.
The Guardian’s New York Review of Books supplement yesterday carried a review by Jonathan Raban of a new collection of Gore Vidal’s essays (chosen by Jay Parini), under the headline ‘The Prodigious Pessimist’.
In the review Raban points out that the phrase “goré vidal” in Russian means ‘he has seen great grief!’, and sometimes colloquially, “fuck you!”. Synonyms for ‘goré’ include disaster, calamity, misery, anguish, woe, melancholy, depression and yearning.
Vidal actually changed his first name to Gore when he was 14 years old - from Eugene - supposedly on account of the fact that his maternal grandfather was Senator T.P. Gore of Oklahoma. However . . . who’s to say such a precocious wit didn’t know exactly what he was doing?
As Raban goes on to say, “Grief is his speciality as an essayist, most particularly grief over the decline of the United States from the best hope of the Enlightenment, via its disreputable adventures as a land-grabbing imperial power . . . to its present sorry condition of mass functional illiteracy and corrupt and bloody-handed government . . .”
Some years ago a Guardian reviewer wrote, “Gore Vidal is the most elegant, erudite and eclectic writer of his generation”. That’s about a good an epitaph as any writer could aspire to.
An Observer reviewer said, “Vidal’s combination of learning, wit and distain gets into your blood. He can change the way you think.”
Melvyn Bragg put it like this: “Vidal is the outstanding literary radical of America.”
For many years Vidal exiled himself to southern Italy, and lived in a villa near Sorrento. It’s crazy that he’s so little known or appreciated in this country.
The most recent book of his essays that I have in my collection is one published in 2002 - “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace”, subtitled “How We Got To Be So Hated - Causes Of Conflict In The Last Empire.”
Those essays focus on the destruction caused by Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City in 1995 and by Osama bin Laden in NYC and Washington in 2001. A key paragraph in the introduction says,
“Things just happen out there in the American media, and we consumers don’t need to be told the why of anything. Certainly those of us who are in the why-business have a difficult time getting through the corporate-sponsored American media, as I discovered when I tried to explain McVeigh in Vanity Fair, or when, since September 11, my attempts to get published have met with failure.”
Clearly it’s not helpful to finding an American publisher when he writes paragraphs like,
“Since 1947 America has been the chief and pioneering perpetrator of “preemptive” state terror, exclusively in the Third World and therefore widely dissembled. Besides the unexceptional subversion and overthrow of governments in competition with the Soviet Union . . . Washington has resorted to political assassinations, surrogate death squads, and unseemly freedom fighters (e.g. bin Laden). It 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 violation of international agreements and [U.N.] resolutions, but also its practice of preemptive state terror.”
Bearing in mind that this was written before Bush and Cheney really got going in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s no wonder that so many of us are now looking at Barack Obama and wondering what the hell’s going to happen to him, and asking what he can realistically do to change the entire culture and the values of a country (and in particular its political establishment) that was once “the best hope of the Enlightenment”.
As it happens the lead story on the front page of the Observer today is
Obama's revolution on climate change
Barack Obama ushered in a revolution in America's response to global warming yesterday when he appointed one of the world's leading climate change experts as his administration's chief scientist.
The president-elect's decision to make Harvard physicist John Holdren director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy reveals a new determination to draw a line under eight years of US policy that have seen George Bush steadfastly reject overwhelming evidence of climate change.
News of the appointment was hailed by scientists around the world, including former UK chief government scientific adviser Sir David King. "This is a superb appointment," he told the Observer.
Revolutionary stuff indeed. And it goes on:
In one telling remark, he added that respect for the scientific process was not "just about providing investment and resources. It's about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted nor obscured by politics nor ideology."
So here’s a U.S president-elect telling the world that ‘politics’ and ‘ideology’ are not going to be allowed to get in the way of solving the world’s problems, and that henceforward policy and programmes in the United States are going to be formulated with reference to facts, to science, and to truth. Which is nice.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/21/obama-climate-change-john-holdren
It also leads into the next item, which is:
“Any Questions?”
A very interesting edition of the programme went out on Radio 4 yesterday - the panel was completely politician-free. And it contained Shami Chakrabarti (CBE) and Joan Bakewell (DBE), who are always good value, and pretty wonderful human beings.
Shami was shortlisted in the Channel 4 Political Awards 2006 for the "Most Inspiring Political Figure" award. The award was voted for by the public and she came second to Jamie Oliver - beating Tony Blair, David Cameron and George Galloway. Not a lot of people know that.
Shami made a point of saying on air that the show was so much better for the absence of Parliamentarians. And so it was. The quality of discussion was excellent - intelligent, respectful, insightful and enlightening. No dumb-ass political posturing on fixed positions spouted by political robots who’ve been prepped and briefed to death by Party apparatchiks prior to the programme.
Clearly the majority of our elected ‘representatives’ are incapable of doing any thinking that’s in any way creative, unbiased, not self-serving or otherwise enlightened. There’s always calculation in everything they say - or at least 90% of it, which amounts to the same thing since it’s not reasonable to expect the rest of us to even bother with trying to work out which bits just might be worth believing.
After the broadcast you couldn’t help but ask yourself what Parliament would be like if it was full of enlightened Independents with integrity like Shami and Joan. I for one would like to see both of them in Parliament, but not (out of pity for them) in Parliament in its present form.
And certainly not through having to join either New Labour or the Tory party and having to suffer all the party political bullshit that MPs normally go through as they climb the greasy pole towards becoming a Parliamentary candidate. What a destructive, desperate waste of their time and talent that would be. And what a waste of time once they actually got there, as I’m sure the fast-tracked Glenda Jackson would agree.
In an anarcho-syndicalist system of representation every MP would be elected as an Independent, standing on account of their own views, ideology and characters, and not needing to pretend to agree with the views of a party hierarchy. On entering Parliament they would group together in syndicates both large and small in order to pursue agreed political programmes and agendas.
A system of proportional representation would at least be a small move towards this, since it would allow small parties that have a decent level of support nationwide to get access to the Commons. But it wouldn’t change the nature of our system, which is about individuals and coalitions we call ‘parties’ vying for power, instead of enlightened individuals coalescing around ideas and policies.
-----------------------------------------------
Instinctual Intelligence
Guy Browning’s columns in Guardian Weekend are always good value. Yesterday’s was “How To . . . Be Instinctive.
Quotes:
The iPod is the enemy of instinct . . . Instinct can make itself heard only in silence, which is why it's almost completely unnoticed and unused in the modern world.
Instinct acts as a kind of behavioural satnav. It's a quiet and reassuring inner voice that will always give you guidance, provided you can be bothered to tune into it.
Instinct is the accumulated wisdom of a thousand generations of human beings hard-wired into our little heads. Sadly, this is then very quickly obscured by the formal process of education.
This irony-filled column would be quite amusing if it’s wasn’t so tragically true that the formal process of education never addresses the need to cultivate and nurture instinctual intelligence, and in fact wipes out any possibility of developing it.
Listening to inner voices and inner feelings is not what instinctual intelligence is all about. As the ironic Len Cohen says,
“I don’t trust my inner feelings,
Inner feelings come and go.”
It’s the perennial problem of differentiating between feelings, emotions, thoughts and instincts, and it’s crucially important that we’re educated into being able to do so. Which is quite a difficult thing to do in a world where teachers and professors aren’t themselves able to do it, or even see the need to do it - to make it central to what goes on in schools, if we really want kids to have a 3-D all-round array of intelligences - intellectual, emotional, social, physical, spiritual and instinctual.
Schools need to teach the theory and practice of sitting (or walking) in silence - to cultivate our readiness and our ability to let what’s within come to the surface of our consciousness, and develop our readiness and ability to focus on what’s within.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/dec/20/ipod-instinct
---------------------------------------------
Review of Childcare Protection
The NSPCC has become involved in the great debate about the quality of our childcare services.
A damning indictment of childcare services has been made by the NSPCC, accusing both the government and local authorities of abandoning vulnerable children in "extremely dangerous situations".
In a submission to Lord Laming's Review of Child Protection, commissioned by the government after the case of Baby P, the charity paints a devastating picture of childcare services in the UK. Its report reveals a lack of high-level political leadership and calls for substantial changes to the law.
It goes on to condemn local authorities and the government for "losing focus" on child protection issues and criticises a "rule of optimism" among frontline child protection professionals, including social workers. This attitude, the charity says, frequently blinds professionals to the truth of child abuse by families and carers.
The submission denounces the government's lack of focus in child protection issues and reveals a frontline culture paralysed by a lack of trust between professional agencies. It also reveals that social workers are struggling to meet "absurdly" high government thresholds for intervention and allocation of services.
"The NSPCC has been keen to avoid adding fuel to the public outrages generated in recent months, but we are extremely concerned about the fragility of the system," said Wes Cuell, the charity's acting chief executive. "Organisations are struggling to cope with the number of new initiatives to implement and the workforce, which has a number of vacancies and is relatively inexperienced, is being overwhelmed by the complexity of what it is being ask to do."
But the NSPCC's report reveals that, far from improving the system, the Climbié inquiry reforms have weakened local authorities' focus on protecting children. "This has, tragically, been the inadvertent consequence of the inquiry's emphasis on a broader safeguarding agenda, with its emphasis on prevention, early intervention and the supporting of vulnerable parents," said Cuell.
Maggie Atkinson, president of the Association of Directors of Children's Services, said she found the NSPCC's criticisms of leadership "harder to accept" than those of the system."
Well Maggie would, wouldn’t she? As for me, I say - did any of the Directors of Children’s Services whom she’s trying to shield from criticism ever stand up and denounce the ‘system’ she’s actually willing to criticise? And if they haven’t stood up and put their heads above the parapet then they’re complicit and therefore guilty of a failure of leadership - for that alone, let alone the ineffectualness of their departments.
What are you actually saying, Maggie? They were just following orders? Is that what we pay these people to do?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/dec/21/nspcc-childcare-services-laming-review
.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment