Following the death of Christopher Hitchens last weekend, there has been much discussion on how to speak of the dead, and whether you should criticise them while their family is still mourning. Hitchens himself was famous for slagging off Mother Theresa after she died (“a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud”) and for being very rude about the Evangelical preacher Rev. Jerry Falwell.
Glenn Greenwald, in an article eviscerating Hitchens’ unwavering support for the Iraq War, makes a distinction between the lives of political figures, who are famous precisely because of the policies they enacted while in power, and ordinary individuals. The death of such a person (Greenwald cites Ronald Reagan) is precisely the right time to evaluate a person’s achievements and actions, both good and bad.
This week on Liberal Conspiracy, Sunny linked to a petition demanding that Margaret Thatcher’s funeral be privatised. This is an odd request, as I don’t believe Prime Ministers are routinely offered State funerals. Yes, Winston Churchill had one, and the Duke of Wellington had one, but these were leaders during a time of existential war. Margaret Thatcher, transformational though she was, does not qualify on by this metric. Any suggestion that a State Funeral will be given to Mrs Thatcher is wishful thinking on the part of Tory fanboys – Not even the Queen Mother had a State funeral!
Rumours regularly circulate that Mrs Thatcher has died, and left-wingers speculate about how they will celebrate. As Glenn Greewald reminds us, this would be to miss the point. When Margaret Thatcher dies, the policies she enacted will still have happened, and the consequences will still be present. Her death would be nothing like as symbolic as the demise of a leader in power (Kim Jong-Il and Colonel Gaddafi both died this year) or someone who is politicially active, like Jerry Falwell, where the negative effects of their politics and policies do actually dissipate as they pass away.
‘The Death of Mrs Thatcher’ discussion is a hardy perennial, and every time it is discussed it makes Left Wingers and Liberals look bad, and allows Tories to take on a sanctimonious air. I wish we would learn not to take the bait.
Category: Diary (Page 126 of 300)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
Writing in Vanity Fair, Kurt Andersen asks whether we are in a decades long design rut. During the twentieth century, design and style evolved at a predictable pace – so much so that images from any given decade are instantly distinguishable as being from that era. The styles of the 1950s, say, would never be mistaken for those of the 1930s or the 1970s. This holds, says Andersen, across the art forms – fashion, design, architecture, cinema, and music from most of the twentieth century are all very much of their moment. However, in the past two or three decades, this evolution has stopped. The 1990s look very much like the 2010s, give or take a collar and quiff. Our big cultural events are all repeats, reboots and revivals.
(See also, by the way, Jason Kottke’s Timeline Twins for a stark illustration of Andersen’s observations). Continue reading
Apparently, the megalomaniac tendencies that many perceive in Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich are inspired by Iassac Asimov:
If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, Newt Gingrich is from the planet Trantor, a fictional world created by Isaac Asimov in his classic Foundation series about galactic empire. Newt’s master plan for America does not come from a Republican Party playbook. It comes from the science fiction that he read in high school. He is playing out, on a national and global scale, dreams he had as a teenager with his nose buried in pulp fiction.
I haven’t read the Foundation series, but I gather it involves grand master plans for the whole galaxy, put into practice by a dedicated bunch of benevolent intellectuals. I know this, because series has been cited as influential on another ideologue – Osama Bin Laden. The phrase ‘Al Qaida’ literally means The Base, or Foundation…
On the surface, the most improbable explanation of the name is that Bin Laden was somehow inspired by a Russian-born writer who lived most of his life in the US and was once the world’s most prolific sci-fi novelist (born in 1920 in Smolensk, Asimov died in New York in 1992). But the deeper you dig, the more plausible it seems that al-Qaida’s founders may have borrowed some rhetoric from Foundation and its successors (it became a series) and possibly from other science fiction material.
Now, I am not for one moment suggesting that there is an intellectual link between Osama Bin Laden and Newt Gingrich. To make that connection would be to unfairly libel Issac Asimov. However, the fanatical American Right are usually happy to make tenuous links for political smears (Sarah Palin’s quip that Obama was “palling around with terrorists” the most high profile example). So part of me would love to see Gingrich hoisted by that petard!
The folk at my alma mater Fifty Nine Productions have produced this stunning short film, with Yes Prime Minister actors David Haig and Henry Goodman taking the two main parts.
Super Shorts 2011: The Half-Light (11-0327SS ) by THEHALFLIGHT
It has been beautifully shot by Feilx Wiedemann, who creates a melancholy mood from the outset. This is what great short films should do – introduce a single idea, a single character, a pivotal point in their lives… and then use the tools of film-making to conjure the mood of the moment.
Well worth 12 minutes of your time… and definitely worth voting for on the Super Shorts Audience Choice Awards (with a chance to win an iPad for your trouble).
The Republican Presidential Primary debates are frightening. From the audiences at these events, we’ve had the booing of a solider because he is gay, the cheering of the idea of someone dying because they didn’t have health insurance, and the enthusiasm for the executions of potentially innocent people. Meanwhile, the candidates seem entirely ignorant of foreign affairs or proper fiscal policy, and instead double down with their demonstrably untrue lies about President Obama.
This is clearly evidence of an extreme intellectual and moral decay – the sort of thing that, if unchecked by good people, could end up at some pretty unpleasant and illiberal end points: war, torture and extreme poverty. Let us hope that Obama prevails in the 2012 election.
In trying to comprehend why the Republican prospective nominees are so ignorant, it is easy to assume that it stems from an underlying stupidity. But this post from Chris Dillow introduces the concept of ‘strategic ignorance’:
Ignorance – normally a weakness – can increase one’s bargaining power. For example:
… The man who doesn’t appreciate the cost of a breakdown of negotiation – say who doesn’t know how much a strike will cost – will adopt a tougher negotiating stance, and so extract more concessions, than the man who doesn’t.
Applied to the presidential primaries, the idea here might be that many of the candidates are being willfully simplistic and ignorant in order to get votes. In the wider US political system, they’re being ignorant in order to increase their barganing power in Congress.
This tactic is of course deeply cynical, disingenuous, and wrong. However, I find it a strangely reassuring analysis, because it suggests that the Republican nominees aren’t actually as nutty as they appear. If (or when) they achieve office, and faced with actual governing decisions, the cynical political player might at least pick the option which diffuses the chance of war or economic depression, when the genuinely ignorant leader might sleepwalk towards catastrophe.
My guess is that the nominess fall into two camps: The genuinely frightening (Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum) and the cynical (Newt Gingrich, Gov. Rick Perry, Gov. John Huntsman, and Mitt Romney). Congressman Ron Paul feels like he should have a category of his own: A zealot, but self-aware in a way Bachmann and the others are not.
“[The Republican Party] consists half of people who think like Michele Bachmann and half of people who are afraid of losing a primary to people who think like Michele Bachmann and that leaves very little room to work things out,” – Barney Frank, the witty Speaker of the House we never had.
Via the Daily Dish.
In the UK we have plenty of terrible politicians, but very few who fall into the former group, of frightening zealots. The negative virtues of cynicism and opportunism, which we deplore, also provoke compromise and middle-of-the-road choices, which we admire. Ann Widdecombe (now no longer in Parliament) and Nadine Dorries MP might plausibly be added to the former category, but even they seem to be more self-aware than their American counter-parts. Could this be because our constituencies are less gerrymandered and more diverse, preventing extremism that can exist when you have a whole continent of disparate values bundled together into a single political system?