In preparation for this morning's (forecast) Great Storm I reread Act III scene ii of King Lear and was struck again by the strangeness of the Fool's role in the scene. It is the scene that starts with Lear's famous "Blow winds and crack your cheeks" speech and whilst the Fool in one sense plays his role as Lear's minder, he also interrupts the old King's rant with an apparently irrelevant little ditty about cod-pieces and lice:
"He that has a house to put his head in has a good head-piece.
The cod-piece that will house
Before the head has any,
The head and he shall louse;
So beggars marry many.
The man that makes his toe
What he his heart should make,
Shall of a corn cry woe,
And turn his sleep to wake.
For there was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass."
Aside from the first and last lines this was presumably sung, and it is hard to imagine a more incongruous note for Shakespeare to strike whilst simultaneously evoking, through Lear's words alone, the power and majesty of the "oak-cleaving thunderbolts" and "all-shaking thunder" of the great tempest that threatens to overwhelm them. Later on in the scene, as Lear's thoughts turn to the various "undivulged crimes,/Unwhipp’d of justice" the Fool's digressions act more directly as a counterpoint to Lear's anger, but the issue of tone still remains: why does Shakespeare introduce elements of levity and humour at such moments of high drama?
Of course he has form in this. Think of the porter in Macbeth, immediately after the murder of Duncan, or of the gravediggers in Hamlet just after Ophelia's suicide. These are amongst the most difficult Shakespeare scenes for modern students to relate to, if for no other reason than that topical stand-up (which is effectively what these scenes are) generally does not date well, and we have to take the scholars' word for it that they would have been hilariously funny to a contemporary audience.
Yet even if we accept that the scenes were funny we are still left with the central question: why are they there? The Fool was obviously a big draw for Shakespeare's audiences and much has been written by many more learned than I about the Fool's sociological significance and historical context. I have nothing useful to add in that regard, but wanted to reflect a little purely on how the Fools' speeches work in the context of the great tragedies.
To some extent, the Fools provide a "way in" for contemporary audiences into the rarefied world of the kings depicted in the plays. The Fool is always the voice of the common people, and counterpoints the grandiosity of others. So when Lear reaches the apotheosis of his rage and strips off his clothes to stand naked in the storm, the Fool injects a note of common sense: " Prithee, nuncle, be contented; ’tis a naughty night to swim in," and when Lear is fulminating against the manifold iniquities of the world in the mad 'trial' of his (imaginary) daughters, the Fool repeatedly interjects with sayings like "He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath."
There is something deeper going on here too though. In some ways the Fools seem to provide Shakespeare with a means to step outside the world he has created for a time and reflect on the plays as constructs. This is done explicitly at the end of Twelfth Night of course, when Feste ends the play with a song, whose last verse is:
"A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day."
but (as so often) it is in Hamlet that Shakespeare pursues this idea to its conclusion. At a key point in a play that is concerned amongst other things with the nature of madness, this interchange occurs between Hamlet and the gravedigger:
"Gravedigger: Of all the days i’ the year, I came to ’t that day that our last King Hamlet overcame Fortinbras.
Hamlet: How long is that since?
Gravedigger: Cannot you tell that? every fool can tell that; it was the very day that young Hamlet was born; he that is mad, and sent into England.
Hamlet: Ay, marry; why was he sent into England?
Gravedigger: Why, because he was mad: he shall recover his wits there; or, if he do not, ’tis no great matter there,
Hamlet: Why?
Gravedigger: ’Twill not be seen in him there; there the men are as mad as he."
What can this joke do but cause the (English) audience to reflect on the fact that they are watching a play?
Hamlet is of course full of this sort of thing (as I have argued in this post for instance) and it is a mark of the supreme confidence Shakespeare had in his ability that he chose to remind us of the 'fourth wall' so frequently, when tragedies are supposed to be dependent on the willing suspension of disbelief. However you don't even need specific lines to realise that this is part of what he was doing with the Fools in his tragedies. It seems pretty clear that the actor playing the Fool would have been a comic star in his own right and that the audience would have seen him as comedian first and character in the play a distant second. It is as if Bill Bailey or Eddie Izzard appeared in a serious drama and didn't play it straight, but launched into a stand-up routine. One can easily imagine the profound change in atmosphere whenever the Fool appeared on stage.
And that is the point. Why did Shakespeare want that change in atmosphere? Would it not utterly destroy the tension and drama he was otherwise trying to build up?
In Lear the situation is potentially even more puzzling as it has been suggested that the Fool and Cordelia were played by the same actor and that Lear's apparently incongruous concern for the Fool's fate ("and my poor fool is hanged") in the midst of grieving Cordelia's death by hanging points up this link. In a sense they play similar roles in undercutting Lear's pompous arrogance whilst simultaneously caring deeply for the "foolish fond old man" hidden beneath the bluster. Yet once again the issue is one of tone. Cordelia is a tragic and the Fool a comic figure, so why would Shakespeare choose (if indeed he did) to have them played by the same actor?
The key, I believe, is in the nature of human emotion. You see, whilst emotion is generally understood as something individual, personal and internalised it is also in a sense social, interpersonal and externalised. As well as hugely powerful effects on the individual who experiences them, strong emotions always have external and very public manifestations. Facial expressions are almost universally understood guides to emotional states (though those on the autistic spectrum for instance seem to find them hard to decode) and at the extremes emotions give rise to behaviours that seem designed to communicate them to others, providing strong visual and aural clues to make them socially understood. So at the extreme: sadness gives rise to tears and sobbing; amusement to smiling, then the full opening of the mouth, the doubling-up of the body and loud uncontrollable laughter; anger to redness in the face, the raising of the voice and roaring; and fear to the placing of the hands in front of the face, whimpering and finally screaming.
And all of these manifestations are to some degree infectious. When you are feeling prone to sadness there is nothing more likely to 'set your off' than the sound of someone else crying and anyone who has experienced the phenomenon of 'corpsing' knows how the same applies to audible laughter (just click here for the perfect example). It is as if these manifestations of emotion were specifically designed to spread the emotion: to transform it from an intra-persoanl to an inter-personal phenomenon.
And that, I believe, is the point and the reason for Shakespeare's introduction of Fools into moments of high drama. In his great tragedies he is dealing with strong but subtle and problematic emotions. King Lear is angry with his daughters but he is also regretful and bitter about his earlier misjudgments and beginning even to feel guilt about the high-handed way that Kings ignore the concerns of the poor. Macbeth is horrified by the blood on his hands and his guilt at his murder of Duncan, but also beginning to glimpse a more profound despair at the pointlessness of life and as for Hamlet- well I haven't got the time or space to list all of the contradictory emotions running through his head.
Shakespeare wants to involve individual members of his audience in these emotional journeys and does so extremely effectively. However he is also aware that audiences are a collective and that an important part of our experience of emotions can be social as well as individual. He wants to harness the collective power of those emotions to enhance each individual's emotional engagement. So how does he do this?
Well, one of the ways is through laughter. Assuming that the Fools' various speeches were hilariously funny at the time and so did give rise to actual audible laughter, then what better way to bind an audience together in a communal expression of emotion?
Of course you may well feel that this is hardly a new observation. Critics have long argued that the various Fools' interjections act as ways to ratchet up the tension through temporary release, much as do the various false alarms in any horror film.
What I am saying here though is, I believe, something slightly different. I think the main effect Shakespeare sought was the communal and social effect that audible laughter can bring about. He wants to bind the audience together so that they can to some extent act as an emotionally connected whole, capable of accessing some of the deeper and more troubling messages of the tragedy. In this process I believe the Fool becomes something of a conduit, and certainly in Lear it is he who first introduces the note of regretful Weltschmerz that becomes Lear's predominant emotion by the end. In the scene with which I started this post, the Fool caps Lears majestic railing against the storm with the quieter but in the end much more touching lines:
"He that has a little tiny wit,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
Though the rain it raineth every day."
Monday, 28 October 2013
Sunday, 20 October 2013
The role of the internet in polarising opinion
In a recent TV programme, Frost on Satire, the American satirist Bill Maher was interviewed and the interviewer mentioned his quotation about the US that, "This country is not overrun with rebels & free thinkers. It's overrun with sheep & conformists." Maher went on to say that communities are often polarised, giving the average American "no reason to leave his echo chamber." The focus of the programme was of course on satire, and Maher was followed by Ian Hislop, who argued (much as I have in a previous post) that the main function of satire is not to change opinion but to validate and harden it. However Maher's comment got me thinking about a wider point about the internet in general.
I'm not sure that anyone predicted it in advance, but what the internet has done almost more than anything else is to provide a platform for vast numbers of people across the world to air their opinions in public. Any news article, any video, indeed almost anything on the internet is now followed by reams of comments, tallies of Facebook likes and Google +1s and streams of Twitter posts. All this, of course, provides an unrivalled opportunity for lively debate and the democratisation of opinion-giving and is thus a GOOD THING (to quote Sellar and Yateman). However, note that I said opinion-giving and not opinion-forming, because like satire I think such stuff will always tend to validate and harden opinion rather than forming it.
You see, the distinguishing feature of such internet-based comment, when compared with almost every form of public comment that predated the internet, is shortness- both of the pieces themselves and of the time taken to write them. Twitter is limited in length of its nature of course, but comment pieces tend to be equally short, and if they are not then they are usually truncated, with a "see more" link that few people probably ever use. Also, such pieces tend to offer a single (often fairly extreme) point of view- hardly surprising since they are generally probably fired off in a fit of rage/enthusiasm/irritation/exasperation. It is rare for a comment to start "You make a number of good points, @fascisttroll, but I would like to pick you up on one detail..."
Indeed it would seem that what the internet has done is to refine the ability of the general public to produce and respond to oneliners. Twitter seems precisely designed to limit each tweet to a single pithily expressed point, and memes can combine text and imagery to produce oneliners that are shorter, more focussed and at least as funny as anything that predated their invention.
However there is a big difference between oneliners and debate. In fact since time immemorial oneliners have been used to end rather than to further debate. You may have heard of the wonderful putdown attributed to Andrew Lang, "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination," but do you have any idea of the subject of the debate in the context of which it was presumably used? Done well, oneliners are of course brilliant, and can demolish an idea in seconds. Who could argue for the more arcane features of traditional English grammar, such as never putting a preposition at the end of a sentence, after Winston Churchill's famous "this is the sort of criticism up with which I will not put"?
Oneliners are of course often used to attack a person's reputation, and where they appear to us justified (the comment about Nixon: "He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears but by diligent hard work, he overcame them" is a personal favourite) they are brilliant. However they can be cruel too. Churchill was famous for his character assassinations, such as "he was a modest man with much to be modest about," and Mark Twain's comment "I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." is, when you think about it, downright nasty. Best of course is where two artists of the oneliner go head-to-head: when GBS wrote to Churchill "“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend... if you have one,” Churchill replied "Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one.”
All of which is slightly off-topic of course. And that is fundamentally my point. The internet-based fora for "debate" do not in fact encourage such digression. If anyone started reading this blog entry in the first place they will probably have clicked away by now. The form of communication fostered by such media as Twitter and comment strands is characterised by speed and immediacy. Pieces are produced swiftly to make a single point, and read as quickly, most of the audience having already framed their personal viewpoint and looking for comments either to agree with (handily, you can often click "like" to register your agreement) or fulminate against. This is new: previously the process by which any statement of opinion appeared in the public domain took time. Even newspaper editors had to write their pieces, have them sub-edited, review them, place them on the page and wait fro them to be printed and distributed. Simple members of the public could only "write in" and hope that their piece would appear in the next day's paper at the earliest.
All of which is fine of course, and the internet has indeed democratised the process of opinion-giving to an extent I would never have predicted. No longer do our opinions come solely from politicians interviewed on the evening news or editorials in newspapers.
However there is a form of debate that the internet does not appear as yet to have fomented, and I think that is a shame. This is the sort of debate where contributors take time to formulate subtle and complex statements of opinion and take time also to absorb, consider and reflect on the contributions of others. As a child I attended Quaker meetings with my family and the one "rule" that I remember is that, if someone has spoken, nobody may respond immediately. There has to be a time of silence between contributions for those present to reflect on what has been said. And of course such silence is not encouraged on the internet. Indeed the opposite is often the case. Should you ever have found yourself following a lively interchange of opinions on a comment thread you will know that if you do not respond IMMEDIATELY then the thread will have moved on by the time your response is posted and it will look completely irrelevant.
It may seem a non-sequitor, but there is a relevance here to poetry. There are poems, such as haikus for instance, that are as short as tweets. However even they they were not produced as quickly, and as a result can have a subtlety that tweets never approach, and promote contemplation rather than instant reaction:
"rain falls on the grass,
filling the ruts left by
the festival cart."
And only slightly longer poems can be constructed to engage the reader in a journey of thought which challenges their preconceptions and encourages deep and repeated reflection, often ending in a surprising place. Shakespeare's most famous sonnet begins "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" and draws the reader in by purporting to be a poem about love. Yet by the end he has made the reflective reader think instead about how we form unattainable ideas about people we love, and about the nature and longevity of poetry itself. Show me a comment piece in an internet discussion that does anything similar. Of course, there may be several, but no-one would know, because no-one would have bothered to read to the end, let alone to reread and reflect on the whole piece.
I would like to end on a piece that combines poetry with comment on a political issue and shows the sort of comment that no-one would engage with if it appeared on the internet. And indeed feel free to click away now and scroll through the pages of comments that follow whatever news story is prominent right now.
The piece is Easter, 1916 by WB Yeats and is about the Easter Rising, which many have taken as the start point of the decades of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Yeats was originally a supporter of the Republicans and had long been in love with Maude Gonne, the estranged wife of John MacBride. Countess Markievicz was a long-time friend, though he is not particularly nice about her at the start of the second stanza.
The point about the poem though is the way that it takes a hugely inflammatory topic (the justifiability of violence in pursuit of a cause) and rather than arguing a single point of view it reflects on a range of issues. Its conclusion, such as it is, is the prescient but hardly simplistic line "a terrible beauty is born."
One of the ways that Yeats "debates" the issues involved is through his use of imagery, particularly in the third stanza. Using the extraordinary power of connotations he causes us to reflect on the image of the stone in the stream. The stone is the vehicle of this image, the tenor being the notion of a band of single-minded revolutionaries living in the midst of a world of more nuanced opinions. The relationship between tenor and vehicle is not straightforward here though, and the grounds subtle and complex, so it is really not clear at the end where Yeats' sympathies lie.
All of which might sound, in today's internet-based world, like woolly, waffly pontification without focus and direction. Yet for me Easter 1916 gives more space and encouragement for thought on a range of issues from Irish Republicanism to jihadist terrorism than thousands of oneliner comment thread contributions. Read it yourself, and see if you agree:
Easter 1916
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
W. B. Yeats
I'm not sure that anyone predicted it in advance, but what the internet has done almost more than anything else is to provide a platform for vast numbers of people across the world to air their opinions in public. Any news article, any video, indeed almost anything on the internet is now followed by reams of comments, tallies of Facebook likes and Google +1s and streams of Twitter posts. All this, of course, provides an unrivalled opportunity for lively debate and the democratisation of opinion-giving and is thus a GOOD THING (to quote Sellar and Yateman). However, note that I said opinion-giving and not opinion-forming, because like satire I think such stuff will always tend to validate and harden opinion rather than forming it.
You see, the distinguishing feature of such internet-based comment, when compared with almost every form of public comment that predated the internet, is shortness- both of the pieces themselves and of the time taken to write them. Twitter is limited in length of its nature of course, but comment pieces tend to be equally short, and if they are not then they are usually truncated, with a "see more" link that few people probably ever use. Also, such pieces tend to offer a single (often fairly extreme) point of view- hardly surprising since they are generally probably fired off in a fit of rage/enthusiasm/irritation/exasperation. It is rare for a comment to start "You make a number of good points, @fascisttroll, but I would like to pick you up on one detail..."
Indeed it would seem that what the internet has done is to refine the ability of the general public to produce and respond to oneliners. Twitter seems precisely designed to limit each tweet to a single pithily expressed point, and memes can combine text and imagery to produce oneliners that are shorter, more focussed and at least as funny as anything that predated their invention.
However there is a big difference between oneliners and debate. In fact since time immemorial oneliners have been used to end rather than to further debate. You may have heard of the wonderful putdown attributed to Andrew Lang, "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination," but do you have any idea of the subject of the debate in the context of which it was presumably used? Done well, oneliners are of course brilliant, and can demolish an idea in seconds. Who could argue for the more arcane features of traditional English grammar, such as never putting a preposition at the end of a sentence, after Winston Churchill's famous "this is the sort of criticism up with which I will not put"?
Oneliners are of course often used to attack a person's reputation, and where they appear to us justified (the comment about Nixon: "He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears but by diligent hard work, he overcame them" is a personal favourite) they are brilliant. However they can be cruel too. Churchill was famous for his character assassinations, such as "he was a modest man with much to be modest about," and Mark Twain's comment "I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." is, when you think about it, downright nasty. Best of course is where two artists of the oneliner go head-to-head: when GBS wrote to Churchill "“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend... if you have one,” Churchill replied "Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one.”
All of which is slightly off-topic of course. And that is fundamentally my point. The internet-based fora for "debate" do not in fact encourage such digression. If anyone started reading this blog entry in the first place they will probably have clicked away by now. The form of communication fostered by such media as Twitter and comment strands is characterised by speed and immediacy. Pieces are produced swiftly to make a single point, and read as quickly, most of the audience having already framed their personal viewpoint and looking for comments either to agree with (handily, you can often click "like" to register your agreement) or fulminate against. This is new: previously the process by which any statement of opinion appeared in the public domain took time. Even newspaper editors had to write their pieces, have them sub-edited, review them, place them on the page and wait fro them to be printed and distributed. Simple members of the public could only "write in" and hope that their piece would appear in the next day's paper at the earliest.
All of which is fine of course, and the internet has indeed democratised the process of opinion-giving to an extent I would never have predicted. No longer do our opinions come solely from politicians interviewed on the evening news or editorials in newspapers.
However there is a form of debate that the internet does not appear as yet to have fomented, and I think that is a shame. This is the sort of debate where contributors take time to formulate subtle and complex statements of opinion and take time also to absorb, consider and reflect on the contributions of others. As a child I attended Quaker meetings with my family and the one "rule" that I remember is that, if someone has spoken, nobody may respond immediately. There has to be a time of silence between contributions for those present to reflect on what has been said. And of course such silence is not encouraged on the internet. Indeed the opposite is often the case. Should you ever have found yourself following a lively interchange of opinions on a comment thread you will know that if you do not respond IMMEDIATELY then the thread will have moved on by the time your response is posted and it will look completely irrelevant.
It may seem a non-sequitor, but there is a relevance here to poetry. There are poems, such as haikus for instance, that are as short as tweets. However even they they were not produced as quickly, and as a result can have a subtlety that tweets never approach, and promote contemplation rather than instant reaction:
"rain falls on the grass,
filling the ruts left by
the festival cart."
And only slightly longer poems can be constructed to engage the reader in a journey of thought which challenges their preconceptions and encourages deep and repeated reflection, often ending in a surprising place. Shakespeare's most famous sonnet begins "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" and draws the reader in by purporting to be a poem about love. Yet by the end he has made the reflective reader think instead about how we form unattainable ideas about people we love, and about the nature and longevity of poetry itself. Show me a comment piece in an internet discussion that does anything similar. Of course, there may be several, but no-one would know, because no-one would have bothered to read to the end, let alone to reread and reflect on the whole piece.
I would like to end on a piece that combines poetry with comment on a political issue and shows the sort of comment that no-one would engage with if it appeared on the internet. And indeed feel free to click away now and scroll through the pages of comments that follow whatever news story is prominent right now.
The piece is Easter, 1916 by WB Yeats and is about the Easter Rising, which many have taken as the start point of the decades of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Yeats was originally a supporter of the Republicans and had long been in love with Maude Gonne, the estranged wife of John MacBride. Countess Markievicz was a long-time friend, though he is not particularly nice about her at the start of the second stanza.
The point about the poem though is the way that it takes a hugely inflammatory topic (the justifiability of violence in pursuit of a cause) and rather than arguing a single point of view it reflects on a range of issues. Its conclusion, such as it is, is the prescient but hardly simplistic line "a terrible beauty is born."
One of the ways that Yeats "debates" the issues involved is through his use of imagery, particularly in the third stanza. Using the extraordinary power of connotations he causes us to reflect on the image of the stone in the stream. The stone is the vehicle of this image, the tenor being the notion of a band of single-minded revolutionaries living in the midst of a world of more nuanced opinions. The relationship between tenor and vehicle is not straightforward here though, and the grounds subtle and complex, so it is really not clear at the end where Yeats' sympathies lie.
All of which might sound, in today's internet-based world, like woolly, waffly pontification without focus and direction. Yet for me Easter 1916 gives more space and encouragement for thought on a range of issues from Irish Republicanism to jihadist terrorism than thousands of oneliner comment thread contributions. Read it yourself, and see if you agree:
Easter 1916
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
W. B. Yeats
Friday, 4 October 2013
The best form of (neo-conservative) government is attack
The above was a phrase I came up with in a previous post, but it got me thinking. I watched some of the lovely David Cameron's speech to the Tory party conference, which took place at the same time as the Tea Party Republicans were engaged in the hamstringing of effective government in the USA. What I witnessed from both was a pugnaciousness that seems actually to underlie much of the attitude of today's neo-cons whether in opposition or in government.
The central message of the neo-cons appears to be that government of any sort is essentially destructive and counter-productive: the dead hand of the State weighing down the burgeoning energy of private sector enterprise. Markets still hold the solutions to all problems (including those that markets have created) and state control is the embodiment of all that is contemptible and wrong.
This is, incidentally, perhaps why the neo-cons enjoy electoral success: politicians are bad, inept, out of touch; government is (or appears from the outside to be) done by politicians; government is bad, inept, out of touch. QED. Vote for the ones who want to tear down government.
And tear down government is clearly what the Tories in the UK are setting out to do. In education Michael Gove has systematically set out to denigrate every element of the State education system, presenting his solution in the form of Free Schools, which are free from almost every aspect of government by any State body. This even applies to the provision of school places. What used to be seen as the central responsibility of the branches of government concerned with educating the nation's youth has now been removed from that control and "freed up" for provision by the private sector. Local government has no say whatever in the location of any new Free School, and virtually none over the provision of new places in Academies, but they have no finance to build schools themselves.
In Health, the current government seems almost to relish the constant flood of negative news stories about the NHS (hardly surprising, since they have been the origin of many of them). Their narrative, it is beginning to appear, is that the NHS is too big, too unwieldy, too uncaring, and essentially too governed to carry out its role effectively. The answer, it is becoming abundantly clear, is to develop health provision where the private sector and the profit motive are the guiding principles, rather than the pernicious and stultifying dead hand of government.
And of course as regards the economy this is the very central narrative. The financial problems the UK (and the rest of the world, presumably) are currently suffering are down to government spending. The solution: less government. Then we'll all be happy. This appears to sweep under the carpet the indisputable fact that the majority of the world's current economic woes were caused by the precipitous and virtually ungoverned rise in the size, power and recklessness of private sector entities like banks, hedge funds and derivative dealerships. It was precisely the lack of government oversight of the scale of the gambles in which such institutions were engaged that enabled the bubble to inflate so massively and then burst so cataclysmically.
There are huge advantages to this sort of narrative if you happen to be in government though. Time was that if something appalling happened in an area of public life (like the crisis in A&E care; like the decline in GCSE performance in schools or the looming school place crises; like the prolonged inability of the economy to show any sort of recovery) the minister involved would have to take responsibility, or at least endure long periods of anguished squirming. I used to feel sorry for such ministers sometimes, because clearly the problems they were facing had been long in the making, but them's the breaks: if you're the one in charge at the time, you take the responsibility when things go tits up.
Or so it used to be. Nowadays, government ministers seem to relish bad news almost more than their opposition shadows. They glory in it- trumpet it to the right wing tabloids. Because each piece of bad news is further proof that GOVERNMENT ISN'T WORKING and needs to have its monopolistic power (and funding) reduced. The role of those in government, in the UK at least, really seems to have developed into one of attacking rather than defending the areas for which they are responsible. And the populace, fed up with politicians of all parties and keen to see them brought down a peg or two, seem quite content to go along with it.
It is interesting, of course, to ponder a little on how this notion could come about. I believe that partly at least it is down to our use of the word "government" itself. There is an urban myth being peddled on facebook and elsewhere apparently that the etymology of the word reveals that it means "control the mind" (from Latin "gubernare"=to control and "mens, mentis"= mind). This is utter bollocks of course (the -ment suffix has nothing to do with the word for mind) but it reveals a strand of opinion of what government is and what governments do.
In fact, the word comes originally from the Ancient Greek κυβερνάω, meaning to steer or pilot a ship. Of course "steering" and "control" have similar meanings, but as ever it is the connotations that make the difference. "Control" (particularly as in "State control") implies a diminution of freedom and of the capacity of individuals to function effectively. "Steering," (as in "steering a steady course" or "steering through a difficult passage") implies almost the opposite. It is about enabling individuals to function effectively and happily, free from the dangers they might encounter were the vessel they were in unsteered.
But if governments begin to set their face against the process of government: to renounce their duty as helmsmen of the ship of State, then what?
The central message of the neo-cons appears to be that government of any sort is essentially destructive and counter-productive: the dead hand of the State weighing down the burgeoning energy of private sector enterprise. Markets still hold the solutions to all problems (including those that markets have created) and state control is the embodiment of all that is contemptible and wrong.
This is, incidentally, perhaps why the neo-cons enjoy electoral success: politicians are bad, inept, out of touch; government is (or appears from the outside to be) done by politicians; government is bad, inept, out of touch. QED. Vote for the ones who want to tear down government.
And tear down government is clearly what the Tories in the UK are setting out to do. In education Michael Gove has systematically set out to denigrate every element of the State education system, presenting his solution in the form of Free Schools, which are free from almost every aspect of government by any State body. This even applies to the provision of school places. What used to be seen as the central responsibility of the branches of government concerned with educating the nation's youth has now been removed from that control and "freed up" for provision by the private sector. Local government has no say whatever in the location of any new Free School, and virtually none over the provision of new places in Academies, but they have no finance to build schools themselves.
In Health, the current government seems almost to relish the constant flood of negative news stories about the NHS (hardly surprising, since they have been the origin of many of them). Their narrative, it is beginning to appear, is that the NHS is too big, too unwieldy, too uncaring, and essentially too governed to carry out its role effectively. The answer, it is becoming abundantly clear, is to develop health provision where the private sector and the profit motive are the guiding principles, rather than the pernicious and stultifying dead hand of government.
And of course as regards the economy this is the very central narrative. The financial problems the UK (and the rest of the world, presumably) are currently suffering are down to government spending. The solution: less government. Then we'll all be happy. This appears to sweep under the carpet the indisputable fact that the majority of the world's current economic woes were caused by the precipitous and virtually ungoverned rise in the size, power and recklessness of private sector entities like banks, hedge funds and derivative dealerships. It was precisely the lack of government oversight of the scale of the gambles in which such institutions were engaged that enabled the bubble to inflate so massively and then burst so cataclysmically.
There are huge advantages to this sort of narrative if you happen to be in government though. Time was that if something appalling happened in an area of public life (like the crisis in A&E care; like the decline in GCSE performance in schools or the looming school place crises; like the prolonged inability of the economy to show any sort of recovery) the minister involved would have to take responsibility, or at least endure long periods of anguished squirming. I used to feel sorry for such ministers sometimes, because clearly the problems they were facing had been long in the making, but them's the breaks: if you're the one in charge at the time, you take the responsibility when things go tits up.
Or so it used to be. Nowadays, government ministers seem to relish bad news almost more than their opposition shadows. They glory in it- trumpet it to the right wing tabloids. Because each piece of bad news is further proof that GOVERNMENT ISN'T WORKING and needs to have its monopolistic power (and funding) reduced. The role of those in government, in the UK at least, really seems to have developed into one of attacking rather than defending the areas for which they are responsible. And the populace, fed up with politicians of all parties and keen to see them brought down a peg or two, seem quite content to go along with it.
It is interesting, of course, to ponder a little on how this notion could come about. I believe that partly at least it is down to our use of the word "government" itself. There is an urban myth being peddled on facebook and elsewhere apparently that the etymology of the word reveals that it means "control the mind" (from Latin "gubernare"=to control and "mens, mentis"= mind). This is utter bollocks of course (the -ment suffix has nothing to do with the word for mind) but it reveals a strand of opinion of what government is and what governments do.
In fact, the word comes originally from the Ancient Greek κυβερνάω, meaning to steer or pilot a ship. Of course "steering" and "control" have similar meanings, but as ever it is the connotations that make the difference. "Control" (particularly as in "State control") implies a diminution of freedom and of the capacity of individuals to function effectively. "Steering," (as in "steering a steady course" or "steering through a difficult passage") implies almost the opposite. It is about enabling individuals to function effectively and happily, free from the dangers they might encounter were the vessel they were in unsteered.
But if governments begin to set their face against the process of government: to renounce their duty as helmsmen of the ship of State, then what?
Tuesday, 1 October 2013
Radicalisation and the fifth column that threatens to destroy the USA from within
We have heard a lot about radicalisation (according to Wikipedia "a process by which an individual or group comes to adopt increasingly extreme political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that reject or undermine the status quo") over recent weeks, particularly given the tabloids' strange, misogynist fixation with the "White Widow". Radicalisation is usually discussed in terms of muslims listening to "hate preachers" or accessing "terrorist material" on the internet. Radicalisation within the USA is not something that I have seen much discussion of, but I can reveal that in fact it is something that has been going on for decades, with vast amounts of money spent in a huge media campaign that has radicalised significant numbers of US citizens to a terrifying degree.
This radicalisation has not been without its consequences. It has led to countless suicide gun attacks, pernicious campaigns to undermine the rule of law, and most recently to determined efforts to destroy America's economic system and to reverse decisions made through the proper democratic process.
So who is behind this process of radicalisation? Hollywood commercial cinema, that's who. Virtually since its inception Hollywood commercial cinema has presented an image of American masculinity that has inexorably led to large numbers of Americans adopting "increasingly extreme political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that reject or undermine the status quo."
Absurd, you say? With American commercial cinema about the most patriotically gung-ho of any media organisation in the world? Well, just look dispassionately at the evidence.
One of the dominant narratives of Hollywood blockbusters since the early days has been that of a lone hero fighting to uphold his individual version of "truth, justice and the American way" and/or protect his friends and/or family from the legion of dangers that threaten to overwhelm them. Whether he be the lone, white-Stetsoned cowboy in a lawless Western town, the maverick cop in a corrupt and inept police force, even the heroic rogue soldier who disobeys orders in pursuit of the greater good the underlying story is the same: truth, justice and the American way (in the movies at least) are protected by an individual's decisive actions, often in contravention of the stultifying, or even actively maleficent dead hand of the State.
The rule of Law in Hollywood blockbusters is almost always something to be distrusted, and even actively opposed. Lawyers are almost universally crooked, devious and obstructive. They use their legal casuistry to frustrate the true hero in his pursuit of true justice, which almost never derives from the courtroom or the legislative chamber. Large scale collective action of any sort is profoundly distrusted, symbolised in films such as Star Wars by the vast, faceless drone armies, or dismissed as irrelevant, as soft liberal hippies wave banners while the true hero takes on the bad guys through direct and bloody action.
The irony of course is how immensely far removed this image of Amercanism is from the actual lives of most Americans. Despite this powerful image of individual freedom and independence from State control, Americans appear to be as placid and easily manipulated as any citizenry on Earth. There has been no tradition of mass protest in most people's lifetime, high proportions of the populace are happy (proud, even) to display that symbol of the state, the US flag, and American children even salute that flag daily in a ceremony that, if it took place in North Korea, would be seen as state brainwashing on an unimaginable scale.
So here we have a paradox: a dominant media narrative pushing a radical (and frequently extremely violent) form of individual freedom in the context of a society that has accepted state control to an unprecedented degree. And these things cannot peacefully coexist. The essence of the Harry Callaghan/John McLane/Hans Solo character is that he decides which laws to obey and which to ignore. He distrusts anyone in a position of authority, and reserves the right to take violent and bloody action against anyone he deems to be frustrating his desire to implement his vision of "truth, justice and the American way." So whilst he may salute the flag, he does not believe in any of the institutions established in the name of that flag. So just how different is such a character from the many rogue gunmen who have taken arms (as they see it) against the faceless hordes who have sought to frustrate and deny them at every turn? What is there, in truth to separate a Hollywood blockbuster thriller hero from a high-school shooter?
The thing that Hollywood heros most particularly do not believe in is government. Government (in the movies) is fundamentally corrupt, out of touch, faceless and irrelevant to the real lives and concerns of the citizenry. What matters that it is democratically elected? Politicians are all on the take, and the sole aim of government seems (in the movies) to be to frustrate the right-thinking hero in his individualistic fight for freedom and justice (and the American way, indeed.)
And so, following this narrative, what does one do if the democratically elected government seeks to implement a law (Obama's healthcare reform) which has effectively been democratically endorsed through the presidential elections, but with which you do not personally agree? Well, it seems there is only one course open to the right-thinking all-American hero (like Ted Cruz) radicalised by decades of Hollywood brainwashing. Having attempted to paralyse the functions of government by talking non-stop for 21 hours, you then seek to bring the nation economically to its knees by denying its access to continuing funding.
If this sort of anti-democratic destructiveness was happening in any other country anguished media analysts would be looking for explanations for the extraordinary radicalisation of a portion of the nation's populace that has led to the election of, and apparent continued support for, people like Ted Cruz. Where did this radicalisation originate, they would be asking. Who is to blame? But this is America, and as I say, we have our explanation already.
Hollywood.
This radicalisation has not been without its consequences. It has led to countless suicide gun attacks, pernicious campaigns to undermine the rule of law, and most recently to determined efforts to destroy America's economic system and to reverse decisions made through the proper democratic process.
So who is behind this process of radicalisation? Hollywood commercial cinema, that's who. Virtually since its inception Hollywood commercial cinema has presented an image of American masculinity that has inexorably led to large numbers of Americans adopting "increasingly extreme political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that reject or undermine the status quo."
Absurd, you say? With American commercial cinema about the most patriotically gung-ho of any media organisation in the world? Well, just look dispassionately at the evidence.
One of the dominant narratives of Hollywood blockbusters since the early days has been that of a lone hero fighting to uphold his individual version of "truth, justice and the American way" and/or protect his friends and/or family from the legion of dangers that threaten to overwhelm them. Whether he be the lone, white-Stetsoned cowboy in a lawless Western town, the maverick cop in a corrupt and inept police force, even the heroic rogue soldier who disobeys orders in pursuit of the greater good the underlying story is the same: truth, justice and the American way (in the movies at least) are protected by an individual's decisive actions, often in contravention of the stultifying, or even actively maleficent dead hand of the State.
The rule of Law in Hollywood blockbusters is almost always something to be distrusted, and even actively opposed. Lawyers are almost universally crooked, devious and obstructive. They use their legal casuistry to frustrate the true hero in his pursuit of true justice, which almost never derives from the courtroom or the legislative chamber. Large scale collective action of any sort is profoundly distrusted, symbolised in films such as Star Wars by the vast, faceless drone armies, or dismissed as irrelevant, as soft liberal hippies wave banners while the true hero takes on the bad guys through direct and bloody action.
The irony of course is how immensely far removed this image of Amercanism is from the actual lives of most Americans. Despite this powerful image of individual freedom and independence from State control, Americans appear to be as placid and easily manipulated as any citizenry on Earth. There has been no tradition of mass protest in most people's lifetime, high proportions of the populace are happy (proud, even) to display that symbol of the state, the US flag, and American children even salute that flag daily in a ceremony that, if it took place in North Korea, would be seen as state brainwashing on an unimaginable scale.
So here we have a paradox: a dominant media narrative pushing a radical (and frequently extremely violent) form of individual freedom in the context of a society that has accepted state control to an unprecedented degree. And these things cannot peacefully coexist. The essence of the Harry Callaghan/John McLane/Hans Solo character is that he decides which laws to obey and which to ignore. He distrusts anyone in a position of authority, and reserves the right to take violent and bloody action against anyone he deems to be frustrating his desire to implement his vision of "truth, justice and the American way." So whilst he may salute the flag, he does not believe in any of the institutions established in the name of that flag. So just how different is such a character from the many rogue gunmen who have taken arms (as they see it) against the faceless hordes who have sought to frustrate and deny them at every turn? What is there, in truth to separate a Hollywood blockbuster thriller hero from a high-school shooter?
The thing that Hollywood heros most particularly do not believe in is government. Government (in the movies) is fundamentally corrupt, out of touch, faceless and irrelevant to the real lives and concerns of the citizenry. What matters that it is democratically elected? Politicians are all on the take, and the sole aim of government seems (in the movies) to be to frustrate the right-thinking hero in his individualistic fight for freedom and justice (and the American way, indeed.)
And so, following this narrative, what does one do if the democratically elected government seeks to implement a law (Obama's healthcare reform) which has effectively been democratically endorsed through the presidential elections, but with which you do not personally agree? Well, it seems there is only one course open to the right-thinking all-American hero (like Ted Cruz) radicalised by decades of Hollywood brainwashing. Having attempted to paralyse the functions of government by talking non-stop for 21 hours, you then seek to bring the nation economically to its knees by denying its access to continuing funding.
If this sort of anti-democratic destructiveness was happening in any other country anguished media analysts would be looking for explanations for the extraordinary radicalisation of a portion of the nation's populace that has led to the election of, and apparent continued support for, people like Ted Cruz. Where did this radicalisation originate, they would be asking. Who is to blame? But this is America, and as I say, we have our explanation already.
Hollywood.
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