Nollaig shona dhaoibh!

Look up, said the angel, be of good cheer, take heart; for — lo! — things could be worse.​

So we looked up, were of good cheer, took heart; and — lo! — things became far, far worse.​

Surely, MMXXI cannot be as horrendous as MMXX?

Reptiles?

I have been called out, elsewhere, on my use of the term reptile. That’s in referring to the Fourth Estate (another term which may need explaining).

It surprised me. Over years reading Dear Bill in Private Eye I had come to thinking it part of the common lexicon. And it’s no great leap, for a writer or a metaphorical flea, from journalist to carping critic.

It’s not as if the usage has no history. Henry Fielding, in Tom Jones, takes a shot at any potential detractor:

This work may, indeed, be considered as a great creation of our own; and for a little reptile of a critic to presume to find fault with any of its parts, without knowing the manner in which the whole is connected, and before he comes to the final catastrophe, is a most presumptuous absurdity. [Book X, chapter 1]

And promptly repeats himself, my good reptile, in the next paragraph.

The OED has earlier citations:

[1648   J. Beaumont Psyche xvi. i. 297   On thy erected Head Much more unfortunate wretchednes doth grow Than ever made the vilest Reptile be The footstool of Contempt to sirlie thee.]

1697   J. Savage in tr. A. de Guevara Spanish Lett. Ep. Ded. sig. A2^v   The Humble Self-dejected Writer..must have continued a poor Groveling Reptile, expos’d to the Insults and Tramplings of Ignorance and Barbarity.

Then follows Sam Johnson, Coleridge and, from September 1826, a precisely-pertinent William Cobbett:

These reptiles publish … a newspaper.

At least I’m promoting reptiles of the press up the evolutionary tree from mere insects. Which us where Swift left them:

If on Parnassus’ top you sit,
You rarely bite, are always bit
Each poet of inferior size
On you shall rail and criticise,
And strive to tear you limb from limb;
While others do as much for him.

The Vermin only teaze and pinch
Their Foes superior by an Inch.
So, Nat’ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller yet to bite ’em,
And so proceed ad infinitum:
Thus ev’ry Poet, in his Kind
Is bit by him that comes behind.

Oiling the wheels of democracy

I have spent too long, of recent days, engaging with Trumpians on politics.ie. This has been depressing because it was contending with repetitive misrepresentation and fallacy (I don’t like using the blunt ‘lying’), so much ignorance, where individuals who might aspire to their natural intelligence reduced themselves to recycling material not far flung from Der Stürmer.

Yet the American system survives, and re-energises itself. The 46th President is duly endorsed, and even the die-hard Republicans in Congress are accepting the inevitable.

Act of homage?

On Monday the Electoral College (that usually-irrelevant historic hang-over) did its bit. The Washington Post reported it; and had a little comment piece on page A2, The electoral college vote was blissfully bureaucratic.

It included this:

It was boring. And it was beautiful.​

It all unfolded after a weekend of violence in the nation’s capital, during which Trump-supporting Proud Boys, with their misogyny and racism, roamed the city, ravenous for a fight. The electors did their work despite threats of violence over the process. They did their work as so many Republicans in Washington, from the White House to Congress, tried to invalidate this election because the results made them unhappy and their happiness was pinned on retaining power at any cost even if all they seem to do with that power — at least in these past few months — is nothing.​

I thought I recognised Robin Givhan’s inspiration. It seemed a homage to the opening of Theodore White’s magnificent (and grandiloquent) The Making of the President. And that’s an invitation on which I can never pass:

It was invisible, as always.​

​They had begun to vote in the villages of New Hampshire at midnight, as they always do, seven and a half hours before the candidate rose. His men had canvassed Hart’s Location in New Hampshire days before, sending his autographed picture to each of the twelve registered voters in the village. They knew that they had five votes certain there, that Nixon had five votes certain—and that two were still undecided. Yet it was worth the effort, for Hart’s Location’s results would be the first flash of news on the wires to greet millions of voters as they opened their morning papers over coffee. But from there on it was unpredictable — invisible.​

​By the time the candidate left his Boston hotel at 8:30, several million had already voted across the country — in schools, libraries, churches, stores, post offices. These, too, were invisible, but it was certain that at this hour the vote was overwhelmingly Republican. On election day America is Republican until five or six in the evening. It is in the last few hours of the day that working people and their families vote, on their way home from work or after supper; it is then, at evening, that America goes Democratic if it goes Democratic at all. All of this is invisible, for it is the essence of the act that as it happens it is a mystery in which millions of people each fit one fragment of a total secret together, none of them knowing the shape of the whole.​

​What results from the fitting together of these secrets is, of course, the most awesome transfer of power in the world—the power to marshal and mobilize, the power to send men to kill or be killed, the power to tax and destroy, the power to create and the responsibility to do so, the power to guide and the responsibility to heal—all committed into the hands of one man. Heroes and philosophers, brave men and vile, have since Rome and Athens tried to make this particular manner of transfer of power work effectively; no people has succeeded at it better, or over a longer period of time, than the Americans. Yet as the transfer of this power takes place, there is nothing to be seen except an occasional line outside a church or school, ora file of people fidgeting in the rain, waiting to enter the booths. No bands play on election day, no troops march, no guns are readied, no conspirators gather in secret headquarters. The noise and the blare, the bands and the screaming, the pageantry and oratory of the long fall campaign, fade on election day. All the planning is over, all effort spent. Now the candidates must wait.​

The Thing-Ummy Bob

It looks simple, this ‘democracy’, but what makes it work?

That took me to another analogy: a 1942 song by Gordon Thompson and David Heneker, celebrating Ernie Bevin’s conscription of female labour:

It’s a ticklish sort of job, making a thing for a thing-ummy-bob​
Especially when you don’t know what it’s for.​
But it’s the girl that makes the thing that drills the hole ​
That holds the spring that works the thing-ummy-bob​
That makes the engines roar …​
And it’s the girl that makes the thing ​
That holds the oil that oils the ring ​
That works the thing-ummy-bob ​
That’s going to win the war.​

And, yes, before you ask, I have been re-visiting Thames TV’s The World at War, partly for Laurence Olivier’s precise enunciation, but largely because of the quality of the writing and the direction.

Or, as Theodore White put it:

the essence of the act [is] that as it happens it is a mystery in which millions of people each fit one fragment of a total secret together, none of them knowing the shape of the whole.​

​There’s something else, though: like any other mystery, everybody involved has to believe in, trust the magic.

Which is why, when the outgoing president and all his craven crew, or his apologists deliberately subvert the process, they create a danger.

Taller still and taller

My memory is that Sherpa Tensing and Sir Edward Hillary scaled an Everest of 29,002 feet.

That was a measurement, from imperial days, already out of date. The new number was something like 29,028 feet.

Now I discover Nepal and China have announced a new official measurement of Mount Everest’s height: 8,848.86 meters, or 29,031.69 feet.

What is happening in the world?

As I recall, Ireland once moved several feet further from Scotland. The arrival of satellite measurements had shifted Mayor General Colby’s early-Victorian work a bit further west. That’s understandable: triangulating from Scotland to Ireland must have been a bit hit-and-miss (and heavily reliant on weather).

Still, just as well to know where things are. If Boris Johnson’s mad bridge project across the gap were ever to come about, it would be sad for it to fall a few feet short.

Pol-bitch

I have measured out my life in columns by political commentators. Almost an apostolic succession.

At this distance I cannot remember who was my first. For want of a better (could there be a ‘better’?) I’ll plump for Alan Watkins. At this stage of the year I’d be looking his annual end-of-year Master Alan Watkins’ Almanack:

Written for the reformation of Manners, the advancement of Religion, and the universall improvement of the human Race.

One or two of those are still in the publique demesne, courtesy of The Independent back-catalogue. Worth a guinea a box.

Then there was Edward Pearce, who graduated from The Sunday Times to The Guardian and New Statesman. Pearce was rarely wrong: he was sound on Soviet Russia (never blind to its horrors), critical of Thatcher and all her works, against the Gulf War. His mistake was taking on trust the pronouncements and pre-judging the Hillsborough disaster.

Most recently I have relished Michael White, stalwart at The Guardian and worthy successor to Ian Aitken as its main political guru. When White retired from the Grauniad, I found unmissable his extended columns for The New European. White is currently hors-de-combat, so the TNE is filling the gap with Donald Macintyre, also a refugee from The Independent.

Which brings us to the current iterations.

Blood and guts

Stephen Bush at the New Statesman, and often elsewhere, is why I subscribe. But before I get to Stephen, I have to get past Kevin Maguire‘s Commons Confidential.

One of my weekly essentials is Andrew Rawnsley’s page in The Observer. Last Month he memorably skewered Jeremy Corbyn and all his works and ways:

Contrary to the narrative being promoted by Mr Corbyn and those still attached to his cult, the former Labour leader is not a martyr to his convictions. Nor was his suspension the result of a premeditated “political attack” designed to demonstrate for the edification of the media that Keir Starmer is a tough leader. This is not about a struggle over Labour’s policy direction or its philosophical orientation. This is about whether or not the Labour party should be a haven for racists and why it did become a magnet for antisemitic bullies and abusers when Mr Corbyn and his acolytes had charge of the party.

The rest of that piece is well worth the trip.

It should remind us that politics and political commentary are  flesh-and-blood businesses. Sometimes they involve flesh-ripping and blood-shedding. Jonathan Swift, one of the founders of the trade, knew that:

His own words: sæva indignatio. WB Yeats would have known that, well, from St Patrick’s. He had that short verse, and loosest of translation in The Winding Stair:

Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.

Anaemia

At the other end of the scale we run into bloodless wordsmiths, churning out stuff to please their limited audience. If I nominate a particular example, a bête noire, it would have to be Quentin Letts, bought in from the Daily Mail to stir some ashes at The Times:

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

Bringing Letts into the charmed circle elbowed aside Patrick Kidd from The Times parliamentary comment spot. Which, by any standard, was a grave mistake.

Even Tories have some haematids

For me, two stand out: Paul Goodman (who has been there, and seen the offal) and Andrew Gimson — both at ConHome. Most of that site’s other names are space-fillers. No: I’m not a fan of Iain Dale.

Gimson is, in a way, the inspiration for this post. I caught him this morning in a near twitter spat over Stephen Wall’s Reluctant European. Wall traces and analyses the relationship of the UK to Europe since the Second War. Gimson and Denis McShane were agreeing that it all went back to ‘the King’s Matter’ and Henry VIII Tudor’s divorce. That seems to me less than certain. The UK, and before that England have not enjoyed harmonious involvements with France and Spain, in particular, these non hundred odd years. I suggest (editor) Nigel Saul’s collection England in Europe 1066-1453 might take us further back. For that matter, Stephen Clarke sent the entire caboodle up with 1000 Years of Annoying the French.

More than honourable mentions

It’s been a recital of male superiority so far. Allow me to mix the cauldron with some further names:

Marina Hyde is the counter-irritant to Polly Toynbee at The Guardian. Toynbee is always well-prepared and to-the-point. She is, thank heaven!, also an antidote to the Corbynite Left On! tendency which has afflicted that paper’s usual reasonableness.

Yes, Owen Jones, I am looking in your direction. And even Jones is a few steps nearer sanity than Aditya Chakrabortty.‘ Chakrabortty’s ‘insights’ into the Tottenham ‘Latin Village‘ and, before that, the Haringey local development scheme, have been incendiary Momentumist.

Hyde’s acidity and Toynbee’s acuity are constant essentials.

One from the Home Front: Miriam Lord, the Irish Times sketch writer. She has had many ‘finest hours’, but the one she did on Bertie Ahern’s ‘dig-out’ must feature. It’s here in large part.

Tell you what: arrange a scratch-her-eyes-out cat-fight and word-fest between Lord and Hyde. It’d be a sell-out (in every sense): reserve the popcorn concession.

 

High Noon

Adam Liptak, in yesterday’s New York Times, extrapolates from the Supreme Court decision to reverse New York restrictions (because of the certainty of CoVid infection) on church attendance. This represented a change of heart by the Justices, and relied on the swing vote of Amy Coney Barrett:

… she joined the court’s four most conservative justices to strike down restrictions in New York.

Those same four justices are now on high alert for a promising case in which to expand Second Amendment rights, having written repeatedly and emphatically about the court’s failure to take gun rights seriously. Justice Barrett seems poised to supply the fifth vote they need.

And they have a case to consider:

It concerns Lisa M. Folajtar, who would like to buy a gun. But she is a felon, having pleaded guilty to tax evasion, which means under federal law she may not possess firearms.

She sued, arguing that the law violated her Second Amendment rights.

Justice Barrett has already gone on record:

“History does not support the proposition that felons lose their Second Amendment rights solely because of their status as felons,” she wrote. “But it does support the proposition that the state can take the right to bear arms away from a category of people that it deems dangerous.”

Voting and jury service are different, she wrote, because those are “rights that depend on civic virtue.”

Like the vast majority of my acquaintance, indeed of most Europeans, I do not come close to understanding the American obsession with guns. And don’t expect ever to do so.

As gun-laws in the US are progressively loosened, so the attrition continues. In the year 2017 it was a whisker short of 40,000. In the United States, averaging, someone dies by the gun every fifteen minutes.

The question the Supreme Court Justices should be forced to consider is where the line will have to be drawn. At what point is the freedom of the individual to bear, tote and even use, at variance with the rules of public decency and private safety?

When does Wade Hatton have to make his appearance, and stop the mayhem?

Alexander the Grate

It seems generally accepted, by dictionaries of quotations, that Philip Graham, President and Publisher of The Washington Post, perhaps as early as 1953, had:

The inescapable hurry of the press inevitably means a certain degree of superficiality. It is neither within our power nor our province to be ultimately profound. We write 365 days a year the first rough draft of history, and that is a very great task.

Except Graham was well behind. George Helgesen Fitch (another decent lefty), and from 1914, wrote in the Lincoln [Nebraska] Daily Star:

A reporter is a young man who blocks out the first draft of history each day on a rheumatic typewriter.

Already we have a confusion: ‘the press’, ‘journalism’, ‘reporter’. Since we are looking at an expression which has descended through  variety of forms, and over a century, we have a cliché. Rather like this one:

• Election year? Check ✔︎
• New President? Check ✔︎
• Democrat? Check ✔︎

OK: time to recycle Roosevelt’s radio address of 24 July 1933.  Sarah Baxter, in this week’s Sunday Times, seems to have got there first. Others will follow.

The impossibility of being original

There exist multiple outlets, in dozens of media outlets, employing hundreds — or probably thousands — of opinionated ‘churnalists’ (plus an infinite number of wannabes), together deploying millions of words. All bouncing ideas, conflating metaphors, hoping to find something that sounds or looks vaguely original — or, failing that, ‘different’ — the trick of singularity, all yellow stockings, cross-garter’d. We see a phalanx of writers playing with words, like an infinite number of boy-scouts rubbing wood together, or striking flints, in the hope of raising a spark.

Among the worst exponents is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, onlie true begetter of the European Union’s straight banana diktat, as a warm-up for all the lies told, and posted on buses, in the #Brexit campaign.

Johnson has invented for himself a totally-false personality — those nearest to him have discovered he is untrustworthy, self-serving, dishonest and devious. He has also evolved a shtik or thing with less-than-accurate Latin and historical allusions, tags and references.

Over the weekend he disseminated his latest:

We can’t blow it now. We can’t just throw it all away – not when freedom is in sight. We have worked too hard, lost too many, sacrificed too much, just to see our efforts incinerated in another volcanic eruption of the virus. […]

Across the country, the disease is no longer doubling in prevalence. It is halving. We did it before, in the spring, and now we have done it again.  

But this time it is different. This time we know in our hearts that we are winning, and that we will inevitably win, because the armies of science are coming to our aid with all the morale-boosting, bugle-blasting excitement of Wellington’s Prussian allies coming through the woods on the afternoon of Waterloo.

Now I’m open to be educated here. My memory of the geography around Waterloo is the woodland was behind Wellington (who invariably chose higher ground, and used the ridge to disguise his force): Blücher came from the other direction. Wellington was well aware of the Prussian disposition and advance — any bugle blasts are sheer invention. Having set up an extended military metaphor, Johnson rides it to death;

Over the coming weeks, I am convinced we will be able to use these two new scientific tools – mass testing and vaccines – to drive Covid out of our hospitals and schools and homes and out of our lives.

With every substantial reduction in infection, across the country, we will de-escalate restrictions and allow whole areas to come down the tiers. We believe that Easter will mark a real end point and a real chance to return to something like life as normal.

But it is crucial to understand that with the help of these scientific advances we hope to make progress – and to de-escalate – BEFORE Easter.

We are so nearly out of our captivity. We can see the sunlit upland pastures ahead. But if we try to jump the fence now, we will simply tangle ourselves in the last barbed wire, with disastrous consequences for the NHS.

Ending with a final segue into The Great Escape:

Notice that Johnson gets that one wrong: fictional Captain Virgil Hilts/The Cooler King doesn’t make it. Of the (historical) seventy-six escapees from Stalag Luft III, only three made it to Switzerland. Fifty of the recaptured were executed.

Apply that to Covid-19, and the odds don’t look too good.

What happened here was Johnson stretching a certain degree of superficiality beyond breaking-point.