Bounderby Speaks

My rereading of Dickens' novels continues apace and I've just begun Hard Times. Josiah Bounderby speaks loudly and clearly for this great nation of ours:


I hadn’t a shoe to my foot. As to a stocking, I didn’t know such a thing by name. I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty. That’s the way I spent my tenth birthday. Not that a ditch was new to me, for I was born in a ditch...

Cold? I was born with inflammation of the lungs, and of everything else, I believe, that was capable of inflammation...For years, ma’am, I was one of the most miserable little wretches ever seen. I was so sickly, that I was always moaning and groaning. I was so ragged and dirty, that you wouldn’t have touched me with a pair of tongs...

How I fought through it, I don’t know. I was determined, I suppose. I have been a determined character in later life, and I suppose I was then. Here I am, Mrs Gradgrind, anyhow, and nobody to thank for my being here, but myself.

My mother? Bolted, ma’am! My mother left me to my grandmother, and, according to the best of my remembrance, my grandmother was the wickedest and the worst old woman that ever lived. If I got a little pair of shoes by any chance, she would take ’em off and sell ’em for drink. Why, I have known that grandmother of mine lie in her bed and drink her four-teen glasses of liquor before breakfast!

She kept a chandler’s shop and kept me in an egg-box. That was the cot of my infancy; an old egg-box. As soon as I was big enough to run away, of course I ran away. Then I became a young vagabond; and instead of one old woman knocking me about and starving me, everybody of all ages knocked me about and starved me. They were right; they had no business to do anything else. I was a nuisance, an incumbrance, and a pest. I know that very well.

I was to pull through it, I suppose, Mrs Gradgrind. Whether I was to do it or not, ma’am, I did it. I pulled through it, though nobody threw me out a rope. Vagabond, errand-boy, vagabond, labourer, porter, clerk, chief manager, small partner, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown. Those are the antecedents, and the culmination. Josiah Bounderby of Coketown learnt his letters from the outsides of the shops, Mrs Gradgrind, and was first able to tell the time upon a dial-plate, from studying the steeple clock of St. Giles’s Church, London, under the direction of a drunken cripple, who was a convicted thief, and an incorrigible vagrant. Tell Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, of your district schools and your model schools, and your training schools, and your whole kettle-of-fish of schools; and Josiah Bounderby of Coketown tells you plainly, all right, all correct — he hadn’t such advantages — but let us have hard-headed, solid-fisted people — the education that made him won’t do for everybody, he knows well — such and such his education was, however, and you may force him to swallow boiling fat, but you shall never force him to suppress the facts of his life.

Hard Times, Charles Dickens.

Of course Coketown may have different connotations today. But without the above, we may not have had this:

Them That Do Nothing - Field Music

TalkShite

"Our talking point this morning is George Best, his liver transplant and the booze culture in football. Don’t forget, the best caller wins a crate of John Smith’s." Alan Brazil, TalkShite Radio

And this year's award for the most sinister and Orwellian advertisement on national radio goes to...



Apparently this advert (not propaganda) is broadcast on TalkShite Radio station. It appears to contain too many polysyllabic words for the average listener of The Alan Brazil show, however. This is of course the radio station whose ideology was forged within the crevasse of Kelvin twat-face McKenzie's sweating arse cheeks, and is a tabloid flow of incoherence, idiocy and inanity. If you listen for longer than ten minutes, you can physically feel your IQ begin to recede. It also employed right wing gobshite John Gaunt, a man who accounts for approximately one third of the EU lard mountain. And apparently Gorgeous George Galloway himself still has a show on the station. It's on a Friday and Saturday night but I always seem to have better things to do than listen to the token one.

Anyway, I once heard the above mentioned character, Alan Brazil - an average football player in his time - utter one of the most remarkable faux pas ever in the aftermath actor John Thaw's death. Throughout the morning after Thaw's death, he kept referring to the dead thespian as "John Shaw" instead of Thaw. When the inaccuracy of his pronunciation was highlighted to him by his co-presenter, he remarked: "John, if you're listening, sorry mate." We are still awaiting John's response to the apology.

Indeed Alan Brazil seems to have a problem with this whole death business, as indicated in one of the greatest meetings of minds ever: (Warning: contains voice of Gary Bushell)



He heard two versions of the death of comic Bob Monkhouse. Was he still alive in the other account?

My Husband Rocks...

I'm gonna email these folks and see if gay men, in loving committed relationships, are also allowed to wear these T-shirts. Friends of ours recently had a civil partnership ceremony, and I think this may have been the perfect gift. I may even buy my common law wifey one too...

From here:

One of my passions in life is seeing marriages succeed and also to be happy. And one of the things that even makes marriage better is when Christians have great marriages and glorify Christ in and through them. So when I found out about this new company called Union 28, that makes pro-marriage t-shirts, I HAD TO contact them and get them on the show.

Thankfully, the owner of Union 28 agreed to come on the show and talk about how Union 28 was formed and also about how the t-shirt ideas came about.

And to top it off, I was blessed to receive one of the t-shirts that says “My husband rocks” and recently I wore it to church with an overwhelmingly positive response. So this is why I want you to listen to the show, click on over to Union 28 and browse their online store and then buy a few t-shirts or hats for your spouse and yourself. I can tell you from personal experience that you will feel proud as you wear the clothing, and your spouse will be blessed. And who knows, you may even be able to share your story with someone who will comment on the shirt, because I guarantee that someone will.

And no, this is not from The Onion either.

Friday Photo - Croagh Patrick, Co. Mayo

Glenn Beck And The Discourse of Neo-Fascism

Progressivism "is the disease here in America." Glenn Beck.

As a teenage radical I was wont to throw around, stupidly, the term fascist when referring to the Thatcher government especially. I was a schoolboy at the time, and as I left school and began to see the differences between conservatism and the bone-headed fascism of the National Front, I modified my language accordingly. I still hated the right wing neo-liberalism of thatcherism but knew that however bad right wing free market orthodoxy was, the ideology of the far right fascist groups was more insidious.

So it is with great reluctance that I use the adjective, fascistic, to describe Glenn Beck's (clown prince of the US conservative hard right) discourse during a speech he gave to the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC). Like our very own right wing conspiracy theorist, Melanie Philips, Beck sees a liberal/left progressive agenda seeping into all forms of political and civil society, all predicated upon a communist/Marxist ideology. It is an unstoppable force, according to Beck and cannot be defeated through mere debate or scrutiny. For Beck, 'progressivism' (his term not mine) is a "cancer" and must be "eradicated" for the health of American society and also the American body politic one presumes.

Words such as cancer, disease and eradicate have been used by any number of dictators or fascist juntas to torture, jail and kill members of left wing groups and progressives the world over. Indeed one could imagine Suharto or Pinochet using such language to crush opposition to their rule.

The speech below shows Glenn Beck, seemingly at his most harmless at first, laughing about the popularity of his one prop, his chalkboard - before launching into his dangerous discourse regarding 'progressivism'. He did a similar trick when he accused Obama of 'hating' white America and all of its pure and untainted values. Beck may look, sound and perform like an idiot, but his rhetoric and ideas would not look out of place in a BNP meeting.



Also, Dan Kennedy, reporting from CPAC, says in The Guardian:

"If you're part of secular America – that is, if you're an atheist, an agnostic, a religious liberal or even a mainstream believer who thinks religion should be kept out of politics and vice-versa – then you should be very afraid of what the Republican party has in store for you in 2012."

Republicans v Secular America, Dan Kennedy guardian.co.uk

Friday Photo - Rabelais

The Courage of the Present

An interesting read which I found gave me a slight jolt of optimism. Found via infinite thØught. I've cut a few paragraphs, but it is Badiou's historical formulation of the 'communist hypothesis' and the distinct phases of human history that caught my eye.

From Alain Badiou
The Courage of the Present

"...So what can the principle and the name of a genuine orientation be today? I propose that we call it, faithfully to the history of the politics of emancipation, the communist hypothesis. Let us note in passing that our critics want to scrap the word ‘communism’ under the pretext that an experience with state communism, which lasted seventy years, failed tragically. What a joke! When it’s a question of overthrowing the domination of the rich and the inheritance of power, which have lasted millennia, their objections rest on seventy years of stumbling steps, violence and impasses! Truth be told, the communist idea has only traversed an infinitesimal portion of the time of its verification, of its effectuation. What is this hypothesis? It can be summed up in three axioms."

"First, the idea of equality. The prevalent pessimistic idea, which once again dominates our time, is that human nature is destined to inequality; that it’s of course a shame that this is so, but that once we’ve shed a few tears about this, it is crucial to grasp this and accept it. To this view, the communist idea responds not exactly with the proposal of equality as a programme – let us realize the deep-seated equality immanent to human nature – but by declaring that the egalitarian principle allows us to distinguish, in every collective action, that which is in keeping with the communist hypothesis, and therefore possesses a real value, from that which contradicts it, and thus throws us back to an animal vision of humanity."

"Then we have the conviction that the existence of a separate coercive state is not necessary. This is the thesis, shared by anarchists and communists, of the withering-away of the state. There have existed societies without the state, and it is rational to postulate that there may be others in the future. But above all, it is possible to organize popular political action without subordinating it to the idea of power, representation within the state, elections, etc. The liberating constraint of organized action can be exercised outside the state. There are many examples of this, including recent ones: the unexpected power of the movement of December 1995 delayed by several years anti-popular measures on pensions. The militant action of undocumented workers did not stop a host of despicable laws, but it has made it possible for these workers to be recognized as a part of our collective and political life."

"A final axiom: the organization of work does not imply its division, the specialization of tasks, and in particular the oppressive differentiation between intellectual and manual labour. It is necessary and possible to aim for the essential polymorphousness of human labour. This is the material basis of the disappearance of classes and social hierarchies. These three principles do not constitute a programme; they are maxims of orientation, which anyone can use as a yardstick to evaluate what he or she says and does, personally or collectively, in its relation to the communist hypothesis."

"The communist hypothesis has known two great stages, and I propose that we’re entering into a third phase of its existence. The communist hypothesis established itself on a vast scale between the 1848 revolutions and the Paris Commune (1871). The dominant themes then were those of the workers’ movement and insurrection. Then there was a long interval, lasting almost forty years (from 1871 to 1905), which corresponds to the apex of European imperialism and the systematic plunder of numerous regions of the planet. The sequence that goes from 1905 to 1976 (Cultural Revolution in China) is the second sequence of the effectuation of the communist hypothesis. Its dominant theme is the theme of the party, accompanied by its main (and unquestionable) slogan: discipline is the only weapon of those who have nothing. From 1976 to today, there is a second period of reactive stabilization, a period in which we still live, during which we have witnessed the collapse of the single-party socialist dictatorships created in the second sequence."

"I am convinced that a third historical sequence of the communist hypothesis will inevitably open up, different from the two previous ones, but paradoxically closer to the first than the second. This sequence will share with the sequence that prevailed in the nineteenth century that fact that what is at stake in it is the very existence of the communist hypothesis, which today is almost universally denied. It is possible to define what, along with others, I am attempting as preliminary efforts aimed at the reestablishment of the communist hypothesis and the deployment of its third epoch."

"What we need, in these early days of the third sequence of existence of the communist hypothesis, is a provisional morality for a disoriented time. It’s a matter of minimally maintaining a consistent subjective figure, without being able to rely on the communist hypothesis, which has yet to be re-established on a grand scale. It is necessary to find a real point to hold, whatever the cost, an ‘impossible’ point that cannot be inscribed in the law of the situation. We must hold a real point of this type and organize its consequences."

"The living proof that our societies are obviously in-human is today the foreign undocumented worker: he is the sign, immanent to our situation, that there is only one world. To treat the foreign proletarian as though he came from another world, that is indeed the specific task of the ‘home office’ (ministère de l'identité nationale), which has its own police force (the ‘border police’). To affirm, against this apparatus of the state, that any undocumented worker belongs to the same world as us, and to draw the practical, egalitarian and militant consequences of this – that is an example of a type of provisional morality, a local orientation in keeping with the communist hypothesis, amid the global disorientation which only its reestablishment will be able to counter."

"The principal virtue that we need is courage. This is not always the case: in other circumstances, other virtues may have priority. For instance, during the revolutionary war in China, Mao promoted patience as the cardinal virtue. But today, it is undeniably courage. Courage is the virtue that manifests itself, without regard for the laws of the world, by the endurance of the impossible. It’s a question of holding the impossible point without needing to account for the whole of the situation: courage, to the extent that it’s a matter of treating the point as such, is a local virtue. It partakes of a morality of the place, and its horizon is the slow reestablishment of the communist hypothesis."

Originally published in Le Monde, 13 February 2010. Translated by Alberto Toscano

Miserablist Music Meme

Started by Phil

Added to byHarpy

And further added to by Splintered Sunrise

I thought I'd dip my miserablist oars into the waters of sadness. It's anti-Valentine's Day mawkishnes...I think. Whatever. Here goes.

Firstly, I'm going to break from the format and go for a song pre-rock/pop. Not sure if this is from the 1930s or 40s. Not much you can say about my first choice, other than it is probably one of the saddest, bleakest and most powerful songs ever written, Strange Fruit sung by Billie Holiday. Definitely not a love song, the lyrics speak for themselves, however. And tears usually follow:



The 1970s: There is always room for a drunken love song and Tom Waits never fails. I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You:



The 1980s: Billy Bragg's, The Saturday Boy. Every heterosexual teenage boy has experienced many of the incidents narrated in this song. Probably my favourite non-political Bragg song. "In the end it took me a dictionary to find out the meaning of unrequited..." Exactly.



The 90s: Of course, there couldn't be a miserablist meme without Radiohead. Here's Black Star:



And finally this decade, the noughties: Bon Iver's Skinny Love is melancholy at its most acute:



Hope that's suitability miserablist.

Anyone else?

Labour's Soft Left, On The Edge of Darkness?

Few escape justice, none escape vengeance...

During the 1980s I remember, as a naïve teenager, watching a gripping drama on the BBC called The Edge of Darkness. It was a paranoid, conspiracy thriller about the nuclear industry, dodgy government security agencies, green politics and the dangers of rabidly privatising anything that moved its arse in a seductively profitable manner. It was politically astute and seemed to epitomize all that was wrong with the extreme rightward turn of Reagan’s Washington and Thatcher’s Britain – as well as the potentially devastating use of nuclear power (as a by-product) in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.

In one scene during the programme, Bob Peck (the main protagonist) - playing a detective investigating his daughter’s murder - visits a left-wing political rally, organised by environmentalists highlighting the potential dangers of nuclear power. There, giving the speech of his life, was Michael Meacher. As an angry, young left-wing wannabee, I was impressed with Meacher back in the day and have subsequently followed the reversal of his stated aims proclaimed in that ‘fictional’ speech ever since.

This was a man, let us not forget, who was Tony Benn’s running mate in the leadership election of 1983. Meacher was also at the heart of Kinnock’s shadow cabinets and a member of the Blair government as environment minister.

I’ve been thinking about Meacher recently for two reasons. Firstly, there is a Hollywood film version of The Edge of Darkness upon the movie screens at the moment - starring none other than Mel Gibson. I’m not sure whether or not in Gibson’s version we see the nuclear industry as part of an all encompassing Jewish conspiracy - as I will not be going to watch the film, and I’m unsure to what extent Mr Gibson was involved in the actual production of the film.

The other reason Meacher has been in the news during the past few weeks, is that he has signed up – along with a number of other ‘soft’ left labour MPs – to a list of ‘radical’ proposals in a bid to make the upcoming election less of a blood bath for New Labour. (Here You Can Read Their 'Radical' Campaign Policies) Or, alternatively for these soft left candidates, in the hope of saving their skins and appearing really radical and not mere New Labour lap dogs.

Yet, if we believe Meacher, he is still haunted to this very day by his capitulation to Tony Blair and his eventual support for the Iraq War – an act he believes to be the biggest mistake he has ever made in his political life. Yet any MP who voted for this war, voted in the full knowledge that a great deal of the intelligence was ambiguous at best, downright dodgy at worst. The last few weeks of the Iraq War Inquiry has shown clearly that Blair and Campbell’s interpretation of intelligence data was one of the greatest works of fiction since The Great Gatsby.

Meacher, along with the slightly less culpable Claire Short, are the epitome of phoney lefties in my eyes; they put their wallets and careers before their alleged principles. Although I had no time for Robin Cook, and felt his ethical foreign policy edict a sham, at least he did the honourable thing over Iraq and resigned. He knew the whole war was a fait accompli, as far as Bush and Blair were concerned. A rebellion by the soft labour left at the time may have heralded the fall of the Blair government – a slim chance to be sure – but an act of rebellion then, would have been preferable to hearing these careerist bleating on about how really, really radical they are now. Indeed at the time, the only body that could have stopped British involvement in Iraq was the British parliament; and shamefully people who should have known better looked the other way and looked after their own arses, careers and pay packets and voted for the war. That includes would be soft left labour radicals such as Cruddas, Mackinlay Winnick, all signatories to this new radical campaign platform.

If, as has been muted, a left wing socialist alternative candidate is set to challenge Diane Abbot at the upcoming election - loathsome and sycophantic as she maybe – examine her ‘crime’ of sending her son to a private school in comparison to those above who sent a sentence of death upon hundreds of thousand of Iraqis – as well as to the hundreds of UK soldiers who returned to the Wootton Bassett in coffins. Socialist Party mulls challenge to Diane Abbott (Dave's Part)

I know which PMs I'd target in the upcoming election - they would include Meacher, Cruddas, Mackinlay et al. Let them see the darkness at the edge of their political careers.

Friday Photo - Poseidon

1990 - Bliss In That Dawn

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

As Harpymarx reminds me, 1990 was indeed a great year for political activism. And, hard as it is to believe now when one looks at the state of the left, there were many notable victories during that year. Mandela's release was the standout moment, but we also had the brilliantly effective Anti-Poll Tax campaign which - let us not forget - actually achieved its aim. In the process we also fatally wounded Thatcher and she too departed from office later that year.

Harpy says the Snap song 'I've Got The Power' reminds her of those heady days; for me, this song always reminds me of those exciting and rebellious times.