... stops here!

President Harry S Truman looked around the Oval Office. His eye took in the rich, red drapes, the deep carpet in the same shade, the mahogany of the furniture. He glanced over each shoulder – right, left – to take in the Stars-and-Stripes and his own Presidential Standard, and reflected that the room was still very much to the taste of Roosevelt his predecessor. How could it not be? FDR was such a dominating personality. He asked himself whether he had the courage (or the energy, or the time…) to redecorate.

Perhaps at this moment he doubted himself a little, but Truman was indeed a man of character. He looked down at his desk. Yes, here was the new Truman Presidency, ordered, workmanlike, symmetrical – that’s how he would be. A place for his pen, a place for his presidential blotter, a place for everything, yes everything was in order, so why was he frowning?

“What is missing?” he thought.

His frown deepened when he caught sight of something he had been trying to avoid looking at. A tarpaulin had been laid on the carpet, and on that was the carcass of a freshly-killed white-tailed deer, a fine male with a single bullet hole in its forehead. It was a gift from an eager, young White House aide who had heard that the President liked hunting. In that the aide had miscalculated – Truman shot grouse, not deer.

The President got up and walked round to the front of his desk. The carcass would not go away of its own accord, it had to be dealt with, a decision had to be made and it was the Commander-in-Chief who had to make it. No one else would make it for him.

“What the hell use would there be in a President who knew how to skin a damn deer?” he asked aloud. The walls of the Oval Office echoed his rhetorical question. He looked down at the white-tailed buck, then to the empty space on his desk. His frown melted. An idea formed in his mind and he made a decision. He lifted the Presidential phone and spoke to his secretary Matthew Connelly.

“Matt,” he said. “Get me the Presidential Butcher. And while you’re at it, get me the Presidential Carpenter and the Presidential Signwriter too…”

John Pilger on the recent riots

I am grateful to blogger Ian Bone for drawing our attention to John Pilger's article in the New Statesman 18th August 2011. John Pilger is a left-wing journalist whose writings are always worth attention even if you find yourself in disagreement with him. In the light of that, if you do follow the link above and read the article don't forget to check out readers' comments too. I was glad to see the comment I reproduce below, because I have noticed that the main thing to emerge from analyses of the riots is the strengthening of the various analysts' prejudices.

"Turns out these riots really are a blank canvas for one's own views to be liberally painted on. On the left? Its the rise of the proleteriat. On the right? Its the breakdown of social order through years of lefty government. Are you a racist? Turns out these riots were the result of them coloured types. Interested in employment issues? Turns out the riots are all about youth unemployment. It's boring and it adds no new insight whatsoever. Can all writers and leaders on all sides of the fence at least make an effort to understand these riots instead of simply using them to legitimise their own ideologies? Is that really too much to ask?"

Diary of a glass-half-empty person 32: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

There was a knock at the flap of the tepee this morning. Consuela (my Tejana maid) being busy in the scullery, scullering, I answered the knock myself. Pulling back the flap I was surprised to see what appeared to be a UPS delivery man, or something very like one. Let me enumerate the differences for you.

Difference the first:- being the scarlet of his uniform, as opposed to the brown of UPS.

Difference the second:- being the rococo, crowned escutcheon bearing an upright cross upon a small Calvary flanked by a wild olive branch and a rapier  embroidered on the left breast of said uniform in place of the UPS logo.

Difference the third:- being the red beanie on his head, somewhat in the likeness of a yarmulke, in place of the UPS cap.

Difference the fourth:- being a heavy silver crucifix on a chain of the same around his neck, this being totally lacking in a UPS uniform.

“Spanish Inquisition,” he announced, holding out one of those hand-held gizmos and a plastic stylus. “Sign here please.”

I choked back the obvious reply to his announcement but did not take the proffered gizmo and stylus. He continued to hold it out, meanwhile looking quizzically at me and shifting his balance from one foot to the other.

“Spanish Inquisition?” I queried.

“Yes. Spanish Inquisition. You are Muzz Marshall, yes?”

“I am.”

“Muzz Marie Marshall, The Teepee, The Sidlaws, by Dundee?”

“Yes indeed, I am she, but I know nothing of any ‘Spanish Inquisition’.”

He retracted and reversed his gizmo and looked at it with some puzzlement. “Yep, that’s what it says here – ‘Muzz Marie Marshall, The Teepee, The Sidlaws, by Dundee; one all-in discount package Spanish Inquisition, including auto-da-fé and execution in effigie’.”

“Well, I’m a little surprised,” I said.

At that he brightened up and held out the gizmo and stylus. “Ah, well, you see, ‘surprise’ is one of the diverse elements amongst our weaponry.”

“Yes I heard that. I also heard that ‘ruthless efficiency’ was another one, but I’m afraid that you’ve rather let the side down in that respect. No Inquisition, Spanish or otherwise, has been ordered at this address.”

His face fell and he looked around.

“Is there another Marshall household in the area?” he asked.

“Not to my knowledge,” I said.

“Another ‘teepee’ perhaps?”

I gestured, and he looked around again at the bare, uninhabited hillside, and at the surrounding and equally bare hills.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You appear to have had a wasted journey.”

“Okay, Madam. Sorry to have troubled you,” he said and walked off back down the faint sentier that winds from the tepee to the nearest track that will accommodate vehicles. He was staring at his gizmo and talking into his Blackberry. A few words drifted back on the nagging, Sidlaw wind.

“Chief? Cardinal Ginger here… yep… yep… nope, you gave me the wrong name and address… I mean, it’s not bloody rocket science, is it...”

I shut the flap of the tepee and settled down on my chaise longue to watch TV again. I hugged my secret, dark, dangerous heresy to my bosom and smiled a smug smile.

Time for a bit of good news

After a decline to near-extinction in the UK, otters can now be found in every county in England. Terry Nutkins (what an ideal name for a wild-animal conservationist) expressed his delight. What makes that last fact so great is that Terry had two of his fingers bitten off by an otter when he was a boy. I kid you not.

I'm delighted too, by the way. I love 'em. My only regret, and that of Consuela (my Tejana maid), is that the teepee is too far from water for us to see them on a regular basis.

3 Lessons from History and Current Affairs

I am currently looking at three posters and going back in time as I do.

The first one is from one of the many anarchist blogs that I read. The blogger, Ian Bone, posts compulsively and has a long train of followers. His thoughts are explosive and controversial, sometimes questionable (for example I don’t expect him to change his mind about the recent riots in the UK but I do wish he would take a step back and review his assessment of the rioters as a revolutionary force – to my mind that is ascribing motives to them that they did not have, or at best didn’t know they had), but always worth reading.

The poster advertises a forthcoming protest to take place outside Eton College. The illustration demonstrates the scattergun approach of the blog. The poster mentions Eton, the illustration pertains to Oxford.

 It shows the Bullingdon Club of a few years ago. The Bullingdon Club is a socially exclusive dining club for the sons of the rich and influential. In the picture above amongst the formally-dressed, indolent loungers is the young David Cameron (now Prime Minister of Great Britain) and Boris Johnson (now Mayor of London). The behaviour of members of the Bullingdon Club is often mentioned these days in comparison and contrast to the recent inner-city rioters. I shall give some examples. 12^th May 1894[1] and 20^th February 1927[2] were two occasions when club members, after dinner, smashed almost all the glass of the lights and 468 windows in Peckwater Quad of Christ Church, along with the blinds and doors of the building. Andrew Gimson, biographer of Boris Johnson, reported about the club in the 1980s: "I don't think an evening would have ended without a restaurant being trashed and being paid for in full, very often in cash. [...] A night in the cells would be regarded as being par for a Buller man and so would debagging anyone who really attracted the irritation of the Buller men."[3] There is also an unverifiable quote currently circulating on Facebook, attributed to David Cameron: “Things got out of hand & we’d had a few drinks. We smashed the place up and Boris set fire to the toilets.” And yes, this is the same David Cameron who said recently about less-socially-favoured smashers and burners: "The looting and arson last night were criminality, pure and simple. Justice will be done and the people will see the consequences for their crimes”. I know it’s a comparison that has been milked and milked lately so I’ll leave it at that.

The second poster I’m looking at is this one from 1942, which announces the internment of Japanese-Americans in the Presidio of San Francisco CA following the attack on Pearl Harbour. It does not relate directly to the first poster except that it is of historical interest. I came across it whilst researching the photography of Dorothea Lange who documented the 1930s and 40s in America, focusing on the conditions of the then-socially-excluded such as migrant workers, people of Japanese heritage, etc.

The final poster is one of which I can’t find an image. It dates from 1912 and contains the following words: “Soldiers, don’t betray your class. You may soon be ordered to open fire upon Workers. Refuse!” It was the publication of this poster by British syndicalists[4] which resulted in the cause célèbre of the so-called ‘Syndicalist Trials’ of 1912, at which the Incitement To Mutiny Act 1797 was invoked and used to prosecute and silence trade union activists.

The reason I am drawing these three things together is this. Even in states that pride themselves on their ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ the law can be used as a spiked bludgeon to stifle political dissent. They can be used against whole sections of society bluntly and indiscriminately. I want to sound a warning and to sound it now. I want people to bear in mind that any new laws, any toughening of existing law, any resurrection of archaic law, any hike in sentencing policy, that are now used against the recent rioters in Britain – people for whom there is little public sympathy and against whom there is understandable anger – will be used in the future as a threat against dissent and activism. It is inevitable.

________ 

[1] New York Times, 13^th May 1894.

[2] J G Sinclair, A Portrait of Oxford, 2007

[3] BBC News: Cameron photo is banned, 2^nd March 2007.

[4] Actually I am not sure whether it was ever published as a poster. It was certainly published in the January 1912 issue of The Syndicalist.

I never promised a rose garden

(reproduced verbatim from the blog of an artistic collaborator of mine - Marie Taylor)

I was reading a book the other day – nothing really memorable except the passage I am about to relate. It was a science fictionbook in which the hero finds the ‘ancient artifact’ that gives him a glimpse into his future. Hero is happy to discover he will live to a ripe old age, be admired and respected by others, and died surrounded by his many loved ones. What a great future! I thought to myself – one that I would like to have but doubt I will achieve.

Anyway, this belief in his future gives the hero courage and a sort of trust in life and in himself that he hadn’t had before and he plunges, with a careless grace, into all sorts of adventures. But further on in the story, when confronted by a dangerous adversary, he has to make the choice of two actions. In that crisis he suddenly thought that the future the ancient artifact has presented was not the future that ‘would be’ but the future that ‘could be.’

In an instant his understanding of the vision changed. There was no Guarantee. The future he had seen was not a certainty, only a probability, or perhaps at best, only a possibility. Since his rosy future was not guaranteed, the hero’s courage wavered; fear took up residence in his heart.

Before this revelation, the hero would plunge blithely forward – the Fool, the Innocent – but he now began to analyze situations, to weigh and balance options. Before he made no plans and set no goals because the future was assured; he now began to devise tactics and set strategies to manifest the future he desired. Instead of living in Faith, he began to live in Hope.

How much control do we have over our lives? How much power do we have to influence outcomes, achieve goals, to determine our futures? Is it better to live in Faith or in Hope?

I remember a few years ago when the book “The Secret” was such a sensation. As I understood it, if you just desired hard enough, if you just affirmed strongly enough, if you just believed deeply enough, if you prayed hard enough, you could have anything you wanted. And there was an implied lifestyle to accompany this.

If you set goals, met deadlines, uncovered subconscious assumptions; if you stop eating meat, did yoga and meditated, rode a bicycle and saved energy; if you recycled, championed peace and human rights, you would become spiritually worthy of all good things – and all good things would eventually come to you.

In other words, if you played the spiritual game according to the rules, you would be safe, happy, healthy, loved, etc. The vision of yourself you pictured in your personal ancient artifact would come true. Your ‘could be’ would become a ‘would be.’

But real life doesn’t exist in a world of Newtonian physics. Causality is not the ultimate arbiter of destiny. Goals, deadlines, affirmations, belief systems don’t work with that level of certainty. Just ask the vegetarians who developed cancer, the yoga experts who had a heart attack, the ‘good’ people who suffered economic or emotional devastation. Just ask the Jobs of this world.

This life is not a rose garden and it is naïve to believe playing by the ‘rules’ will get you what you want. Life is not an academic course that comes with a text book and mid term exams; nor does it come with a roadmap with carefully marked rest stops.

Maybe it would be more correct to say it is a Fun House at the carnival, filled with unexpected twists and turns, a bumpy ride with the occasional bogeyman jumping out, a hall of mirrors in which reality has many dimensions. Maybe life is just an adventure to be lived, rather than a lesson to be learned or a trophy to be won. Maybe life is an experience in which hope is not needed, and is, in fact, a place where hope keeps us from experience by placing the emphasis on the destination rather than the journey.

So I say give up hope and deadlines and goals and achievements. If you must have a vision, see yourself in total surrender to what life brings; that way all decisions and stresses and indeterminations are set aside, along with worry and suffering. All is meant to be exactly as it is; we are all doing the very best we can right now; and we are all part of the Great Game that does not keep score.

Juan Guzmán – a remarkable photographer

Whilst researching for striking images I came across the two below by the same photographer. Hans Gutmann was German by birth and upbringing, but came to Spain at the time of the Revolution* and changed his name to Juan Guzmán. He was a war photographer and spent his time with the International Brigades. Apart from that I can find very little about him.

The first photograph is of the Catholic priest Martin Martinez Pascual.

The photograph was supposedly taken immediately before his execution on 18^th August 1936. He is counted as a martyr amongst some Catholics and is supposed to have called out “Viva Cristo Rey!” (“Long live Christ the King”) before he was killed. I can’t substantiate the claims about when this photo was taken nor about his last words; however, if there is any truth in that it is indeed a remarkable photo. The subject is relaxed, hands on hips, looking directly at the camera, and there is even a smile on his face. It’s a picture of courage. The Catholic apologist on whose blog I found the photo said of Guzmán, “We may assume that he was a communist”. Fair bet, although I can find no record of his having been a combatant.

The second picture is of the Miliciana Maria Jinesta.

Maria was a member of the Socialist Militia associated with the UGT** and she is pictured here on a high spot in Barcelona, again in 1936. Again the subject is smiling and looking directly at the camera. It is almost as though Guzmán’s technique is to get his subjects to look directly at the camera, saying “Show us who you really are, show us your truth”. How much his photographs are contrived or staged, beyond this liking for the full face, I couldn’t say.

As I say, very little seems to be known about Gutmann/Guzmán. His work is virtually unknown in his native Germany. He survived his time in Spain and WW2 and his death date was possibly 1982 (which would put these images outside public domain) but again I can’t confirm that. The latest photo of his that I have seen was of Frida Kahlo in 1951. Anyhow, I want to mark his work here, and that’s that.

Juan Guzmán

__________ 

* Better known as the Civil War, but it was in fact a revolutionary situation first and foremost.

** Unión General de Trabajadores (General Union of Workers)