Exposed

From some of the stuff I’ve been reading it has become absolutely clear that if the Israelis had just carried out a cunningly targeted strike against a fleet of invading aliens dead set on destroying human civilisation and then eating anyone left over, there are plenty of people out there who would right now be raging against them.

As an information gathering tactic ‘Grim Beeper’ has not only opened a lid on Hezbollah and its noxious network in Lebanon, it also seems to have successfully baited and exposed many of the individuals elsewhere who have more or less camouflaged their anti-Jewish hatefulness (and/or Islamist indoctrination) behind the constantly equivocating ‘progressive’ rhetoric of Palestinianism.

And for some reason this particular incident, against a truly unpleasant corps of militants that are non-core to the conflict and represent a violent repudiation of the key values which many of these commentators appear to live by — an incident they might easily have just ignored — has fully disengaged their brains and scrambled their moral compasses. 

You can't really be an anti-fascist who hates to see bad things happen to fascists. This would be like shedding tears over a defunct Dalek in Doctor Who.

Yet this is what the above-mentioned fools have been up to for eleven months when it comes to Hamas, because they have at least partially re-imagined and doggedly re-packaged those exterminators as heroic resistance fighters.

But Hezbollah? Try the same trick with them and the moral high ground becomes a spot with the un-surest of footing.

 

Pescado Empanizado

Mexican seaside destinations pass through distinct phases, rather like Mesomaerican civilisations.

The Postclassic for example, manifests not just as a palpable sense of diminishing returns, but with a kind of pustulating pretentiousness.

Playa del Carmen surely had an Early Postclassic era made up largely of boutique and or ‘hip’ propositions around town, before the serious overgrazing commenced and content switched places with style. 
Almost every key structure from the apogee was demolished and replaced — they didn’t even bother themselves with encasing the old with the new.

I have found that one of the key markers one can make use of for determining which stage is current is the size and quality of the breaded fish fillets served in the beach restaurants — establishments which, back home, the lapsed-conquistadores call chiringuitos.

Much of Oaxacan coast appears permanently mired in the shamanistic Early Pre-Classic. Not a bad thing.

There is Huatulco however, laid down by one of those visionary ‘build it and they will come’ approaches to higher civilisation. But they didn’t, at least not really, leaving it as a seemingly incomplete exemplar of all the stages, juxtaposed. 

Blink Twice (2024)

If this had been Zoë Kravitz's first novel as opposed to her Hollywood directorial debut, I suspect she would have been assigned an experienced editor who would have pointed out the conspicuous (and not particularly complex) changes she would have needed to make in order to make the material more compelling.

That clearly didn't happen here, so instead we get a sort of calling card demonstrating what she is good at and not so good at in this new role. 

 

She can get very good performances out of her cast and she knows how to work with the camera to build arresting visuals. But neither the screenplay nor the on-screen storytelling is quite as A-list as they seem to think they are.

There seem to me to be a pair of good reasons for making a psychological thriller. Firstly to demonstrate mastery of the form, that controlled interplay with audience speculative responses leading up to the reveal. And secondly to place within that form a story with wider human meaning, either on the level of individual existential concerns or on the more collective plane: social symbolism.

I don't believe Kravitz undertook this with a strong sense of how to deliver the former, beyond applying the obvious tropes, and any underlying message is blurry at best. This is exacerbated by the inherent sketchiness of not only the basic mechanism of the scenario, but also the characters, and their ethical underpinnings.

The version we saw came with a trigger warning that doubled as a spoiler. The plot does indeed possess a lot of potential for some seriously disturbing darkness, but largely dodges it at every key opportunity. This has been fashioned as entertainment not as intellectual or psychological stimulation and as entertainment the film is substantially successful.

Adria Arjona, playing an odd sort of stand-in, second tier protagonist is kind of emblematic of some of the on/off issues here. I remember concluding during Hit Man that while she can definitely play a role, I’m less convinced when she’s playing a role within a role (or perhaps only seeming to).

One fun aspect of the film is the primary location, the strikingly red Hacienda Temozón, just south of Mérida. I remember skyping with a friend who’d found himself as the only guest there during the swine flu panic, and got a great little laptop tour of the location.

Colourful Characters

Up until my early 20s if you'd asked me about the things that make me proud to be British I would have named the BBC fairly close to the top of any such list.

Habitually I date the rude awakening to December 21, 1989, the day after the US invasion of Panama, when I witnessed a news report* which suggested to me that the Beeb might not actually be any more reliable that those shortwave broadcasts from Radio Moscow that I'd listened to regularly for a lark as a teenager.

Nowadays I have concluded that there could well even be something worse about Aunty, as the manipulative dishonesty is seemingly far less self-aware. And sometimes I have no solid clue as to WHY they choose to shamelessly push a particular agenda, such as Bush's back then, and Hamas's today, and on some levels I am not sure they do either. (Vladimir Posner knew exactly what he was up to.)

I'd had a clear inkling of what goes on a year or so earlier, if truth be told (the very thing the BBC seems to shy away from).

Producers decided to hold a televised debate hosted by Janet Street Porter and picked my college as the venue. The topic was the defunct newspaper known as The Sunday Sport, then considered the dregs of vulgarian reportage and so ripe for a going over by the Corporation.

I suppose the idea on paper was to see how a group of young, potentially high-minded Cambridge undergrads would respond to the views aired, but in practice that was not what was broadcast. The BBC had invited a small group of 'colourful' characters who were not members of Girton and whose questions to the panel were largely the only ones that were shown in the final edit.

The entire exercise was essentially a bait for the tabloids, and they duly responded, unfairly lambasting the attitudes and intelligence of Girtonians, unaware of the ruse.

Perhaps the eventual fallout turned out to be that the BBC packed itself with these very same 'colourful characters'?

* Not a matter of 'slant'. A Panamanian in the ruins of his home was asked a question by the reporter who then live translated it in a wholly dishonest manner. I had only just become bilingual and I cannot begin to tell you how much this shocked me.

Surprising turmout at the old school reunion...

Didn’t age particularly well.

Let’s suppose this strike had been carried out against a drug cartel rather than a well-organised gang of hateful Nazi-saluting militants.

It’s highly targeted, yet on other levels it’s also explorative, practically an information gathering exercise.

Most of the victims would be low level foot soldiers and associated auxiliary cell-members, but there are bound to be a few surprises, not just ‘higher-ups’, but individuals who are going about more openly in ‘normative’, not so explicitly murderous society, often exercising a role which would provide a measure of legitimacy or indeed, untouchability.

In Mexico, for example, one can only wonder who might be rubbing their crotches today. As a bare minimum you’d expect politicians and members of the judiciary to have entered the ‘net’, perhaps even a priest or two.

Israel has attempted to demonstrate in Gaza how UNRWA and media outfits like Al Jazeera provide Hamas with a parallel infrastructure, but there’s been nothing as definitive and uncontestable as an exploding pager. 

The Iranian Ambassador will surely not turn out to be the only crossover case identified this way.

(If anyone wants to establish the basis of sensible government in Lebanon, now might be a goodish moment.)

Rebel Ridge (2024)

The plot is a ‘chirmol’ and there are loose ends to deal with as the credits roll, but Rebel Ridge is gripping from start to finish.

Jeremy Saulnier’s last movie Hold the Dark (2018) featured an extravagantly violent, high body count police/suspect gun battle, and I am sure that for some, expectations had been set for some sort of reprise here, but instead the near final shoot out is almost comically chaotic and imprecise.

 

Indeed the material’s USP is the subtle frustration of viewer expectations (e.g. an ex-Marine Corps protagonist who apparently has a Wikipedia page detailing how good he is at Asian martial arts who doesn’t really do any of that stuff in the movie, which is named after a completely subsidiary location in the story etc), yet we never felt properly frustrated and a large part of this has to do with the commanding persona of Terry Richmond, played by Brixton-born Aaron Pierre— a late substitution for John Boyega — and now surely on the path to Hollywood mega-stardom.

Don't Turn Out The Lights (2024)

The trouble with genre horror movies is so often that whilst they openly tease so many possible explanations for what's happening to a given group of unlikeable 'teens', the resolution, when it comes, always feels a bit disappointing.

So here Andy Fickman gives us instead something far more unsettled (perhaps in the hope that jaded audiences will find this more unsettling), and not in the Henry James ambiguity kind of way either, rather a constant stream of ill-defined potentialities, up to and including the final shot.

Overall this results in an exploration of how abnormal or paranormal events are interpreted by those on the sharp end of them, rather than of these happenings themselves.

Does it work? Kind of. Something both formulaic and yet lacking that creeping expectation that habitually rides with these formulas is gripping, if ultimately imprecise in its narrative payload.

 

(The title seems to be an instruction to home viewers rather than a reference to anything that occurs on screen.) 

 

 

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.