Layer 72 Oxford, the ‘Credit’ ******, and Obama.

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Fog in August - today’s morning outlook. Thick fog at that. Followed by rain before the morning was even half way through. Well at least it got rid of the fog.

It was predictable really - that yesterday’s fabulous sunshine and warm temperatures, coming on top of endless damp and dreary weather, would result in fog once the cool, damp stuff returned overnight.

Oh well, mustn’t grumble. At least we had a wonderful sunny day for our outing to Oxford yesterday, so that my academic friend could visit this strange city and have a busman’s holiday.

Oxford Town, around the bend,
Come to the door, couldn’t get in,
All because of the colour of his skin,
Whadda ya think about that, my friend?

(Bob Dylan, Oxford Town)

Actually it was more like the colour of our money that was at issue, preventing us from getting into the various colleges for a tourist’s eye view of those famous temples of academia. What’s a few gold coloured coins from a few hundred tourists to the college authorities, when they can rake in a few thousand quid for each private wedding party that they book for the toffs and the nouveau riche who are wealthy enough to thereby turn what are (or should be) essentially public premises into exclusive private premises for their poncy wedding parties?

So there we were, having driven 60 miles, coming across college after college closed for weddings. At one point, I think it was St John’s College, I pleaded with an old porter guy to let us at least just go through into the courtyard, if that’s what they call it, to take a couple of photos for two minutes since it was obvious the wedding hadn’t even begun to assemble. Having grumpily allowed us to do that, the bastard then had the nerve to come out of his little piggy den to chase us out after exactly two minutes. God knows what foreign visitors make of all this. Imagine going to visit some world heritage site elsewhere, like a Buddhist temple complex or the Taj Mahal, and finding it closed to the hoi polloi because it’s been booked for a bloody wedding.

And it’s the sheer exclusivity of places like Oxford that make people like me so depressed and angry. It’s not there for the masses - of course it isn’t. We have to pay to even look at it, and even then only when the moneyed classes haven’t reserved it for their exclusive use. And as for becoming a student there - we know that the place is packed full of effete little twats, admittedly the swatty little twats, who have right of access because mummy and daddy could afford the best schools, the best teachers, and the best private tutors for extra cramming. Of course there are some very brilliant kids who come from the moneyed classes, but not enough to fill Oxford and Cambridge. So the places fill up with the not brilliant but swatty and privileged rich kids.

Not that I’d want to go there myself, or want my kids or my grandkids to go there - not unless one of the colleges changed its admissions policy and allowed in only students who could prove they had at least one parent who’d earned a living doing a regular working class job for at least a year, and therefore understood what it’s actually like to be poor and insecure and to have to struggle to get by. In fact priority for admissions should be given to students who have themselves worked in a low paid job for at least a year, and because they needed to, i.e. were not just doing it as a ‘gap’ year. Though a year spent on a volunteer project in a third world country would also stand them in good stead.

My ideal college would also prioritise students who had a thorough knowledge of rock, blues and soul music, and a decent amount of ‘world’ music - because, well, it’s important to be able to relax and socialise with your fellow students from time to time, and it’s important to have an appreciation of the finest and most spiritual music the planet has produced.

Credit would also be given for having a working knowledge of Zen, an understanding of how mainstream religions undermine and get in the way of real spiritual intelligence, and ability to dance without looking like a banana and a prat. Ability to sing and play some blues and rock would also count in your favour, especially if it had been developed without the benefit of mummy and daddy’s private tutors.

Evidence of high levels of EQ and SQ would be particularly welcome. In fact what we’re talking about is being able to establish that you’re a properly rounded human being, and not just a one-dimensional exam-passing machine, in which case you definitely wouldn’t get a place and would be sent off to somehow, somewhere, get real.

Ah yes, you say, but these elite colleges are very expensive to run, and need to maximise their incomes. Which is why so many student places are reserved for foreign students who pay the full whack, and thereby reduce even further the number of places available for ordinary Brits who attend a state school. So it all comes down to money in the end.

To which I say, the country must make up its mind to ensure that allowances are made for privilege, and therefore to discriminate against all those who have had the greatest amount of privilege, and discriminate in favour of all those who have shown they not only have first class brains and motivation but have also have had to deal with the least amount of privilege.

And yes, this will cost money, but it’s money well spent if the end product is an investment in genuine talent and ability and an investment in greater fairness and equality. No doubt some of the colleges would say they’re already doing this, but my guess would be that what they do is pretty tokenistic.

At which point I must say hats off to Magdalen College which manages to demonstrate that allowing visitors and booking wedding parties need not be mutually exclusive. It would appear to be the college’s policy to allow people to use their premises for weddings, but only on the basis that visitors have priority - i.e. the two sets of people mingle respectfully and don’t interfere with one another’s business.

It’s even quite entertaining to view at close quarters how these people dress and speak, especially when they’re done up in their hilarious wedding garb. With the blokes taking the biscuit for sheer poncy nonsense.

I do find it hard on the ears though - especially those strangulated whines emanating from the wannabees, who are trying too hard and have picked up their attempts at upper class speech from other fakes at their second-rate private schools. The languid drawls of the real upper classes I even quite like, since they are somewhat genuine and effortless, almost artistic in their svelte musicality.

I should also acknowledge, in fairness to Oxford, which is a place where I’d hate to live, since it’s so dominated by the class system, twattish, neurotic and arrogant students, egomaniacal and dull academics, tourists, etc, that in terms of the physical environment the place is just unbelievably stunning.

Everywhere you look the architecture is dazzling in its sheer brilliance and beauty, its proportions and layout, and its gorgeous glowing Cotswold stone. Even the paving and the cobbles, the lawns and gardens, are simply magnificent. The whole place is a testament to our human capacity for brilliant invention and creativity, for sublime spiritual connection, whilst at the same time showing and reminding us what the abuse of power and wealth and unmerited influence can actually do to fuck up a place, and indeed a planet.

We must never forget that it’s the Oxbridge system that’s responsible, in its eager determination to sort out the sheep from the academic goats, for distorting and corrupting what goes on in the name of education in this and many other countries. And it’s only real education and its practical application, enlightenment, that can save our sorry souls.

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A friend of mine has been told by her partner that she cannot buy something that she’d like to own because of the ****** ******. I hate the term ‘credit crunch’. It’s a lazy, stupid, journalistic cliché, if ever there was one. What is ‘credit’, anyway? I thought it was something you earned for something good you’d done. Or something for which you shouldn’t ask, for fear of its refusal causing offense. And what’s a fucking ‘crunch’, in this context? Merely a pathetic alliterative device, and a euphemism that avoids the need to describe what’s really going on.

What we have is an economic crisis, or emergency, if you like - a time when the supposedly rock solid banking system is close to collapsing - brought about by one of the periodic breakdowns in the capitalist system, assuming we agree it’s just a periodic breakdown and not a deliberate part of how the system works, as with any economic ‘bubble’ - where stupid punters are conned into believing that they can and should invest in a slice of the action, driving up the prices of shares, property, etc, until such point as the really clever bastards who pull the economic levers decide it’s time to cut and run, to cash in on the bubble, to take their profits and instigate the inevitable ‘crash’, which then comes down to no more and no less than the stupid, the ignorant, the greedy and the overstretched being told that what they’ve struggled to purchase isn’t, after all, worth what they were told it was worth, and what’s more in order to keep on borrowing the huge amount of money they’ve been loaned they are going to have to pay a hell of a lot more for it. QED.

Of course there are also stupid banks and finance houses whose directors thought they would be able to continue to borrow money from the really big boys in order to go on lending money to the minnows at even higher rates of interest, and were amazed when the real money men turned round and said, effectively, that they were no longer prepared to lend money to silly little banks who were so stupid and so greedy that they were lending too much money to people who had no realistic chance of keeping up payments on their crappy little properties once the full effects of rising fuel and food prices and unemployment started to bite. Sub prime indeed.

It’s going to be fascinating to witness what Obama, or McCain, and further down the line Cameron, do about it all, if anything. McCain’s instincts will be to use the power of the US of A to grab more of whatever oil and gas is still available, whilst the other two will be much more considered in their actions, one would imagine, and indeed would hope. There was an excellent piece about Cameron in the Guardian this week, by the excellent David Marquand.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/29/davidcameron.margaretthatcher

I think it’s true that Cameron is basically Whiggish at present, and something of an old-style One Nation Tory whose instincts really are towards maintaining national cohesion through a degree of fairness and support for the least well-off. I think he’s intelligent enough to understand the need to do that if we intend to improve the state of society and aspire to be a civilisation rather than a battleground between rich and poor, with more and more of the wealthy feeling bound to live in gated communities and middle-class suburbs, districts and commuter towns and villages, where membership, i.e. residency, is gained on the basis of being able to afford being able to buy property there, never daring to venture into the neighbourhoods they consider dangerous ghettos.

It’s been very interesting lately realising that so many people who were born and bred in London know absolutely nothing about many different parts of the city, especially those that they consider either too poor or too wealthy by their own standards. Of course we’re familiar with the north/south divide, with the Thames being something of a physical as well as a psychological barrier, but even people with their own cars, people who are in their forties and fifties, have so often shown no curiosity whatsoever about what goes on in places like the East End, which is actually fascinating in all sorts of ways. For this reason alone I’m glad that the 2012 Olympics will be happening here, as well as the fact that the money spent on developing the landscape in my beloved Lea Valley is going to make a massive difference to local people’s enjoyment of the place.

Marquand’s conclusion seems to me to really hit the nail on the head:

“One of the great questions of the age is how to protect the precious filaments of civil society from the pressures of resurgent capitalism, hyper-individualism, resentful populism, family breakdown and state encroachment. Cameron has not found the answer, but he has realised there is a problem. I think he has also realised that the feverish social engineering beloved of old Thatcherite and New Labour policy wonks is part of the problem, and that lasting social and cultural changes have to grow from the bottom instead of being imposed from the top.

Against that background, Labour talk of a leadership change is not just petty and mean-minded; it is sublimely irrelevant. The question that matters is whether it can retrieve the non-statist democratic republican strand in its heritage - exemplified by John Milton, John Stuart Mill, Tom Mann and RH Tawney - and abandon the heavyhanded, statist democratic collectivism that has been second nature to Labour governments since the 1920s. There is still time. Just.”
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I was going to say a few things about Obama, but have run out of time. Suffice to say I’m delighted he’s made it to the nomination, whether or not he manages to persuade enough rednecks and backwoods folk to actually vote for him. At least it’s been a very big shake up and indeed shock to the American political system. I love the guy’s style, and his speeches. I fear for his health and safety if he gets elected, and indeed before the vote even takes place.

In many ways it will be better for him personally, and for his family, if he doesn’t get elected, since he will then be able to stay a real person, rather than become a figurehead, and an embattled one at that. If so, that is if he ‘fails’, I can see that he will be able, through his writing and his speeches, to continue to exert a massive influence on American politics from the sidelines, as it were. It was brilliant that he was able to make his acceptance speech on the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Wonderful.

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Incidentally, I’m about to make a pitch to a major confectionary conglomerate to produce what I believe will be a massively profitable and best-selling bar of chocolate containing nuts and bits of biscuit, in a gold wrapper so that it looks like a small bar of gold, to be called a Credit Crunch. You heard it here first folks. The idea is hereby copyrighted.
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