This is a response to a fellow car forum member reproducing an "article" from a website called thedailymash satirising Public Sector workers defense of their penson rights. The "article" hit all the usual cheap right wing targets - strikers who act like pigs, teachers who can't spell, all the usual Tory bullshit:
God knows what sort of society "thedailymash" wants. Doctors are talking about strike action now. Another triumph for the ConDems.
Some people need a lesson in what the Trades Unions have done - and are doing - for the working man and woman. The Tories under Thatcher, Labour under Blair, and now the ConDems under Cameron are ruining this country. Our industrial base is disappearing (only yesterday the train manufacturer Bombardier announced 1400 redundancies), our politicians are in thrall to Murdoch and his murky empire, and the Bankers are still paying themselves huge bonuses. The public sector Unions seem to be the only ones who have a grip on reality. Why shouldn't they defend their members interests? At last (and at least) someone is taking a stand.
I wonder when the working people who support the coalition will wake up. When their nearest hospital is privatised? When families by the thousand are thrown out of homes they can no longer afford? When their local schools all have to be sponsored by car dealers? When this country is sucked dry by Osborne and his banker pals and unemployment hits three and a half million again? Or higher?
Who is going to look after your interests then? I suggest that all workers who don't already belong join a Trade Union, and that those who are members get active and open their eyes to what is really going on here.
How many Charity shops do you want in your High Street? How expensive do you want your weekly shopping basket to be? How much are you prepared to pay for a litre of fuel?
Never mind, eh? Roll over and laugh while they screw you!
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
Sunday, July 03, 2011
The review that caused the fuss . . . .
Here's the review I wrote on Amazon about Edmund de Waal's book on his family history. Certainly caused a fuss. Follow the link at the end if you want to see the posts it engendered on Amazon.
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (Hardcover)
I really wanted to like this book and, as far as literary craftsmanship is concerned, I do. It is beautifully written. But I can't help feeling that there is something important missing. We read about the fabulous wealth (and it was really fabulous) of the Author's forebears (the Ephrussis) going back five generations. These were men - and a few women - who commissioned works of Art from such as Renoir and Manet; who lived in huge palaces in the centre of Paris or Vienna; who owned huge estates in the Czech countryside and homes in many different cities; and who assembled their massive wealth, not through invention or production, but through banking and brokerage in foodstuffs. In living as the Author describes none of them, I am certain, meant any harm to anyone. They saw themselves, surely, as model employers, as philanthropists. They floated above normal Viennese (and Parisian) society; they were hardly affected by the First World War; the slump and depression of the early 1930s didn't affect their standard of living much; only the Nazis were able to bring down their world of privilege after the Austrian Anschluss of late 1937. And, unforgiveably, this happened because they were Jewish, as it happened to so many at the time. But the consequences for this particular very rich family were not as serious as for many of their fellow Jews, since they were able to buy their exits from Nazi Austria, albeit at the expense of almost their entire fortune, and with a huge amount of very stressful anxiety (which circumstance, the Author indicates, sadly killed his Great Grandmother). But those members of the Family who ended up in England for the duration of the Second World War lived in more comfort than many of the English, in a villa in Tunbridge Wells. Distant connections and some friends had their lives ended, tragically, in Nazi death camps, but these cultivated, educated, privileged people survived, although in very reduced circumstances.
The account of events immediately after Anschluss are very interesting. At first the local Austrian Brownshirts trashed the Ephrussi Palace in what seems, from the descriptions in the book, as much like undirected class resentment as political violence and sequestration. Only when the Germans arrived did the systematic theft of the family's treasures take place. The poor (or poorer) people of Vienna wrought a sort of violent anti-capitalist vengeance before the serious work of the German SS commenced. All this was and is deplorable, of course. But, rather like the Bankers in our present society, I wonder if the Author's forebears had any idea of the resentment that they had stoked up against themselves with their fabulous and unreal standard of living.
So I read this book with great interest and enjoyed it for the most part. But from fairly early on I had an unworthy feeling that "they had it coming". Not the anti-Jewish persecutions - which, it surely goes without saying, were utterly barbaric and inexcusable - but a reckoning with and by the poor and the dispossessed, even if their poverty and dispossession was only relative. (I sincerely hope that no-one reads this as any sort of apology for or justification of, the atrocities of the Nazis' vile regime; I have simply tried to be scrupulous in my explanation of the uneasiness I felt at the story told in this book.)
And I was left with an interesting question. Just how civilised are (were) the very rich? Of course, they have all the hallmarks of civilisation - appreciation of high Art and Culture, a code of behaviour which appears to be the epitome of politeness, often a great philanthropy, a facility with languages, a wide reading, cleanliness, reliability, and (that elusive quality) character. But - you have to accept - the very rich are very rich because they are able to make a profit from the labour and from the needs of their fellow men. At what point on the sliding scale does "a fair profit" become rank exploitation?
It is always fruitless to say "this would have been a better book if . . ." but a little more empathy from the Author for the poor and the dispossessed who formed the foundations of the society in which the Ephrussis flourished so remarkably would have been welcome.
The review and the posts it engendered.
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (Hardcover)
I really wanted to like this book and, as far as literary craftsmanship is concerned, I do. It is beautifully written. But I can't help feeling that there is something important missing. We read about the fabulous wealth (and it was really fabulous) of the Author's forebears (the Ephrussis) going back five generations. These were men - and a few women - who commissioned works of Art from such as Renoir and Manet; who lived in huge palaces in the centre of Paris or Vienna; who owned huge estates in the Czech countryside and homes in many different cities; and who assembled their massive wealth, not through invention or production, but through banking and brokerage in foodstuffs. In living as the Author describes none of them, I am certain, meant any harm to anyone. They saw themselves, surely, as model employers, as philanthropists. They floated above normal Viennese (and Parisian) society; they were hardly affected by the First World War; the slump and depression of the early 1930s didn't affect their standard of living much; only the Nazis were able to bring down their world of privilege after the Austrian Anschluss of late 1937. And, unforgiveably, this happened because they were Jewish, as it happened to so many at the time. But the consequences for this particular very rich family were not as serious as for many of their fellow Jews, since they were able to buy their exits from Nazi Austria, albeit at the expense of almost their entire fortune, and with a huge amount of very stressful anxiety (which circumstance, the Author indicates, sadly killed his Great Grandmother). But those members of the Family who ended up in England for the duration of the Second World War lived in more comfort than many of the English, in a villa in Tunbridge Wells. Distant connections and some friends had their lives ended, tragically, in Nazi death camps, but these cultivated, educated, privileged people survived, although in very reduced circumstances.
The account of events immediately after Anschluss are very interesting. At first the local Austrian Brownshirts trashed the Ephrussi Palace in what seems, from the descriptions in the book, as much like undirected class resentment as political violence and sequestration. Only when the Germans arrived did the systematic theft of the family's treasures take place. The poor (or poorer) people of Vienna wrought a sort of violent anti-capitalist vengeance before the serious work of the German SS commenced. All this was and is deplorable, of course. But, rather like the Bankers in our present society, I wonder if the Author's forebears had any idea of the resentment that they had stoked up against themselves with their fabulous and unreal standard of living.
So I read this book with great interest and enjoyed it for the most part. But from fairly early on I had an unworthy feeling that "they had it coming". Not the anti-Jewish persecutions - which, it surely goes without saying, were utterly barbaric and inexcusable - but a reckoning with and by the poor and the dispossessed, even if their poverty and dispossession was only relative. (I sincerely hope that no-one reads this as any sort of apology for or justification of, the atrocities of the Nazis' vile regime; I have simply tried to be scrupulous in my explanation of the uneasiness I felt at the story told in this book.)
And I was left with an interesting question. Just how civilised are (were) the very rich? Of course, they have all the hallmarks of civilisation - appreciation of high Art and Culture, a code of behaviour which appears to be the epitome of politeness, often a great philanthropy, a facility with languages, a wide reading, cleanliness, reliability, and (that elusive quality) character. But - you have to accept - the very rich are very rich because they are able to make a profit from the labour and from the needs of their fellow men. At what point on the sliding scale does "a fair profit" become rank exploitation?
It is always fruitless to say "this would have been a better book if . . ." but a little more empathy from the Author for the poor and the dispossessed who formed the foundations of the society in which the Ephrussis flourished so remarkably would have been welcome.
The review and the posts it engendered.
Thursday, February 03, 2011
Greer versus GBS
Ten days ago Germaine Greer had a go at the reputation of George Bernard Shaw in the Guardian; yesterday the post graduate student who set her going by sending her his paper on GBS. Then last night there was a bit of chatter in the paper's "Comment is Free" site. This was my contribution:
Let's have a think about some of the right-on things Germaine has forced on us over the years. Well, before "The Female Eunuch" there was the full-frontal picture she posed for in "Oz"; as I remember, quite titillating but not particularly feminist. Then there was her Latin Lover period, when she urged women to take a Latin Lover because they could keep on having sex for ages and made it a matter of pride not to ejaculate inside a woman - or even at all, as I recall her account of her very own Latin Lover. There were the aforementioned pops at Tom Paine for abandoning his Wife (er . . . no!) and at poor old repressed A E Housman who managed to write some pretty little things in his day but did have the audacity to offend Greer by fancying "lads" rather than lasses and inspiring - apparently - the whole greetings card industry. She also suggested that a degree of moral and cultural relativism is OK when thinking about Female Genital Mutilation, seeming to make the assumption that it was wrong for us to judge the traditional acts of another culture. This was denied, but her words upset a House of Commons Select Committee at the time. And that Shakespeare! He was a bit of a bludger, wasn't he? After "The Female Eunuch" she co-hosted a sort of Comdey show for TV with Kenny Everett. And a few years back she appeared as a participant in the "Big Brother" house. So that's her extra-academic career. She's a bit of an old windbag really. Funny how you never see her and Clive James together in the same room.
Let's have a think about some of the right-on things Germaine has forced on us over the years. Well, before "The Female Eunuch" there was the full-frontal picture she posed for in "Oz"; as I remember, quite titillating but not particularly feminist. Then there was her Latin Lover period, when she urged women to take a Latin Lover because they could keep on having sex for ages and made it a matter of pride not to ejaculate inside a woman - or even at all, as I recall her account of her very own Latin Lover. There were the aforementioned pops at Tom Paine for abandoning his Wife (er . . . no!) and at poor old repressed A E Housman who managed to write some pretty little things in his day but did have the audacity to offend Greer by fancying "lads" rather than lasses and inspiring - apparently - the whole greetings card industry. She also suggested that a degree of moral and cultural relativism is OK when thinking about Female Genital Mutilation, seeming to make the assumption that it was wrong for us to judge the traditional acts of another culture. This was denied, but her words upset a House of Commons Select Committee at the time. And that Shakespeare! He was a bit of a bludger, wasn't he? After "The Female Eunuch" she co-hosted a sort of Comdey show for TV with Kenny Everett. And a few years back she appeared as a participant in the "Big Brother" house. So that's her extra-academic career. She's a bit of an old windbag really. Funny how you never see her and Clive James together in the same room.
Anyway, the poor old girl wrote one goodish book back in 1970, since when she's flailed around. I like GBS. I think he'll outlast her.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
I hate Michael Gove
Michael Gove has embraced the idea of "Boot Camps" to sort out disaffected young people. There's been a lively debate on the Guardian's "Comment is Free" website, to which I just had to respond:
Just shows that the Tories haven't changed at all. Still the Nasty Party. The Thatcherite "short sharp shock" re-emerges as the Govian boot-camp. Just as prisons breed criiminals so boot-camps will breed either thugs or suicides. I was amused by the comment that Gove probably gets a semi at the mention of "boot camp".
Seems to me that the current crop of Tories put problems into two categories. First come "the problems that affect me". These need careful analysis and complex schemes of action. "How do I get to be filthy rich?" "How do I keep the bloody Oiks off my land?" "How do I find a little man who will do all the jobs I can't be arsed to do myself, preferably for virtually no money?" And "Where shall I keep all the money I hope to make?" (This last question is perhaps the most important.)
Then there are "the problems which affect society at large". These are easy to solve; they require no depth of analysis or thinking; a short phrase will get us off the hook here! So the problem of inequality in society? "Tell the proles we're all in this together". Economic woes? Huge budget deficit? "Throw another million out of work to drive wage costs down." Disaffected and disruptive youth? "Boot Camp".
But then the hacks in the various Ministries get hold of the soundbite and may even try to act on it. God help us if they take Gove seriously.
Kenneth Baker, Tory Education Minister in the late eighties and architect of the National Curriculum, said in a Guardian interview in 2008 "I think anybody doing educational change should begin slowly." Would he please talk to Gove?
Just shows that the Tories haven't changed at all. Still the Nasty Party. The Thatcherite "short sharp shock" re-emerges as the Govian boot-camp. Just as prisons breed criiminals so boot-camps will breed either thugs or suicides. I was amused by the comment that Gove probably gets a semi at the mention of "boot camp".
Seems to me that the current crop of Tories put problems into two categories. First come "the problems that affect me". These need careful analysis and complex schemes of action. "How do I get to be filthy rich?" "How do I keep the bloody Oiks off my land?" "How do I find a little man who will do all the jobs I can't be arsed to do myself, preferably for virtually no money?" And "Where shall I keep all the money I hope to make?" (This last question is perhaps the most important.)
Then there are "the problems which affect society at large". These are easy to solve; they require no depth of analysis or thinking; a short phrase will get us off the hook here! So the problem of inequality in society? "Tell the proles we're all in this together". Economic woes? Huge budget deficit? "Throw another million out of work to drive wage costs down." Disaffected and disruptive youth? "Boot Camp".
But then the hacks in the various Ministries get hold of the soundbite and may even try to act on it. God help us if they take Gove seriously.
Kenneth Baker, Tory Education Minister in the late eighties and architect of the National Curriculum, said in a Guardian interview in 2008 "I think anybody doing educational change should begin slowly." Would he please talk to Gove?
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Charles and Camilla
After the student protest in London on Thursday over the increase in tuition fees and the axing of the Education Maintenance Allowance for poorer students, and the attack on Charley Saxe Coburg Gotha's Roller, I loved this comment from "softMick" on The Guardian website today:
"Irony could not have wished for a more timely coincidence, as young people out in force to show their revulsion at the raising of tuition fees and abolition of EMA by a government headed by very rich ex-public schoolboy Cameron and his side-kick comfortably rich ex-public schoolboy boy Clegg, subsequently barring access to higher education for kids from low income backgrounds, find themselves confronted by two royal parasites shmoozing along in the old Rolls, probably wearing clothes and jewellery that would cover a poor student's tuition fees for an entire degree course, with all expenses thrown in. The sheer obscenity of the tableau will be lost on the better offs, including the royals, and completely ignored by the media intent upon gaining knighthoods for their execs and toeing the government line. But it sickened me to the core, and makes me feel ashamed of my country and my government."
For your enjoyment, here's the pic again.
"Irony could not have wished for a more timely coincidence, as young people out in force to show their revulsion at the raising of tuition fees and abolition of EMA by a government headed by very rich ex-public schoolboy Cameron and his side-kick comfortably rich ex-public schoolboy boy Clegg, subsequently barring access to higher education for kids from low income backgrounds, find themselves confronted by two royal parasites shmoozing along in the old Rolls, probably wearing clothes and jewellery that would cover a poor student's tuition fees for an entire degree course, with all expenses thrown in. The sheer obscenity of the tableau will be lost on the better offs, including the royals, and completely ignored by the media intent upon gaining knighthoods for their execs and toeing the government line. But it sickened me to the core, and makes me feel ashamed of my country and my government."
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