Oxymorons in Washington

Most of us who are not-American can intuitively grasp that the USA is a Jekyll and Hyde kind of place. 

Sometimes the doc is in charge, sometimes the plain old mister, but this internal conflict and resulting pattern of periodic political alternation has never really been a permanent put-off. 

For we understand that this nation is rather obviously a hybrid: between Old World and New World conditions and values, not quite a proper First World country like Japan or Germany, nor yet a full-on Third World clusterfuck either. 

In contrast with other notable hybrids — Italy or indeed China, say  — to the casual visitor the United States can come across as somewhat neither here nor there, for it lacks the profounder allure of a deeper history. 

It all began rather more recently and oxymoronically as the 'Empire of Liberty', a phrase coined by slave-owning Jefferson, and has continued in much the same vein ever since. 

There are always so many things for outsiders to admire, yet while Americans might think their 'brand' is the ideal, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the manner with which the self-image is often out of step with the actual has always been very much part of the package.  

And this, somewhat counter-intuitively, makes global brand USA relatively immune to the sort of permanent trashing one could imagine it might now be receiving at the hands of the moron in the White House. (Even though it has to be noted that the paired down ideal, as currently expressed by the GOP in particular, is becoming less and less uplifting in the international arena.) 

However, extend what you mean by 'other people' to your internal audience - non-white people for instance — and therein you do have a bit of a problem, for Brand USA is much less able to cope with flagrant off-message hypocrisy when it comes to its own citizens, which is why it imposes the signs, symbols and platitudes of patriotism so rigorously at home. 

Kneeling NFL players do seem have found just the right contemporary spot in this old wound to insert and wriggle the finger. Nevertheless their protest is a mild one compared to some of the stuff witnessed in ante-bellum America: such as the public burning of the Constitution (a 'covenant with death') on July 4 by William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator. 

One has to wonder what Vice President Pence would have made of THAT. 

De-centralisation, aka Anarchy

Post-2008 populist insurgencies have been piggy-backing onto a pre-existing bent in European politics: separatist, anti-establishment sentiment along with the compulsion to push back against globalisation by re-isolating.

In recent times the referendum in Scotland and then in the wider UK when the Conservatives offered a plebiscite over EU membership, the turbo-charging effect of populism has been clear - especially as this form of decision making appears both more popular and more democratic than it actually is.

But England and Scotland were both fully-formed nation states at the start of the modern era. Spain was always going to present a thornier set of problems to an established order confronted by devolving and decentralising tendencies.

This nation has always been more of an amalgamation: of kingdoms, of cultures, of peoples, of languages and dialects, of antiquated legitimacies. Even the modern monarchy sits on a mesh of mutually-reinforcing regional tiles, each with its own form of sovereignty.

The Inquisition and, more recently, the Franco dictatorship provide testimony to just how hard 'conservatives' have had to work to contain Spain's inner contradictions.

Mariano Rajoy was only (barely) able to form a government in Madrid after a second popular consultation. In the form of Podemos the populists are undermining the old status quo from within as well.

I guess I've found Rajoy unpalatable as a politician ever since his abortive attempt to pin the blame for the 2004 atrocities on the Basques - which cost him the premiership and condemned him to looking surly for seven years. In his own mind he is probably a Lincoln-like figure, standing up for the union and the rule of constitutional law, perhaps comforting himself that Abe used a lot more than boots, batons and pepper spray on the secessionist scumbags. If he wins, he might be reckoning, history will give him the same sort of uncomplicated thumbs up, while the would-be breakaways will be remembered as traitors.

For now other EU leaders will support his take on the letter of the Spanish constitution — that sovereignty belong to all — because it rather obviously suits them. But with any further escalation, who knows?

It strikes me that the genre of science fiction reveals that many liberal westerners tend to imagine our collective political future as one of ever larger structures, one of federations, if not empires. For deep down we surely recognise that nationalism is a rather base instinct, and thus anticipate that it will eventually be dissipated by the sort of diversity we witness on the bridge of the starship Enterprise — with only the Klingons literally clinging on to the urges embodied by the likes of Nigel Farage.

Yet let us not forget that Catalunya was the wellspring of the anarchist disposition on the Iberian peninsula prior to the Civil War, and thus one should remember that the alternative utopian path to one big happy human family has always been one of radical de-centralisation.

(A snap I took in Euskadi, 2004)

The Vietnam War (Part 1)

Some initial reflections on the introductory episode of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary. 

I suppose few nations are truly adept at looking at themselves in the mirror, but the USA does seem especially bad at it. 

Last month I visited the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, which has an entire building devoted to explaining the course of the war in the Pacific, but the section covering the detonation of two atomic weapons over major urban areas is so tiny as to be completely miss-able.

Having watched just this opener, it does immediately strike to me that the USA is still not ready, culturally, for a no-punches-pulled interpretation of this conflict. The origins bit at least.

Many of the facts here were new to me, and interesting, but the underlying tone of much of the analysis rankled. It was essentially apologetic, at times seemingly determined to deflect as much of the blame from the US as an intelligent audience might bear.

So, we witnessed some archetypally arrogant and perfidious Froggy behaviour (followed by the inevitable capitulation), as well as that of duplicitous native political actors that the Americans ‘didn’t understand’

The French and Japanese presence was put down to a naked compulsion to exploit, whereas the Yanks apparently just wanted to protect freedom and stem the red tide - yet were slowly drawn into conflict against their better, anti-colonial, instincts.

Crucially, we are expected to believe that Eisenhower and his CIA underlings in Indochina were at their most ingenuous in 1954-5, precisely the moment Guatemalans were learning just how cynical and ruthless they could be.

This ‘all men are created equal’ business is the foundational doublethink at the heart of the American project and has led to some extraordinary bouts of hypocrisy over two and a half centuries or so. The irony that it is something Americans broadly share with the French is apparently lost on these film-makers. 

It permits its users an enhanced perception of the failings of others vis-a-vis such a precept, whilst making them almost oblivious to their own.

Before watching episode two I think I shall need to have another go at The Quiet American...

Plot and Perspective

If I were young again and heading to Film School I think I’d like to write a dissertation on the difference between narrative and camera perspective and why some directors seem a bit oblivious to it. 

Certainly one of the most entertaining novels I’ve read this year was Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill, set in 18th century New York. For most of the text I was thinking how long it would take for the story to be adapted for TV or even the big screen; there are plenty of very ‘cinematic’ moments in the drama. But then at the end Spufford delivers something of an apple-cart upsetting reveal, a well-disguised transformation of narrative perspective that ought to make the reader immediately re-consider everything that has occurred before if not actually start to re-read the whole novel from scratch. 

This is one of those ruses of intelligent literature that should, by rights, make this one of those unfilmable books, yet somehow I still think the temptation to tell this tale anyway (and with lavish costumes) will remain. 

Narrative perspective is often crucial to other aspects of a story, such as plot. 

What a lot of otherwise talented directors don’t quite seem to appreciate is that swapping a first or even third person narrative for the apparently more objective showing rather than telling of the camera’s-eye-view can render an effective plot somehow less so. 

Case in point an otherwise excellent Argentinian film we watched this week - El Otro Hermano - based on Carlos Busqued’s novel Bajo Éste Sol Tremendo. The performances, the grotty rural mise-en-scène ...all top notch. But about 80% of the way in the conclusion turned into one of those utterly predictable yet not completely necessary third acts that writers should try to avoid. 



Now, I’ve not read the novel, but I strongly suspect that the narrative perspective was more firmly cinched to Cetarti, the outsider in this contemptible environment. 

The film however established right from the first moment a sense of symmetry between the goings on around Cetarti and those around local would-be capo Duarte. As the last few minutes approached at least one more interesting and appropriate way of concluding the story was suggested to us. 

Now I have to read the bloody book - if only out of curiosity about how the author managed to marry plot and perspective. 

Revolutions in disguise

For me a ‘revolution’ can be said to have occurred when one group or class hijacks the state along with all its usual mechanisms for mediating between competing interests within that society. In this sense the accession of Trump is as much as revolution in the US as that of Chavez was in Venezuela, even Castro in Cuba. What it suppose it currently lacks is the clear sense that either he or those behind him will openly attempt to make more permanent this direct corporate power grab at the expense of America’s traditional political intermediaries. But it is clear that last November the choice was qualitatively different to the usual formulation at an American general election: a vote for the Donald was not really a straightforward vote against Hilary or even Barack, and it was hardly an endorsement of the GOP. If the citizens of the USA are not too careful they may end up stuck with the consequences of this 'revolution' in disguise for longer than their constitution normally allows. The groundwork for this was rather transparently laid by suggesting to the less sophisticated parts of the electorate that 'liberals' had been slowly effecting an unconstitutional revolution of their own.

A Tale of Two Cyclones

Harvey. This one was being widely reported in Mexican and Central American media from August 18, but the US was simply too distracted by falling statues and resurgent Neo-Nazis and was in effect caught completely unawares. When I left Houston on the 24th I had mentioned the incoming storm to several locals who seemed neither to know or care that much about it. 

Irma. Almost from the moment this one started to swirl in the mid-Atlantic the story was all about the threat it would ultimately pose to Florida - even as it laid waste to several small islands in the Caribbean and then the biggest one. The victims out there in the archipelago face a lose-lose situation in terms of the news cycle now. If the sunshine state does succumb to Irmageddon, this news will dominate for days unless the Donald sets off Armageddon proper. And if the story turns out to be a massive collective ‘phew’ in the southern states, this will have much the same effect, leaving the daminificados of Barbuda etc. largely forgotten. 

'What the fuck just happened here?'

I had a series of affectingly positive experiences on my recent trip to the American south. I have reflected however that if I were to try to somehow visualise them graphically, they’d all turn up disconcertingly proximate on the spectrum to some of my more negative experiences. As I think David Lynch has been at pains to suggest in his now-concluded Twin Peaks revival, there is a marked Jekyll and Hyde quality to many aspects of ‘Americana’. 

In the past I have tended to divide the places I have visited into those that are merely ‘interesting’ and those that can somehow be elevated into the premium category of 'deeply or even disturbingly interesting', to which nations such as Russia (the USSSR when I was present), Japan and Mexico belong in my notes. 

I’d add the USA, but as Lynch has demonstrated time and again, ‘interesting’ is far from being the most applicable adjective for an experience that more than occasionally teeters on the dreamlike, hangs the hyper on reality and which seems both so self-contained and yet at once full of worm-holes. 

Dummy's Guide

A handy guide to many-sided conflicts for the likes of Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn. 

When should one check oneself before suggesting that both sides in a ruckus are equally violent and generally looking for trouble? 

a) When one side is a bunch of Nazis
b) When one side is the state and has an army and has just flushed the constitution down the toilet.

Freeing ourselves from Freedumb...

There really is no 'free' thing that is an endless good in itself.

To some extent the West is constantly struggling these days to free itself from the strident American misconception of freedom, free markets etc. Put simply this is the notion that the application of freedom to anything improves it and any negative consequences are somehow being imagined by people with jaundiced mentalities.

In the English tradition we get our base conception of freedom from Thomas Hobbes. And as Quentin Skinner puts it: 'The desperate paradox on which Hobbes’s political theory is grounded is that the greatest enemy of human nature is human nature itself'.

Hobbes got it. Freedom is in our nature, he insisted - our birthright - but it comes with negative consequences as well as positive ones.

The trouble is that in making this point Hobbes famously emphasised a worst case scenario: the nasty, brutish and short lifestyle that results from everyone exercising their right to freedom at the same time.

In practice it is more of a slow-burn or layered kind of apocalypse that tends to occur. We get many good things from the Internet, open borders, free markets, the Uber economy and so on. In many cases the good far outweighs the bad, depending in part on one's historical perspective.

Whilst this is undeniable, so too is the fact that freedom amplifies good and evil at the same time. And some of those amplified evils manifest themselves as NEW evils and thus have a transformative effect that belies their minority status in the whole package.

Viz Douglas Murray today on the issues posed by 'free' migration into Southern Europe...

British Ancestry and Diversity

This over-heated debate about diversity in Roman Britain is skirting around one of the more interesting aspects of the nation's genetic heritage.

If Romans of African descent have left almost no trace in the British gene pool, Mary Beard is quite right to point out that neither have the Normans. (Or for that matter, any other kind of Romans.)

But more to the point, there is a notable (and for many, surprising) dearth of Anglo-Saxon ancestry in the English gene pool as well.

DNA studies tend to reveal that most 'native' Britons can trace their ancestors back in an unbroken line to the people that occupied the island long before the Romans even turned up, and that is this component of their DNA that tends to predominate. 

This should not be all that surprising. After the ice age Britain was effectively an empty space that was suddenly repopulated both by people coming up the Atlantic coast from the Iberian peninsula and people crossing the North Sea from what is now Germany and Scandinavia. (My own paternal ancestors belonged to the former group, according to an analysis I had done a decade ago.) 

Everyone who came later, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, Normans etc etc. represented little more than a top-up. 

Though from the political perspective the locals experienced this more as a top-down phenomenon!

Corbyn condemns 'all violence' in Venezuela...

Oh snore. 

Back in the 80s when many different Latin American countries were enduring US-supported tyrannies, a public condemnation of 'all the violence' was shorthand for downplaying the oppressive conduct of the state, as well as an attempt to establish moral equivalence between the authorities and their armed forces and anyone brave enough to stand-up to them with anything other than a placard. 

In other words, casuistry Jeremy, pure and simple. 

Ex-pat or Migrant?

That old controversy about the difference between an ex-pat and an immigrant resurfaced on the newly re-branded Ex-Pats Living in Guatemala page yesterday (now redacted).

The literature on this one is quite extensive and politically gnarly. In the UK we have non-doms as well, just to add to all the fun.

But in Guatemala, although these categories are necessarily fluid, I think it is clear that in the main an ex-pat is someone who is...

A) Wanted by the FBI, or..
B) On a 90-day tourist visa either working illegally or running a small business 'bajo agua', as they say here. 

On a somewhat separate note, I recently crossed the border between Corozal and Chetumal and the process at Mexican customs was so utterly interminable that one Belizean wag was heard to quip 'We're not here to ask for asylum you know man!' 

A typical Q&A session...

...on the Facebook page formerly known as 'Guatemala Ex-pats'..

Q: Has anyone used Uber to get to the airport?
A1: Well, I once got an Uber in Kuala Lumpur and it was fine...
A2: No, but that sure is an interesting question.
A3: What's an Uber?

Decoherence

There's a choice of scrambled eggs or strawberry cheesecake for breakfast. I deliberate.

According to seventeenth century English thinker Thomas Hobbes, that's exactly what I am doing: de-liberating.

For in Hobbes's view we are only truly free at the moment of choice, not in the making of it. 

As Keanu Reeves said in a recent BBC interview, 'It's quantum baby'.

This take on freedom mingles well with my own notion that one should try to juggle one's worldviews. In other words, as far as possible, one's political cats should remain both dead and alive, for that is the only way that they are also going to be free.

So, while one might think that taking up a firm and radical position out on the ideological fringe makes one look handily both conspicuous and coherent — to follow the analogy — instead the tendency is to de-cohere.

Waterguate?

Conjoined

This operation is freely available on the streets of Guatemala...

15 minutes from Antigua...

By hang glider?

One has to wonder just how above board it can be to flog off parcels of land three quarters of the way up the volcano for almost $200,000. 

These are 40 little eco-cabins we'd rather not be looking up at. 

Let's hope that 'off the grid' doesn't actually mean lack of proper planning oversight. 

Greetings, my German friends...

When I first came to Guatemala in the late 80s there was a local man of my acquaintance who was wont to greet any German national he encountered with a well-practiced yet amiable Nazi salute, often adding an ardent 'Heil Hitler' for good measure. Whilst he reported being a little disappointed with some of the responses he received ('maleducados'), there were still quite a few Teutons around town back then who might be said to have had more than a passing familiarity with this gesture...and must have had to consciously restrain themselves from responding in kind!

The Wrong Battlefield?

Back in November I was given some brief exposure to the gameplay of Battlefield 1 by a friend in London. 

Now it would be fair to say that I've been finding computer games less and less engaging as I grow older, but there was a lot more to this experience than incurious indifference. 

Back in the day I dabbled with other murderous first person scenarios which were surely conceived in at least as much poor taste (Carmageddon, Wolfenstein etc.), but given a couple of days reflection I realised that I have never felt as profoundly offended by any game as I was by this one. 

This might be a very subjective response by a lapsed historian like myself, but I suspect there are some more objective cultural triggers behind this which are worth exploring. 

The Second World War has become our primary meta-narrative of warring worldviews, the ultimate triumph of good vs evil, life over the cult of death etc.  As such, it kind of lends itself to gameplay. 

The Great War on the other hand has a very different place in our collective imagination. As we roll through the various centenaries we Brits have commemorated the conflict with a bloody moat of poppies around the Tower of London and, just recently, a melting soldier of mud in Trafalgar Square.

It has become the modern western world’s Memento Mori, a politically acceptable cult of death. Which is why I think re-spawning avatars a la Doom seem somehow especially inappropriate. 

The western front is not just any battlefield, it’s where something in our civilisation died and as with any death of personal significance, it marks a painfully irretrievable loss. 

A similar if more subdued form of vexation took hold of me during the recent and otherwise enjoyable Wonder Woman movie. 

I gather the comics were set originally in WWII, but the decision was taken to place the emergence of Diana's somewhat aggressive brand of pacifism during the earlier conflagration. Along the way the First World War was given a bit of a makeover such that it took on many of the characteristics of the next one. 

This piece of chicanery was only just legitimised by the proposition of the movie's basic mythology that the warlike Amazons are somehow against all war, and it is certainly true that the no-nonsense pacifist position encounters less resistance from WWI than it does from WWII. 

Anyway, unlike many people in modern discourse, I do understand the important difference between being offended myself and believing that everyone should be offended. 

Press 1 for English?

Dear new, possibly soon-to-be-old, fuckface at the White House podium, 

Before accusing the cosmopolitan-biased Mr Acosta of Fake News Inc. of ignorance, consider the following not-so-stupid questions. 

What proportion of the names of US states derive from the English language?

What proportion of the territory of the United States was until fairly recently part of Mexico? And in the broader sense, what portion of the continent of North America has in general strong historical ties to a non-anglophone cultural tradition? 

As Felipe Fernández-Armesto said in Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States: 

‘Citizens of the United States have always learned the history of their country as if it unfolded exclusively from east to west. In consequence, most of them think their past has created a community essentially—even necessarily—anglophone, with a culture heavily indebted to the heritage of radical Protestantism and English laws and values...even well-educated, amiable, open-minded people in the United States do not realize that their country has a Hispanic past, as well as a Hispanic future—or, at least, that if people do realize this fact, they commonly assign it no contemporary relevance or cultural significance.’ 

An immigration policy which makes speaking English a requirement for work permits isn’t racist per se so much as genuinely fascist, in as much as the last century’s biggest fan of linguistic discrimination was one Francisco Franco. 

Just imagine that the UK refused a work permit to a Patagonian Welsh-speaker that wanted to come and work in Cardiff but only spoke Welsh fluently. Just how ignorant would that be?