Heretic (2024)

 

At last a religious horror flick without a nun in it — though the female characters do occasionally refer to each other as ‘sister’.

Heretic was custom-made for Hugh Grant, and one of its pleasures is how obvious he sets about making this.

I've griped in the past about the sometimes extremely arch techniques that Hollywood currently deploys as a mechanism for preserving the flood of both liberals and conservatives towards the box office to enjoy the same movies. The resulting 'balance' often feels like a disingenuous marketing ploy. 

 

Not here though, as the battle of perspectives is handled extremely deftly, even rendering an illusion of premium depth to the religious debate providing the basic plot dynamics. Perhaps even Latter Day Saints will be able to unwind a little. In essence this screenplay is rather cleverly more about the mechanics of faith than the 'rights and wrongs' of it.

The only reason why I docked it half a star from the five was a handful of largely discountable examples of a slight waywardness in the manner that plot and character were realised, but overall, excellent. 

There's a moment when one of the 'sisters' suggests to Reed that he has started improvising, having lost track a bit of what he originally had planned, meticulously, and that turned out to be the moment that I felt that the movie might have done just that. At the very least it was I who lost track of this distinction between the underlying plan and the various plot driven contingencies we witnessed leading into the final act.

Devils and their hooks

Both last week's viewing of Heretic, plus the debate surrounding whether a telly adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude has been a bit of a fool's errand, have reminded me of this somewhat lighthearted passage in The Brothers Karamazov, which also touches on why we believe the things that we do.

In the movie, High Grant's Mr Reed tries to upset the belief system of the two visiting missionaries by pointing out a few of the logical problems and what he calls iterations. 

In this illustrated bit of Dostoevsky's novel, Alexei has to listen to his father Fyodor Pavlovich pondering whether the devils in Hell really have hooks, and if so...

Even as he rabbits on, the old man senses that his son will be unperturbed. And this will tend to be because Christianity achieved more than one important transformation in its early history. Not only was it adopted by the ruling classes, the state, it also absorbed enough of the classical neo-platonic tradition to make it appealing to educated, reasonably rational people and semi-watertight against what we might refer to as Socratic assault.

You'll see what I mean if you do a Google search for overtly 'Christian' reviews of Heretic. These critics have answers for most of Mr Reed's challenges to their beliefs (even if many seem happy to throw the Mormons under the bus.)

A rationalist assault on religious stories might unsettle, confuse or even annoy a person whose beliefs are wholeheartedly irrational, but for the more learned listener questions like 'does Hell have a ceiling?' slip off their sophisticated cerebral armour — which has been fashioned to suspend the import of such enquiries somewhere liminal between the literal and the non-literal.

Or, as Doestoevsky's narrator puts it a page or so further on...

"In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith."

In this novel there are also nested mini-narratives which would translate badly onto the small screen, such as a coffin which refuses to go inside a church. Show it and it becomes historical fact, rather like showing Mary getting an unexpected visit from Archangel Mike in a TV movie.

Christianity, like Gabo's masterpiece, more or less depends on everything being literal only within a kind of folk universe. The high priests of the faith have one foot in this world, but also one foot in another, where they consider themselves immune to the biting logical animus of men like the late Christopher Hitchens.

Some of the readers of Cien Años de Soledad will be believers, in ghosts for example. Maybe for them Hell also has a roof.

García Márquez was a Marxist-Leninist materialist, so he almost certainly was not. (This is why his flavour of magical realism differs from that of say Isabel Allende, who is clearly more open-minded towards the immaterial. Her novels are not just representations of provincial storytelling of the common sort.)

Meanwhile, Doestoevsky further notes that young Alyosha would probably have ended up as a socialist if he were not a believer, "for socialism is not only the labour question or the question of the so-called fourth estate, but first of all the question of atheism, the question of the modern embodiment of atheism, the question of the Tower of Babel built precisely without God, not to go from earth to heaven."

The same basic urge, flipped.

 

Heroes of our Time

One of the more disconcerting early experiences I had in Central America: was watching the Batman movie in downtown San Salvador in 1989 and discovering that almost everyone in the cinema audience around me was audibly rooting for the Joker.

Anti-heroes are a fascinating phenomenon. The Russians have long led the way. (Lermontov's A Hero of our Time would be a strong recommendation.)

But the Yanks have been catching up, fast. They not only have their Trumps and Mangiones, it seems that the majority of their younger, supposedly educated citizens find something heroic in the bloodbath unleashed by Hamas on 7/10/23.

El Salvador was in a difficult place in 1989. There may be a tome to be written about the social conditions which foster this bizarre inversion of what civilised societies are more frequently looking for in their role models. Though in the USA you might end up concluding that there was always an element of mass sociopathy right under the surface.

The trouble is, it has become a major export product.

 

 

'Self' Blame

One of the most interesting aspects of twentieth century history-making — a genuine cultural phenomenon — is the sheer amount of effort the former belligerents of WWI have put into blaming each other for the conflict.

For decades this was not just empty finger-pointing, but an urgent part of how they collectively attempted to reconstitute the ‘world’ order after 1918.

In some ways one could say that WWI mutated into an almost never-ending, less lethal intellectual conflagration over its origins. In 1929 the German historian Bernhard Schwertfeger explicitly referred to this as the 'World War of Documents'.

By 1991 it was being estimated that the relevant literature ran to 25,000 books and articles, featuring an extremely diverse range of takes on culpability, and this has only expanded further since.

What stands out in this for me is the fact that each ex-participant tried to pin the blame on the others, with the telling exception of the Russians — who largely blamed themselves, or rather their former imperialistic, non-Soviet selves. (There is one key example of German self-flagellation from later in the century to consider as well, from a noted Nazi apostate.)

Anyway, this strikes me as a very solid example of how the Far Left have always found it easier to get worked into a froth about the enemy within than without, with a tendency for rather pointedly arguing amongst themselves that was sent up so well by Monty Python in The Life of Brian.

However, it’s true to say that in the developing world the USA provides international imperialist bugbear services which generally help divert from this innate back-biting tendency, albeit as an outside meddler with explicit connections to more local antagonistic elements.

But in the developed world, it is the domestic imperialist history and its modern adherents that are pretty much always the left-extremists' #1 nemesis, and there is almost no amount of bad behaviour from their nations’ actual external enemies that will distract them from the task of calling it out. (I have noticed on this platform however, that some American tankies also like to project onto us Brits as natural-born Imperialists, par excellence.)

This contrasts markedly with the Far Right, for whom these days their own inner blamelessness (for just about anything) is more axiomatic that ever, and what we might refer to as the Far Centre, for whom it is usually 'the system' that is at fault and in need of a re-jigging in order to deliver more utilitarian results.

 

Albanese's Homscoming Blues

There are no good guys, as such, in the Syrian civil war, though one could make a case for the interests of the Kurds as representing a genuine struggle for self-determination. Homs is very much likely to the last stand of Assad’s underpaid, under-motivated army, after which...who knows?

Francesca Albanese, the UN’s ‘Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories’ has been tweeting her support for the faltering psychotic regime this week, in the interests of ‘stability’. Albanese gets her mandate from the UN Human Rights Commission, currently chaired by Iran who, along with Hezbollah and Russia, are seemingly on the verge of a major strategic setback.

She appears concerned that the current awful status quo is all there is preventing something much worse taking hold, a variation of an argument familiar from American foreign relations in Latin America in which Assad takes on the role of “our son of a bitch”. (It's possibly not too much of a stretch to characterise Macron as a similar bastion of relative sturdiness as the radical nutters close in on him from all sides, albeit less fundamentally psychotic than the Syrian President.)

Maybe there are no good Syrian outcomes to look forward to. Maybe we need to think about the outcomes which are less bad for everyone not living in Syria.

Perhaps we also need to recognise that anything even remotely resembling a good outcome is unattainable by definition unless there is a process of change — and that the ‘stability’ Albanese supports is actually part of a fast-metastasising geopolitical instability promoted by her preferred mafia of SOBs, unsettling not just other nations in the Middle East, but Western Europe too, via a not-too-distantly related conflict in Ukraine and the migratory pressures which Iranian and Russian anti-western meddling have generated. 

 

Free Walestine

Palestine is much less an ideal of nationhood than an ANTI-ideal of nationhood. It’s been that way since the Romans first came up with the cunning plan to un-brand the homeland of the Israelites with a Greek place name referring to its neighbouring polities.

Palestine thus came into human historical existence very specifically as ‘Not Israel’ or even “Seeya Israel’, and this turned out to be the basis of its appeal to Arab ‘nationalists’ in the last century.

Nations are imagined communities and this one, almost uniquely in today’s world, specifically contains a starkly negative component: a national community imagined without its location-specific indigenous people.

And not just in politics either. Visit a so-called Palestinian restaurant in New York and this project of erasure is baked into almost every aspect of the aesthetic, on the plates, on the walls. This all belongs to us and nobody else, it all screams. The others are like, usurpers.

The flip-side of this dogged negativity is the insistence that Israelite nationalism is in its very nature a dark and unpleasant thing — and in that way the anti-ideal contained within ‘Free Palestine’ is freely projected onto its nemesis, making it possible for seemingly fair and reasonable people everywhere to be “Anti-Zionist” in a manner they would almost certainly never imitate in relation to any other community’s national aspirations.

To understand the absurdity of this situation, imagine Wales divided into two extremely hostile 'cultural' camps: Welsh-speakers and English-speakers.

Now consider that the latter have always refused to be part of ‘Wales’. Indeed, when it was first proclaimed independent, they immediately attempted to completely destroy it — with considerable help from over the border in England — even though they had been given the opportunity to have their own part of the country where only English need be spoken: WALESTINE.

No, they absolutely wanted the whole place for themselves, and not in order to share it either, even though in Wales itself English-speakers had the full rights of every citizen, in spite of being a potentially troublesome minority. (It was always a given that the Welsh-speaking zone would be more hospitable to English-speakers than vice versa. )

The forebears of the Walestinians had been around in this area speaking English and generally lording it over all other minorities including those annoying Welsh-speakers for centuries, and could see no reason at all why this situation should not be preserved for all eternity.

And so Walestine has always been conceived of as a place where only English-speakers with a certain well-defined set of values would be welcome.

Everyone else would have to get with the programme, basically a somewhat extreme spin-off of English nationalism elsewhere on the island. (Though it must be said that even the English — white van, St George's flag-waving fanatics aside — have become more than a bit fed up with their Walestinian ‘cousins’ over the years.)

Meanwhile, the UN has been perpetuating what was already an almost un-resolve-able situation by declaring that all the Walestinians (plus their progeny), long ago displaced as a result of their own failed attempt at eradicating all the Welsh-speakers, have become forever refugees, even if they are working in the city of London and making a fortune.

And in spite of the fact that the UN recognises Wales and was clearly 'at fault' for the original bungled attempt at partition, a rather radicalised section within it, the one responsible for the Walestinians — now possibly ten times in number, leaving it unclear how many of them are just plain English — is committed to the idea that they should all have the right to flood back into Wales at some point in the future, thereby destabilising this vulnerable little democracy completely, and most likely leading to a replay of the original attempt at country-cide.

While there may be fairly strong underlying ethnic component to this conflict, one suspects that any attempt to map it onto DNA will result not only in several surprises, but also a good deal of additional confusion and murkiness.

One has to recognise therefore that the essence of the ‘argument’ however, is cultural identification: do you speak English and align with England, or do you want this rather small area to be at least partly a sanctuary for those weird Welsh-speakers, where they can determine their own destinies (and manage their own historically-fraught security issues).

Yet under the auspices of the so-called international community, this argument has been spun into a terrible cycle of violence and a catalytic process of fortified unreasonableness wherever one chooses to look.

(For the record, as I am quite used to being misrepresented when I make statements relating to this topic, and not just by the usual suspects as it turns out. My base position is broadly similar to the one promoted by leading British historians of Jewish heritage, such as Sir Simon Schama and Simon Sebag Montefiore, who consistently promote a pro-peace, anti-Netanyahu position set within a sincerely-held compassionate take on the whole ugly situation.

And just like them, I would draw a clear line between these views and the faux-humanitrarian, antisemitic toxicity of the 'Free Palestine' campaign with its rather prominent ties to Jihadi intolerance and attempts to delegitimise and overrun the Jewish state entirely.)

 

 

 

 

Bitter Aftertaste

Maybe the biggest advantage of living here compared to any city in the US, but also many in Europe as well, is a comparative, not absolute, isolation from the synthetic...the proudly contrived.

Social media provides a daily window onto this divergence. So when I see affluent people in the developed world celebrating their consumption, there is nearly always something inauthentic one can observe (or sniff) about about this, the food and drink they eat, plus the environment in which they down it.

This extends beyond the phenomenon of blatantly synthetic comestibles, so called ultra-processed food, because even top quality grub in London or New York can come soaked in a semiotic sauce which for me at least, is bitter to the taste.

The same sort of people venture over there and tend to make much of the culture that they immerse themselves in, and down to the last plate of frijoles it can appear fundamentally more grounded in human realities than in branding and marketing communications.

I think the essential difference is that such aspects of culture around here do not expressly exist as some sort of compensation for all the rest of the crap. A sort of smokescreen.

Ethno-states

One of the ideas that floats around in the empty heads of the use-X (add your suffix of choice) idiots, is that Israel = an ethno-state. 

There is of course an element of "well, duh" about this. 

Israel is a post-colonial nation and one of the defining characteristics of such, at least those which achieved independent statehood in the last century, is usually an ethnic or ethno-religious patina to the political structures. 

This is true not only in the Middle East, where the phenomenon is close to ubiquitous, but also in parts of Asia — like the Indian sub-continent — even when a form of democratic rule with broad enfranchisement has long been established. Parts of Africa too. 

Where post-colonial nationhood tends to look starkly different is actually in the Americas. 

Here, independence was achieved earlier under the auspices of landed or bourgeois elites, many of whom kept slaves (and their womenfolk out of politics). Ethnic tensions were generally resolved with blatant genocides — then not understood as such — which were far less exposed to the critical outside gaze. 

Where this process dragged on late into the twentieth century, in places like Guatemala for example, things got seriously ugly for they became cross-contaminated with the ideological fancies of the era. 

So if Israel has been constructed around the idea that there should be at least one country in the world where Jews are in charge of their own destinies (and specifically, security) there is indeed a very clear ethno-religious component to the state that has been built there. 

That said, whichever structural inequalities remain — and may now be experiencing reinforcement — every Israeli citizen has the right to vote and to participate up to the highest levels of their society, as well as that of equality under law. (In the UAE if an Emirati crashes into the back of your car, it's YOUR fault. In theory at least, these kind of shenanigans are less prevalent in Israel.) 

This is another reason why 'Apartheid State' is another slur, and a pretty far-fetched one at that. If you think you can draw useful, non-absurd comparisons between that other tortured post-colonial state, South Africa, up to the very end of the last century, then you might as well try to crowbar the same analogy into place across a range of contemporary and historical societies — many perhaps more deserving, yet it would still not be especially illuminating. 

Take Roman Britain for example. Fearing for the security of the society they were attempting to build on our island, they constructed a wall across the top of it, the general idea being that some (not all) of the people living to the north of these bricks manifested as obstinately hostile marauders. Sometimes the wall itself was not enough and they had to venture north on campaigns designed to (often brutally) restore the basic stability…incidentally rather notoriously once losing an entire legion this way.

Would the Picts have had a trans-historical case for describing this state of affairs as as "Apartheid"?

Well, unlike their non-Roman southern counterparts, they showed almost zero inclination to participate, to collaborate with civilised life on any sort of level. And the Romans erected their stone barrier, not because they were following the dictates of racist creed, but because they knew what would happen if they operated an open border policy. 

The Britons who were meanwhile mingling a little more usefully in the south enjoyed a mixture of rights plus potential for wealth and status. There was clearly a lot of the sort of formal inequality that the ancient world was famous for. But there was also that fundamental tension between tribal forms of organisation and larger-scale state building which has been a feature of our world and its gruesome conflicts during my lifetime. 

When I first came to Central America in the 80s I associated with an individual who harboured certain fantasies which, if not 'Leftist' as is now generally understood, were deeply revolutionary and presumably dependent on fairly extremist action for their realisation — he wished to foster the formation of a Mayan ethno-state, mainly out of northern Guatemala and other parts of the Yucatán, with its capital on Lake Petén-Itzá, at Flores, no less.  

If there seemed to be one native American people for whom this might make some sort of crazy sense — if only in a (bloody) wet dream — it would have been the Maya, with their strong association, going back around three millennia, with a specific geographical expanse — the 'Mayab' — and who, unlike say the Mexica or the Inca, had no significant history thetein of enforced hegemony over subject races. 

The point is that before it became fashionable for some sections of Arab opinion and at least some of their transnational eedjits to — hypocritically — decry the Jewish state as grounded in ethno-religious prejudice, it was quite common for radicals to imagine post-colonial orders based rather firmly on shared ethnic identity, especially when these identities pertained to so-called indigenous or 'original' populations, such as the Israelites...with their strong association going back around three millennia with a very specific geographical expanse.

Living Authors League

I operate a kind of Premiership and Championship system with promotion and relegation. 

Writers in the top tier are the ones whose every new book essentially becomes a compulsory acquisition for me. 

Lower down there are those whose latest publication represents an 'event', if not an immediate incentive to pile on.  (Usually more on pile though.) 

This is not a guide to my favourite authors, many of whom are no longer with us, and Mario Vargas Lllosa no longer features as, although alive, he has gone into receivership, to follow the metaphor.

Premiership...

Lawrence Osborne (GB)

Kazuo Ishiguro (GB)

Haruki Murakami (Japan) 

Yoko Ogawa (Japan) 

Tim Winton (Australia) 

Samantha Schweblin (Argentina) 

Mariana Enríquez (Argentina)

Andrés Neuman (Argentina) 

Jorge Franco (Colombia) 

Katie Kitamura (US) 

Emily St John Mandel (US)

Francisco Goldman (US)

Michel Houellebecq (France)

Rodrigo Rey Rosas (Guatemala)

Championship...

Ian McGuire (GB)

David Szalay (GB)

Geoff Dyer (GB)

David Mitchell (GB) 

Julian Barnes (GB)

Gregory Norminton (GB)

James Meek (GB)

Ian McEwan (GB)

Carlos Fuguet (Chile) 

Nona Fernández (Chile)

Lina Meruane (Chile) 

Dave Eggers (US)

Ben Lerner (US) 

Junot Díaz (US) 

Margaret Atwood (Canada)

Arturo Arias (Guatemala)

A Murder At The End of the World

 

The two most interesting characters (and most fascinating performances from the pair of young British thesps) are Darby and Bill, which means that on some levels the parts of the show shot in Utah are more intensely interesting — in spite of all the big concepts seemingly flying around at the retreat in northern Iceland.

Other than Bill, the male characters are all rather flimsy, even Andy (and especially, Ray.)  Ultimately, so too the plot and the plotting, though I enjoyed the ride. 

Brit Marling herself didn’t give any real life to Lee. It was always as if the show-runner had wandered onto the set and was standing in for the real actor cast in the role. 

Tech tycoon lurking in outlandish isolated crib is becoming a bit of an overworked trope, though most of the equivalent scenarios I can recall took themselves a tad less seriously. (The ideas don’t need to be quite so ploddingly interconnected when there is an openly satirical slant. Most of these might have been improved if the proverbial piss had been taken more openly.) 

Yet I also wanted a bit more thought-provoking dialogue between the guests on all the big picture stuff. The closest we got to this was the suggestion that human creativity can be improved via collaboration with AI. It is not to be dismissed out of hand, but it could also be taken as an example of the ‘augmentation’ fallacy often pushed by Silicon Valley types as a kind of moral justification for their private, often narcissistic obsessions — along the lines of ‘eat your greens, they are good for you’, not so much a perspective on the potential for human enhancement, but a tactic whereby a tech-elite minority forces its expensive toys on the masses.

On this occasion I mused about how many of the great minds of the past would have benefited from an AI collaborator, just as in the past I have wondered whether Hemingway would have written better novels on MS Word instead of a typewriter. 

Some might have done. I think if one were to make a big list of all the great creatives of the past, a subset do turn out to be the ‘spent most of their life in a library’ sort. But only a subset. 

For others, their achievement was largely to lift themselves above the background noise of information and opinion. 

And just how many great thinkers and artists ever really ‘collaborated’?

Alice Braga appears to be making quite the career for herself as ‘most intriguing secondary character’ in American TV shows. I remember her well in 2002’s City of God, but have been freaking out as I also seem to have an entirely false memory of her co-starring with Joaquim de Almeida in an adaptation of one of Machado de Asis’s novels. 

 

(I would have been tempted to title this Ten Little Hackers...and risk cancellation for the implied reference to a play that was performed by the staff of my prep school with its original name on the programme.)

The Right Side...

One of the ultimately reassuring things about ‘all this’ is that you cannot be on the right side of history, at least not for long, if your entire project is grounded in fallacies.

That’s not how History works. Indeed its mechanism is not entirely dissimilar to that of evolution — fundamentally directionless — but also like a live action testing system for hypotheses…against reality.

 

 

From Lies to Absurdities

 

 “And lies, since they are often used as substitutes for more violent means, are apt to be considered relatively harmless tools in the arsenal of political action.” > Hannah Arendt, Truth and Politics

 

The best response to lies, especially in politics, is often not the truth.

Or rather, not the facts, which we intuitively believe ought to be the simple antidote to the lies, but instead the truth about why the lies are being adhered to and propagated in the first place.

Politicians of the Right often tell lies nowadays with such a steady flow that we get a parallel media stream of ‘fact checkers’ struggling to keep up.

But the Left have their own special trick when it comes to lies: packaging them into absurdities, which are a form of untruth that is that much harder to counteract one by one with factual ripostes. 

 

The two most obvious sets of codified absurdities in contemporary Leftist discourse are Transgenderism and Palestinianism. I am not going to waste my time explaining in depth the individual fibs which underpin these ideologies because, as I said at the start, the truth rarely helps. They don’t go away. 

 

And one of the reasons that they don’t, is that what ought to be an issue mattering only to a small minority of highly-engaged individuals directly connected to it, becomes almost existential for the whole far-left movement. 

 

This is what we need to understand better then: is there something about counter-factual, codified absurdity per se that makes it broadly useful to the radical left? 

 

Historically the identities that progressives stood up to defend were those which were, to all intents and purposes fixed and non-elective, such as ethnicity and sexuality. One might express one’s ethnicity and sexuality in a variety of different ways of course, but these could never be entirely ‘made up’ e.g. no matter what the law says, whatever we think about them individually or collectively, they persist as observable parts of the human condition. (Crucially, also no matter what ‘History’ says or does as well.) 

 

Trans identity on the other hand is grounded in a curious double game. It begins by celebrating that it is completely elective. Everyone is free to choose their own gender. And at the same time another parallel configuration of everyone is completely un-free to safely pass judgement, as they might otherwise be with such elective decision-making processes.

This simultaneous exploitation of hyper-freedom and hyper un-freedom is clearly what interests the authoritarian Left here, and we can see them applying a version of the same mechanism on a variety of other cultural issues, thereby blurring all distinction between nature, nurture and personal choice. 

 

The trick is to root opinion in an underlying, indisputably fixed characteristic of the old sort of identity. So, the form of censure we now know as ‘Islamophobia’ involves applying the charge of ‘racism’ to anyone who would dare to openly debate the cultural or elective aspects of a religious ideology. Trans extremists wrap themselves in the rainbow flag in a somewhat similar fashion. All criticism — pretty much all commentary even — thus becomes ‘discrimination’. 

 

In such an environment any broadly tolerant person is going to lose track of the basic distinction between the fixed things we should all be fundamentally obliged to tolerate and the fabricated fallacies we should be permitted to unpick without fear of social or legal censure. 

 

This is all very deliberate on the part of the radicals. The essential shiftiness is then consciously retro-fitted to all parts of the human condition, so that aspects of it one might actively (or even unknowingly) discriminate against become a kind of transgression and even race and sexuality begin, by default, to appear like conscious patterns of rebellion against societal norms. 

 

And if one transgresses, one MUST be a victim of Hate, almost by default, and so left with little alternative than the enveloping embrace of illiberal-liberal Love. Get with the programme or the programme will get you.

One identity that has been thrown under the battle bus — sacrificed to the wider goals of this project of radical dishonesty — is that of sex, specifically the rights of the ‘fairer sex’, formerly fellow-travellers with the progressive movement. 

 

There is something almost pitiful about the way certain subsets of humanity now rail against their newfound status as enemies of the ‘humane’, ineffectually tossing facts at the problem, and often paying the prescribed consequences. 

 

Now, you might not care one bit about the desire of say, women and Jews to maintain their own limited ‘protected spaces’ where their traditional, occasionally very hazardous antagonists are excluded, but be advised, Absurdity has bigger plans for pretty much everyone, which could ultimately include many aspects of the lifestyle you currently cherish.

And the mendacious ideological bullies on both extremes, are keenly aware that the best way to have their own way, is to get the rest of us to most of their own dirty work for them. Though in the UK they have been seeking and sometimes also getting assistance that they ought not to have received from the Police and other authorities.

 

 

Smile 2 (2024)

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

 

 

 

 

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

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

 

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

 

Inverted Transgressives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Echo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Communications and outcomes

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

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

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

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

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

So there you have your three options...

a) Peace

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

c) Perpetual war.

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

See, not so hard, is it? 

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

 

Disruptor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Firebird

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was.

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

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

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

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

Much sex was had in the rear toilets.

 

Pogrom?

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

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

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

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

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