Layer 479 . . . Towns, Cities, Communities, Big Lunches, Urban Riots, Gandhi, Hazare, Tim Smit, Heligan, Totnes and Naomi Klein

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There's been an interesting series of programmes on BBC TV this summer on the subject of towns. As something of an amateur geographer it was compulsory viewing for me, in spite of the irritating presenter - his false bonhomie & chumminess, and his ridiculous shortie double breasted macintosh that he'd insisted on wearing throughout the series and had about nine pockets and two epaulettes too many.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b013n5gl/TOWN_with_Nicholas_Crane_Totnes/

Previous programmes have focused on towns such as Ludlow and Scarborough - last night's was on Totnes, which is becoming well known as the first of the 'transition towns' in Britain. The key idea in these programmes is that it's possible to live more on a human scale in a town, which is less of an anthill than a city, but has more to offer than a village.

http://www.transitiontowntotnes.org/content/transition-town-totnes-newsletter-54-may-2011

This final programme, however, floated the idea that people need to rediscover a sense of community within cities, or within particular communities within cities. A typical London borough, therefore, such as Hackney or Islington or Tottenham, can have its own sense of community, and within those boroughs there are specific areas that can generate their own sense of community - Stoke Newington, Clapton, Dalston, Canonbury, Barnsbury, Angel, etc.

We can even take it down to street level - and I've written in the past about brilliant street parties that have taken place in my own locality - in response to the brilliant Tim Smit's idea of a "Big Lunch". http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2010/07/layer-333-radio-4-reasons-to-be.html

In a typical street of Victorian terraced houses there as so many people and so many families it's possible to generate an amazing sense of community if people live there long enough. There are many wonderful streets where people love living and do indeed stick around for many years.

Tim Smit was also featured on TV this week in a superb documentary - beautifully filmed and edited - about the Lost Gardens of Heligan. It was Tim who discovered the abandoned estate in Cornwall, and who brought it back to life - which he subsequently wrote a book about. It was also Mr Smit who raised the money for and built the Eden Project.  He's quite a guy.

http://howtomakeadifference.net/2010/06/14/tim-smit/

http://www.edenproject.com/media/big-lunch-3d-art-pr.php

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/06/food-big-lunch-production

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/tim-smit-breaking-bread-together-will-break-down-community-barriers-1658946.html

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The last time I went to see Naomi Klein speak at a public meeting was a few months ago  in Totnes. She was there to study the Transition Town concept. Unfortunately the meeting was spoiled by a few typical locals who insisted on turning the meeting into something resembling a hall full of small discussion groups so that they could listen to themselves talking rather than pay attention to what the sublime Ms Klein had to say. Ordinarily I wouldn't have cared particularly - and if the 'workshops' and the 'brainstorming' had turned out to be dull then I'd gladly have gone down to the nearest pub and left them to it. Unfortunately, when the guest speaker lives in Canada and rarely gets to England, let alone Totnes, then it just seemed like a missed opportunity. What a pity there were no civic leaders present who had the presence of mind to stand up and say to the gathering that they really could listen to one another at any old time, whereas Naomi Klein was in town just for the day . . .

Naomi wrote a brilliant piece this week on the subject of England's urban riots:

Looting with the lights on


We keep hearing England's riots weren't political – but looters know that their elites have been committing daylight robbery

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/17/looing-with-lights-off

Argentina's mass looting was called el saqueo – the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country's elites had done by selling off the country's national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatisation deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centres would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge.


England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn't theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behaviour.


This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G8 and G20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable. They would do this by firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuition fees, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatisations of public assets and decreasing pensions – mix the cocktail for where you live. And who is on television lecturing about the need to give up these "entitlements"? The bankers and hedge-fund managers, of course.


This is the global saqueo, a time of great taking. Fuelled by a pathological sense of entitlement, this looting has all been done with the lights on, as if there was nothing at all to hide. There are some nagging fears, however. In early July, the Wall Street Journal, citing a new poll, reported that 94% of millionaires were afraid of "violence in the streets". This, it turns out, was a reasonable fear.


Of course London's riots weren't a political protest. But the people committing night-time robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. Saqueos are contagious. The Tories are right when they say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with what those cuts represent: being cut off. Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered – a union job, a good affordable education – being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our increasingly fortressed borders.


Cameron's response to the riots is to make this locking-out literal: evictions from public housing, threats to cut off communication tools and outrageous jail terms (five months to a woman for receiving a stolen pair of shorts). The message is once again being sent: disappear, and do it quietly.


At last year's G20 "austerity summit" in Toronto, the protests turned into riots and multiple cop cars burned. It was nothing by London 2011 standards, but it was still shocking to us Canadians. The big controversy then was that the government had spent $675m on summit "security" (yet they still couldn't seem to put out those fires). At the time, many of us pointed out that the pricey new arsenal that the police had acquired – water cannons, sound cannons, teargas and rubber bullets – wasn't just meant for the protesters in the streets. Its long-term use would be to discipline the poor, who in the new era of austerity would have dangerously little to lose.


This is what Cameron got wrong: you can't cut police budgets at the same time as you cut everything else. Because when you rob people of what little they have, in order to protect the interests of those who have more than anyone deserves, you should expect resistance – whether organised protests or spontaneous looting. And that's not politics. It's physics.

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The correct response to the political situation, as I've said so many times, is peaceful, non-violent protest and demonstration - walk like an Egyptian. Talk like Tahrir, or Tiananmen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahrir_Square

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Revolution_of_2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989

Gandhi was the first to use non-violent mass protest as a means of making political demands. There's a new movement happening in India based on Gandhi's ideas and example. And a man called Anna.

Indian corruption: Gandhi's mantle


Anna Hazare's anti-corruption movement is posing an increasingly serious challenge to the Indian government

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/17/anna-hazare-gandhi-india-corruption

Editorial


The practical and sometimes dirty business of power-seeking and deal-making has in the past been countered in Indian politics by periodic impulses to transform society root and branch. This dualism was famously embodied in the divide between Nehru and Gandhi, partners but also rivals in the Indian independence movement.


The two men had profoundly different ideas on the direction in which India ought to go, Nehru seeing a future India as a great industrial and military power, while Gandhi wanted a society which would keep the worst aspects of modernity at bay while transcending caste, class and religious differences.


Anna Hazare, the 74-year-old former soldier whose anti-corruption movement is posing an increasingly serious challenge to the Indian government, has certainly borrowed both style and technique from the Mahatma. He wears plain white clothes, if not the actual homespun on which Gandhi insisted. Like Gandhi, he fasts. Like Gandhi, he goes to prison – and sometimes refuses to come out. Like Gandhi, he has a model village, in his case in his home state of Maharashtra. Like Gandhi, he is against tobacco, alcohol and other drugs. Like Gandhi he has mobilised large numbers of Indians, many thousands of whom have been demonstrating in New Delhi and other cities after Manmohan Singh's government made the mistake of arresting him two days ago. Anger at corruption, of both the grand and the petty kind, has never been so intense.


The basic issue is simple. Mr Hazare and his followers want a powerful anti-corruption agency established, something that various governments had promised in the past. The prime minister pushed legislation to create such an agency, but without giving it powers to investigate the senior judiciary and the prime minister's office, or to pursue the lower- level officials who make life an expensive hell for Indians seeking driving licences, passports and other documents. Mr Hazare will not accept this, while Mr Singh says democracy is being subverted.


Mr Hazare does not have, or aspire to, anything like Gandhi's stature. He does not confront, as Gandhi did, his followers' complicity in social evils, an aspect of his career underlined by the subtitle – His Struggle With India – of a recent book on Gandhi. But Mr Hazare has found an issue – and is exerting a leverage which on balance must be good for India.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/anna-hazare
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Layer 153 Totters, Meditation, Happiness, Politicians and the Ox Year.

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Totnes is a curious town. I do like visiting it. Sitting in the sun with a coffee outside the Seven Stars on a sunny Monday morning gives you a real sense of how busy the place can be. There are steady streams of traffic coming and going from four directions, and a terrific variety of people walking to and fro.

It’s interesting to observe the retired community as they come together in the various cafes and coffee shops around mid morning. Relaxed, cheerful, chatting and just gazing at the world going by.

There’s a community of young women in their late teens and early twenties who clearly don’t have conventional nine to five jobs, who also sit in little groups, chat, talk on their phones and send texts to friends.

Then there’s the young hippie element, also enjoying the Spring sunshine, with their signifiers of identity showing their tribal loyalty - clothes, hair, piercings, tattoos, etc. One young woman who’s about eight months pregnant has her entire enormous bulge on display to the town in general, with just a skinny top barely covering her ample breasts.

The older ex-hippies tend to move around singly or in pairs, looking eccentric and alternative, and vaguely authentic. They’re by no means in the majority in what’s essentially quite a bourgeois town, decent and prosperous, but they’re clearly more ‘at home’ here than they would be elsewhere.

Most people are just conventional Brits, largely mono-ethnic, well-to-do or passably well-off, and out shopping for families and homes.

There’s a new shop in town, just opened at the weekend, selling Bulgarian earthenware, textiles, jewellery and clothing. Fair Trade, naturally. A pretty young Bulgarian woman sits expectantly within the empty shop, amidst her thoughtful and creative displays. It seems she came to Totnes a couple of years ago for a language course, and fell in love with the place. And also with a guy she subsequently married.

These little shops open and close all the time, as people either fail to earn decent money from them, or just get bored with being a retailer, or find something more lucrative or more interesting to do.

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In the evening I tag along to a meditation class down by the River Dart. £5 gets you two hours with a Buddhist nun, listening her talking about the practice of loving-kindness, and how to achieve happiness through letting go of self-obsession and self-cherishing, and attending properly to helping others to achieve happiness.

She wears a yellow robe trimmed with deep purple, and has extremely short hair. An audience of about 20 people sits on chairs listening attentively and joining in when she invites us to meditate, still sitting on the chairs, noticing our breathing and letting go of troubling thoughts.

I have to admit to feeling irritated when she continues to murmur during the meditation about happiness, about kindness towards others, and so on. I’m quite troubled by the concept of happiness, and the pursuit of happiness, either for oneself or on behalf of other people.

It’s the same kind of irritation I feel when Jehova’s Witnesses and other evangelical types come around assuming we’re unhappy and offering to help us feel better. What’s the point of wishing for someone else’s happiness? What’s the point of going around smiling at people and looking benevolent? What right has anyone to assume they could possibly bestow happiness on anyone, just by being pleasant and caring towards them?

Obviously it can’t do much harm to float around trying to keep one’s ego under control, trying to curb any tendencies towards self-obsession, and being nice to people. But logically there’s a problem here.

If it’s futile to go around pursuing one’s own ‘happiness’ (and I agree that it is), rather than self-actualisation and self-development, then surely it’s equally futile to go around hoping to wish happiness on others if they too can only achieve happiness through acts of loving-kindness towards others and through finding their own ‘Way’ towards self-development?

Therefore what we should perhaps aim to do is simply to mind our own business, get on with our lives, live as productively as we can, and hope that if we can succeed in acting always in a spirit of loving-kindness that others too may come to realise that they may need to cultivate positivity, emotional and social intelligence, and spiritual intelligence.

I’m quite troubled by the nun’s failure to draw any distinctions between emotional, social and spiritual intelligence. It seems to be a common trait amongst religious types to create this melange of ‘goodness’, in which ethics, morality, emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence are intermingled and undifferentiated. Ultimately this can’t be helpful.

Personally I need clarity and precision when analysing human frailties and difficulties, and when suggesting ways to progress towards being more enlightened, and living life on a higher plane.

The beauty of Zen, to me, is that it points directly towards a kind of wordless and conceptless understanding of what’s important in life, and aims, through meditation and learning from lived experience, to increase our capacity for spiritual intelligence.

Enlightenment? Don’t know what it is. But I know it when I see it.

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Since being back from Japan I can hardly bring myself to pay attention to what’s happening here in politics and current affairs. But just putting one’s head in the sand is no solution and not helpful either.

Like everyone else I’m enraged by what’s come to light in the past few days regarding Members of Parliament and how they’ve had their snouts in the trough of public funds.

We already knew about Jacqui Smith, of course. Seeing those policemen outside the house of her sister in Peckham toting pistols and machine guns is still infuriating. It’s so outrageous that she calls that house her ‘main residence’ so that she can claim all the living expenses, including the cost of the mortgage, that are incurred in her real home in the Midlands, where her husband and children live. As if anyone could possibly believe that just because that house in Redditch is actually in her constituency it’s merely a ‘second home’!

And now we can see plainly that Prescott, Blears, Darling, Miliband, Mandleson and most of the rest of NuLabour are also stuffing their bank accounts with bogus claims, albeit within the ‘rules’, for ‘expenses’. Not that the Tories are any better.

Prescott claimed for additional ‘Tudor’ beams to tart up the front of his Hull house. Blears has been dodging capital gains tax by regularly switching the designations of her different properties, each time she does up a flat and sells it on at a profit. She even has the gall to claim £200 a night hotel bills for periods when she’s been waiting to move into the next flat after selling her previous one.

Does she really have no idea of what a repulsive figure she is as she puts on her inanely grinning little feisty face whilst dodging reporters in the street? She plainly has no shame whatsoever. None of them do. And why should they? They’ve done nothing ‘wrong’.

Like fuck they haven’t.

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1979 - The year of Thatch. 1989 - The fall of the Berlin Wall and communism in Eastern Europe. 1997/99 - The beginning of NuLabour, Tonyism and cronyism. 2009?

The year that unregulated capitalism was totally exposed as bogus, shambolic and a completely fraudulent economic philosophy.

The year that Obama set about clearing up the enormous shit heap left over from the era of Bush, unregulated capitalism and untrammelled American imperialism.

The year that British parliamentary multi-party politics was finally exposed as a totally corrupt, ineffectual and inept system of government.

The year that even the moderate wings of the NUT and NAHT said enough of these bloody SATs and league tables.

The year that NuLabour lost whatever little credibility it had left.

The year that the British people finally saw clearly what happens when politicians give businessmen, bankers, speculators, hedge fund managers, stockbrokers, financiers, the City of London, fat cats, oligarchs and plutocrats everything they have always demanded - complete freedom from regulation and taxation and complete freedom to move all their ill-gotten gains offshore into tax havens.

Well it seems to me that this year something dramatic should happen, because it’s now or never as a moment to bring about radical changes to our systems of governance and economics. If not now, then when?

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I said to the nun that I couldn’t find it in me to wish for happiness for all those politicians, bankers, etc.

She responded that it wasn’t a good thing to wish for someone else’s unhappiness. I pointed out to her that I wasn’t wishing for their unhappiness - I just don’t think it’s a good use of my time and energy to wish for their happiness.

I don’t feel benevolent towards them, and I don’t like what they’ve done to fuck up regular people’s lives with their greed and their rapaciousness. I want to see justice done. I want to see them punished. They did nothing illegal? They did worse than that. They did things that were immoral and unethical. Just like the politicians. I want them to be punished as well.

I could have pointed out the interesting case study of Jonathan Aitken, who lied to the courts and tried to sue the Guardian for defamation. Thankfully he was caught out, found guilty of perjury, and banged up in prison, as all fair-minded people hoped be would be. None of us wished happiness upon him.

He then had a period of time to think about what he’d done, how he’d been living his life, and how he needed to change his outlook and his approach to life. He had time to meditate. He had an opportunity to meet ‘real’ people.

Eventually he had some sort of spiritual renaissance, and since his release he seems to have shown a lot more capacity for compassion, understanding, humility and grace. He’s done some good work for prison reform.

None of this would have happened without his demise as a politician and a high-flyer, you can be sure of that. Slinging him in pokey was a very good thing for him, in the long run. That may be an example of ‘tough love’, and it’s a fine example of the need for us to expect justice when bad people do bad things.

Or even when basically decent people do things that are selfish, greedy, corrupt, unethical, immoral, etc. Anyone who does anything to harm or exploit anyone else, either consciously or without proper regard for the consequences of their actions, in my book forfeits the right to have other people wish for their ‘happiness’ or care about their well-being. End of.

Such people need to look to their own salvation, and put in some hard work on themselves. Set themselves some targets. Aim for higher achievement of higher things.

I’d like to see people like those named above having to rank themselves in a league table against one another. I’d like to see them debating with one another and with Parliamentary inspectors from the Office of Standards in Politics whether or not they have reached the required or expected levels within the various statements of achievement. Especially those for probity, honesty, decency, effectiveness and value for money.

And I think any Zen master would probably want to give them all a damn good slap for being such snivelling, conniving, pathetic arrogant arsehole apologies for human beings.
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