Blog is up again

Apologies to my readers. It was not a good summer and I was ill and uncommunicative.

Also it seemed the Blog needed re-thinking.

It is now more a journal of what goes through my mind that I think might be of interest to others.

IRELAND & THE TROUBLES

I re-read as I read, a lot. Last week five novels by William Trevor, who is by a long shot the best living writer in English. Fools of Fortune which alas I will finish today, made me reflect the Great War, the Spanish Civil War in the mid-‘Thirties, and the more recent dismemberment of Yugoslavia are cut of the same cloth. They can’t be extirpated from Irish, Spanish or Serb memories; injustices, follies, were committed during these events and there will forever be family connections to those acts and crimes. They will all have lost something valuable.

The big totalitarianisms of the past century, in contrast, were vast, impenetrable and anonymous. It was talk one heard, or other peoples’ memories. The fouler for that, but not so personal.

OF BURMA

My memory was jogged by hearing of the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. An old friends from my Sunday Times days, Mihir Bose, had made me read a little twentieth century Burmese history, in which his father – mysteriously killed in a plane flying to Japan – played a part. If I remember rightly, this fetching lady’s father was the head of Burma’s communist party, which thought it better to collaborate with the Japanese invader than submit to British rule.

The lady cannot, then, be said to spring full-blown from. Jove’s brow. There, too, there is a family history.

It is curious that in moments of euphoria, democracy and whatnot, all sense of history is lost. Does anyone remember anything?

FROM SUBLIME TO RIDICULOUS

Now there is to be a Library (or something) Prize for homosexual literature for the young. Will it be literature, which is just that, with no adjective preceding it?

WHY FOOLS RUSH AND THE SMART WAVER

It took some time to get the actual words our President used in the press conference after the recent election. Here is the gist of what interested me:


“There is a inherent danger in being in the White House and being in the bubble. I mean, folks didn’t have any complaints about my leadership style when I was running around Iowa for a year. And they got a pretty good look at me up close and personal, and they were able to lift the hood and kick the tires, and I think they understood that my story was theirs. I might have a funny name, I might have lived in some different places, but the values of hard work and responsibility and honesty and looking out for one another that had been instilled in them by their parents, those were the same values that I took from my mom and my grandparents.

“When you’re in this place, it is hard not to seem removed. Those letters that I read every night, some of them just break my heart. But nobody is filming me reading those letters. And so it’s hard, I think, for people to get a sense of, well, how is he taking in all this information?”

A President who can both think and feel can’t be all bad. I’ve known presidents and nabobs and big shots, and there’s a part of most people that wants power. But ultimately my observation is in accord with Lord Acton’s. Exercising power over others will kill you. You live by it, you die by it. It is the biggest bubble there is: when no one’s left who dares say, ‘I don’t think you should do that.’ Power deletes thought in those around you.

I thought it was a pretty remarkable thing to say to the nation.

STATE OF THE DISUNION

The man -- his smile, his rhetoric, his ease, his obvious superiority to the ruck -- is unfair to the Union of Snake-Oil Salesmen. Selling ice-boxes to Esquimaux (or whatever we´re supposed to call them in these days) is all in a day´s work for our pesident. That is because there are Esquimaux out there. He can sell his message to the public because we are there. But the great amphitheater he daced last night is a Great Void. True, you see the Hairy One (that´s what her name means in Italian) leaping up and down with applause, but trust me, she is just an Illusion. She is not there and she certainly is not listening to the Message, somewhere in her crafty little invisible head a machine goes round and round tallying what this elegant man is saying in terms of what it means to her Job. This will advance those desperate to have an Armenian genocide, for their cyber-votes are here; that will do well with the homosexual ¨community¨ which is also part of her constituency. Oh, I can use that one against him in November says a hoary senator from the Tea Party. Yum yum say those whose legislative wages are paid by lobbyists, that´s worth a few mill. Bingo! shout within their incorporeal selves the sales reps from states with defense industries. But don´t worry. None of them are really there. They live in Elsewhere, a marvelous country populated exclusively with professional politicians. It´s what Obama says there that speaks to such souls as they have left. For is Obama not, also, the President of the PPs, a class apart?

That there is nothing worse than democracy except every other form of government is an adage tested and true, but it is irrelevant to the State of Disunion address we heard last night. Once ´elected´these people no longer have anything to do with democracy, they are a Governing Class, a classical corporate oligarchy, which deals behind doors and lives on the Free Lunch. Bit by bit, day by day, they recede from reality, devoid of meaning and any importance save to themselves. Too bad, for it was a good speech and given by an almost good man, that is: he might be entirely good were he not one of them.

To such an audience, how can one give a good speech or sell a program? If Saint Francis of Assisi, a saint mostly known for walking around shoeless and talking to the birds, appeared before the joint houses of Congress, what he said would fall into the same abyss -- Now listen, Frank, we have to stick together on this thing or you won´t have a habit to wear next time you want to convert people to your Better Life! Because what counts in PP-Land is staying there and not being exiled to America. That would be worse than the Gulag. Have you ever seen an ex-politician? What a sorry figure he cuts! Belly up, the catfish eat him rather than the other way around. Lawdy me! says Frank. Please Massa. Out there it´s Hell.

Hell it is. Even on the level of substance, the remedies offered seem pretty hokey. Take money away from the Big Banks and they´ll find out some other way to take your money and put it into their own pockets. Does the Great Leader really believe that to correct the Education Deficit in America (seven years, I calculate, from the days when I was in the Eighth Grade in Balboa, California, reading books that now puzzle Juniors and Seniors in our colleges) what is needed is a further expansion of educational opportunity, via community colleges? There was a time when a high school diploma did indeed fit you for a decent working wage, and if our high schools could be brought back to their 1939 levels, that would be a mighty reform. Like elects like is a rule in education as in government: giving more money to the best teachers would be great, if it weren´t teachers who chose them.

Quousque tandem abutere patientia nostra? flung Cicero in the court-room. For how long are we to stay patient, eh? With the Afghanistan farce? With the health care joke? It would be no bad thing, for instance, to make sure that hospital in America were not places where we get sicker. They could start with the world-famous Massachusetts General, whose general filth is not far off that available in Somalia. But will that happen? One thing our president got right: he knows that we know what´s wrong with our disunion. That´s visible and palpable to million upon million of us. As it is visible and palpable that nothing that is said in PP-Land is real. You can´t sue them, it costs a fortune to join them, and whatever we do, so long as PPs exist, nothing, nada, will change.