June 12, 2003
This seems as good a point as any to mention that I won't be posting for several days. See you Tuesday-ish.
Irritating internet practices #2,523,009
. Sheesh. You know that Joyce Marcel piece in the American Reporter that I've been so taken up with? You know how it had today's date in the top left-hand corner? Turns out that The American Reporter uses a misleading template that puts today's date on top of all their articles, however old. The Great Purge of the Poets took place in February. Lileks was on the case. Solved it before I even saw it. Yes, I'm having a Lileks jag.i wrote a blog
dead after a day
all your fault gw bush
Bloodthirsty Literatteurs.
Turkeyblog has a post about those warmongering French poets, in which he adds The Song of Roland to the roll-call. He writes:What this is about, of course, is that poets are supposed to see revealed truth, so if you can find a pacifist poet, ta da, you've your proof that peace is the way to go.
Sigh.
I'm a free speech absolutist. I don't lament the decline in deference to politicians. And I have no time for Plaid Cymru. Nonetheless, as I read this story about how a Plaid Cymru politician died in a massage parlour, the arguments in favour of a press "gentlemen's agreement" to keep quiet about such things suddenly didn't seem so bad. There's no hypocrisy issue; so far as I know neither the dead man nor his party had a strong public line on sexual morality. There's no anything issue. He is dead, so the relevation that he went to massage parlours cannot affect his showing at the next election. Nothing is added to my understanding of Welsh Nationalism by showing a photo of the very establishment where he died and labouriously giving its name, street and district. (The more I think about it, the weirder it gets. Since when did Auntie provide publicity for houses of ill repute? The BBC is certainly not alone in doing so, but it seems an odd use of my taxes.)In any case, the BBC would once have waited a few months to give his widow and children a chance to let their emotions settle down.
I posted last July about the unequal treatment by the press of the sexual embarrassments of Conservative and Labour politicians, taking as my examples the death from auto-asphyxia of Stephen Milligan and the adultery of Stephen Byers. I suppose I should be grateful that the BBC seems now to be impartially salacious about all of them. I'm not grateful.
UPDATE: Here's Lileks writing on what could be, you know, a core libertarian subject: the decline of public decency. For anyone who didn't get it: what I want is for our customs to change, not our laws.
About war, but not poetry.
The Telegraph reports that Hirohito wanted to apologise for his role in the war. It was an apology directed at the Japanese people, rather than the apology to the Chinese and Koreans that has been so notably unforthcoming, but it makes me think somewhat better of him all the same.Following the links to Japanese reports of the same story, I was reminded that now that he is dead the Japanese refer to Emperor Hirohito by his "reign name" of Showa. This practice must be very confusing, even to the Japanese. I noticed that the writers did trouble to insert a little note of explanation, which makes me wonder whether the custom is dying away.
Rosie Bell
writes:It was Wilfred Owen whose subject was the pity of war, not Rupert Brooke.Good Lord, was it? I carefully checked the spelling of "Aeneid" but it never occurred to me to check that, so certain was I that it was Rupert Brooke.
We were taught in my school to compare and contrast Rupert Brooke's patriotic sonnet If I should die with Owen's intensely bitter Dulce et Decorum Est. Rupert Brooke died though before that war was fixed into a bloody stalemate.
However, you are right to say that of the war poems in existence many celebrate soldierly virtues (Kipling, Horace, Virgil, Homer). One of the
most touching in that line is The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna byCharles Wolfe. And of course battles make exciting stories, as witness the popularity of Lord of the Rings, Braveheart and Star Wars (where wars are hell if your side loses but great if it wins, naturally).Joyce Marcel - was she not brought up on Louis Untermeyer's Golden Treasury?
It's stuffed full of poems celebrating the American War of Independence - Paul Revere's Midnight Ride, a poem about Bunker Hill battle - don't have the volume to hand but in my memory of it there are plenty of illustrations of smoking cannons tended by American heroes.
And Louis Untermeyer - I have just read on the net - was one of the victims of the House for Un-American Activities Committee!
Culture vultures flash crowd?
Just checked my stats. I saw not so much a spike as a mound, and a glimpse at the referrer logs showed diverse addresses rather than one big-name link. I think that finding pro-war poets has become a parlour game."Shakespeare" says Brian Micklethwait (I thought of him too, particularly Henry V, but hesitated to call it poetry. Does blank verse count?)
Joanne Jacobs writes:
The last verse of John McCrae's "Flanders Field" is quite pro-war.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you with failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Field.And that was World War I.
A friend suggests Col. Richard Lovelace's To Lucasta, Going To The Wars
The final sentiment, though dulled by repetition of that over-famous line, is a pyschological truth. Dickens, writing about slavery in the southern states of the USA, observed the other side of the coin: that the great evil subtly corrupted every human relationship. Not that I think or Dickens thought that it was impossible for slaveowners to be virtuous or loving, but that, for instance, a man's devotion to his wife could not be unaffected by the knowledge that he could brand and rape other women if he pleased.
Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind,
To war and arms I fly.True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Lov'd I not Honour more.
I digress. Or do I? There's something there that is on-point, something about what is separable and what inseparable in the human personality, being as it is the valley into which so many streams called "culture" and "environment" and "genetics" flow. It's coming, it's coming.... Aha. Character is sort-of separable into packages. That's why people can surprise us, when suddenly the wrapper of a different package from the one we usually see is torn and we glimpse what is inside. But the packages aren't what you think they are. They certainly aren't separable enough to put the "anti-war" bit in the same package as the "poetic impulse" package. It's a parochialism of the last 150 years to think that there's an "artistic temperament" at all, let alone an "artistic" political platform. I think it was James Burke in Connections who pointed out that many of the great visual artists of the Renaissance were notably orthodox sons of the Church (except Caravaggio, a time traveller from from 1930s Bloomsbury) and Clive James who wrote that the old Carlsberg beer ad that showed Schubert never finishing his symphony because he went off for a pint was a thousand times truer to what the man was actually like than a film that showed him as a tormented rebel.
June 11, 2003
The world echoes with praise for righteous war.
Laura Bush, it seems, told some poets they weren't welcome to insult her in her own home. Off the poetasters went, pleasantly aggrieved, and had their group hug-cum-poetry reading somewhere else. Joyce Marcel was there. And deeply, deeply moved, so much so that she was inspired to ask this rhetorical question:Throughout the ages, blood in the streets has inspired poets to write passionately against war. Does Mrs. Bush know of any poets who have written enthusiastically in favor of it?Dunno about her, but I do. Try Tennyson (Charge of the Light Brigade - read the last verse if you think it's an anti-war poem, Riflemen Form! and, oh, boy, Ballad of the Revenge will not be reprinted in Peace News any time soon.) Try Macaulay (Horatius at the Bridge). Try Homer. Try the author of Beowulf. Then there's the anonymous Anglo Saxon scribe who wrote The Battle of Maldon. Or Kipling, in some phases (although to say that he was blind to the cost of war, which killed the last of his children, is to traduce him.)
Notice that I have strictly adhered to her request for enthusiastic writing about war. However the enthusiast for war is a straw man when it comes to describing the opinion of those who supported the recent war in Iraq. Our position is closer to that of Rupert Brooke. Contrary to popular opinion the fact that he took as his theme the 'pity of war' did not stop him supporting the one he fought in. Almost his last words were the hope that his work would "survive Prussia." Brooke wasn't the only poet to take that position; so did Walt Whitman. In the article Marcel says, "It seems especially odd that Mrs. Bush would honor Whitman, a born rebel." Not if you've read Ethiopia Saluting the Colors, where an old black woman stands to honour her liberators, it doesn't. In fact, the anti-war movement will draft the memory of any poet who mentions that war is horrible (though not the worst of horrors) irrespective of whether said poet showed by his life or words that he sometimes supported it nevertheless.
Frankly, I haven't read more than a fraction of the work of the poets I have named. But that is the point: even a person with my mediocre knowledge of English-language poetry and near to nonexistent knowledge of the poetry of other languages knows that "From the dawn of history down to the sinking of the Terris Bay, the world echoes with the praise of righteous war," as C.S. Lewis put it, in Why I Am Not A Pacifist. He went on, "To be a Pacifist, I must part company with Homer and Virgil, with Plato and Aristotle, with Zarathustra and the Bhagavad-Gita, with Cicero and Montaigne, with Iceland and with Egypt." (OK, so not all those mentioned are poets, but you get the idea.) Now Lewis was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at Cambridge - but you don't have to be a professor, or to have got very far in your Virgil, to know that the first big name poet in Latin wasn't a conchie: the very first line of the Aeneid is "I sing of arms and the man." And I don't think, somehow, that the Norse sagas were in praise of peace at any price.
OK, so Joyce Marcel is startlingly limited in her knowledge of poetry. It wouldn't surprise me to find that Laura Bush knew more than she does. But maybe she's a woman of wide mental horizons in other respects? Let's see what she says about one poem she does appear to have read:
The poetry reading and President Bush's casual dismissal of the anti-war protests brought to my mind Shelley's poem, "Ozymandias of Egypt," about an ancient statue found in pieces in a lonely desert.Riiight. Shelley wrote about a absolute ruler... who once ruled over a desert country of the east and caused its enslaved people to raise monuments to his own glory... who called himself by vainglorious titles designed to show his might and power... whose statue was cast down... whose fate serves as a warning to tyrants everywhere.When Shelley describes the ancient despot's "wrinkled lips and sneer of cold command," it was not too great a mental leap to the arrogance of President Bush. "I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair," the despot says. But, as Shelley points out, "Nothing beside remains."
Despots die and their wars are read about in history books; we cluck our tongues, shake our heads and wonder at their evil. But, as Auden says, time "worships language and forgives everyone by whom it lives." Words live. Poetry lives.
The poets know how difficult it can be to break out of an obsession, but perhaps if she really, really concentrates she might think of someone in the news recently who fits that profile better than George W. Bush.
UPDATE. A reader points out (see above) that the "pity of war" quote was not from Brooke. The point remains.
Yes, the Iraqis did have Scuds in residential areas.
"After the first marketplace bombing we heard there had been a hit and we were able to go there in our own vehicle. We got lost and a couple of blocks from where the two missiles had hit there was a Scud missile launcher with a Scud on top."We then realised the Iraqis were hiding Scuds in residential areas. If I'd said that I think we would have been thrown out the next day," she told a Media Society event last night.
With these words, Channel 4's diplomatic correspondent admits self-censorship.
Read.
I've just discovered Oliver Kamm's blog. "Oh my, oh my, oh my," as Mole said when he came out into the sunshine. Here are some quotes:[quoting Clare Short] ..."The current administration has shown its disrespect for the UN throughout the Iraq crisis." Exactly. Respect is not an entitlement: it is something you have to earn.......The dire Fergal Keane School of Emoting On-Camera, with its many recent imitators, is the product of this culture...
...The party she [Shirley Williams] left Labour in order to found has long since merged and mutated, leaving consistent liberals – those who believe the UN has an obligation to implement its own Security Council resolutions rather than allow bellicose tyrants to mock them – with a recurring ideological obligation that is yet also a pleasure: tactical voting to defeat the Liberal Democrats.
June 10, 2003
Redbridge museum
- serving the people of the London Borough of Redbridge since AD 503.And don't you just love that "it's keep". The Wanstead and Woodford Guardian needs to shoot it's prufereeder's.
"Knock, knock."
"Who's there?""Helena."
"Helena who?"
"Helena handbasket."
...has moved. Update your bookmarks.
Continuing the theme
of 'how much clearer do the lessons of history have to be', Winds of Change has up a good post on the how the EU is not a tyranny but has put into place many of the mechanisms to become one. Few of the links were new to me, but they are assembled in a useful and logical package. One to bookmark if you often get into arguments about this.
"The Czech Agression against Nazi Germany"
is the title of an anonymous pamphlet from 1969 possessed by Jerusalem Post writer Sarah Honig. No, it isn't a piece of German revisionism. It's a very apt piece of satire that takes some of the world reactions to the 1967 war and transposes them to an alternative history where the Czech forces hurled back the Nazi attackers. Ms Honig describes it thus:The brilliant Czech campaign lasted six days. Chunks of Germany were occupied. Wrathful condemnations were rained upon the aggressor by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, the French Quai d'Orsay, the Soviets, and the League of Nations.Many readers might be surprised by how vague my opinions on what should be done in the middle east actually are. Is this 'road map to peace' going anywhere good? I don't know. What I do know is that millions of Arabs, especially Palestinians, say without equivocation that the Jews should be driven into the sea. The West persists in saying airily that it's "all just political hyperbole, old chap, not to worry, just be nice to them and they'll come round..." All of which was said about the Nazis too.The Czechs were raked over the coals for firing the first shot, winning a war without permission, and damaging international commerce. Their willingness to contract a peace in which Hitler would recognize their country's independence and integrity did no good. The world pitied Nazi refugees and accused the Czechs of inhumanity. Thus began the period of unjust occupation.
The Czechs "stood alone against world opinion... The British called them arrogant, willful, inhuman." The French deplored them for being "disdainful of world opinion, irresponsible, and not justifying the trust put in them."
To the Russians they were "hooligans, pirates, tools of imperialism, and agents of capitalism." The Nazi Germans branded them "murderers, assassins, criminals, rapists, gangsters, etc, etc." - just as the world and the Arabs brand Israel, whose so-called occupation of Arab territory began in self-defense, with every bit as much moral justification as Czechoslovakia would have had to strike at Hitler in 1938.
...Which takes us back to the storybook. Its Czechs insisted that their heroic stand saved "Britain and France from fighting Germany. That claim was considered ridiculous. Why should Britain and France at all have to fight Germany?"
The Czechs also asserted they prevented "a world war. This was considered typical of their inflated ego. The height of absurdity" was the Czech notion that, had they not acted, "20 million Russians would be killed in a war with Germany. But why would Nazi Germany attack Russia, considering their non-aggression treaty? snickered omniscient cynics. Another Czech argument was that they had averted the murder of six million Jews. This claim, though, was received rather indifferently because nobody really cared about the Jews."
Once I would have thought the point above too thumpingly obvious to need making. No longer.
UPDATE: Interesting link to a presentation on the new anti-semitism found via Libertarian Parent ITC. (Backup link here.)
June 09, 2003
Cat magic and the European Union.
Don't blame her for the regrettable use I made of her original insight, but just so you know, what follows was put into my mind by this post from Kris Murray in which she said:The elitists of the EU beauracracy want to create a "superstate" just like the US but they seem perfectly clueless as to what makes all fifty of the US states one. These elites think it is just a process of merging tangibles. That all they have to do to make a unified Europe is create a single set of tangibles such as one monetary unit, one set of laws, one military, etc. and, ta da, Europe is one. But that's not going to work because the intangibles are more important.
I think that's quite right. In many cultures there is a ritual of blood brotherhood, where the mingling of blood symoblises a mingling of loyalties - but the EU acts as if you could make me feel that Jurgen Habermas, say, was my soul-brother by taking an ampoule of my blood from the blood bank and mixing it up with a good slosh of his. Sorry guys, but the thing that makes swearing blood-brotherhood meaningful is not the actual blood.
If you think the idea of a Solent-Habermas blood exchange was approaching the yukkiness limit, stop reading now.
"Middening" in cats means deliberate defecation in strategic places. According to this website on feline socialisation:
The motivation is a cat’s need to enhance its sense of security in its environment. A frequent feline response to stress or conflict is to distribute its scent.Another motive not mentioned in that passage is even more striking. Owners who go away for a day or two leaving neighbours to feed the cat sometimes come home to a nasty surprise. The cat doesn't just poo, it seeks out those places most impregnated with the owner's scent and poos there. Such as in the middle of the bed, or in your shoe.There are two main categories of trigger factors :
Environmental change and challenge within the home.
E.g. House moves; new furniture; re-decoration; conflict or introduction with a person, dog or cat; visitors; challenging smells from shopping bags and new shoes.Threats from outside the home.
E.g. Invasions through the cat flap; a narrow escape with traffic; aggression from other cats.
It's cat magic. By mingling my humans' scent with mine, thinks Fluffy, I will mystically call their physical bodies home. The resemblance to the behaviour of the European Union will, I trust, be obvious to all cultivated minds. It explains why EU bureaucrats will sometimes provocatively trumpet some very unpopular measure at the worst possible moment for British Europhiles, just as the latter are trying to damp down resistance to the next step in their delicate schemes. The bad timing is no accident. The very delicacy of their situation is what provokes the attention-seeking behaviour.
Perhaps, however, we should not push the analogy too far:
The only treatment is to make your home more safe and secure. Identify the cause of the marking behaviour and, if possible, remove it or desensitise your cat to it. If your cat’s insecurity is caused by a rival cat outside, chase it away as often as possible, arrange a garden time share with their owners, keep external doors and windows shut, and block your cat flaps. If you are moving house, put your cat in a cattery during the move and then initially confine it to a small area of the house so making it feel secure. Increase access to the rest of the house slowly.(P.S. No one will ever believe me in this, but this analogy struck me as being true before it struck me as being either insulting to my political opponents or funny.)
To be European is to be just like me and my friends
: The philosopher Jurgen Habermas recently put out a statement or manifesto on what it means to be European. Chris Bertram analyses it here.Those Canadians who use the grand phrase "Canadian Values" as meaning "those areas of public policy where Canada's government happens to be to the left of the last two Republican administrations in the United States" are making the same mistake as Habermas. Even if I agreed with every one of those policies I would warn against making them the test of Canadian-ness. Eventually people who do not share and will never share those values might start taking you at your word. Secessionist feeling is growing in parts of Canada, which I think is sad but understandable.