Style

Style will out. Despite condition the 1964 Series 3 Lambretta LI150 'Slim' is an icon. It is a design that has never been bettered for its aesthetics, same as the Fender Stratocaster, the young woman's mohair suit in Prince-of-Wales check from 1969, the two-tone coffee-and-cream Chervrolet Bel Air from 1957, the samurai sword...

‘The Blacked-up Men, with their strange agenda…’

It’s quite a while since I wrote about blackface, so let me sidle up to it in an oblique way. I came across this by chance on the web

               Lonely, unmarried, looking for love,

               Life was passing me by.

               So I sent off my photo, hobbies and age;

               Magazine marriage I'd try.

               They say for centuries lovely Japanese girls

               Have been trained in the art of pleasing men.

               Be lonely no more, open destiny's door.

               For one dollar they arrange a meeting.

Thus spake (sang) Viv Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, way back in the swinging sixties, and we can see where he got it from. The song Look Out There’s A Monster Coming is satirical, surreal, and witty – as you would expect from a band containing Stanshall and Neil Innes, to name but two – but what are we to make of this video clip? It’s from the BBC children’s comedy show Do Not Adjust Your Set and it shows the Bonzos in blackface, all except for Neil Innes who looks plainly disgruntled and embarrassed by the idea. The Bonzos are clearly hamming this up, and their use of blackface is deliberately intended to be absurdist rather than offensive, but this kind of absurdism would not be possible today; humour is killed by having to explain a premise. Don’t forget that blackface was still seen at that time on BBC TV in the slick work of the George Mitchell Minstrels, so the Bonzo's ridicule here would be apparent. Incidentally the first two faces you'll see in the clip are Terry Jones, who went on to be one of the Monty Python team, and David Jason, who became famous as Granville in Open All Hours and as the grumpy detective in Frost.

Speaking of the Minstrels, here’s another clip from the 1960s showing them at full throttle, and featuring their principle male voices Dai Francis, who had been blacking up to sing since the age of ten and who provides the Al Jolson sound-alike, John Boulter the mellifluous tenor, and Tony Mercer the bass.

Between 1996 and 2001 there was a BBC radio and television show entitled Goodness Gracious Me, featuring Sanjeev Bhaskar, Kulvinder Ghir, Meera Syal, Nina Wadia in the radio version, joined by Dave Lamb and Fiona Allen in the TV version. Just quoting from their Wikipedia write up:

“The title and theme tune are based on a hit comedy song of the same title sung by Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren, in which they reprise their characters from the 1960 film The Millionairess in which Sellers played an Indian doctor and Loren his Italian patient. The show's signature tune is a bhangra arrangement of the song. The show's original working title was "Peter Sellers is Dead", but was changed because the cast generally liked Peter Sellers. (The character Sellers plays, although in itself a fairly crude and broad parody of an Indian man, is actually portrayed as an intelligent, diligent, professional person). Many of the sketches explored the conflict and integration between traditional Indian culture and modern British life. Some reversed the roles to view the British from an Indian perspective while others poked fun at Indian stereotypes.”

One of their TV sketches was a musical number They Were The Blacked-up Men, ostensibly a parody of Men in Black but used as a semi-serious vehicle to question the whole question of cross-heritage acting. I recall that there were images on the screen of Sir Laurence Olivier as Othello, and of Sir Alec Guinness as Professor Godbole in Passage to India. In my opinion the latter casting came about because David Lean was unable to make a film without Guinness in it and for no other reason. Notable exceptions from GGM’s gallery of blacked-up men, however, were Ben Kingsley as Gandhi and Christopher Lee as Jinnah. I often wondered what GGM's agenda was there.

Okay, back to folk dancing… haven’t been there for a while… here’s GGM’s own Punjabi superhero Bhangra Man battling the dastardly Morris Dancers.

An aphorism

Never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a cricket bat, does not pick it up and mime electric guitar.

Of Anarchism, Lies, and Sports Bras.

On the lookout for something else entirely, I came across an interesting column in the Telegraph of Calcutta, India, dated 26^th November 2006. The journalist is Amrit Roy. The column itself deals with several topics, but the first section is a glowing endorsement of a book by Lord Meghnad Desai, Professor Emeritus of the London School of Economics, now a member of the House of Lords where he sits on the Labour Party benches.

The book is Rethinking Islamism: the ideology of the new terror. I haven’t read it, but I’m prepared to bet it’s a fascinating read. I would like to quote. Amrit Roy is certainly a fan, if one is to believe this column. I would like to quote a passage that Roy quotes in the column:

“There is one distinguishing feature of the new wave of terrorism that has done more than anything else to muddy the debate about its nature. This is the religious rhetoric which has been at the heart of its propaganda. The new terrorism wears Islamic garments. Its perpetrators recite and quote the Holy Koran. Its young agents the suicide bombers, men in most instances, go to their deaths with the promise of a paradise with scores of virgins waiting for them. But my argument is that one needs above all to separate Islam as a religion in both theory and practice and Islamism as an ideology. It is the ideology which feeds terrorism. It puts on religious garb and takes shelter in quotations from the Koran. But the ideology is political, its aim being the winning of power over people. In this, Islamism is much like other ideologies: Communism, anarchism, nationalism.”

I would like to offer some comments on this. Firstly it seems to me to be entirely true that Islamism is a political ideology, and that its Muslim aspect, no matter how sincere the Islam of its adherents, is its clothing rather than its nature. However, what many people fail to realise (I will give Lord Desai the benefit of the doubt until I get the chance to read his book) is that no matter how detestable one may believe a particular group to be, they do not exist in a vacuum. They exist because they can persuade a constituency. I do not mean that word as in an electoral constituency, but in a broader sense. If there was not a constituency of people in Muslim countries and communities that felt itself powerless and disenfranchised by the powerful, capitalist West, then there would be nowhere from which to draw recruits. The same could be said of other fascistic movements – the Nazis in Germany, for example, whose rhetoric was populist and patriotic in a time of Germany’s humiliation and poverty. Even today’s British National Party recognizes the appeal of populism, coming out against the UK Government’s cuts, declaring itself against the threat to Civil Service jobs, and so on.

It is pointless confronting ideologies unless you are prepared to confront the conditions in which those ideologies exist. Even if the disenfranchisement I spoke of above were nothing but a perception, then that perception too should be confronted. This is something that politicians of the 'liberal democracies' consistently refuse to do or fail to do, this is something that is not in the interests of the rich and powerful to address because they actually need the weak, poor, and disenfranchised to stay in that state in order to be able to dominate and exploit them. Meanwhile they perpetuate the myth that their way of doing things is magnificent and laudable simply because things elsewhere can be seen to be worse - the old myth of democracy being "... the worst form of government except for all the others" (to which I add "... so far tried", which is far from saying it's perfect!). So my message to the likes of Lord Desai is this: confront the basic problems first, and do not neglect to ask yourself whether you are part of those problems!

My second comment is this – and it is one in which I take a stand against Lord Desai. I want to nail the lie that anarchism’s aim is “the winning of power over people”. Where is the evidence to substantiate that? Where is anything except evidence to the contrary? The rigorous rationality of anarchism is entirely open to view, it is sane and humane, it is the antithesis of the arcane secrecies of Capitalism, Statism, Bolshevism, and even of the superficial Democracy of Western bourgeois societies. With anarchism what you see is what you get. It is arguably the most open political ideology ever conceived. Here is an unattributed passage from An Anarchist FAQ at infoshop.org:

“So, in a nutshell, Anarchists seek a society in which people interact in ways which enhance the liberty of all rather than crush the liberty (and so potential) of the many for the benefit of a few. Anarchists do not want to give others power over themselves, the power to tell them what to do under the threat of punishment if they do not obey. Perhaps non-anarchists, rather than be puzzled why anarchists are anarchists, would be better off asking what it says about themselves that they feel this attitude needs any sort of explanation.”

This is typical of all information given out by anarchists. So why the persistent lie? Well, perhaps because of the principle set out by Nazi propagandist Dr Joseph Goebbels, a principle which has been employed by all power structures, no matter how seemingly liberal:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

It is not for us to prove a negative; it is for the likes of Lord Desai to make their case. Where does he and his colleagues in ‘conventional’ politics make a case? Nowhere (apologies if he does so in his book, but as it would be off the central topic I would be surprised if he did). Where has conventional politics ever confronted our arguments, here and now in the 21^st century? Nowhere.

Except perhaps by kettling.

_______________    

Following on from that section of his column, Amrit Roy has a few frothy paragraphs about the endorsement by England cricketer (and a personal sporting heroine of mine) Isa Guha’s endorsement of the Uplifted Lingerie Company’s sports bras. An advertising blurb says:

“If you are about to start heading to the gym this bra is for you. Offering maximum support with a funky style, this can also be worn as a top.”

                                                                                      Laura Newton, Nicki Shaw, and Isa Guha

My straight friends are looking forward to the endorsement of sporting underwear by Alastair Cook and Stuart Broad. They have been waiting five years for this. Come on, lads!

No Borders, No Bosses. Part 3.

... In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present… ) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle – the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?"

Aldous Huxley in the foreword to the 1946 edition of Brave New World

No Bosses, temporal, spiritual, or financial.

At the end of my last blog on this subject I posed these rhetorical questions: “How might important aspects of infrastructure be handled? How would the railways run? How would the mail be delivered? How would hospitals function? How would justice be administered?”

There’s an easy and ready-made answer, of course. “Let us take care of that for you – at a price, of course!” That’s the voice of market forces. It seems that there is always someone offering to do things for us. First we had the political class, and now we have Capitalism. Of course we could lapse into sloth and apathy and let them do just that, but don’t ever make the mistake that the offer comes from generosity. Any action, no matter how apparently altruistic, made by a political person or party has only one end – the getting or maintaining of power; any action, no matter how apparently altruistic, made by a business person or a corporation has only one end – profit. I’m sorry but that’s how it works.

We would find a way to run the railways, the mail, the hospitals, and the courts, because it would be necessary to find a way. Otherwise there would be chaos. Anarchists do not believe in chaos and do not believe in no structures – for too long we have let the Right get away with using the term ‘anarchy’ (which was once, certainly in Bakunin’s time, used where we now use ‘anarchism’) to equate to chaos and disorder; I dare say you could run to your Merriam-Webster, jab your finger at the page, and say, “But that’s what it says, right here!” There is usage, friend, and there is abusage! The running of essential services would be hard work, but it would get done. It would have to, and that’s that.

But hand it all to capitalism? Thomas Jefferson said of merchants: “Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.” Capitalism, no matter how it may drape itself in the flag is not the stuff of patriotism. If patriotism were to be replaced by a general dedication to the good of all, a willingness to work within and participate in a flatter, more local structure with a highly participatory democracy, and within a network of cooperating communities, then capitalism would find itself at cross-purposes still with the common good.

There has never been, since the absolute monarchies of the Middle Ages, an institution more autocratic, more unaccountable, more antithetical to true democracy, more selfish, than the Business Corporation. You may argue that it is accountable to its shareholders. It is its shareholders. They are the Caliph, and the CEO is their Grand Vizier. Something that is accountable only to itself can hardly be said to be accountable at all. You may argue that it is accountable to its customers, who can choose to buy or not to buy. To that last I say: “Where have you been for the last century – the Moon?”

In 1957 – that’s more than half a century ago – American journalist Vance Packard wrote a book which has relevance to this day. It was The Hidden Persuaders. The review published in The New Yorker at the time said of it: “A brisk, authoritative and frightening report on how manufacturers, fundraisers and politicians are attempting to turn the American mind into a kind of catatonic dough that will buy, give or vote at their command.” The thrust of the book was to expose the hidden world of ‘motivation research’, the psychological technique that advertisers use to probe our minds in order to control our actions as consumers. Packard analysed marketing and political campaigns and TV programmes of the 1950s, and uncovered and demonstrated how the manipulative concept of ‘creating a market’ came to dominate the twentieth century’s corporate-driven world. It changed the way that advertising was viewed, but its lessons have been forgotten by consumers. It may have frightened capitalism for a short time, but certainly since the emergence of Reaganomics, Thatcherism, and the new Right, capitalism has reemerged with renewed confidence to dictate to us what we want to buy. So much for it’s being accountable to us!

Incidentally Packard, who died in 1996, also wrote The Status Seekers (about American social stratification), The Waste Makers (about ‘planned yearly obsolescence’ – a trick to persuade us not to buy durable goods but slavishly to grab ‘this year’s model’), and The Naked Society (about the threats to privacy posed by new technologies). He’s sitting up in heaven now saying, “See! See! I told you so!” as our every keystroke on internet sites is recorded, the phones in our pockets fix our moves by GPS, and the CCTV cameras track our every step. We’re down here wondering why we didn’t listen to him sooner!

Back to corporations. They are the antithesis of democracy. They are strictly hierarchical, and no decisions are made with reference to either customers or workforce (and in workforce I include all who work there up to a relatively high level of management, as the latter are merely functionaries and not decision makers). They are secretive; whilst demanding that government is ‘open’ and reveals its workings, its in-house instructions for dealing with business, its every move, corporations reveal nothing to anyone. Everything is private, secret, more arcane than even the inner workings of the Vatican or the ancient court of Byzantium. It is easier to probe the workings of freemasonry than it is to discover what actually happens within the average corporation.

In case you hadn’t gathered by now – Capitalism is not your friend.

It cannot and will not survive in a society where democratic participation has increased to its optimum level. It will fight tooth-and-nail to ensure that democracy, cooperation, and accountability do not increase. It is inimical to democracy. It is the natural habitat and domain of The Boss.

A recent correspondent came across a comment I made a few years ago, to the effect that crime was merely the extension of business to its logical extreme. He countered that by saying that whereas business was symbiotic, crime was parasitic. I don’t buy that distinction. At the very least the edges are blurred. We have seen that where corporations are bound by the laws of a society they will push for those laws’ ‘liberalisation’; if they have the opportunity, they will often find a ‘work-round’, a way of avoiding or even evading a law, some going as far as to break it covertly. A corporation will move its operation elsewhere in the world, if it can find somewhere where workers can be employed for half a bowl of rice, or where it does not have to comply with safety regulations. There is no scuzzy dictatorship to which it will not buddy up if favourable conditions can be obtained. Just because a business was founded in, say, Britain or America, it is not to be supposed that it feels the least sympathy with the citizens of the country of its foundation. It’s only motive is to exploit. Some corporations become so powerful that they can dictate policy and law to the countries in which they squat. In times of difficulty when, according to the principles of competition by which capitalism is supposed to function, they ought to fail, they can wring their hands, cry crocodile tears, and demand huge pay-outs from the pockets of the citizens. “We are ‘too big to fail’!” they cry. Some symbiosis!

Capitalism is a religion. Certainly in America it seems to occupy a cult status alongside and equal to the flag and church-going. It is assumed to be somehow divinely-ordained and protected, as though “I got mine” were a passage from scripture. Inconvenient Biblical admonitions such as: “No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (KJV Luke 16:13), might as well not exist. In fact capitalism does not serve God; the existence or non-existence of God is an irrelevance to the world of markets and money, as the only supernatural entity upon which that world relies is the ‘Invisible Hand’ which rights the balance of an economy after difficulties. This ‘Hand’ defies rational analysis, as of course does any supernatural entity, but it is most devoutly believed in and worshipped!

The proper foundation of religion is in the experience of humankind – of an individual first and foremost, but also of a community of individuals gathered by a common inner experience – and the realisation that there is something in us all, but not necessarily of us all, that can raise us from the mud. I am aware that this is as intangible, as irrational if you will, as the ‘Great Hand’ of capitalism; but in its purest form it is a liberating force. Aldous Huxley, whom I quoted at the head of this entry, said of religion that it should be “… the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman.” Where religion is free, where it is a response in faith, a holding of all things in common, a love of truth, a love of the truth that “will set you free” (KJV John 8:32), then it is liberty indeed, and lives in that liberty beside those who are free not to believe. Where religion is an institution, where it has bosses to lay down the law, where it does not allow the unmediated access of the individual and of the community of individuals to experience of the godhead, it is slavery. It is in its institutional form in which religion is closest to statism and capitalism, in which it is an unaccountable hierarchy in which the laity have little say and in which the professional clergy hold the whip. Indeed the institution of religion has often been used to bolster the state and/or big business – look at the Protestantism of the USA, the Orthodoxy of Tsarist Russia, the Shia Islam of the mullahs and ayatollahs of Iran (is there a more blasphemous title than 'ayatollah' - 'mirror of God'?), to name three salient examples. Even political philosophies can take on religious characteristics in the name of power – Naziism and the personality cult of Adolph Hitler, the cults of Stalin and of Mao are notable examples, but more subtle and insidious is the glorification of capitalism in the West.

Religion can be a dangerous thing in the wrong hands. Not for nothing did Karl Marx say “Die Religion ist das Opium des Volkes”, not for nothing did the likes of Mikhail Bakunin say that once a person had given his or her autonomy into the hands of a supernatural authority, then he or she had as good as given away intellectual, moral, and political autonomy also. But what are the ‘right’ hands? Religion (or rather faith, as Aldous Huxley understood it) must be communitarian – the early Christian Church was a network of independent congregations held together by a bond of understanding and experience, where its ministers were servants (diakonoi) rather than masters, and in that set-up we find much of the template for a new society free of political and commercial control, for a society of libertarian municipalism, of common ownership, and of participatory democracy. This is the antithesis of capitalism, the antithesis of statism, the antithesis of political oligarchy, the antithesis of party-control, the antithesis of the sham of bourgeois democracy of the political class, the antithesis of hierarchical and institutional religion, the antithesis of the covert and the secretive world.

Friends, capitalism is dead but won’t lie down. It struggles and struggles against its inevitable demise. It rages, it blusters. It cajoles, it sneers, it has its hirelings and stooges, it has its devout propagandists and apologists. It is a lame duck. The king has no clothes. Capitalism in the 21^st century can’t create wealth, can only create debt. The supply of the things that capitalism needs to fuel it is not inexhaustible. It must end. It must end because we want it to. No one can liberate us, we have to liberate ourselves. We will need to stop being dazzled by the pretty things in the shops, stop being what Marx called ‘commodity fetishists’ (he had a good turn of phrase, I’ll give him that). We will have to stop being led by the nose to the polls every four or five years, and we will have to reconstruct democracy from the ground up.

I know, I know – the arguments I have used in these three blog posts has not exactly been rational. They don’t have to be, because this is a polemical argument, not a rational one. At the moment I feel more emotionally engaged with the feeling of an impending capitalist cataclysm than I do intellectually engaged with Realpolitik. To hell with Realpolitik. Let’s take the world by the scruff of its neck and Get Real!

_________________  


A word or two on the demise of Osama bin Laden. I won't be mourning his passing any more than I would mourn the passing of any fascist. I do mourn the fact that he wasted his life in the pursuit of hatred, but I also note that just because we were the object of his hate is no reason to consider ourselves perfect.


Here's a quotation from Clarence Darrow (elsewhere wrongly ascribed to Mark Twain) which seems to be on many lips lately: "All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike someone they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituaries with satisfaction."


__________________    


UK voters are at the polls today... something to do with a different way of selecting which members of the professional political class are going to 'represent' us. I won't be voting. It would stick in my throat.

Here come the girls!

In the latest of a long-running series of TV adverts for Boots, the High St chemist chain, a married couple are in bed. The wife is reading and the husband starts to snuggle up to her amorously. "Not tonight," she says. "I have a..." At that point he smiles smugly and rattles a packet of paracetamol.

You can tell a man devised that advert. Any woman worth her salt would have instantly changed tack and claimed a totally different ailment from a headache. No man would walk into a pharmacy and buy Vagisil!

Diary of a glass-half-empty person 26

I had hoped that my life, along with that of Consuela (my Tejana maid) would be peaceful and undisturbed. However, I reckoned without the lurker upon the opposite hilltop. Remember him? No? The person who had been stalking us for months, on whom we sprang a dawn ambush, whom we reported to the Police, and who subsequently walked free when the wheels of Scottish justice ground to a sudden procedural halt? Och, you must remember him! Aye, aye, the chap who cracked on that he was Wes Studi.

Well, the bugger’s back.

No lurking now but brazen openness. It seems we only have to step out of our tepee and he’s there, on the opposite hilltop, binox on a tripod, Thermos flask in one hand and a cheese-and-pickle piece in the other. He’s on Twitter foreby, updating all-and-sundry about what he’s doing and, more intrusively, about what we’re doing.

Last week the ‘flash mobs’ started. Hordes of his followers turned up and made a day of it.

Consuela’s answer to all this is simple. “Give them something to look at,” she said to me the other day. She had been rummaging in the extensive cellars here at the tepee (honestly you would not believe what we can pack into such an apparently small space), and had found our bikinis. When I asked her what she imagined we could do with them she said, “The weather’s warming up, let’s give them some bikini-aerobics to look at – show them we don’t give a monkey’s!”

Consuela is fast becoming fluent in British idiom.

However, I have to say that I declined to participate. Consuela has a large bust and a flat stomach, whereas I am her diametric opposite in those respects. The upshot was that she has been going out solo to do her bends and stretches. She had been doing it for a week when we received a visit from the Police. An impossibly young man and young woman wearing high-vis stab-vests hung about with radios, telescopic batons, handcuffs, fly-whisks, saucepans, bath-plugs, and so on turned up at the flap of the tepee. I made sure Consuela was downstairs and quiet.

“There’ve been complaints’” they said. A cup of Earl Grey and some shortbread rounds softened them, as did the sight of this inoffensive, plain, middle-aged woman in joggers. I think I convinced them that I was the injured party in the matter.

The following day’s flash mob was effectively ‘kettled’ for ten hours on the opposite hilltop by a large number of Tayside’s Finest.

As my friend Lucy says: “Revenge is a dish best served cold… with a cherry on top!”