normblog

A moving experience

Back in the now prehistoric past, in - ooh - March or April, when Adèle and I began to wonder about the possibility of moving south, I made a list of 'considerations': you know, pros, cons, and things of (as yet) uncertain leaning or value, to be thought about in coming to a decision. I won't bore you with the list as whole, but one important item for me went under the heading of 'disruption'. The thought behind this was, roughly: OK, if we decide to move, fine; but it must happen with a minimum of disruption. I meant disruption to normal life: work, blogging, reading, social intercourse and suchlike.

Ha. Was I ever deluded! To move house without incurring disruption is a hope of the same order as intending to mark a huge pile of exam scripts while maintaining an interest in what you read. It's like listening to the music of Mary Chapin Carpenter without longing for Emmylou or Merle Haggard or George Jones. You start by setting aside an hour here and there, nicely integrated into the rest of your day; soon you find that an hour is way too little if you're to be ready in time, so you do a bit more, and then a bit more than that. Then, if you have a positive attitude to life, you begin to find that the aforementioned disruption has an enjoyable side to it. You're planning a different future - might as well do it well. What the hell, next thing is that if this isn't the best-organized move in the history of the world, we'll have failed. What was at first disruption to normal life has become your normal life, and you're trying to fit in the odd other activity when you can manage it.

The big week is upon us. What will happen on this blog in the coming days I do not dare to contemplate. But I will endeavour to sustain some sort of presence here. I beg the indulgence of my regular readers.

Crooked words and straight ones

You'll remember from a couple of months back the young Afghan woman whose face was mutilated by her Taliban husband, and whose photograph was featured on the cover of Time magazine. It was an issue over which one or two members of the Western commentariat didn't exactly distinguish themselves. A report in Thursday's Independent has a picture of Aisha after reconstructive surgery. Discussing - apropos of the item - some of the progress lately made by women in Afghanistan and the distance there still is to be covered, one person expressing her simple moral solidarity with these women is Laura Bush.

Relevant reading

From a feature on Howard Jacobson in today's Sunday Times (£):

"I don't think people are being taught how to read. I saw Michael Gove being attacked for saying that children should read Dryden. Well, children should. I read Dryden. I can still quote you Dryden. [He does so, at length.] The minute you give children books that are 'relevant' to them, you are depriving them of a real education. Reading is about discovering other lives than your own."

'Relevant' is, in any case, a context-relative term. It may be relevant for young readers to read about others just like themselves. But it also may not. What if some of them find this dull? For someone who's interested in reading about people in locations that are, to her or him, exotically different, or about people from the past, or from invented worlds, then these all become relevant to them. At a certain stage during my teenage years, I became fascinated by stories of escape from German and Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. Just like my life in Bulawayo! Taking a narrow view of relevance, wherever that happens, is not a good pedagogic philosophy.

The Momma 'n' Daddy Collection 121

The way some people look down their noses at country music, it dismays me. Country music has real depth. As an illustration of this, today I bring you another facet of the Momma 'n' Daddy experience. As I believe I've said before, just about everybody has a pair of parental woojes; it stands to reason, therefore, that all variants of the relationship between mothers and fathers, on the one hand, and their children, on the other, are reflected somewhere in the canon. This episode may be regarded as the King Lear Momma 'n' Daddy. I know the song - 'Over The Hill To The Poor House' - from Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and you cannot fail to get the Shakespearean reference:

Oh, how can it be they have driven
Their father so helpless and old
(Oh God, may their crimes be forgiven)
To perish out here in the cold

Oh, heaven I'm sad and I'm weary
See the tears how they course down my cheek
This world is so lonely and weary
My heart for relief vainly seeks

Chorus:
I'm old and I'm helpless and feeble
And the days of my youth have gone by
And it's over the hill to the poor house
I must wander alone there to die

Long years since Mary was taken
My faithful affectionate wife
Since then I've been alone and forsaken
The light has died out of my life

Oh, me on the doorstep up yonder
I've set with my babes on my knee
No father was happier or fonder
Than I of my little ones three

Repeat chorus

The boys were so rosy and cheerful
And Lily was bright and so sweet
God knows how their father has loved them
But they've driven him out on the street

I gave them the place where I lived on
A deed to the farm and more
I gave them the house they were born in
And now I am turned from its door

Repeat chorus

And you thought it was all honeyed stuff. There's a version here by Lester Flatt and Mac Wiseman.

[The Momma 'n' Daddy Archive, containing all the details of the series, is here.]

Train fare for history buffs

I'm sitting here on the train back to Manchester, idly casting my eye over the Evening Standard, when I come across this item in Londoner's Diary:

Tin hats at the ready. Sebastian Faulks has launched a broadside at the British education system. Speaking at Larmenier and Sacred Heart School as part of the Brook Green Literary Festival last night, the author of Birdsong bemoaned what he called the lack of learning in the modern generation.

"History dropped off the curriculum at GCSE," Faulks said. "There are a thousand secondary schools who entered not a single candidate at GCSE and you can also see it in politicians..."

Can you guess what's coming? Yes, you can.

"... If Tony Blair had a better grasp of history in the 20th century, rather than simply living in the moment, he wouldn't have invaded Iraq."

There are times when I think that the notion of Blair-derangement is an exaggeration. But these people really are crazed. History isn't being taught enough or properly in schools – oh yes, and Iraq.

The normblog profile 369: Joanna Walsh

Joanna Walsh writes and draws the Webby-award-winning blog Badaude. She is designer-in-residence at legendary Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company. She has just finished a book about London for the Tate and is currently writing a graphic novel about Paris and planning an exhibition at the Wellcome Trust Gallery.

Why do you blog? > I started because I lost my regular illustration slot on a UK newspaper and was at a loose end. Why do I continue? Addiction: an itch to tell, however trivial.

What has been your best blogging experience? > Meeting interesting people: other bloggers who have become good friends, particularly Maitresse and Coquette, as well as everyone at Shakespeare and Company, Port Eliot and Five Dials. My life has become much more interesting.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > The usual stuff: write (or photograph, or draw, or whatever you do) frequently. You'll soon find out what you want to do, whether anyone's listening, and whether you want to continue.

Who are your intellectual heroes? > William Morris, Jean Rhys, Angela Carter, George Gissing, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin.

What are you reading at the moment? > The Wicked Pavilion by Dawn Powell; Morality by Bernard Williams; Adèle Blanc-Sec: Momies en Folie by Jacques Tardi.

Who are your cultural heroes? > William Hogarth, Ronald Searle, Honoré Daumier, Jacques Tardi, Jaime Hernandez, Lynda Barry, Aubrey Beardsley.

What is the best novel you've ever read? > Bel Ami is fighting it out with Good Morning Midnight, That Uncertain Feeling, War and Peace and Nana (what a picture). OK, maybe War and Peace. Just because there's more of it.

What is your favourite movie? > The Awful Truth (Irene Dunne/Cary Grant/Leo McCarey). A comedy about the impossibility and inevitability of love.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > I'm no longer sure that people's opinions can be changed by argument.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > Situationism.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > Utilitarianism.

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > Abolish private schools (or at the very least remove all their privileges, like charitable status). Nothing in the UK is more socially divisive.

If you could choose anyone, from any walk of life, to be Prime Minister, who would you choose? > Florence Stevens.

What would you do with the UN? > Party! But we'd have to go somewhere big. I hear there are a lot of them.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > Don't be afraid to be pretentious. Everything starts there. If you don't know how to be a writer (or whatever it is you want to be), pretend you're a writer. Think about what a writer might do when s/he gets up in the morning. Then start doing it or learn how to. This is particularly important in creative professions where there is little 'career structure' and no one is even sure how much of it can be taught. I have to do it every morning.

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > I find conflict erotic but I'm not so sure would get on doing the washing up - so, yes, but not live-in.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > A sense of fun.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Snobbery.

In what circumstances would you be willing to lie? > Most, unfortunately. I strongly disapprove of lying but find myself doing it time and time again.

Who would play you in the movie about your life? > Claudette Colbert.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > Somewhere with a door handle. Mine fell off a couple of weeks ago. There's a screw missing and I'm mystified as to how to put it back on.

What would your ideal holiday be? > A long journey taken alone on several forms of public transport, ending up in a major city I don't know.

What do you like doing in your spare time? > I like looking at pictures of nice clothes and wondering whether I should buy them.

What talent would you most like to have? > Tightrope dancing.

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? > Movie director. What I do is a bit like that - telling stories with pictures - but I don't have to manage a team or a budget.

Who are your sporting heroes? > Emily Wilding Davison.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Competitive sports.

If you could have one (more or less realistic) wish come true, what would you wish for? > I wish there were bakeries where you could buy decent bread throughout the UK. And that they opened at 7.30 am.

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? > Being freelance, so much of my life is based on repeatedly trying to get money - or some other equivalent benefit - I'm not sure I could handle the change.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > Honoré Daumier, Isabelle Huppert, Guy de Maupassant.

[The normblog profile is a weekly Friday morning feature. A list of all the profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

Cause for embarrassment

I'm sitting across the table from Professor Dwight Geist, visiting this country from the University of Eastern Colorado. Dwight and I have corresponded by email, he has views on the sociology of political violence that interest me (though I disagree with them), and I've travelled up to Edinburgh, where he's attending a conference, in order to meet him for lunch.

'So, Dwight,' I say, 'you think there are good grounds for attributing suicide terrorism against Jews in Israel to the grievances of the Palestinians on account of long occupation.'

'Yes, I do,' returns Dwight, 'though I must emphasize that this is not to justify or condone suicide terrorism, which I abhor as I do all targeting of civilians in pursuit of a political objective.'

'Of course. No differences between us there, Dwight. But does it follow from the same line of thought, then, that Israeli policies of which I know you are critical may be put down to a causal history of persecution, culminating in the Holocaust - so that the Jews have fears for their long-term safety, in what they consider to be their national homeland?'

'No, Norm,' says Dwight, and after pausing to swallow some potato salad, he continues: 'That is a too simple understanding of political causality. As a formerly persecuted and oppressed people, the Jews, including the Jews of Israel, have good cause [he smiles and winks] to know that it is not appropriate or just for one people that has been a victim of injustice to act unjustly towards another people.'

'But hang on Dwight. Aren't you just playing on different meanings of the word "cause"?'

'Not at all. The Jews have been caused by their own history to know better than to behave badly towards their Palestinian neighbours.'

'OK. And those Palestinians who resort to terrorism?'

'They've been caused to do that by their legitimate grievances.'

'Changing the context a bit...' I now say to Dwight, 'It's sometimes argued with reference to 9/11 and other Islamist terrorism, that the perpetrators are motivated by the misdeameanours of the West towards Muslim countries. I take it you'd have to reject this, and say that would-be Islamist terrorists must have been caused, just like the Jews have been, to know better than to turn one's own oppression into an injustice against someone else.'

'You're wrong there,' Dwight says. 'Islamist terrorism is caused by the obvious grievances that Islamists have, which are in turn caused by the bad foreign policies of the West.'

'I can see, Dwight, that this causation stuff is more complicated than I thought. But I reckon I'm getting the hang of it at last. Let me try this on you: when, in response to 9/11, the US and its allies invaded Afghanistan, and when people were interned at Guantanamo, and when some in the Bush administration thought it was OK to resort to so-called enhanced interrogation methods, all of this was caused by the crime committed on 9/11 and the aggrieved feelings aroused by it?'

'Norm! No, no, no. The West has cause to know - thanks to a rich tapestry of prior historical causation - that we have to be better, to measure up to higher standards. Can you deny that this attitude of principle is firmly grounded in a prior causal history?'

'Boy, it really is complex. I'll have to come and study up on the sociology of political causation in your department, Dwight.'

'Sociology? Whatever gave you that idea? I'm Esteemed O'Donnell Professor of the Creative Arts!'

'Oh, sorry. My mistake.' I parted from him in some embarrassment.

What the butler saw

Charlie Butler must be a most tentative chap. I can't remember a blogger's argument that was presented so apologetically. Charlie starts by anticipating the disagreement of his readers, then tells them he doesn't 'care for Acknowledgements pages in novels', then goes on, in saying why, to label the first of his two reasons the 'less respectable' one.

For my own part, I don't mind a bit that he doesn't like Acknowledgements pages in novels; in fact, I'm like that god in Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan - utterly indifferent. I even have some time for Charlie's less respectable reason: which is that 'Acknowledgements can feel a bit breathless and Oscar-speech-ish'. It does sometimes seem a bit much, who and what gets into these tributes. But it's his other reason that defeats me:

The (arguably) more respectable reason is that Acknowledgements tend to throw me out of the fictional world by reminding me that it's all made up.

Come on, Charlie. You mean that otherwise you might forget that the fiction is fiction? 'Damn, there I was, just following the Dront of Gabardine down into that dark dungeon, when I was reminded of the acknowledgement to Spiffy Treadlace and the illusion collapsed.' Surely not.

Cause for humour

Stephen Pollard relays one or two good Jewish jokes in commenting on Howard Jacobson's Booker win. He also has - something new to me - that Saul Bellow said 'oppressed people tend to be witty'. How very confusing; I thought they tended to blow other people to smithereens.

AMIA, Argentina and Appeasing Iran (by Eamonn McDonagh)

1. On July 18th 1994 a truck bomb destroyed the headquarters of the AMIA Jewish community organization in Buenos Aires; 85 people were killed and hundreds injured.

2. Carlos Menem's government saw to it that the initial investigation was carried out with the intention of protecting the authors of the attack rather than apprehending them. Why? No one really knows but theories abound; the more popular ones refer to massive bribes and the notion that Syria, where Menem's family originally came from, had some involvement in the attack and he wished to protect it. Judicial investigations of the cover-up have been going on since 2000 but no one has been brought to trial yet.

3. A group of corrupt police officers and a dealer in stolen cars were eventually tried on charges of having played a secondary role in the attack. In 2004 they were all acquitted. A subsequent Supreme Court decision revoked the acquittals of Telledin - the stolen car dealer who sold the van to the terrorists that they would subsequently load with explosives and blow up in the entrance to the AMIA building - and some of the corrupt police, and ordered that they be tried again. This still has not happened. The same ruling held that the initial investigation into the attack had produced a considerable amount of valid evidence and the AMIA building had indeed been destroyed by a massive bomb packed into a van, which was driven through its front gates. This scotched such colourful rumours as that the explosion had been caused by an arms dump maintained by the Jews in the building, or that it had in some way been connected with a dispute between drug traffickers.

4. Argentina has been ruled by Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner for more than seven years now. During this period the investigation into the attack was reinvigorated; there has been a marked improvement in the quality of the lip service paid by the authorities to the need to find those responsible for the attack. In 2006 State Prosecutor Alberto Nisman claimed that the attack had been approved at the highest level in Tehran and issued warrants for the arrest of a number of senior figures in the Iranian regime in connection with it. The validity of those arrest warrants was subsequently confirmed by Interpol. One of the men being sought by the Argentine legal authorities is Ahmad Vahidi, Iran's Defence Minister.

Iranian regime enthusiasts are fond of pointing out that Nisman's accusations are heavily reliant on testimony from exiled opponents of Iran's present government. Some would say that this added to their credibility rather than subtracted from it, but that's not really the point. It is not usual for democratic states to have to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt in order to simply achieve the extradition of a suspect. No one is suggesting that the fugitives be sent straight to jail on arriving in Argentina. The idea is rather that they would be tried in a court of law and have every chance to test the evidence against them.

5. Like her husband before her, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has repeatedly used her annual speech at the United Nations to request that Iran hand over the wanted men. The framework for the performance of this ritual is now well established. In the days leading up to the speech there's speculation in the press about exactly what form of words will be used to appeal for the extradition of the fugitives. Will it be harder or softer than last year? What do the official representatives of the Jewish community in Argentina want? Then the big day comes. The president speaks. The press analyzes what was said in terms of the above-mentioned criteria. The official spokespersons for the Jewish community declare themselves entirely pleased. The world moves on. Nothing happens.

This year an interesting variant was added to the traditional script for this event. President Fernández de Kirchner offered the Iranian government the possibility of trying the AMIA massacre suspects in a third country if it believes they could not get a fair hearing in Argentina. This modest innovation in the ritual served three purposes: it protected her from accusations of doing nothing to bring real pressure to bear on Tehran to give up the AMIA fugitives; it delighted, once more, the official representatives of the Argentine Jewish community; and it kept her in the good books of the United States.

6. Héctor Timerman, Argentina's foreign minister, gave a two-page interview to Pagina/12 on taking office in June, in which he said the following with regard to Argentina's attempts to have the fugitive Iranians extradited to answer charges of having been responsible for the AMIA massacre:

The case of Iran is simple. An Argentina court has asked for the extradition because it says it has evidence connecting them to the attack on the AMIA and wants to question them. It's up to Iran to extradite them to Argentina, where they will receive due process. We have always placed our reliance on the path of justice and respect for human rights. But Iran should be aware that Argentina isn't going to give up on its request to bring these people to justice. We suffered two attacks, first against the Embassy of Israel and then against the AMIA. Since 2003 the government has supported the demands of the courts. We are not taking other measures. We are not going to pursue other measures.

As I have translated the above text from Spanish into diplomatese, let me now translate it into English.

Hey there, everybody in Tehran - I mean both the government and terrorist suspects - you can all pour yourselves another cup of tea and relax. Neither I nor the government will do anything to make your lives uncomfortable. We're not going to further downgrade diplomatic relations nor do anything that would damage trade. And don't think for a minute that we're going to ask our allies Presidents Chávez of Venezuela and President Lula of Brazil, both of whom are friends of yours too, to use their good offices to encourage you to hand over the suspects. Call for and support tougher sanctions against Iran and bring up your sheltering of terrorist suspects in every forum that is available to us? Ha! Ha! Do you think we are completely stupid?

Yes, yes, we have to keep supporting the call for some of you guys to be extradited but that's just a show to please the gallery and, especially, the leadership of the local Jewish community. We don't want any trouble from them, do we? And note that I said that the court 'said' that it had evidence against the suspects; I didn't say that I thought such evidence existed. See how far I'm willing to go to give you guys peace of mind? I'm not even willing to give credit to the decisions of a federal court of my country.

7. Bashar al-Assad, the dictator of Syria, visited Buenos Aires in July. He was welcomed by the government. It treated him with respect and deference. There was no mention of dead Jews or Syria's close relationship with Iran. Living Jews being repugnant to the visiting tyrant, Héctor Timerman was careful to make himself scarce during the visit.

8. The government of Argentina recently granted political asylum to Galvarino Apablaza, a Chilean citizen suspected of murdering a member of his country's Senate and the kidnapping of a businessman. These crimes were committed after the return of democracy to Chile. The decision flew in the face of a Supreme Court ruling that he ought to be extradited. The reasons given for not handing over the suspect included the fact that he has married and has children in Argentina and that Chile's anti-terrorism laws are harsh.

The refusal to extradite Apablaza shows contempt for Chile and its democratic government. It also makes it even harder for Argentina to insist on Iran doing something that it has refused to do itself.

9. Argentina's failure to convict anyone for the AMIA massacre is a national disgrace. So is its pursuit of almost completely normal relations with Iran, in spite of Iran's ongoing protection of men suspected of murdering dozens of Argentine citizens. The AMIA and the DAIA, the official representative bodies of Jewish Argentines, are accomplices to this shameful policy. They place a higher priority on winning favour with the government and generally not rocking the boat than they do on actively pursuing justice for the victims of the AMIA massacre.

10. Any democratic government that was serious about seeking justice for its slain citizens would by now have: i) broken diplomatic relations with Iran, ii) criminalized tangible support for Hezbollah and the current Iranian regime, iii) ceased to provide tangible support for Iran in the form of continuing trade relations, (iv) started actively campaigning in every forum open to it for Iran to be pressed to extradite the suspects, which means never failing to bring the matter up at the numerous international organizations of which Argentina is a member and in which it enjoys well-earned (on some issues) prestige on matters relating to human rights and (v) used its influence with its neighbours - some of whom have very good relations with Iran - to demand the extradition of the suspects.

Argentine policy is not directed towards achieving extradition of the suspects and, therefore, it has not included nor will it include in the future any of these measures. It is directed at achieving three aims: (i) not to upset Iran unduly, (ii) to keep the official representatives of Argentina's Jews onside, and (iii) to curry favour with the United States. (Eamonn McDonagh)

Don't sell that cow

There's a long, inglorious history on the left of reaching for something quick and apparently inviting when what you had previously placed your hopes in seems to be letting you down. The working class not fulfilling its revolutionary mission? The peasantry of the Third World will do the business - or students will, from their 'red bases' in the universities. A democratic majority proving hard to find? Well, democracy has its limits, after all, and The Movement has its own internal forms of democracy, even if it doesn't tolerate opposition parties.

Of course, the left has no monopoly on turning from avenues that appear to be blocked towards others which look more promising. This may even be regarded as an elementary form of rationality: if the envisaged means aren't working, try to find something else that will. Except that, from the examples I've given above, it's plain that one needs to be careful. A good solution is better than a bad one or than no solution; but if you give away your bike for an inflatable pogo stick, you may just be making a mistake.

In this category of shallow miscalculation I would place George Monbiot's Guardian column today. Impressed by 'a series of fascinating recent advances in the field of psychology', Monbiot is ready to set aside the 'myth of human cognition... [that] holds that people make rational decisions by assessing facts' (labelled by the authority he's citing 'the enlightenment model') - facts that are then used by them 'to decide which options best support their interests and desires'. He's willing to set this aside in favour of the notion that 'we accept information that confirms our identity and values, and reject information that conflicts with them'. Not to put too fine a point on it, there are, Monbiot goes on to tell us, nasty, self-interested values, and nice, other-regarding, empathetic ones, and the left has been making the mistake of bending to the former, as propagated by the right. What the left must do, rather, is 'cease to be embarrassed' by its own cuddly values, and reaffirm them in full confidence that this is the way to move forward.

Ho hum. First, that the left has ever been backward in affirming its values is a thesis I'll take some convincing of. Second, that the left should let go of its intention - one shared across Marxist, Labourist and Social-Democratic traditions - of showing that people's interests matter, along with their ideals, is a thesis I'll take some convincing of. But, above all, for a would-be progressive to commend, in these times, the affirmation of identity as opposed to the attempt to assess facts rationally so that our deliberations about principle can be well-based, be well-informed, is a sorry cave-in to the fashions of the day. It is as flimsy as the argument has always been that there is some good substitute for democratic pluralism.

Compact library

Here's one for my occasional series of library pictures. From the Michigan Lighthouse Conservancy:

Lighthouses were often time located in remote areas and as such had no access to city services such as libraries, opera houses, entertainment, etc. that most people enjoyed who lived in a town or city. As light keeping was a lonely profession in most cases supplies were brought to them by lighthouse tender ships. One of the items the tender supplied was a library box on each visit as pictured to the left. Library boxes were filled with books and switched from station to station to supply different reading materials to the families.

For the rest, and the pics, across here. Now, if they'd had a Kindle... (Thanks: Peter.)

The Blair-Hitch project

Now, here's a debate at which I'd like to be present:

One is a prominent atheist, the other a devout Roman Catholic. Both share mutual admiration for each other, but for a few hours next month, they will be adversaries, facing off over the contentious topic of religion.

Renowned author and journalist Christopher Hitchens and former British prime minister Tony Blair will share a stage for the sixth semi-annual Munk Debates this November.
.....
The official resolution, "Be it resolved, religion is a force of good for the world," is close to the hearts of both debaters.

Blair says Hitch 'promises to be a formidable opponent'. You better believe it. At the same time, since religion doesn't poison everything, though it can and sometimes does poison some things, the former prime minister should be able to cope, provided he neither claims too much nor denies the harm that has undoubtedly been done in the name of religion.

Writer's choice 280: Suzanne Moore

Suzanne Moore is an award-winning journalist. She has been a columnist for The Guardian, The Independent and The New Statesman, and now writes for The Mail on Sunday. She has published two books of collected journalism, Looking for Trouble and Head Over Heels. Below Suzanne reviews Valerie Solanas's Scum Manifesto. (The review first appeared in The New Statesman and is posted here with Suzanne's permission.)

Suzanne Moore on Scum Manifesto by Valerie Solanas

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

This is the first sentence of Scum Manifesto. If there is a more exhilarating start to any political tract, I'm damned if I know it. I won't pretend to talk about Scum Manifesto with much objectivity. As far as I can see, the only reason that I might ever deign to go on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs (an imminent possibility, obviously) would be so that I could ask Sue Lawley if I could take Scum Manifesto to the island, to make me realize what I was missing - precisely zilch. The thing is, you either happen to think this is a work of unadulterated genius, or you dismiss it as the ravings of a loony psycho-bitch, not understanding that this is exactly what makes it so compelling and so charged with insight.

Verso has chosen to republish it in a nice little hardback edition with an introduction by a respected academic that sets Solanas's work in context, and therefore takes it seriously. Believe me, she was serious - serious enough to shoot Andy Warhol and end up in a locked ward of a psychiatric hospital.

Actually, I don't need a respectable version of her vision. Ideally, the Manifesto should be in the form of a little pamphlet, the kind you'd find in the back of an anarchist bookshop - if such places exist any longer - and pored over by females of impressionable age. It should be dirt cheap and scuzzy. Still, anything that helps brings forth Scum into the world is all right by me. At a time when feminism is ruled by the social-worker smiles of fembot Blairites, when we all lurve and respect men and are happy working together in the 'equal' partnership of dullard wage slavery, when female empowerment means the freedom to give ourselves implausible breasts and freeze-dried skin, we need Solanas more than ever.

Solanas was abused and misunderstood while she was alive, and she still is. As far as I'm concerned, her crimes are irrelevant. I am not reviewing her crimes; I am reviewing her words. But isn't it funny how all these academics who invoke Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche and Judith Butler, as Avital Ronell does in her introduction, still cannot simply deal with the word (or the 'text', as we must call it)? For all the theorizing about allowing the text to speak for itself, Ronell insists on filling us in on Solanas's miserable life in order to explain the text. Or is it to excuse the text? She gives details of the abuse by Solanas's father, the prostitution, the poverty and the final insult of being excluded from Warhol's inner circle, which drove her to shoot him. He had lost the script for her play Up Your Ass, so she shot him three times with a .32 calibre automatic and then gave herself up to a traffic cop, explaining that Warhol was trying to exercise too much control over her life.

Yet, the previous year, 1967, she'd written Scum Manifesto, publishing and distributing it herself in 1968. Why was this angry poor butch dyke able to speak the unspeakable? Can't we just say it was because she was a dazzlingly intense writer, a witchy genius, and have done with it? Apparently not. Instead of being given her due as a clairvoyant revolutionary, Solanas has been treated as some sort of embarrassing bag-lady offshoot of 'respectable' feminism.

Scum, as any thrill-seeking female knows, stands for the Society for Cutting Up Men. So there you have it, the goal of all feminism made clear: murderous rage directed against men. Except that it's not true, not if you read it, not if you cherish it, not if you go with her flow.

Solanas starts from the position that men are incomplete females. They have something missing, these 'walking abortions'. (Show me a woman who has never thought that and I'll show you a halfwit.) In order to cope with their incompleteness, their 'pussy envy', they have constructed an elaborate system of defences to make themselves feel better. These include screwing, war, the money system, prostitution, work, art and culture, to name a few.

On all this, Solanas is viciously funny. On sex, for instance, a man will 'swim through a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there'll be a friendly pussy awaiting him'. Men have invented work although there could be complete automation, because they abhor leisure, as it would give them time to contemplate their grotesque selves. These days, there may be much talk of the work/life balance, as this has become the polite and coded way of discussing sexual politics, but Solanas is not polite. She is gloriously succinct. She understands that women will not benefit merely from economic equality, to which she refers, beautifully, as 'co-managing the shitpile'.

As for romance, well, Carrie Bradshaw and Bridget Jones will have to realize that it is not to be found with men, who 'expect women to adore what men shrink from in horror - themselves'. The male's function is to create sperm and the female's is to 'create a magic world'. Sex is for the mindless, but, as Solanas says, you have to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex. What a hoot.

In her own sweet way, Solanas was taking on the big guns before she took the little gun to Andy. Contrary to Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Derrida, it is not women but men who suffer from lack at every level - real, symbolic and imaginary. Now we can theorize this, as Ronell does, and talk of Solanas's difficulties once 'she was inserted into the phallologocentric crush of the linguistic grid'. Or we can say, 'Go girl, you're right on the money.' For the beauty of Scum Manifesto is that it takes us to its own logical but dented conclusion. The conflict that Solanas advocates is not between men and women. You see, we don't need to eliminate men, as they are doing it all by themselves. The real conflict is between the women of Scum and the nice daddy's girls who have bought into the system.

Scum's terrorism will be a kind of withdrawal from the money system and workforce. Women will 'unwork' until they get fired, in which case they will get another job to unwork at. Eventually the system will collapse, there will be electronic voting on every issue, and no more males will be born, because artificial insemination will take care of reproduction. In the end, however, no more females will be born, either. Solanas makes us uneasy because she understood that one of the major problems for feminism was, and still is, not just 'men', but women's relationship to their own oppression, their willing collaboration in it.

But guys, don't despair. It's really not all bad news. Scum will conduct versions of 12-step meetings to which men can go to recite phrases such as 'I am a turd, a lowly abject turd'. Men who are rational (that includes New Statesman readers, surely?) won't struggle against Scum; they will 'just sit back, relax, enjoy the show and ride the waves to their own demise'. Now whoever said there were no more happy endings?

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

A question of proofs

The proofs of my book have arrived and I've started to go through them. Why, you may ask, am I telling you this? I didn't share with you that on the train WotN and I took to London yesterday there was a guy lying across two seats sleeping, with so much of his body protruding into the aisle that no one could get past without climbing over him. I didn't tell you that I have now packed 32 boxes of cricket books, in preparation for moving them to Cambridge. Though, come to think of it, I have now told you this. Isn't life strange? Anomalies lurk everywhere. The truth can alter just as quickly as that.

Why I'm telling you is (a) because I'm pleased and (b) because I want to spread some advance publicity. Watch this space for further information about:

Crimes against humanity: Birth of a concept - by Norman Geras

To be published by Manchester University Press early next year.

Hand in Glover

We all have a version of the same difficulty. The world being a complicated place, when you try to think about it, and about a lot of different bits of it, you can find that one thing you think here doesn't quite harmonize with another thing you think there, and though this may not matter, because there's something about the difference between the here and the there that makes the lack of harmony benign, it also may matter. The lack of harmony may involve an uncomfortable tension, or a positively painful inconsistency, or even - horror of horrors - a screaming contradiction.

So we all have to balance the ornaments against the flagpoles, and the ornaments and the flagpoles against the many items of furniture, and these items of furniture against one another; and to keep the whole show on the road without its falling down or apart. None of us escapes altogether unscathed. A flagpole drops on your head; you lose a wardrobe; or you can't find the chair that goes with the rest of the set.

Still, some problems are more obvious than others, and it never fails to surprise when one of these gets trotted forth for the zillionth time without its proponent even noticing, or fluttering so much as an eyelash of self-consciouness or unease. Julian Glover may be, not the zillionth, but the zulti-zillionth person to commit himself thus, but he's having it both that equality is to be rejected as a goal and that a 'valid idea of a fair society may be one in which people are given the space and the right to strive for inequality: advantage achieved by their own efforts'; or, as he takes it from John Rawls, 'fair opportunity in a liberal society'. And I just want him or someone else to spell out how you combine inequality as end product with fair opportunity as starting point; how you avoid that the former will be passed on from parent to child so that the next generation can't enjoy fair opportunity, because some children will get from that prior-generation inequality advantages that other children won't have. It's not a deep point, but I've never seen anyone attempt to answer it. Why not just say, I'm against equality and that's flat; so not only will there be inequality of outcome; there must also be an unfair distribution of opportunity to go with it?

Terrorism as caused

There's a longish piece by Glenn Greenwald here discussing cause and effect in the War on Terror. If you take Greenwald at his word, cause and effect is all that he's discussing: it's just about what causes terrorism, so he assures us; it's not about the moral assessment of terrorism. This topic, of course, is now so thoroughly well-rehearsed as to have become like stale cheese. But since the discourse of would-be pure explanatory understanding never lets up, it remains necessary to respond to it from time to time. And my own brief response to Greenwald is: pull the other one.

Expanding on this a little bit, I would invite you to consider three things. First, consider the balance of Greenwald's piece. He has one sentence telling his readers, 'As always, the issue is not justification - it is inherently unjust to deliberately target civilians with violence - but causation' [his emphasis]; and, aside from it, he has paragraph after paragraph that reads like this:

It's one thing for Americans to argue that we have the right to engage in these actions, that we are justified in doing them, or that we somehow are doing Good Things for Muslims with our bombs and drones even though these primitive ingrates don't realize it. But it's another thing entirely to act shocked, surprised or confused when our endless (and still-escalating) stream of bombings, invasions, occupations, and other means of control in their part of the world end up provoking a desire to retaliate and return the favor.

How is it possible to read matter of the above sort without seeing some kind of effort of moral persuasion at work in it?

Second, it's not difficult to identify what kind. Even if it is no part of Greenwald's intention to justify terrorism, the way he writes plainly does have an effect of mitigation. The terrorist may be wrong to practise terror, but if it is 'we' who have provoked his desire to retaliate...? Along with much more of this kind, Greenwald even says that the reaction of the terrorist is 'inevitable'.

Third - and not the least important for being a statement by omission, so to say - consider the selectivity of this kind of 'liberal' hymn to political causation. It only ever focuses on very particular cases of causation. However, causation is everywhere. For example, the use by democratic governments of torture and rendition is also, for its part, caused. How many times have you ever read from anyone of Glenn Greenwald's cast of mind an article in which it was said just in one sentence that torture wasn't justified, but then across paragraph after paragraph that we had to take account of the way in which terrorism and the threat of terrorism caused those who favoured the use of torture to take the steps they did take in changing the definitions, lowering the restraints, giving noxious legal advice on the matter, and so on? From liberals, this doesn't happen (unless I've been missing something); and it's quite right that it shouldn't happen. If it did happen, it would be called what it was, torture apologetics.

Compulsory cover-up

It's the longtime position of this blog, defended over and again, that human rights and the demands of secularism entail that those women who wish to wear the burqa in public should be free to do so. It follows from the same moral premises, however, that others must also be free to dress as they please in public, without having to respect religious beliefs which they don't share. Julie Szego, in the Age, discusses a breach currently being made in this principle in Australia, with 'a religious dress code mandatory at a public venue'. Her article is about swimming sessions at municipal pools, for which, as she puts it, 'human rights laws [are] producing outcomes that restrict rights'. Szego concedes that there are some good arguments for the restriction. There are women keen to swim who wouldn't be able to enjoy the benefits of doing so without the dress-code-restricted swimming sessions. She points, at the same time, to the way in which the sessions can affect others of different sensibility:

"I've spoken to a lot of women; they don't want this," Women's Better World president Mandy Ahmadi told the Dandenong suburban newspaper, flagging her campaign to overturn the ruling. "Enough is enough... why run from the Taliban to come to this?"
.....
[W]hat about the young Muslim girl who is beginning to question some aspects of her religious heritage, and wants the same room to move as the daughters of these "tolerant" folk?

(Thanks: JN.)

Rekindled

Howls of email outrage have been coming my way in response to that Luddite post of mine about the Kindle. Not since I supported the Iraq war have I been so vigorously denounced.

OK, not really. But many friends have written to express their dismay or perplexity at my benighted attitude - or merely to remonstrate with me and point out the advantages of the aforesaid golden resource. I have been urged to 'get with it'; to 'think about how amazing it is to have an entire library of favorites in your pocket'. I console myself with the message I received - against the current - that some of my words celebrating the old-style book are to be printed on a card and placed on a wall somewhere in a house in Dublin.

A mea culpa, anyway. I may have misled some readers by way of the assumption, not explicitly stated in my post though I think pretty close to the surface there, that to have a Kindle would mean displacing my books ('think of no longer having them'). This was a conceit adopted to explain the, er, backward-looking attachment. But in order to placate everyone who wrote to put me right, let me say: yes, I know one can have both books and a Kindle; and yes, I can see all the wonderful advantages of the electronic thingie. Still and all, long live the book that's made of paper.

The nameable society

The architects of the 'big society' have had trouble encapsulating it in a slogan, if Ian Birrell is to be believed. They know what they think the thing is; they're just not sure what to call it.

At its core, the big society is an attempt to connect the civic institutions that lie between the individual and the state - and these range from the family and neighbourhood to churches, charities, libraries, local schools and hospitals. It is born out of recognition that our centralised state has become too big, too bureaucratic and just too distant to support many of those most in need of help, and that it deters people from playing a more active role in public life.

In political terms, this means passing power to the lowest level possible: radical public service reform, so that schools, social services, planning and even prisons are more responsive to the needs of those using them; and social action, to encourage more people to play a role in society. Not just charities, but neighbourhood groups, workers' co-operatives, social enterprises and, yes, businesses. [Italics added by me - NG.]

Puzzling that they've been unable to come up with anything better than 'big' when the central idea is, whatever else you may think of it, so obvious. The active society? The self-reliant society? Not necessarily all that catchy, but at least stating what's intended.