Salman Rushdie has been given a knighthood, causing much offence and effigy burining in Pakistan. Now the diplomatic row has intensified, with British ambassadors in Tehran and Islamabad receiving offical complaints. I am confident that the British Establishment won’t back down on this issue, and that Sir Salman will recieve his daubing from the Queen sometime soon. Proof that we are not sacrificing our values to an intolerant minority.
It seems to be fashionable to complain about what a smug bore Rushdie is. I can’t speak for the man himself, but I’ve always enjoyed reading his iconoclastic prose, his unreliable narrators. Midnight’s Children is very rewarding, as is Shame and even Grimus. I never really related to the satire in The Satanic Verses, although I might do now I appreciate just how stratospheric Bollywood actors can be.
However, I was not impressed when he turned out to be one of the few authors on OpenDemocracy.net who refused to let his work be licenced under the Creative Commons agreement. He did apologise though: “Sorry to be old-fashioned,” he said.
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In the absence of the stalwarty DoctorVee, I have edited this week’s Scottish Roundup. I actually found trawling through loads of politicians’ blogs quite encouraging. People have a genuine passion for making things better (although of course, they all have a slightly different conception of how that might be achieved). Yes yes, I know “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”… but so is the forked path to progress and prosperity.
I included in the round-up a post from Rhetorically Speaking, about the fact that the Executive have legislated in favour of women being allowed to breastfeed in public. Much has been made recently of Labour’s frenzied approach to law-making, with apparently a new law being made every three hours since they came to power. I wonder how many of these were laws that affirmed a citizen’s rights, as opposed to laws which took rights away?
Update
Just spotted a post from Tim Worstall on the issue. There are some pertinent points in the comments. My favourite is from Little Black Sambo:
This is entirely consistent with the new understanding of law. The purpose of making a law is to “send a message”.
Over at Pickled Politics, Sunny Hundal presents his essay on how the War On Terror has fractured the British Asian community along religious lines.
… a change has been taking place within minority communities in the way they interact with each other, identify themselves and become politically engaged… The atmosphere of distrust following 9/11 and 7/7 made it easier for Muslim, Sikh and Hindu religious extremists to openly express distaste towards other religious minorities.
For me, the a key feature of the post-9/11 politics, which includes the enigma that is ‘Britishness’ and the hammering of ‘multiculturalism’, has been a focus on differences between groups: How does the white majority interact with the minorities; how do the values of different groups differ, and can they be reconciled; what concessions does the State make to these groups, and does it ask for any change in return?
As we debate ad nauseum the conflicting identities within the State, it often seems as if other aspects of multiculturalism are neglected. Specifically, the different and conflicting identities that exist within the individual. This is a particular issue for British-Asians (Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims all) as well many people with dual nationality, and many people of mixed race (an exponentially expanding group). For these people, to suggest that notions of multiculturalism should be abandoned is nonsensical. For while a compromise with (or even a capitulation to) the behemoth that is ‘mainstream culture’ might be theoretically possible on a group level, this is not true on the level of the individual.
That is not to say that people, on an individual level, cannot resolve what conflicts they are presented with. Indeed, they seem to succeed much more often than they fail. At places like Pickled Politics I think the contributors manage to elucidate very well how they reconcile such differences, and what immediately becomes clear is that their solutions do not lie in their granting total supremacy of one culture over the other. That they can do this proves for me the value of multiculturalism. The most sensible commentators seem to be those who can say, for example, “I am 100% Hindu and 100% Asian and 100% British”.
And yet much of the political debate (from both the, erm, generic white majority, and also within the various interest groups Sunny highlights) refuses to accept that this kind of reconciliation is possible. Because these critics cannot make that reconciliation themselves, they smear those who can as either delusional or fake. In this dismissal, they fail to accept the idea that one may be changed by other ideas, fail to understand the value of multiculturalism, and therefore become a kind of fundamentalist. Its a shame that the post 9/11 political climate has exacerbated this problem too.
Dear Owner,
Yesterday my cat fell out of the window and ran up to your car where it proceeded to climb into your engine. It is a new cat and is very timid and nervous of people. I beg you not to start your car before you open the bonnet or before you open the bonnet please could you phone me at my work which is just around the corner… The cat may have already disappeared but it is better to be safe than sorry.
One striking aspect of Taking Liberties was the art direction. There’s a lot of computer generated imagery, which has been beautifully designed by Nexus Productions. Much of it is inspired by 1930s propaganda imagery and the letterpress aesthetic of printing and pampleteering (a visual style I’ve been toying with on this blog too, to much derision).
The Nexus animations are very effective at conveying the sense of oppression and fascism that the film-makers want to hint at. As an added bonus, it is also a very effective means of covering vast chunks of screen-time. Finding the right film footage to get your point across is often very difficult and always costly. Even stock footage from the BBC and similar organisations is incredibly expensive. For a film-maker working to a tight budget, animation can be a very useful method of getting your point across.
A good example of this is the short film What Barry Says by Knife Party, which is similar in style to the Taking Liberties animations… both in visual style, and in the manner in which they ‘illustrate’ what is essentially a political essay, ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’.
Uber-blogger Andrew Sullivan was struck by the aesthetics of What Barry Says too:
It contains Chomsky-esque platitudes about a new American fascism blah blah blah. 9/11 is a response to American imperialism; North Korea is a victim, etc. But its use of graphics and editing is extremely skilled propaganda: Nazi-like in its concern with aesthetics. Somehow I feel the irony was lost on it creators.
I totally disagree. Andrew acknowledges that the film-makers are seeking to establish a conceptual link between the facist regimes of the past, and the US Government under President George W Bush. It is entirely appropriate that they choose an aesthetic that is reminiscent of fascist designs. The self-awareness is definitely true in the case of Taking Liberties: When the messages turns from what negative things have happened, to what positive things could be done in response, the design becomes flourescent and modern instead.