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There are some things that we Brits have to give ourselves credit for. Electing a socialist government in the aftermath of World War Two. Setting ourselves against any form of fascism. The creation of a national health service. The BBC and the concept of public service broadcasting with a mission to ‘inform, educate and entertain’.
On television over the weekend it was possible to watch the following on free terrestial channels:
The FA Cup Final (never mind that it was a rubbish match with a John Motson commentary so predictable, dull and boring that it’s not surprising the BBC have had the FA Cup broadcasting rights taken away from them. They should have given Motty the boot some years ago.)
Have I Got News For You. (Hislop & Merton - national treasures) (BBC)
Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain. (BBC)
The Comedy Map of Britain. (BBC)
Wild China. (BBC)
Doctor Who. A special Agatha Christie edition.(BBC)
Agatha Christie: A Life in Pictures. (BBC)
Coast (BBC)
Russia: A Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby. (BBC)
Bremner, Bird & Fortune. (National Treasures) (Channel 4)
The South Bank Show: Gore Vidal. (ITV1)
Various movies, including a TV premier of Brokeback Mountain (a dismal, depressing film if ever I saw one.)
All of the above (- a single weekend’s output) with the exception of the movies, are made in Britain or made by British companies shooting in China, America, etc, - an incredible creative effort that adds enormously to the culture of the nation. This is something we have a right to be proud of as a nation. I have no time for people who moan about there being nothing on TV worth watching. The fact that we can now access Catch Up TV On Demand is something else worth celebrating.
Not that I have anything against the best of American TV either. Down the years there have been some amazing programmes - too many to remember. Twin Peaks. The Simpsons. ER. Murder One.The West Wing.
Though nothing can ever surpass our very own Green Wing, which I miss very badly.
The BBC did very well to recruit Andrew Marr from the Observer, though I really miss seeing him in print. A friend’s son, who is by no means politically sophisticated or astute, happened to see him on an interview programme and remarked that he should be Prime Minister. Too good for that, I’m afraid, laddie.
His History of Modern Britain is a masterpiece of clear, concise and well-judged historical analysis, made vivid with some very well chosen clips from the film archives, which carry the viewer along and maintain interest throughout. Superb TV.
Melvyn Bragg is another national treasure, who has contributed to the culture enormously down the years, making very few dud programmes either on ITV or BBC radio. We will just have to forgive and forget his madness in making a programme about the pathetic and laughable ‘The Darkness’ - possibly one of the silliest bands of all time.
Gore Vidal, born on my daughter's birthday and a Libra Ox, is one of the USA’s national treasures. Bragg’s programme on him this weekend remarked that at 83 he’s the last surviving member of a brilliant generation of American writers - with Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer all being sadly departed.
Vidal makes the point that the USA’s education system (like ours) kills curiosity. He says you can no longer meet interesting 16 year olds who have real individual voices, whereas at the age of five or six they still do.
The New York Times for years tried to persuade readers not to read Gore Vidal or Norman Mailer. Vidal still feels that it’s possible to have a positive impact on society through literature and fiction. His instincts are to still to ‘intervene in the affairs of a sad country’.
He’s old enough to remember America in the time of the New Deal, pre neo-conservative America, in the era of liberal intervention and federal policies to reduce poverty and unemployment. The era before the USA’s spending on ‘defence’ went completely crazy. He spent decades living in self-imposed exile in Italy, but he’s still a great patriot, in that he still believes in the ideals of America’s Founding Fathers.
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Andrew Marr’s programme quite rightly gave a heavy emphasis to John Maynard Keynes, who was a brilliant economist, a liberal interventionist, and an incredible guy. He literally worked himself to death on behalf of Britain trying to persuade the American administration to give proper support for reconstruction in Britain in the aftermath of World War Two.
What did the Americans really think about a Britain governed by Socialists? Why did they play such hard ball over financial help? It was pretty obvious they wouldn’t have wanted State socialism to succeed in Britain - national health service and all. They still don’t, but then neither do New Labour. We’re living in the American Era all right.
Read more about Keynes at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes
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The last book by Gore Vidal that I bought is ‘Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace’ (How We Got To Be So Hated - Causes Of Conflict In The Last Empire) [2002], which should be on every student’s reading list. The Guardian’s review of the book called Vidal "the most elegant, erudite and eclectic writer of is generation". The Times said, "There is no one quite like him, and if you do not know his work, you should".
Melvyn Bragg is quoted as saying, "Vidal is the outstanding literary radical of America". The Observer said, "Vidal’s combination of learning, wit and disdain gets into your blood. He can change the way you think."
So some Quotes from Vidal:
"Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never told the truth about anything our government has done to other people.
[Our government] masterminded the killing of Lumumba and Allende; and it unsuccessfully tried to put to death Castro, Khadafi, and Saddam Hussein; and vetoed all efforts to rein in not only Israel’s violations of international agreements and U.N. resolutions but also its practice of preemptive state terror.
George Bush booms, "Either you are with us or you are with the Terrorists". That’s known as asking for it.
His predecessors also assiduously served the 1 per cent that owns the country while allowing everyone else to drift.
Clinton, in his frantic pursuit of election victories, set in place the trigger for a police state that his successor is now happily squeezing.
We are no longer even remotely the last best hope on earth but merely a seedy imperial state whose citizens are kept in line by SWAT teams and whose way of death, not life, is universally imitated.
Once we meditate upon the unremitting violence of the United States against the rest of the world one begins to understand why Osama struck at us from abroad in the name of 1 billion Muslims whom we have encouraged, through our own preemptive acts of war as well as demonization of them through the media, to regard us in - how shall I put it? - less than an amiable light.
These guardians of our well-being have sternly, year in and year out, refused to allow us to have what every other First World country simply takes for granted - a national health service.
At the first suggestion that it was time for us to join the civilised world, there began a vast conspiracy to stop any form of national health care. It was hardly just the "right wing", as Mrs Clinton suggested. Rather, the insurance and pharmaceutical companies combined with elements of the American Medical Association to destroy forever any notion that we be a country that provides for its citizens in the way of health care.
Although drugs are "immoral" and must be kept from the young, thousands of schools pressure parents to give the drug Ritalin to any lively child who may, sensibly, show signs of boredom in his classroom. Ritalin renders the child docile if not comatose. Side effects? "Stunted growth, facial tics, agitation an aggression, insomnia, appetite loss, headaches, stomach pains and seizures."
For Americans morality has nothing to do with ethics or right action or who is stealing what money - and liberties - from whom. Morality is SEX. SEX. SEX.
This is just plain old-fashioned American stupidity where a religion-besotted majority is cynically egged on by a ruling establishment whose most rabid voice is The Wall Street Journal.
More than 50% of the national budget goes for war. Fifty years ago Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, cold, hot and tepid.
Representative government of, by and for the people is now a faded memory. Only corporate America enjoys representation by the Congresses and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media. Now, with the revolt of the Praetorian Guard at the Pentagon, we are entering a new and dangerous phase.
Although we regularly stigmatise other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honour no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues. We complain of terrorism, yet our empire is now the greatest terrorist of all. We bomb, invade and subvert other states.
Our Congress has been hijacked by corporate America and its enforcer, the imperial military machine. We the unrepresented people of the United States are as much victims of this militarised government as the Panamanians, Iraqis, or Somalians. We have allowed our institutions to be taken over in the name of a globalised American empire that is totally alien in concept to anything our founders had in mind. I suspect it is far too late in the day for us to restore the republic tat we lost a half-century ago.
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This theme of the USA behaving like a rogue state is taken up by another great American writer and thinker, Noam Chomsky, in his 2006 book, ‘Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy’.
The book’s blurb says, "Offering a comprehensive and radically insightful examination of America past and present, Chomsky shows that this lone superpower - which topples foreign govenments, invades states that threaten its interests and imposes sanctions on regimes it opposes - has stretched its own democratic institutions to breaking point. And how an America in crisis places the world ever closer to the brink of nuclear and environmental disaster."
Gore Vidal is a great thinker whose family background and circle of friends have given him intimate connections with the highest levels of government, so he has every right to see himself as an ‘insider’ with a clear understanding of how power operates in the USA. Noam Chomsky, a professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT, was recently named the number one public intellectual in a poll by Prospect magazine. We, and the people of America, ignore these people at our peril.
But as Gore Vidal says, truth-telling can drive people crazy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gore_Vidal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chompsky
(note to Wikipedia - dreadful spelling error in web address!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcO4WD5Z81c Gore Vidal - www - well worth watching
http://www.chomsky.info/
http://www.zmag.org/
http://www.synaptic.bc.ca/ejournal/chomsky.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marr
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvyn_Bragg
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