was invited on a tour of Oaxaca state by the American Fern Society. In his journal he would write...

“This sweet, unspoiled, preprofessional atmosphere, ruled by a sense of adventure and wonder rather than by egotism and a lust for priority and fame, still survives here and there, it seems to me, in certain natural history societies, and amateur societies of astronomers and archaeologists, whose quiet yet essential existences are virtually unknown to the public.”

A Flickering Light

 

The question of whether Nazism was the product of the Enlightenment or the anti-Enlightenment remains an open and fascinating one, with unquestionable relevance to today’s ‘border’ mindsets.

Hitler himself seemed quite adamant…

 

“National Socialism is a cool, reality-based doctrine, based upon the sharpest scientific knowledge and its mental expression...We have no desire to instill in the people a mysticism that lies outside the purpose and goals of our doctrine…For the National Socialist movement is not a cult movement...Its meaning is not that of a mystic cult...In the National Socialist movement subversion by occult searchers for the Beyond must not be tolerated.”

 

The trouble is, “I am not a cult member” is always a bit of a giveaway. And however ‘reality-based’ and ‘sharp’ it aspired to be, Nazi science was essentially a form of pseudo-science. 

 

American historian Eric Kurlander has recently attempted to revitalise the connection between Nazism and the supernatural, in the face of evidence that the Gestapo actively conducted surveillance and repression against occultists (and more trivial irrationalists like Tarot readers), in particular after it came out that Rudolf Hess had consulted an astrologer before embarking on his harebrained solo peace mission. 

 

Many of his claims have largely been debunked by Third Reich expert Richard J. Evans, yet how the Nazis behaved once in power should not be the entirety of the story, as it is in the very nature of all revolutions to persecute the assorted charismatics and other weirdos that made them possible. 

 

Indeed, fringe thinking is always relevant to this mix. Kurlander looks at our own political debates and concludes that ‘a renaissance in supernatural reasoning, shadowy conspiracy theories, extraterrestrial powers, and the omnipresence of a hostile ethno-religious other has begun to correlate with illiberal political and ideological convictions, influencing national elections, domestic social policies and matters of war and peace.’

 

It is certainly true today at least, that an interest in Nazi fixations correlates with a kind of obsession that could be characterised as ‘religious’. And when this becomes more esoteric, it expands the pool to more seemingly-secular ideologues. 

 

The crossover effect in the discourse is still very much present, with the enemies of these contemporary cultists depicted verbally and visually, Kurlander notes, as ‘vampires, zombies, demons, devils, spectres, alien parasites and other supernatural monsters’, adding that the end result was ‘an ideological and discursive space in which Nazism’s enemies could be dehumanised, marginalised and figuratively transformed into monsters requiring physical elimination’. 

 

Freemasons and Communists are no longer on the hook so much as they were, but Jews are very rarely off it. Add to them certain kinds of migrant, and other distinct groups perceived as a threat to organised irrationalists, and the modern parallels become that much clearer. 

The frontier between reasoned and magical thinking has become even less firm than it was a hundred years ago. As a result irrationalists now seem unsure how to safely select their allies and adversaries from amongst the friends and enemies of the Enlightenment.

The Sympathizer (2)

There are a number of different dualities bouncing off each other here. East and West, obviously, but also bourgeois and revolutionary consciousness, the nature of Revolution itself, before and then after the triumph and nothing, the kind that is really nothing and the kind that is actually something.

Halfway through I might have complained more confidently about the psychological make-up of the narrator, in part because he’s the only character in the story whose mind in shown to us with the requisite depth. And in part because he is battling another duality, that between being less than his two halves and twice as much as them, which to my estimation makes him the victim of either a chip or an inverted chip, character traits I never particularly warm to, and here they tend to accentuate an apparent weakness in his descriptions of others. Specifically almost all the non-Asian characters are white, middle-aged and somewhat crudely caricatured, but as the novel proceeds to its conclusion, one begins to appreciate how the author has covered himself rather well against such objections, for the entire written account turns out to be a) a confession to a Communist re-educator and b) a polemic about the denial of proper representation.

Some of the dust cover blurb suggests that this is a ‘novel about friendship’. It isn’t. It has lots of interesting things to say about a whole load of topics, but friendship, although it features, isn’t one of these.

Anyway, herewith the second batch of memorable aphoristic observations that I have culled from the text...

Confessions are as much about style as content.

Never underestimate what you can do to your worst enemy.

The anti-American already includes the American.

The only cure for being a bastard is to take a side.

This was the problem with a walk down memory lane. It was almost always foggy, and one was likely to trip and fall.

The loudest voice in the world is the voice of one’s own tortured stomach.

Happiness, American style, is a zero-sum game.

It seemed as much of a crime to commit a cliché to paper as to kill a man.

What one should never do was to require other people to imagine they were just like one of us. Spiritual teleportation unsettled most people, who, if they thought of others at all, preferred to think that others were just like them or could be just like them.

If you know how to steal it, time is on your side.

Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself.

Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.

The only worthwhile courtship involved persuading a woman who could not be persuaded, not a woman already predisposed to examine her calendar for her availability.

And although some say that America is a welfare state, in actuality it is a dream state.

The hardest thing to do in talking to a woman was taking the first step, but the most important thing to do was not to think.

Whereas women could look at us as much as they wanted, and we would appreciate it, we were damned if we looked and hardly less damned if we didn’t.

What makes us human is that we’re the only creatures on this planet that can fuck ourselves.

I was the kind bothered less by sinning than by unoriginality.

Love is being able to talk to someone else without effort, without hiding, and at the same time to feel absolutely comfortable not saying a word.

You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you.

Beauty is not needed to make a milieu more attractive. A very ugly object can also make an ugly room less ugly by comparison.

That omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious.

If Adam and Eve had debased God’s knowledge, we had in turn debased Adam and Eve.

She was a professional who had seen the likes of me a thousand times, which I could hardly complain about, given that I had seen the likes of her a fair number of times myself.

The true optical illusion was in seeing others and oneself as undivided and whole, as if being in focus was more real than being out of focus.

People who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed.

And, again, a pair of longer ones...

Some animals could see in the dark, but it was only humans who deliberately sought out every possible route into the darkness of our own interiors.As a species, we have never encountered a cave, a door, or an entrance of any kind that we did not want to enter. We are never satisfied with only one way in.

No author was immune from having his own ideas and words quoted back to him favorably. Authors were, at heart, no matter how much they blustered or how suavely they carried themselves, insecure creatures with sensitive egos, as delicate in the constitution as movie stars, only much poorer and less glamorous. One only needed to dig deep enough to find that white, fleshy tuber of their secret self, and the sharpest tools with which to do so were always their own words.

Trap (2024)

 

On some levels a sort of shameless promo for the director's daughter Saleka’s talent and/or eyelashes.

 

Is there another active director so able to craft 'experiences' which register simultaneously as rather fun and utterly terrible? 

 

M. Night Shyamalan's signature silliness pervades every aspect of Trap. 

 

I’m not sure if any description of the plot counts as a spoiler, but here’s one for sure: the body count is not what you would expect with this sort of material.

 

 

Príncipes Salvajes / Untamed Royals (2024)

 

There are essentially two kinds of Mexican movie. The first kind features a hapless protagonist, usually a lucky loser from the lower middle classes, catapulted into some sort of 'comedic' caper.

Príncipes Salvajes (Untamed Royals on Netflix) is the other kind: a relentless portrayal of the irredeemably morally bankrupt upper class elites and the officialdom which reports to them.

In this instance director Hinojosa Ozcariz places viewers amidst a group like the sociopathic teens of Hollywood films such as Cruel Intentions (1999), yet without the dramatic resolution.

The set up here has a certain promise and there are some fetching performances, but even 'empty' young people need to be written a little better than this. Shades of dark, so to speak.

Specifically there appears to be a sort of missing link dramatically here between the second and third acts, which left me feeling let down. I didn't need 'consequences' as such, but I did need something which ultimately made more sense as a story.

 

Detached Immoderates

When radicals become detached from moderation, moderates become radicalised.

This is not always a good thing.

Those who are unprepared to budge an inch get so wrapped up in their own cult that they end up staring at their own reflection, convinced that their antagonists are themselves fully committed non-budgers. And in so much as the latter might become so, it’s nearly always the fault of the extremists.

For instance, in England a decade or so before the Civil War, public opinion was almost uniformly opposed to royal policy. But then the radicals started to say (and do) the quiet stuff out loud, thus driving a significant group in English society to coalesce behind a new anti-radical sentiment, which sought to preserve the essentials of the existing order.

This is actually the commoner form of civil strife. One does not need two diametrically-opposed, ludicrous propositions.

 

Top Ten Bars in Central America

 

La Rana Dorada 🐸 in Panama City’s casco viejo — one of my current top ten in the region, perhaps even my favourite, mood depending.

The others, south to north, roughly… 

 

Wet Deck Bar, W, Panama City 

Stiefel Pub Otoya, San José 

Cafe Bar Revolución, SCDLC 

Tipsy Tuna, Placencia 

Barefoot Beach Bar, Placencia 

Caiman Tugurio, Playa del Carmen 

Roof 28, Playa del Camen 

La Negrita Cantina, Mérida 

Catrín, Mérida

 

 

The Sympathizer (1)

I'm yet to watch a single minute of the telly version of Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer.

I'm tempted though — Robert Downey Jr and all that —u but there's a lingering mystery for me surrounding how this novel was deemed suitable for adaptation, as the story is really the least interesting thing about it.

Almost all the excitement comes from the constant stream of set-piece observations by its narrator, resulting in something that could handily stand in for a dictionary of quotations or aphorisms. 

 

I suppose the screenwriters can put some of these into the character's mouth, but unless one is Oscar Wilde it's relatively hard to set up dialogue as an exchange of epithets and the trouble here is that only 'The Captain' seems to be doing it, so how much voiceover is there? 

 

I shall I have to find out, I guess, but meanwhile I am going to dump a few of my favourites here, in several batches. Herewith, the first...

 

No one could make a guilty pleasure like the French.

 

If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth? 

 

Wars never die, I said. They just go to sleep. 

 

I had forgotten something, but what that something was, I did not know. Of the three types of forgetting, this was the worst. 

 

Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment.

 

I always assume a man is at least a latent homosexual until proven otherwise.

 

In negotiations, as in interrogations, a lie was not only acceptable but also expected. All sorts of situations exist where one tells lies in order to reach an acceptable truth.

 

Isn’t it funny that in a society that values freedom above all things, things that are free are not valued? 

 

One could choose between innocence and experience, but one could not have both.

 

I naively believed that I could divert the Hollywood organism from its goal, the simultaneous lobotomization and pickpocketing of the world’s audiences.

 

Every full bottle of alcohol has a message in it, a surprise that one will not discover until one drinks it. 

 

I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. 

 

The proper way to approach a prostitute is to adapt the attitude of a theatergoer, sitting back and suspending disbelief for the duration of the show.

 

Every man should have a false bottom in his luggage.

 

A talent is something you use, not something that uses you.

 

Amnesia was as American as apple pie, and it was much preferred by Americans over both humble pie and the fraught foods of foreign intruders.

It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends. 

 

The mall was bordered by an example of America’s most unique architectural contribution to the world, a parking lot. 

 

Like rolling one’s own cigarettes, or rolling one’s R’s, lying was a skill and a habit not easily forgotten.

 

Vodka was one of the three things the Soviet Union made that were suitable for export, not counting political exiles; the other two were weapons and novels.

 

Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen.

 

After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence. 

 

And, a slightly longer one...

 

Americans are a confused people because they can’t admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. You can’t have both. You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence. The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just.

 

More to come...

 

Longlegs (2024)

 

We camehere for Nicholas Cage, of course we did, and he does not disappoint.

It's a fine looking and atmospheric movie, but the story and the characters are not quite so well construed, and overall there's a tendency towards predictability.

Perhaps some of the issues emerge from blending the FBI procedural with the supernatural horror genre, not really to the full benefit of either, and there were times when I found myself asking 'what exactly is at stake here?'

When we were watching Twisters recently, we did get snagged on one small kink in what was otherwise an smooth experience: "Did they eat the pizza?" In contrast Longlegs is kind of packed with such "Did they eat the pizza?" moments.

 

Unlearnable Lessons from the Bronze Age

Homer's Iliad was our civilisation's first proper set of pointers towards the abiding dilemmas of human conflict. e.g.

1) Communities which embark on a war hoping to recover something they believe they have lost, will inevitably propagate a whole new chain of losses, with restitution becoming ever more partial the longer the fighting lasts.

2) A key consequence of the mortal human condition is that while some losses are finite i.e. recoverable, many others are infinite, unrecoverable.

The dynamic of conflict and the related pool of emotions are very much driven by the interplay of these two kinds of loss, and by the participants' perceptions of the balance between them, usually mistaken.

3) Even those who have read their Homer and understand points 1) and 2) above, will often still feel compelled to go to war, reluctant at any stage to take a step 'back' and reassess the situation.

Sometimes the imperatives are cultural, a sense of honour for example. But warfare often occurs as a kind of narrative process with the instigating incidents having already created a loss of stasis before anyone takes up arms.

Thus there is no way to recover that dissipating 'peace' simply by pretending it is still there, intact.

Indeed, the conflict typically has to play out in order to restore an equivalent or novel situation, no matter how many additional losses, finite and infinite, occur along the way.

Perdida (2019)

New on Netflix this week, this is a Mexican movie that seems unsure exactly what it wants to be other than some combination of dark, sexy and perhaps a little nasty, yet made me imagine of a superior combination of these moods which might have been achieved if plot and character had been organised and presented better. 

Having discovered after the event that it is a remake of a Colombian movie from 2011, The Hidden Face, I now rather urgently need to know if the mis-steps made here were additions or reproductions.*

 

I think I already know how I would choose to re-make it. I'd actually like to see a French version. It would probably never get an English-language treatment, as it contains elements which some people within that culture might take as misogynistic, mistakenly I think, and it is these very which would actually need to be accentuated a bit to get the most out of the basic scenario.

 

* I have now downloaded the earlier version and checked and Perdida is an almost bizarrely perfect facsimile, right up to the very end where the Colombian movie handles one small detail a little better. 

 

 

National Greats

Between the Romans and the Renaissance England (geographical area) possesses a key quartet of available national heroes: Arthur, Alfred, Robin and Henry, all of whom have been served rather indifferently by Hollywood, when at all.

This is in part because each of them embodies aspects of our history which outsiders (and Americans in particular, either don't get or want to get), but also because their roles are even a little problematic in terms of our own collective narratives.

Take Arthur, for example. Much of his story as a 'native' British hero was invented by our French overlords specifically as a means of suppressing English alternatives. Yet these adopted myths contain a deeper and sometimes darker payload, Christianised pagan symbolism (or vice versa), which transcends the propaganda usage, and these have continued to fascinate poets, artists, composers and so on throughout history.

John Boorman's Excalibur has undoubtedly been the superior silver screen treatment which these have been treated to so far. Elsewhere Hollywood has occasionally confused this Arthur with his demi-historical progenitor, an essentially post-apocalyptic figurehead, representing a final burst of Romano-British resistance before the darkness descended.

If Arthur is a placeholder for not quite the end, Alfred the Great does the same for not quite the (new) beginning. He’s the man who didn’t lose, rather than the great victor, and his finest achievements were perhaps intellectual, which don’t translate well to American action movies. And it’s his enemies that everyone is really fascinated with.

Robin of Loxley, aka Robin Hood, is the English man of the hour that Hollywood has seemingly found most universal, specifically as a not too doctrinal redistributor of wealth — even if neither the rich he took from nor the poor he gave to are exactly the people we think of when these terms are mentioned today. (For Robin was not really the saviour of the actual, very poor, the illiterate peasant masses, who by definition were unable to read about him.)

In as much as he took up arms against the Norman state, he’s a kind of noble resistor and anti-colonialist, but his story awkwardly dovetails with that of the Crusades, material which cannot be handled today without some sort of lip service to Arab-Muslim, anti-western prejudice.

And then there’s Henry V, whose tale has been told, almost too well, through the course of three plays by Shakespeare, a state of affairs which makes it hard to re-tread any other way. In the last of these he is triumph personified, but the Bard had one eye on the bigger picture too, and Henry’s story is one of the reasons George R.R. Martin plotted GOT so that there were no definitive winners or losers in the end.

Our best medieval King, Henry sired our worst, sixth of that name. This might not have mattered all that much had he not died, rather randomly and prematurely, before his project was completed, and as a result his no-fault condition as the son of a usurper came back to haunt House Lancaster.

The Anti-Zionism Fallacy

First of all, because it apparently needs to be said, non-Jews have no established authority when it comes to policing the boundaries of antisemitism. 

And when they do start up with this, they only end up sounding like Elon Musk lecturing black people on the permissible uses of the term 'racism'. (Or indeed, worse, Musk appropriating minority black voices in order to do this.)

Secondly, I shall resort to a simple analogy to make the key point here...

As a non-Scottish Brit I am aware that there are aspects of the Scottish Nationalist programme which I do not favour (specifically the call for full independence), but I am also aware that I have an obligation to express these opinions in a manner which doesn't make me appear to be a total prick. 

The same is clearly also true of any bona fide Scot who might feel the same way. 

Stating that I am engaged in a fanatical fight against all forms of Scottish national aspiration, demeaning Scots, or perhaps stating that they all originated in Ireland, or similar, would certainly be a fast track to prickishness.

Nobody, no matter which identity or group with which they habitually align, has a fundamental right to oppose another human group's aspirations to nationhood. One can take issue with policy, with attitude even, but not the basic impulse. For that is bigotry.

Most of the above applies to non-Arab 'anti-zionism'. The Arab form is instead more often a kind of negative image of the typical aspiration to nationhood: a dogmatic anti-nationalism targeting Jews rather than any serious attempt to build a coherent and viable vision for Arab Palestinians. 

I have certain hard red lines when it comes to antisemtism, so when self-professed 'anti-zionists' cross them without shame, I am not interested in any subsequent bleatings about how their chosen cover story gives them a free pass. 

Whatever anti-zionism might be in the abstract, their version of it is Jew hate. This includes demonising Jewish nationalism, or juxtaposing it with Nazi iconography, to state the rather obvious.

 

 

The Migratory Trinity

Britain is the name of a place which has become synonymous with colonialism, yet it is also an island which has been invaded and colonised more than most geographical spaces on planet Earth. 

Throughout most of the Middle Ages it would be hard to say if England was a French colony or vice versa, and it took a war which famously lasted a hundred years to finally resolve this. (Kind of.)

The Conquest of Mexico could not have taken place if it had not been simultaneously an act of de-colonisation, for the Mexica civilisation had migrated down from the north and imposed itself on the peoples and cultures which had previously established themselves in the central highlands, and their desire to be free of a very brutal imperial system was very much part of the dynamic unleashed by the arrival of Europeans. 

502 years ago today

Those are three tiny snapshots of the nuances of History, of the kind which tend to get lost every time History is ransacked for the purposes of contemporary political invective. 

The first thing I would have taught about the past in British schools is that every single citizen is descended from people and things which migrated. For after the Ice Age the island was a blank slate. Empty. And then the boats started coming. 

I mention 'people and things' because the second lesson which needs to be conveyed in those classes is that migration always takes the form of a trinity: peoples, languages and cultures and these typically become detached and independent in their historical actions as the migrations occur. 

Our contemporary habit of focusing on only one element of this trinity, usually either ethnicity or culture is a modern misconception largely driven by our prevailing political grudges*. Indeed, we cannot hope to resolve many of our own world's migratory challenges unless we properly (and dispassionately) understand how the trinity operates.

The notion that all we need to do with migration is welcome it has an obvious appeal to anyone experiencing an urgent desire to be recognised as 'good' by their peers, but it is clearly not very sophisticated.**

Each of us has our biological heredity, often not as clear-cut as we would like to imagine, but we are also made up of the way our minds work and express themselves, and this has its own history of geographical movement from the dawn of homo sapiens in Africa.

The Mexico story mentioned above leads one to add one more element to the story of human migration, a kind of fourth horseman if you like: the non-human biological component that piggy-backs on the other movements. Stuff like germs, plus both wild and domesticated plants and animals. 

* One of the ways that we collectively ensure that our arguments relating to these matters are intractable, is by pointedly referencing one element, ethnicity, say, when it suits us, which often means when the other side is talking about culture, and contrariwise. 

** Just consider the so-called 'ex-pat' phenomenon here in Antigua, where some could be said to add the whole and others detract from it. See also the current spate of resistance movements in major cities like Barcelona to tourism, perceived as a more short-term and temporary form of migration. All hard to legislate for or even regulate, but surely worth a try.

 

Communication and Feedback

Much of the prevailing discourse about free speech has been implicitly solipsistic. There is an assumption that the most important thing is the ‘right’ of the talker, as if communications were always somehow one way and disconnected from listeners. 

Social media encourages this of course, because of the sheer ease of public speech and because within that environment we all speak to an auditorium that is at least partially swathed in shadow.

One way I approach this issue today is to recall how I learned to write my essays at Girton. From the moment I put pen to paper I had a mental image of my reader, singular, not an amorphous group of individuals with different biases, but one person with whom I had had regular face to face interactions, an individual who was by definition a lot more informed on the basic material than I was, and a lot more intelligent to boot. Writing for such a person is a genuine discipline.

For me the scariest thing about platforms like Twitter is to see this discipline turned completely on its head. Elite academic minds, well-informed and skillful with words, using the medium to communicate with the relatively ignorant, deliberately and with considerable guile. This version of ‘free’ speech involves carving up issues so that there is a notable slant, sometimes well camouflaged, but the overall effect is warped, propagandistic.

One of the most critical comments ever delivered by one of the readers of my essays was that I possessed a style which might convince anyone I knew more than I really did. But I took this as a sort of semi-compliment, as this was one of those skills one was driven to cultivate on the side, given the basic circumstances of the weekly supervision.

But if I had constructed my essays the way supposedly acute, reasonable and knowledgeable people now communicate into their chosen echo chambers, I’d surely have been on the end of some serious ear-bashings.

So, rather than concerning ourselves uniquely with the freedom of expression, we should surely also be simultaneously considering the proportion of public speech which is ‘talking down’ (or indeed screeching all around), the sophisticated getting off on positive feedback from the unsophisticated, and whether there are any trends therein worthy of our anxiety.

The Antis

There are certain aspects of the political programme of the Scottish nationalists, specific sentiments even, which I will readily express my opposition to. That said, I am careful how I express that opposition. 

For example...

I try to stick to the issues, steering well clear of ad-hominem attacks on the Scots, specifically avoiding characterisations which they might find deeply demeaning. (For instance, suggesting that anyone in their 'camp' is somehow inhuman and monstrous.) 

I will not refer to my own position wholly in terms of a negative outcome for theirs (e.g. I don't call myself an Anti-Scottishist.)

I won't call for them all to be driven back where I imagine that they originally came from. (Ireland?) nor will I insist that instead of granting them autonomous statehood they ought to be purged entirely from the political map. 

And however much I may suspect that there are a bunch of Scottish nationalists who are card-carrying reprobates — as there are certainly some Russian nationalists one would not want to be stuck in a lift with — I do not discount the notion that it is possible to espouse a nationalist worldview in a largely benign fashion and that there are aspects of the associated cultural programme which are undoubtedly worth celebrating without caveats.

These are all important divergences of the kind we all need to bear in mind whenever we hear someone trot out the 'I am not antisemitic, I am anti-zionist' chestnut. 

Superficially there is indeed a clear de jure distinction between the two pathologies, but do those who claim this 'amendment' truly understand it, or are they simply disguising a bigoted worldview, or perhaps even dog-whistling an essentially hateful, racist project? 

Often enough they rumble themselves almost as soon as they open their mouths. One can almost immediately tell if the very idea of Jewish self-determination is abhorrent to them. 

And let's face it, any kind of 'anti-zionism' which holds that Zionism — the nationalist aspiration of some 80% of Jews worldwide —  is some sort of global Satanic conspiracy, is surely antisemitic by agreed definition. 

 

Le Hump

Having watched much of the Opening Ceremony again, in a far better mood than I was in throughout the original viewing, I have one or two more thoughts to share.

I believe I have experience, both first hand and less so, of examples of when French people appear to be noticeably rather less adept than others of vetting their own ideas, especially the big ones.

They’d come up with some truly great (but...) concepts and would immediately get Le Hump if one were to begin by enumerating some of the things that might not work out as planned.

You know the kind of thing. Maginot Line: what if the Germans come in over there? Le Hump.

My father’s business was large scale theatrical events and I recall him explaining (sometimes com-plaining) how constant the need always was to keep a close eye on the ambitions of the creatives.

The problem in Paris may have begun as an urge to in some way over-compensate for the pompous and pious solemnities of the modern Olympic Movement, its ever so slightly neo-fascist aethetics even, all of which the French probably feel rather responsible for, and rightly so. So from the outset, some sort of shattering of the boundaries of good taste and common sense was always going into the final recipe.

Even the best bits of the ceremony were hindered by little details that might have been addressed rather better in the planning stage.

As for the part they have since felt the need to apologise for, Thomas Jolly did try to allocate himself some plausible deniability by leaving it open to interpretation which, if any, great work of art and thematic mythological material was being referenced, but then his cast members went on the platform formerly known as Twitter and explained what they thought they were up to, and there we have it, one of those (likely) mishaps which were not given due consideration at sign-off.

Soft Targets

 

Yesterday saw the rather predictable surge in righteous indignation over certain aspects of the Opening Ceremony, with a subset of commentators scouring the footage for the remotest indications of satanic imagery.

Some even went back twelve years to the NHS bed sequence at London 2012 in order to propose a new exegesis involving demonic possession.

As Danny Boyle had some notoriety as a lapsed aspirant to the Catholic priesthood, Thomas Jolly is both Jewish and homosexual, and a man with an understanding of the term ‘republican’ which no longer travels so well across the pond.

Still, his artistic vision, if stoked by Hellfire, suggests that the latter may after all be a metaphor for the most extreme, everlasting form of ennui, for his ceremony was diabolically boring at times, when not fiendishly shambolic, aesthetically and organisationally.

I don’t have an issue with sending up religion per se, but there’s a time and a place for the full Charlie Hebdo, and with freedom comes responsibility — the responsibility to not just go after the soft targets. 

 

People who think The Last Supper is an article of faith rather than say, a painting by a gay man in the Renaissance are surely the softest of targets.

Slippery Slopes

Disturbing events in the USA over the weekend, (Pennsylvania not Miami) can, one supposes, either be put down to a deep level conspiracy or monumental incompetence. 

I currently favour the latter interpretation. (And let's face it, even if we lean towards the former...)

Perhaps these two doddery, barely competent men occupying the White House for the last eight years have somehow 'conspired' to disguise a larger problem. Rather than being anomalies at the summit of American power, perhaps it has become one-legged turtles all the way down?

As a detached Brit, my biggest beef with Biden during his term was the behaviour of his Secret Service goons at Buckingham Palace the night before the Queen's funeral. The self-conceit of this entourage was immediately apparent, but perhaps the resulting rudeness was itself a consequence of poor quality leadership, of basic incompetence. 

The rot, the hollowness, may now be irreversible.

B Teams in action

Following defeat at Waterloo and a subsequent failure to reconsolidate his political position in Paris, Napoleon made a beeline for the west coast in the hope of escaping to America, but he failed to secure passage on any ship other than HMS Bellerophon. 

There were many reasons to be disappointed with Ridley Scott's Boney biopic last year. The story was too sketchy and none of the characters psychologically interesting enough. 

I guess it will be a few years before we get another big budget take on Napoleon. If it were me, I'd be looking at the period between the calamitous flight from Moscow up to Waterloo. 

Hollywood tends to tell this story as a collection of minor incidents around the pivotal moment when Napoleon arrived back on French soil after getting away from his tiny realm of Elba, and the French army dispatched to take him back into custody instead cries 'Vive L'Empereur!' and joins him for the march to Paris. 

Napoleon V2.0, the so called 100 Days, deserves a more detailed dramatic exploration. Rather than simply going back to where he had been rudely interrupted in 1814, Bonaparte decided to reboot himself as the people's sovereign, the true avatar of the Revolution. 

Or at least some sort of workable trade-off between the ideals of 1789 and the stability he later imposed. To this end he re-abolished slavery, having before de-abolished it, and re-jigged the constitution along more liberal lines, forming two chambers with powers alongside that of the executive. Ironically, it would be these deputies who turned against him after his decisive defeat by the allied coalition. Had this happy compromise been unbeatable, like Spain proved on Sunday, things might have become very interesting indeed. (Though Napoleon in America would have been worthy of a movie treatment in itself.) 

This coalition, which some have compared to a kind of proto-NATO, also had a strong core and some wobbly fringes. Wellington had to face his adversary with an army consisting of 30-40% Dutch and Belgian troops, some of which were little more than militia, while others had only recently fought alongside the French. 

Part of the Duke's problem was that since Napoleon had come a-cropper in Russia the British had gone to war with the US in 1812. Other than the whiteness of the White House the most significant consequence of this conflict was the fact that the best bits of the British army were stuck in North America when Napoleon marched on Brussels, in particular the majority of the regiments with relevant experience of fighting and defeating the French in the Peninsula War.

One could even say however that both sides undertook this most history-adjusting of battles with their second string squad members. Certainly, other than Ney, Bonaparte had very much a B team of advisors and military subordinates around him. His best hope of success, as with Putin vs NATO, was divide and conquer and/or pick off the weak parts of the alliance. 

It almost worked, but he made some critical errors of judgement and the weather didn't help. 

There were many different political and constitutional visions in play during this final phase of Napoleonic aspiration. 

We've seen these last few days how History can pivot on tiny details. Waterloo was rather like an great compilation tape of such 'sliding doors' moments, fully deserving of the title 'Now That's What I Call A Near Run Thing'.

The parentage of invention...

Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something > Robert Heinlein

 

This rather drôle quotation made me think back to some essays I wrote in my first year of Uni, specifically about some of the apparent great leaps forward in medieval agricultural techniques. 

 

As ever the issue in historical analysis is usually whether necessity is the mother of all invention. Heinlein seemed to say “yeah”, with a bit of a yawn. 

 

At some point since Heinlein's era, there seems to me to have been a fairly subtle adjustment to the meaning of the term ‘easier’ and a further complication in our understanding of the ‘something’ needing to be addressed. 

 

Innovation in contemporary capitalist societies is often driven by a need to create additional ‘value’ or ‘augmentation’ over firm solutions. Indeed, problem solving is generally avoided, as it generates a potential profit dead end. 

 

So perhaps we have seen a switch back towards the early risers, people who spend at least half their days configuring new problems that might need fixing during the rest of their waking hours. 

 

And it does seem that the outcome of this is more like ‘peculiarly driven men trying to find more complicated ways to do something’, i.e. acquire money and status, whilst almost tangentially, adding novelty to everyone else’s lives. 

 

Novelty was not such a big thing in the lives of medieval people.

 

Mentalities

When commentators blame formal bodies of ideas or 'isms' rather than people for the things they apparently find seriously problematic, they are quite often trying to camouflage another kind of ism altogether: race-ism.

"I'm not against Jews, I'm anti-Zionist" or indeed "Islam represents a threat to our way of life." 

And the people who don't mind being considered shamelessly bigoted tend to blame aspects of those groups they regard as complicit in propagating the phenomenon they hate, which are usually only tangentially related to it, if at all. 

Even when it's not one of these surrogate attributions, we are still dealing with a subset of the major fallacies which persist in our culture about how live action History actually works.

Neither Karl Marx and his book nor Mohammed and his book are directly responsible for the inhumanities later committed in their name. 

These detached dogmas function a bit like chemical agents which in some people engender, or more often accentuate, what historians often refer to as a 'mentality' (or more pretentiously, a mentalité.)

It is these that we need to watch most closely, not texts or the way people dress etc. The conflicts surrounding us are driven by complex dynamics which include impersonal situations and cultural factors, but ultimately it is nearly always the aforementioned mentalities which provide the key impetus.

If you understand how they form, you can start to appreciate how they can be either encouraged or discouraged.

Focusing on how people look, where they are from geographically, what information they consume and spread, can often be an unnecessary distraction.