Biology of the Worst Kind

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PS:  It's worth taking a look at Wayne's comment in the previous post, for another take on my MetaFilter dissatisfaction.

What a Cunt, I Adumbrate

Adumbrate or Advocate?   Martin Amis writes an open letter to Yasmin Alibhai Brown for her suggestion that after reading everyone's favourite last-living Marxist Terry Eagleton's comments  on this, Amis is 'with the beasts' on Muslim-hating. He may have been adumbrating not advocating, but is there another way to describe patronising and smug? Known for his writing, he was, in his day.  Bright, some people thought him.  This contributuion to thought and debate doesn't confirm either of those beliefs. But that's not my problem.

I've eschewed the word 'sexist' for many years now: I've never even been tempted to use it, but really 'patronising and smug' won't do it.  They don't get into the crevices of my reading of Amis's letter.  Sexism, as a word, is a crude and instant response to what was usually a crude and instant attitude to women. I'm after some other word that conveys what it is when in 2007 someone publicly responds to a woman making a point by hoping 'Yasmin, for your soothing hand on my brow!', suggesting 'you've been listening, rather dreamily perhaps' to Eagleton, and repeatedly using her first name.  Oh, Martin, Martin, what's the word I'm looking for?  A friend suggested 'cunt' - as in 'What a cunt', and in truth that would do it for me.  But I'm trying for a more writerly way of describing this middle-aged man's laboured tone.  There's something of the travelling salesman trying to keep his end up.  What's the word for that?  Pathetic?  Yes, pathetic.  I think that will do.   

Who Gives A Fuck, Says The Home Office

A report from the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights says that immigrants are deliberately being made destitute by the government.   BBC News Online (before the piece was replaced later in the morning) said:

The JCHR highlighted one case of a destitute Rwandan asylum-seeker who suffered bowel cancer and had a colostomy bag, but was refused treatment by a hospital and could not register with a doctor. Meanwhile, a woman had been forced to live rough for three months - sitting at crowded bus stops all night because she was terrified of being alone - but on winning her asylum appeal had been ruled entitled to immediate support.The Committee also reported how the parents of a three-week-old baby had been housed in a "filthy, bug-infested room" in Leicester.

The report said: "Many witnesses have told us that they are convinced that destitution is a deliberate tool in the operation of immigration policy.  We have been persuaded by the evidence that the government has indeed been practising a deliberate policy of destitution of this highly vulnerable group.We believe that the deliberate use of inhumane treatment is unacceptable."

If this doesn't make you fall over backwards with astonishment, perhaps the statement the Home Office put out in response to the report will make the earth tremble - if there was a God, he surely would:

"We simply do not think that it is right that those without any right to be in the UK should be given the right to work or access other services."

Let's leave to one side the illiteracy of the statement (right...right...right) because after all the people who put out the statements were educated, educated, educated doubtless in the Tony Blair system for minimal learning.  And that extraordinarily Blairite 'We simply do not think...' What is 'simply' doing there?  There is nothing simple about that thought at all.  And surely what is simply thought requires more debate rather than none at all, as the sentence seems to imply?

When did it come to be all right to state openly that there is nothing wrong with abusing human rights and allowing (actually encouraging) vulnerable individuals to sleep on the streets, and sick people to go untreated?  Oh, I remember, it was during the Thatcher years.  That was the first time I heard an official from the (privatised) gas services saying that the living conditions of people and their families was not their problem when they turned off the gas for non-payment of bills.  I recall then thinking that my world had just tipped dangerously.  Doubtless, they never cared, but when people feel it's all right to say they don't care then there are no social safeguards.  That's the upside of hypocrisy: not to allow what is most venal in us to become publicly acceptable.  People are doing vile things to others all over the world, but usually they pretend they aren't.  This at least suggests a knowledge that what they are doing is not approved of, even of some vague sense of shame.  When people respond to accusations of denying people their human rights with 'So?' then it's finished.

Remember all the talk about ethics in government when Blair got in?  Now there's an official shrug when a parliamentary committee condemns internationally unacceptable behaviour by the Home Office.  And for some reason, we are making prissy noises at Iran for their behaviour in mistreating British service personnel.

I have never felt any government in the UK to be more dangerous and shameful than this one.

Reasons To Be Cheerful - But Not Today

I'm troubled about being a miserablist.  It's not because of the recent information from the latest psyche-soma study that cynics have a higher risk of heart attacks - that's clearly nonsense since everyone knows, and I can tell you for certain, that cynics don't have hearts.  Obviously.  Nor is it the result of the declaration of a young Christian woman who recently told me that 'more good things than bad things happen in the world.'  I asked her to elaborate, for her evidence.  'Oh,' she said, blushing prettily. 'It would take me far longer than you  have time for to go into such a complicated question.'  I offered her all the time in the world.  Silence.  And I'm comfortable as a grouch - habit is everything.  But still there are things to celebrate and they should be celebrated.  And just as soon as I've done howling at the latest confirmation of the destruction of any sense of the importance of anything not totally material, I'm going to post about some really lovely things.  About how happy I am to find myself in the post-Thatcher, please-god post-Blair world, and all the delights that somehow, miraculously, have survived.  I'm sure I'll think of something.

In the meantime, here is a quote from Mark Steel in today's Independent.

In his book, Robin Cook recalled a conversation in which Tony Blair justified sending his son to a selective school, saying he didn't want his kids to end up like those of Harold Wilson. It was pointed out that Wilson's sons went to a comprehensive school, and one became a headmaster, the other a professor. To which Blair said: "Well, I certainly hope my children do better than that."

Actually, I'm not sure it's possible to be a cynic and so completely dismayed by reading that.  It shouldn't be a surprise, what has happened to education and the arts can only be explained by having ten years of government by a man (and his sad power-corrupted crew) who feels that teaching is a loser's option.

In the 1970's there was a burst of excitement about education.  Lots of us taught in comprehensive schools because we thought there wasn't anything more important to do, and that anyone could be made enthusiastic about learning with the right presentation and respect for them as persons.  Some of us stopped teaching, the energy went (for this we are to blame) and others took to an easy version that involved equalising learning from the top down.  That old terrible phrase 'too clever by half' was heard in staff rooms. The rest is GCSE and A level History, English literature, the current national curriculum, and university undergraduates and general readers who aren't expected to engage with anything excitingly difficult.

I will cheer up - but not today.

Dead Dictators, Turning A Profit and A Dwindling Sense of Humour

Pinochet is dead.  Good.  An absurd response, though we all deserve a little cheering up.  The problem was with Pinochet alive.  All the people who are no longer around as a result of him, are still not around and won't be coming back.

And we were informed this morning by clipped and matronly Patricia Hewitt that the NHS must not only clear its debts but must achieve a surplus.  As I understand it, a surplus is a profit.  What is the National Health Service supposed to make a profit on?  Its purpose is to make people better.  Is Hewitt expecting tips from grateful patients?    An organisation that does not produce anything can only make a surplus by cutting costs: getting rid of staff, buying outside cheap labour and supplies, cutting corners, making patient turnaround faster.  Get them in and out of the operating room and hospital and back home before the bleeding stops.  Not so many sheets to wash, fewer nurses to employ.  Why must there be a profit?  Of course, it's nonsense, because the money is state money, or should be.  And if they do make a surplus, the NHS will be told it doesn't need so much funding.  I can't be bothered to find the figures, but I have a strong intuition that the cost of updating and maintaining Trident, and the shortfall in funding of the NHS that causes it to be in debt may have a relationship to each other.  A moral one, if nothing else.  I loathe this government.

I've just read Kurt Vonnegut's  A Man Without a Country.  I've never read any of Vonnegut's books without a)smiling and b)weeping quietly to myself.  This time is no different.  I suspect I recognise a fellow depressive who knows exactly what there is to be depressed about.  Laughter is how depressives survive, when they do survive (though the Prozac helps).  But Mr V suggests that eventually the laughing stops.  He's in his mid-eighties now and working on a novel about a comedian living at the end of the world, which he can't finish.  The problem is:

              'Finally, you get just too tired, and the news is too awful, and humor doesn't work anymore.  Somebody like Mark Twain thought life was quite awful but held the awfulness at bay with jokes and so forth, but finally he couldn't do it anymore...It may be that I am no longer able to joke - that it is no longer a satisfactory defense mechanism.'

I really hope he finishes his novel.  But I know what he means.  I can feel the sadness seeping up through the Prozac like slime through floorboards.  Still, Pinochet's dead.  Hey ho.

Grim Tales Told By An Idiot

Yesterday it seemed as if the traces of polonium 210 (are there two hundred and nine other versions of it...or is my lack of chemistry showing?) the police are finding scattered around restaurants, hotels, office and flats in London, on aeroplanes, in Europe and who knows where next, are like the breadcrumbs Hansel and Gretel dropped behind them when they were taken out into the forest.  Eventually they will lead to home (or in this case to the door of the wicked witch) unless of course the birds peck them all up first.

But today I've decided that for the protagonists it's more like the story of The Golden Goose where Dummling, the idiot third son of the farmer shows kindness to the little grey man in the woods, shares his lunch, and gets given the golden goose.  Three young girls try to steal golden goose feathers but get stuck to it.  A parson tries to berate the attached girls for apparently following the young man, and finds himself stuck.  His sexton comes to get him to give a sermon and gets stuck too.  And so on until there is a long line - like the dance of death - following the oblivious Dummling and the golden goose under his arm. 

A contamination story, I think.    It starts with getting stuck from greed.  Then it's interference that gets you get stuck on/sucked in to what you interfere with. But further and further down the line the ones who are stuck know nothing about why they are getting stuck.  They're miles from the golden goose.  They've never even thought of a golden goose.  They were just passing by and took a hand that was held out to them for help, or brushed against the last in line and there they were attached too.  No idea why or what for.  Innocently stuck.  Not greedy, not interfering, just stuck, as the goose procession crossed their path. Like people who have just been going about their business this past month, living in society, getting on with their lives and work, going to a Japanese restaurant (hundreds), meeting in a hotel (more hundreds), or flying on a BA plane (30,000), being part of the busy world. 

All the while intricate webs were being woven with invisible thread no one's ever imagined actually existed, the stuff of ironic post-cold war spy movies, nothing to do with real life or you or me.  Like viruses reproducing, impossible to see with the naked eye, just getting on with their own ridiculous minimal concerns, self-involved, a world apart from restaurants and aeroplanes that you or I go to and travel on.  We don't really believe in viruses any more than we believe in doses of polonium 210 that can kill you in amounts 2 million times smaller than a lethal dose of cyanide (A curious statistic.  It's also probably 1quintillion times stronger than a lethal dose of common salt.  I can see why that makes salt less frightening.  But I feel no comfort about a small dose of cyanide).  We know viruses exist, but we don't believe in them.  Not until we get the flu.  It always feels astonishing to me that I have caught something, from the air, from someone else.  Very hard to credit, those microbes that get under your skin and make your blood boil for no reason at all.  Just because you breathe and happened to be breathing where the microbe was breeding or the polonium dust fell.  If you believe in polonium clap your hands.  Much, much easier to believe in purpose than randomness.  Which is why we have religion, of course. 

Wouldn't it piss you off if you got polonium poisoning just by accident?  Being poisoned by an enemy -  spies and hitmen with sci fi methods - that all makes sense.  Just like getting the pox from having sex makes sense.  But from a lavatory seat?  Ridiculous.  Innocent bystanderdom is the worst.  See Kafka (unless you think that K was guilty all along, which of course he is, we are, and being fitted up is just being punished for the thing we happened not to do rather than for what we in fact did).  But surely we're none of us so guilty that we should die of nothing very much at all, something invisible, for God's sake.  Something that has nothing to do with us. Actually, that's not a bad description of death.  We all die of something that's nothing to do with us.

Tacked on to the end of the story of The Golden Goose, for all the world as if it got stuck to the story just the like people in the story did, is the greedy anal-retentive king, father of a princess who never smiles.  He promises her hand in marriage to anyone who can make her smile, and Dummling happens to be passing by.  An innocent bystander, in fact.  She laughs at the line of people stuck to each other and the goose.  Dummling wins the hand of the beautiful princess but the king doesn't fancy handing over his kingdom to a simpleton.  He sets tasks as princesses' fathers are wont to do.  Find me someone who will drink a cellar full of wine and eat a mountain range of bread.  The little grey man, ever grateful, ever greedy, obliges.  Competitive eating, more like a shitting on all the hungry people in the world, isn't just a grotesque modern invention.

Between competitive eating and murder by polonium I conclude that we are insane.  Folk tales have been warning us about this for centuries, but to no avail.  And the moral of this story (apart from it's always a good idea to help out grey little men) is: If you want a laughing princess you're going to have to settle for a simpleton as a son-in-law.

Jungle Clearings

If the world was a less  excruciating, less incorrigibly awful place for most people to be, there might be a case to be made for taking it seriously.  Just a glimmer of the possibility of doing something about any of it, would justify making that the centre of your life.  As it is, sincerity seems at best naive, more likely self-righteously and pointlessly pious.  (Just reinvented the wheel there: the best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity.) So I think now, after so many years of watching very little improve, unless you count the freedom to fuck on TV a great humane breakthrough.  It's not cynical to be cynical, it's perverse not to be.

Still, I remember marching from Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square at sixteen, half of me thinking that so many people must have some effect, and the other half knowing absolutely that at best I was just making myself feel good.  Exactly divided.  I confess I still am astonished (while 50% of me knows better) that the voiced dissent against the invasion of Iraq could be entirely ignored, that the scandal of lies, evasions, claims to having god's ear and the corruption of those who both bombed and made money out of rebuilding, all just went on and on, transparent enough for an infant to see through.  How can that happen?  How, in full daylight, with intelligent objections, can essential individual human rights in the UK and US be whittled away in the name of guarding against an incredibly handy global something which, for entirely understandable reasons, doesn't like us?  I don't like us either. 

This morning, the radio news announced that some international negotiator had stood in 'a jungle clearing' and tried to persuade the leader of God's Revolutionary Army in Uganda that the best way to get the international community to respect him more would be to release his child soldiers.  I hope the negotiator moves on to jungle clearings in Washington and somewhere near Downing Street. 

Nothing's Changed. Again.

So after a parliamentary vote there will be no public inquiry into the invasion of Iraq while Tony Blair is Prime Minister.  It's more or less definitive that he has got away with it.  I wonder why the getting away with it is what angers me so much, when I should rather be focusing on what is happening in Iraq?  Getting away with something is what upsets children.  Not the fact of  wrongdoing but the lack of consequence upsets them because it suggests that there might be no natural justice.  An elementary part of growing up is acknowledging that and a few other things.  No natural justice.  No purpose.  Contingency is the nature of the world.  We die.

It doesn't seem like much to have got into my head after all these years, and you won't find me denying any of them, but I still can't confront any of those facts with equanimity.  I can tell you the only way of being human is somehow to manage in that reality .  It can be done with good manners and respect for everyone else in the same boat.  It can be done by being quietly useful.  I can say that, believe it, too, but it does nothing to lessen my fury with the way of the world.  I thought there was something terribly wrong with it (socially, politically, intellectually) when I was young and had some notion then (as many of us did, hormones, probably) that it was possible to change it; that things could be made different.  This entailed marching, demonstrating, arguing, raging, running alternative schools, teaching in regular schools, paying attention to writing, painting, music and drama, taking drugs and even being mad in response to the way things and people were, how it all worked.  I'm wasn't sure that those things would have much effect in the world we didn't like, but  if nothing else we were passing time and giving warning while we waited until 'we' were running things and things were therefore improved. 

Well, I'm quite moved by such ideas and sorry there aren't more young people now believing that of themselves.  But nothing in the way of who controls the world and their motives has altered, nothing has changed and here we all are, just as they ever were.  It turned out that for our lot, wanting, taking and keeping power went on being the way to be in the world and superceded anything I thought of to pass the time less harmfully.  And even those who understood about the overwhelming attraction of power didn't have the means of subverting it.  Political activity might make you feel better but it appears to change none of the structures that keep greed and ambition keep on keeping on.  It seems the best manner to be in the world is provide it with palliative care as NGOs attempt to do.

So I am furious that Blair, Bush and the network of self-interested parties who have caused such havoc in Iraq that no one seems to have a solution for it, are going to get away with it.  Again and again and again.   I am also furious with myself for not having grown up enough to understand that they will always get away with it and for finding no better response than to be furious.  It's the anger of the impotent, but impotence is no excuse.