No! Not the towels!
I had been thinking of seeing the new Hitchhiker film but this post by AE Brain leaves me very unsure. No towels? No Restaurant? No leopard?
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I had been thinking of seeing the new Hitchhiker film but this post by AE Brain leaves me very unsure. No towels? No Restaurant? No leopard?
The French anti-EU-constitution types have a website. The reasons given there diagnose precisely the fundamental problems (unfortunately no way to link to the specific post):
Une Constitution doit être lisible pour permettre un vote populaire : ce texte-là est illisible.
A constitution should be readable in order to permit a popular vote: the current text is unreadable.
Une Constitution n’impose pas une politique ou une autre : ce texte-là est partisan.
A constitution does not impose one or another policy: the current text is partisan/ prescriptive.
Une Constitution est révisable : ce texte-là est verrouillé par une exigence de double unanimité.
A constitution is changeable: the current text is bolted in place by the double-unanimity requirement.
Says it all, really. Bonne chance, mes braves.
...but from a man who meant business. David Adesnik takes us behind the scenes of a democratic transition process. It remakes the point that one can only start to understand anything twenty years after it's happened.
Via Clive Davis, a splendid letter from Emanuele Ottolenghi.
Also from Clive, this interesting post about the prevalence of ex-liberals. Well, I was once liberal enough to go on demonstrations for right-on causes (Jubilee 2000, as was, and I don't really regret it), read a huge amount of frightful guff by and about Gramsci, Althusser, Freire etc. etc. (ah, nostalgia, not) and think that proportional representation was a path to national salvation. So I suppose it was only ever a matter of time before becoming a reactionary monarchist babykiller. 9/11 wasn't a turning point, just a marker along the way, but it might be more than coincidence that it was about then that I stopped thinking of myself as a small-l liberal and started to entertain the previously alarming thought that I might become a small-c conservative.
Which is how I come to read this sort of thing sympathetically. A dashed good read.
The Sun demonstrates a level of sympathetic multicultural engagement that certain other organs find regrettably impossible. Perhaps those others need sensitivity training.
Via The Glittering Eye, a historical reminder: today is the anniversary of the birth of Ulysses S. Grant, consecutively drunken failure, commander of the Federal armies in the latter stages of the American Civil War, and President. He was extremely good at being a drunken failure, which would normally have disqualified him from any higher post.
War brings odd opportunities, and Grant turned out to have a way to win the war when a succession of apparently smarter men (think McClellan, Hooker) had failed. Grant's life always seemed to me to argue against the logic of the rich man in the parable of the talents: being capable in one job doesn't mean being capable the next rung up the ladder. What is odder, being inept at following doesn't need to mean being hopeless at leading.
Yet another attack-dog performance by Humphrys against poor Jack Straw on Today this morning. Surely it's reached the point of diminishing returns by now? On the news bulletin at 9 an excerpt from the inquisition interview was played in which Humphrys got the last word: in other words the journalist had become the story. He could hardly have been more partisan without wearing a yellow rosette, I'm assuming he doesn't, perhaps it's just that being on radio we can't see it. The problem, for the nth time, is not that he goes after government ministers: the problem is that he wouldn't dream of going after Menzies Campbell remotely as hard. But that theme is one these good people can take up.
The wider problem is that Humphrys plainly has no capability for sympathetic understanding of his ideological opponents. I remember once saying to a political science class that no politician should be trusted who hasn't read and understood and reflected on both Burke - the Reflections, say - and Paine, say the Rights of Man. That was hyperbole, of course. But the point should be obvious enough. Is it true to think that the average politician, the average blogger, and (above all) the average journalist has never done anything of the kind? Or is that unfair? What is clear enough is that people who have done this kind of mental work are invariably better writers than the party-line hacks. (Orwell, inevitably, made the same point long ago.) Look at this, for instance, from SIAW, atheists (and Marxists) to a wo/man, or this.
None of this implies wishy-washiness. It doesn't even imply a centrist or moderate or non-partisan position in politics etc. My touchstone here is the historian Macaulay, who was also an active politician, a very partisan Whig, strongly identified with Protestantism, England and the British Empire (in no particular order). His writings are nonetheless full of generous tributes to the enemies of England, to French soldiers, to decent Tories, to good Roman Catholics, and many others. His History of England is unapologetically pro-Whig and pro-William of Orange: Macaulay unequivocally identifies the Revolution of 1688 as the origin of British greatness. Much of the four volumes is taken up with description and discussion of the villainy and stupidity of the Jacobites, the enemies of the Revolution.
And then he writes this:
TO my true king I offer'd free from stain
Courage and faith; vain faith, and courage vain.
For him I threw lands, honours, wealth, away,
And one dear hope, that was more prized than they.
For him I languish'd in a foreign clime,
Gray-hair'd with sorrow in my manhood's prime;
Heard on Lavernia Scargill's whispering trees,
And pined by Arno for my lovelier Tees;
Beheld each night my home in fever'd sleep,
Each morning started from the dream to weep;
Till God, who saw me tried too sorely, gave
The resting-place I ask'd, an early grave.
O thou, whom chance leads to this nameless stone,
From that proud country which was once mine own,
By those white cliffs I never more must see,
By that dear language which I spake like thee,
Forget all feuds, and shed one English tear
O'er English dust. A broken heart lies here.
Tune me back in to Today when Humphrys expresses anything like that level of insight.
The AUT has gone bonkers. There don't seem to have been any motions demanding a boycott of Chinese or Russian universities in protest at what's going on in Chechnya and Tibet, but I guess I'm just a Likudnik or something.
Meanwhile, I got out of the smoke for a dose of the real world, visiting my home town. I wouldn't want to live there, but it's good to know it's still there. My companion described it as like going back to the 1980s. I bumped into the local MP, out canvassing in close proximity to the Tories - the two studiously ignored each other in the time-honoured way. I wished him luck, even though I won't be able to vote for him. Strolling through the street market on Saturday the sense of historical continuity was tremendous. That space in the town centre has seen markets week in week out since 1159 or thereabouts, the shouts of the vendors changing slowly from Old through Middle to Modern English, but the business of the day much the same as always. May it always be there.
A reminder to free-market fundamentalists that there are an awful lot of Uneconomic Men.
James Hamilton takes the same test as I have and gets a similar result, i.e. the wrong one.
Joseph Britt has been having some further thoughts about apportionment of responsibility for Doing Something About Darfur. He's right.
Dean Esmay has noticed something that struck me in Manchester, when I first met mixed-race people (having grown up in a hideously white Midlands town). They're all good-looking and most are sharper-witted than average. A pity there aren't more mixed marriages: they're still very rare, even in London. Of course, these things take time. But this fact is one reason why America is such a Good Thing.
