"Gallowaying" Galloway

I've always found it slightly unfair that Robert Fisk should be singled out as the eponym of the verb meaning "to deconstruct or demolish a specious argument using point-by-point responses" - and no, this doesn't mean that Mr. Fisk is especially skilled in such matters; it means that he is the frequent target of such treatment, for he is an idiot. Unfortunately for him, "fisk" actually sounds like a verb: it has that transitive, transitional sense about it and is pleasantly conjugable (fisks, fisked, fisking, fisker, fiskage, etc.), so he's probably stuck with it. You couldn't really say the same of "Galloway", which is a shame, since George seems to be trying desperately hard to have his own verb coined in the image of "fisk".

Writing in the Guardian (where else?) on Wednesday, which is odd in itself since you wouldn't think a national newspaper, even one so disreputable and degenerate as the Guardian, would willingly give gangway to the ravings of someone who has previously advocated treasonous acts in public, George decides to stick it to all those who don't get their kicks fawning before tinpot tyrants with what he doubtless fondly imagines to be a "robust" defence of the nascent Venezuelan dictatorship led by Hugo Chàvez. "These orchestrated attacks on Chàvez are a travesty," declaims his headline, and right there in the byline, before he's even started the article proper, he's using the "neocons" buzzword, confident that merely by invoking that dread cabal he will be seen to be on the side of the angels.

The chilling Oliver Stone film Salvador got a rare airing on television this week. It was a reminder of a time when, for those on the left, little victories were increasingly dwarfed by big defeats - not least in a Latin America which became synonymous with death squads and juntas.

Admittedly, the death squad is not commonly associated with communism. I suppose when you're chasing the kind of body-count that communism can claim, yer basic death squad seems a little feeble. A purge is probably more likely to get the job done; failing that, a famine. And this explains your general point. It was a reminder of a time when people were so horrified by the results of collectivism that they went too far the other way - or what they thought was the other way, but which turned out to be essentially the same way. The difference between you and me, George, is that you claim to disapprove of one method of curtailing individual freedom - the military junta - while actively endorsing another - communism - merely on the grounds, I can only surmise, of their respective economic outlooks. I abhor them both.

How different things seem now. Yesterday US Vice-President Dick Cheney came uncomfortably close to the reality of Afghan resistance to foreign occupation. On the same day Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez delivered a mightier blow to the neocon dream of US domination, announcing an extension of public ownership of his country's oil fields - the richest outside the Middle East.

It's not "Afghan" resistance, it's the Taliban - another crowd of violent, repressive obscurantists with whom you throw in your lot merely because they hate the Great Satan (c.f. Saddamite Iraq, Cuba, the Soviet Union, whose fall you have described as the biggest catastrophe of your life). It is they who are the foreign occupation, hailing as most of them do from either Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.

I'd also like to know how Chàvez' "extension of public ownership of his country's oilfields" (an agreeable euphemism for theft at the point of a gun) is in any way a "mighty blow" to the "neocon dream" (there's that word again; it's as though you hope it will have some Pavlovian effect on your readers) of US domination, when the US imports barely 10% of its crude oil from Venezuela - and if, as you seem so facilely certain, the US went to war in the Middle East to secure oil supplies, what does it matter if a Venezuelan personality cult arbitrarily decides, in violation of the rule of law on which you are so keen when it suits you, to "nationalise" their oilfields and stop selling oil to the US? How is that a "mighty blow", again?

Much more is at stake than London mayor Ken Livingstone's welcome oil deal with Chávez, which will see London bus fares halved while Venezuela gets expertise from city hall and a bridgehead in the capital of the US's viceroy in Europe.

I eagerly anticipate the halving of London bus fares. This will return them to the price they were in 2003, a fact which betrays the rapacious fare increases Londoners have endured under the villainous Livingstone, while the provision of services, in the absence of competition which, it is almost universally acknowledged, promotes better performance, has remained miserable. Is this the kind of "expertise" Venezuela stands to get in return for its valuable oil? And why isn't Chàvez using this commodity to improve the lot of his citizens (I use the term advisedly) if he's so committed to the mirage of social justice? Why is he flogging it on the cheap to the UK? Surely what he should be doing is getting the best price possible for it - even if that means selling it to the Great Satan. If he were truly committed to improving the lot of his people, that's what he'd do. But he's a posturing megalomaniac, not a man of the people.

Washington's biggest oil supplier is now firmly in the grip of a social revolution. This month I watched with Chávez as thousands of soldiers, French and British tanks, Russian helicopters and brand new Mirage and Sukhoi fighter bombers passed by: the soldiers chanting "patria, socialismo o muerte" - enough to make any US president blanch. Chávez answered the salute with the words: "the Bolivarian revolution is a peaceful revolution but it is not unarmed".

Venezuela is not Washington's biggest oil supplier. Not in terms of crude, and not in terms of petroleum. And I'm sure sitting there with Uncle Hugo as the military parade passed you by was faintly erotic, but please don't try and persuade us in the same paragraph as you so lovingly describe it that this is a "social" revolution. It is clearly nothing of the kind: it is like Russia's, Cuba's, China's and North Korea's before it. It is a military revolution (so much for your dismissal of "juntas" at the top of your article, Geroge) and a death cult, if we take the soldiers' chant seriously. Chàvez' magnificently paradoxical statement is the icing on the cake. An "not unarmed" revolution is not peaceful. It has no intention of being peaceful. It utilises the classic Marxist technique of systematic ambiguity towards violence, claiming peaceful intentions but clearly prepared for bourgeois resistance to the historical inevitability they proclaim - and once entrenched in power, that same threat of violence will prevail. Peace is not the absence of violence; this is particularly so when the only reason for the absence of violence is that the threat of violence was sufficient to win the day.

The music played throughout the event was the hymn of Salvador Allende's 1970s Chilean government, declaring that the people united will never be defeated. But Chávez's socialism is a good deal more red than Allende's - and its enemies seem no less determined than those who bathed Chile in blood in 1973.

Yes, because socialists never bathed anyone or anywhere in blood, did they?

Despite complete control of Venezuela's national assembly - the opposition boycotted the last elections after being defeated in seven electoral tests in a row - Chávez has been given enabling powers for 18 months to ensure he can pilot his reforms through entrenched opposition from the civil service, big business, the previously all-powerful oligarchy, their vast media interests and their friends in Washington.

Despite complete control? The true application of doublethink, personified by the character Syme in Nineteen Eighty-Four, is the ability to be on some level aware of one's use of doublethink yet still use it such that on a conscious level you believe something entirely different from what you know subconsciously to be the truth. It cannot have escaped your notice that there's a glaring contradiction in this sentence, George. If Uncle Hugo has "complete control" of the assembly (the legitimacy of those seven elections notwithstanding), why on Earth does he need these "enabling powers" (another delicate sidestepping of the facts, but I do see how you couldn't possibly have used the word "decree" when you're valiantly trying to pooh-pooh the notion that Uncle Hugo is a dictator, since decree and dictator have more-or-less the same etymological root) to pilot his "reforms" through "entrenched opposition" blah blah blah conspiracytheoryofsocietycakes? Isn't his "complete control" enough to achieve this? Or is complete control not quite complete enough? This arbitrary rule he has acquired is good for one thing only: tyranny.

Among those friends we must include our own prime minister, who only last year declared Venezuela to be in breach of international democratic norms - though when I pressed him in parliament he was unable to list them.

Really? I spent a good while searching Hansard for this. Hansard has only one reference, ever, that you make to Venezuela, and that was in 1998 in connection with mistreatment of two of your constituents. Hansard has no record of your ever having used the phrase "democratic norms". Hansard has no record of your ever having used the word "Chàvez". Looks rather like your penchant for frivolous, fact-free grandstanding got the better of you again, George.

The atmosphere in Caracas is fervid. The vast shanty towns draping the hillside around the cosmopolitan centre bustle with workers' cooperatives, trade union meetings, marches and debates. The $18bn fund for social welfare set up by Chávez is already bearing fruit. Education, food distribution and primary healthcare programmes now cover the majority for the first time. Queues form outside medical centres filled with thousands of Cuban doctors dispensing care to a population whose health was of no value to those who sat atop Venezuela's immense wealth in the past.

You apparently forget, though, that while this all sounds completely unexceptionable and, nudge-nudge, wouldn't you have to be such a total heartless bastard to dispute the righteousness of any of this, the sad fact remains that it is wealth creation, not socialistic conviction, that funds the welfare state. And Uncle Hugo has just driven any sensible entrepreneur running screaming from Venezuela, taking with him all he can carry and, if he has any sense, setting alight to that which he can't - particularly after those ridiculous antics with the supermarkets and the meat wholesalers last week. And the revenue from cheaply-sold oil will only go so far.

Chávez, who regularly pops over to Havana to check on the health of Fidel Castro, is at the centre of a new Latin America which is determined to be nobody's backyard. Reliable US allies are now limited to death squad ridden Colombia, Peru and Mexico - and latterly then only by recourse to rigged elections.

Sure, so Mexico's elections are rigged because you find their outcome unfavourable - but never let any doubt be cast on those seven election victories Uncle Hugo has won! I can't think of a single party, leader or political entity of any kind, anywhere, ever, which has won seven elections on the trot without a significant degree of "assistance" at the ballot box.

But Chávez's international ambitions are not confined to the Americas. He became a hero in the Arab world after withdrawing his ambassador from Tel Aviv in protest at the bombardment of Lebanon by US-armed Israeli forces last summer, and has pledged privately to halt oil exports to the US in the event of aggression against Iran. This all represents a challenge to US power which, if Bush was not sunk in the morass of Iraq, would be at the top of his action list.

It's always comforting when a populist, economically ignorant leader has "ambitions". In fact, if one were to review the history of government ambition of any political stripe, one would, I think, have to conclude that it is invariably bloody.

And I'm not sure what kind of a recommendation the esteem of the Arab world (or more accurately a certain sect of the Arab world) is supposed to be, given that that sect of the Arab world celebrated the fall of the Twin Towers (as, no doubt, you did, secretly); it is essentially the mediaeval, tribalist respect accorded a local strongman after a wanton display of strength. You overlook, magnificently, the fact that Israel was retaliating for an unprovoked act of war constituted by the kidnapping of two of its soldiers; you overlook the fact that Israel was not attacking Lebanon but an unelected, widely unsupported minority terrorist faction operating out of the southern territories of Lebanon, funded and directed by Iran precisely to provoke Israel, and committing the gravest war crimes imaginable by placing military assets in civilian areas to maximise the Lebanese body-count; ... but, of course, you do not overlook the provenance of the ordnance with which Israel exercised its right to defend itself against the sworn enemies by whom it is almost entirely surrounded. Let's take a break for a West Wing moment:

SAM
You mind my asking how the meeting with the Chinese ambassador went?

BARTLET
Well, how do you think it went?

SAM
I think they said if Taiwan tests the Patriots, they'll start their exercises.

BARTLET
That's right, except they didn't call them Patriots. What did they call them?

SAM
US-made Patriots.

BARTLET
Right.

When a show as fluffy and left-wing as The West Wing is making my point for me, you're in a real muddle, George. Back to your drivel:

Not that his supporters are marking time. The mendacious propaganda that Chávez is a dictator and human rights abuser is being spread with increasing urgency by the Atlanticist right and their fellow travellers, such as leftie-turned-neocon Nick Cohen who told his London newspaper audience last week that Livingstone's relationship with Chávez was making him think of voting Tory.

We've already established that you avoided using the word "decree" precisely because you realise that he is, in effect, a dictator. He is unchallenged and unopposed, and his word is law. That's a dictator. He rules by decree. That's a dictator. He's in the process of building up his personality cult and shutting down all means of sedition. That's a dictator. It is equally plain that he is a human rights abuser. The tradition of property rights is among the most fundamental of human rights, and is in fact a guarantor of other rights - if we cannot "own" ourselves, what is the point in claiming other rights? Yet Uncle Hugo is merrily trampling all over property rights. There's a reason they're the first to go when tyranny looms. They're the foundation of a free society. Get rid of them and the rest of your task is that much easier.

I see you're using your favourite swearword again, too. It's not an argument in itself, you know. And the parallels between Marxism and neo-conservatism are rather interesting. Both, for example, turn on the delusion of historical inevitability, part of what Popper called historicism. You should maybe read about it.

Chávez's decision not to renew an expired licence for an opposition television station involved in a coup attempt - there are plenty of others - is being portrayed as the beginning of the death of democracy. It's as if Country Life's diatribes against the fox hunting ban were taken as irrefutable proof of totalitarianism in Britain.

When a leader who has recently awarded himself absolute power, including the right to alter his country's constitution and make himself president for life, starts arbitrarily banning unfavourable TV stations (let's not pretend that the decision "not to renew" the expired licence is in any way conventional behaviour in a free society), he is clearly seeking to consolidate power by removing or silencing as many opposing voices as he can. He is undermining the independence of the press by forcing them to give him more favourable coverage if they want to avoid being nationalised. A free press is essential for those human rights you're so confident aren't being undermined.

And, needless to say, the fox-hunting ban is not on its own proof of totalitarianism in Britain. But you beg the question; the arbitrary criminalisation of perfectly legal activities is a small part of a totalitarian ethos, as the most cursory of glances at the history of Nazi Germany will amply demonstrate. That was, after all, where fox-hunting was first banned.

The so-called "dictator" Chávez is nothing of the kind. He has won election after election, validating his radical course. Still the fear of a coup - such as in 2002 when Chávez was removed and imprisoned for three days before millions descended to the presidential palace to reinstate him - is everywhere. One Englishman abroad who welcomed the 2002 coup as the "overthrow of a demagogue" was the foreign office minister Denis MacShane - a humiliating correction had to be issued following Chávez's restoration. That tale underscores the importance of the links being forged between revolutionary Caracas and anti-war London. Chávez is well aware that the people were defeated in Chile, the fascists allowed to pass in Republican Spain. Just as in Venezuela, the defence against counter-revolution lies with the poor and the working people who are shaping the world they want; so too must all those internationally who want to see this ferment reach its potential rally to Venezuela's side.

Yawn. You've said all this stuff already. Bored now.

The Elephant in The Room

Sorry, I know it's a cliché. Just be grateful I'm not about to start banging on about "global warming". (The boy Tremayne at Samizdata has a rather amusing little vignette skewering Hollywood's dreary obsession with green causes.)

No, the elephant to which I refer is the one that goes unmentioned in this Sunday Times piece. Apparently, we're entering another golden age of the super rich. Millions are being made and ostentatiously spent every day. Champagne, Porsches, hedge funds, private equity, blah blah blah idlerichcakes. The point of the piece is that whereas the last time this kind of money-making was prevalent, apparently in the Victorian era (like, not the Eighties? Come on, surely we haven't exhausted the Eighties' bogeyman potential yet?), when the super-rich were possessed either of a sufficiently strong social conscience or a sufficiently well-developed sense of preservation to do a great deal of charitable work, this time around no-one's giving anything away (except Bill Gates, of course).

There are two reasons for this. One of them, that poverty is these days to a large extent relative as opposed to absolute, the article notes, in passing, before ignoring it and getting back to the point of the piece, which is subtly to warn that rich that unless they start ponying up they can expect another revolution, because God knows everyone deserves to share in others' success, right? So far so predictable (it is staggering to me that certain "progressive" friends of mine consider the Sunday Times unacceptably Tory in character). The other is not mentioned at all, despite the article running some 3,200 words.

It is, of course, the welfare state. In the Victorian era there was still the concept of noblesse oblige, the idea that one indeed had a responsibility to help those less fortunate than oneself. But the general feeling that the nobles weren't feeling sufficiently obliged led inexorably to the establishment of the welfare state, and the consequent eradication of the custom, long passed down the generations, of charitable work or donation. The metacontext these days tells us that the state will do all the work - after all, it taxes the rich enough. Is it any wonder that they have simply lost the habit of charity?

Shit, get BSG off the ceiling!

My all-TV-all-the-time lifestyle continues - certainly all the time I don't have anything better to do, that is. Since my House post I've watched nearly all of the new series of Battlestar Galactica, two-and-a-half seasons of it. This is not something I necessarily thought I would ever find myself doing, based as BSG is on that total acid-casualty of a series from 1978 of the same name, in which space pilots wear suede jackets (in space), the units of time are ostentatiously different for no apparent reason, everyone says "by your command", like, the whole time and whenever a Cylon was on screen they had to get hold of another 750 spotlights to shine at his head so that it would have hundreds of pinpricks dancing on it at all times. Quite what sense of unease or dread this last was supposed to attach to the humourless killing machines remains unclear.

Thankfully, new series exec-prods Ronald D. Moore and David Eick were able to deduce that underneath all that foolishness was the germ of a decent story waiting to be rescued from its prison of kitsch and kite-high writers. Out went the suede jackets and laser guns; in came the rather more realistic military dress and projectile-based firearms. Out, mercifully, went a system of time-notation featuring centons, sectons and yahrens (how foolish the actors must have felt delivering these lines) - although the slightly arch faux-swearword "frak" has been retained; conjugated exactly like "fuck" (including "motherfrakker", although I've yet to hear it used as a noun), it theoretically allows dialogue to be slightly more realistic to the setting yet still get past the network censors. Unfortunately in practice it renders allegedly "realistic" dialogue lumpen, since it always intrudes on the flow of the words and reminds you that you're watching a TV show. (In Iran, apparently, until 1994 the film censor was blind. Likewise, these days Standards and Practices seem to be deaf.) Apart from a single homage instance, the vaguely fellatial phrase "by your command" is also absent; the Cylons are CG; technology's outdated even by our standards because the Cylons are all t3h l33t hAx0Rz, and Starbuck and Boomer are women (although Starbuck still contrives to have less hair in the new version).

Sundry other changes give this new BSG its greatest advantage over its predecessor: because the Cylons can now mimic human form, and have twelve humanoid models, each model having many copies, each copy having a unique consciousness, the show plays on themes of mistaken identity and psychosis for both human and Cylon. In particular Gaius Baltar, formerly the willing traitor, is in the new show tricked by the scheming (and never knowingly overdressed) Number Six, who manipulates him on the home planet Caprica to give herself access to defence computers, gives her life to save him in the ensuing nuclear holocaust and haunts him throughout the series, either as Baltar's guilty subconscious or as a result of Cylon chicanery in his head - we're never sure. Meanwhile, her consciousness downloaded into an identical new body, her fellow Cylons come to know her as Caprica Six, and she is often at odds with the other Sixes.

BSG is also ripe with allegory for these post 9/11 times - although gratifyingly, and by no means expectedly, it is not prepared simply to gloss and snark and take cheap shots. It takes pains to acknowledge that often the military is right, the the decisions it takes are hard and its task thankless, and it's never shy to show the unfortunate consequences of a populist, pacifist decision where other shows might be content with pat platitudes. Plus it has Edward James Olmos, best know to me as Judge, soon to be Justice, Roberto Mendoza from Season 1 of The West Wing. That's enough gravitas for anyone, and he brings a vital degree of sympathy to what could easily have been a distinctly fascict portrayal of Adama.

I'll catch up with the Sci-Fi Channel's transmission schedule some time this week. Next stop, Roswell. This one seems a little B-List, but we'll see.

It's for your own good and you've got it coming.

Anyone continuing to believe that this government any longer considers itself accountable to the people that elected it - in fact has ever considered itself accountable to the people that elected it - is very clearly soft in the head.

Several years ago, despite howls of entirely legitimate protest from almost everyone that the law would directly affect, and with the only support coming from people whose lives would not be altered by it one whit, this government passed a law banning (or, in retrospect, attemping to ban) hunting with hounds. Its justification for this (as distinct from its actual reason, which was indisputably class vengeance) was that it was apparently the democratic will of the people that the "barbaric" activity be outlawed. Who was this government, went the rhetoric (when it wasn't pushing the envelope of sanctimonious anthropomorphism), to stand in the way of the will of the people? This despite the very obvious fact that most of the people that willed it so didn't know the first thing about the evolution of the practice or the function it performed; still less did they care about its correspondence with the laws of nature (it requires a spectacular moralistic contortion to claim that hunting an animal, which may therefore escape, is more cruel or unnatural than shooting it in the head from a distance or setting a snare for it): the people knew best and that was all there was to it.

The lamentable Douglas Alexander last week gave the lie to that notion in memorable fashion. Presently, this government aims to implement a "road pricing scheme", or "movement tax" to those of us not afflicted with the Newspeak disease. The justification for this, as again distinct from the actual reason, is that our roads are too congested and there's all that nasty carbon to think about. (The first is meaningless, since no-one holds a gun to our heads and makes us go out on the roads. It is drivers' choice to drive. As for the second, China has over 30,000 coal-fired power stations. I wonder how long Britain's drivers would have to sit in traffic jams with their engines running to match the carbon output of just one of those, even assuming that carbon is the bogeyman the watermelons would have us believe it is.) Meanwhile, over on Tony's petitions site, someone set up a petition calling on him to scrap the planned road pricing scheme, which at the time of writing has received 1,594,909 signatures and is due to close tomorrow. By comparison, the next most popular petition, in the equally worthy cause of scrapping inheritance tax, has received 73,820 signatures, or less than 1/20th the number.

But Mr Alexander knows better. He has already announced that it doesn't matter how many signatures the petition gets: it won't make any difference. The scheme will go ahead. He knows what's good for us, see, and all of a sudden the democratic will of the people counts for nothing. Let's not forget that when it comes to actually going to a website and signing a petition, you can take it as read that most people can't be bothered. A good rule of thumb is to reckon that for everyone who bothers to sign a petition, five others are of the same opinion but never get round to signing. The opinion of the thick end of 10,000,000 people, in other words, is about to be marginalised by a junior minister.

Clearly, the democratic will is only respected to the degree to which it enables this government to practise class warfare. Plus ça change....

NO! No, I won't have that! There's a place in Eastbourne!

Reading this excellent post at Samizdata, I chanced to follow the link for the Black Book of Communism. Inevitably, I ended up looking for a paperback edition, given that the choice is between paying £42 for the hardback from Amazon.co.uk, or $30 for the hardback from Amazon.com and making up the difference in iniquitous import taxes. Having googled "black book communism paperback" I chanced upon this rather hysterical page belonging to the Maoist Internationalist Movement, whose members I can only assume are greatly enjoying their trip back to 1976.

In their cosy parallel universe in which Karl Popper never published The Open Society and its Enemies and Friedrich von Hayek never published The Road to Serfdom (or perhaps the members of the MIM are actually enjoying a trip back to 1942), there is nothing laughable about referring unironically to "the bourgeois press"; there is no savage irony to their putting freedom in inverted commas. Whatever - self-delusion is like a warm shroud for the tenacious adherents to a dishonoured and discredited political dogma that has turned so many lives to ashes. They can keep their outdated, meaningless rhetoric - and they can continue to pay some big capitalist telecommunications company for the privilege of disseminating it on the web.

But in among it all is possibly the funniest thing I've seen yet this year - in a bleak, black, Black Book of Communism way, of course. The author is protesting that during translation a symbol meaing "per thousand" was interpreted as "per cent" and that consequently the book has "[overestimated] deaths by a factor of 10". Still unironically (I can only assume), he goes on to say that this is why the book is so famous - the "claim that communism killed 100 million".

The Maoist Internationalist Movement wishes to make it perfectly clear that their political ideology did not, in fact, kill 100 million people, but a mere 10 million. Much better. I think there comes a point when the number of deaths involved becomes meaningless, and it's probably at less that 10 million, but for the sake of argument: 10 million people is still 100,000 people per year for the whole of the 20th century - and since communism lasted essentially from 1917 to 1989, what is sometimes called the Short Century, that figure rises to just shy of 140,000 people per year. That's 380 people per day. More than 15 people per hour. More than a person every four minutes for 72 years - that is what the MIM wants the Harvard University Press to acknowledge while they ramble on about "self-censored bourgeois 'freedom'". Can you say cognitive dissonance?

Still, it has put me in mind of a classic moment of comedy. In the Waldorf Salad episode of Fawlty Towers, Basil is getting chewed out by an obnoxious (though ultimately correct) American fellow, who states that, "What I'm suggesting is that this place is the crummiest, shoddiest, worst-run hotel in the whole of Western Europe!" To which the dotty old Major, staunch in his defence of Basil, interjects, "NO! No, I won't have that! There's a place in Eastbourne!"

Cottage Industry

It's been all TV, all the time for me recently. Such is my backlog of shows to watch (I'm on to my sixth 25-disc DVD cake, and still have stuff in the second that I've yet to see. That's not to mention the 120GB HD in my downloading machine and the 80GB HD in my watching machine - yes, they're different - that are both also full) that I've had to step it up from merely three or four eps a night before bed - I've had to start much earlier, breaking only for dinner. I'm determined to greet the start of the new US TV season in September with nothing outstanding to watch.

It's Rapidshare's fault, of course - Rapidshare and BitTorrent. A Rapidshare premium account is a dangerous thing for someone as helplessly addicted to long story arcs as I am. I watched Invasion in sodding HRHD, for example - High Resolution HDTV, 700MB per episode: 17GB for a 22-ep season. Good stuff it was, but the knowledge that you get another 3,000MB every day from Rapidshare just means that you end up scouring the web for forums with rapidshare links for TV shows. I found some good ones, downloaded some stuff I'd never heard of that came well recommended - now I've got to watch it all.

Not falling into that last category is House. I've been aware of House since midway through its first season, and continued to download it despite having watched the first few eps and then not stuck with it. It was good, but had the feel of a strict procedural which makes for a tedious "monster/crime/case/disease of the week" feel which plagues much American TV since the networks are unshakeably convinced that their audience comprises exclusively drooling morons incapable of remembering story threads week to week. This fatuous assumption having been comprehensively blown out of the water by the success of 24, not to mention later seasons of Buffy and Angel, the networks unsurprisingly insisted that their showrunners continue to waste the potential for complex, involved stories of episodic television and instead make standalone eps (see Season 5 of Angel after the astonishing achievement of Seasons 2, 3, and 4).

It took several comments on the front page of Television Without Pity to alert me to the fact that House had not been condemned to this fate. So I watched nearly two seasons in a fortnight, and am glad to say it lives up to the promise of the early episodes, promise that nonetheless seemed destined to drown in procedurality. We still meet the case of the week before the credits (a formula from which the show has deviated only two or three times), but increasingly less screen time is devoted to its solution in the episode, the writers evidently realising what a rare and brilliant combination of character and actor they have in House and Hugh Laurie and therefore preferring to get their money's worth rather than simply having him standing around regurgitating medical terms.

However, the show nearly tripped up recently. Spoilers follow, for those thousands of House fans beating a path daily to this blog who might not be entirely up-to-date. I say "tripped up" - I'm sure nothing of the kind was ever likely, but the audience only realises this at the very end of the arc. House becomes the target of a vendetta by a policeman whom he humiliated, leaving him in an exam room with a thermometer up his rectum with no intention of returning (this before House knew his occupation, of course). The cop, ably (ie hatefully) played by David Morse, responds by exploiting House's belligerence and his Vicodin dependency to bring him within a whisker of disbarrment and jail. No sane TV show, of course, would ever send its main character to jail for more than a night, which is exactly what happens, because "at the last minute" the principal witness against House alters her statement just enough to derail the prosecution.

The point is, we know House is a prick. He's rude, and insensitive (the recapper at TWoP, whose name is Sara M, is convinced House is racist because he doesn't overlook that fact that one of his assistants (whom she memorably calls The Cottages) is black. He's not racist, Sara - it's just your hairtrigger cultural assumptions. If he were racist, he wouldn't employ Foreman, or he would pay him less than the others, or he would routinely denigrate his ability as a doctor on the basis of his skin colour. None of these he does. I notice you don't get upset when House mocks Chase's Australian accent. This is no less racist, but because Chase isn't black, you let it slide), and he's a drug addict - but we also know that that is how he functions and how he performs his difficult tasks better than anyone else. The risk the show ran, or appeared to be running, was that it seemed House was going to get his comeuppance, so beloved of Hollywood hackery, for his abrasiveness and unorthodoxy. By comeuppance, I don't mean that House would have to go to jail - as already noted, that's not an option for a TV show. But what I didn't - with a passion, I didn't - want was to have House chastened, muzzled or emasculated by the experience. So the sight of him, fresh out of rehab, knocking back Vicodin in the cell in which he was spending the night for contempt of court, was a tremendous relief. I would have had to stop watching the show otherwise.