In Every Way, Shape and Form

This used to be my blog. Well, I suppose it still is. It's over three years since I said anything on it, though. But it's still mine, and it's here I come now, not exactly to vent but simply to get my thoughts down in such a manner as I might not be the only person to read them.

My life has changed quite a bit since I quoted Sports Night in that last post. The cliché of the blogger is the unemployed malcontent, and that was more or less me. Now I'm an employed malcontent, although the context of my dissatisfaction has changed somewhat.

I have made an awful lot of mistakes in my life (see: unemployed malcontent), but there was a time recently when it seemed that they'd all be worth it, because if I had managed to avoid making just one of them, any one of them, I would not have been working where I was working on the morning of October 13th, 2009, when without any warning at all into my life breezed quite the most amazing girl I'd ever met: smart, beautiful, powerfully sexy, funny, warm, compassionate, kind-hearted, fiercely loyal, possessed of an intoxicating independence of spirit, an intoxicating smile, intoxicating jet-black hair, and an intoxicating pair of norks. We could barely seem to spend enough time together, and in due course the moment arrived, with that air of powerful inevitability that all such moments have, when we got drunk, kissed and told each other how much we liked each other.

Then: nothing. And to be fair her reasons for that were unimpeachable, but before she finally told me what they were there was an evening when she had sat at home, under no pressure, and calmly sent me a text where she told me that she thought I was perfect for her in every way, shape and form. So you can imagine my surprise when it turned out that the reasons she gave for not wanting to get together with a guy she had described in those terms apparently didn't apply to someone else, with whom she remains.

I like to think I'm reasonably fair minded, but I just don't understand this at all. And apparently my lack of understanding, and desire for same, ideally through having a reasonable, mature, meaningful and adult discussion with her about the choices she made which have impacted on me so hugely, is of no concern to her, or is at least significantly less important than her terror of rousing her boyfriend's stupid, juvenile jealousy, which in turn implies a mistrust of her that she should find roundly offensive, given that even the most emotionally illiterate Neanderthal could probably surmise after about five minutes with her that she is, as I said, fiercely loyal.

So now we just work together and pretend nothing ever existed between us. That is the hardest thing I've ever had to do. The best bit is, he works there too.

It's a warning, not an instruction manual

There's a moment in Sports Night where Isaac Jaffe, the managing editor, figures out that an unfavourable quote about the show attributed to a source within the parent company came from the person who has been pretending to help him all day. He says, "JJ, if I find out that quote came from you I'll own your ass. I mean I'll absolutely own it."

This is a fairly common expression these days. In my opinion it came from computer games, where victory in a given arena or map or level enabled the victor to claim he "owned" the arena, or map, or level. Mutating as slang is prone to do, it soon came to be applied not to the venue but to the vanquished opponent, who "gets owned".

It is hardly surprising that Gordon Brown is apparently unfamiliar with this particular sense of "own". He is shaky enough on the original sense of ownership, poisoned by Proudhon as he is. Yet he has evidently come across the phrase "I'll own your ass" recently, because this week he announced that henceforth he did, in fact, own all our asses.

That is to say, his ownership of our asses would be presumed, unless we actively took steps to reclaim them for ourselves. As an idea this is so self-evidently totalitarian in conception that I'm staggered that even so unreconstructed an old statist as Gordon Brown could bring himself to announce it, let alone have the breathtaking neck to try to dress it up as a reclaimed liberty. (Mind you, that strategy has been handsomely successful in the past.) But, of course, he wouldn't be alone: he'd have the usual cheerleaders.

But I guess you can shop there.

I don't go home for Christmas. That is to say, I don't return to the town of my birth to spend it with my family, since only my father remains there. The rest of us all live in London, so he comes to us.

I'm glad about this. My schoolfriends (from that hellish provincial market-town grammar school) have nearly all moved to London too, over the years, and they never seem to relish the trek back to the shires for Christmas. A small village on the outskirts of a small town is extremely dull whether or not you've come to visit your family. Even the relatively populous conurbation to which I would return holds little in the way of interest for me now, beyond housing my father.

In fact I was there last weekend. Two-and-a-half hours on a weekend train through grim afternoon giving way to oppressive dusk puts me on the familiar platform, and I surrender immediately to autopilot, barely thinking about how to get out of the station on which I've not set foot for five years. In the tunnel under the tracks I remember how this was the final part of a journey I made every Friday night when my grandmother, blessed beloved, lay dying. Out of habit, or something deeper - muscle memory perhaps - I light a cigarette as I make the double doors, and opposite, drearily unchanged, is the station hotel, and I catch my first blast of authentic accent: "Cost gezza nand, youth?"

My sister meets me. She went ahead the day before, and has already run out of patience with the city. She describes coming back here as like putting her life on hold. It's impossible, I have found, to retain long-term antipathy for this city, but when you pull into it on a miserable December evening, not even the fact that it was your childhood and adolescent stamping ground can disguise its unremitting bleakness and its classic industrial town decline. Not even being able to do the accent like the native I am can make me feel at home here any more. So disconnected from real life do I feel that when D rings, her beautiful cut-glass vowels sound like another language, and her easy metropolitanism seems like another country. From then on I'm just riding it out, counting the hours to get back on the train.

Of course, had I known the disgusting fucking mess Virgin had made of that train, with their relentless overbooking, I would have looked forward to it a little less. Still.

Fixed terms and fixed wisdom

Chancing to watch Question Time last night (nowadays rarer than a post on this blog), I became enraged during a discussion on elections and term limits. Much gangway was given to the usual blasts of hoofy self-righteousness about "the gift of the Prime Minister" and related plaints concerning his use of the timing of an election to his advatange. Sir Menzies Campbell, in his usual role as Question Time's human amphetamine, proffered a lengthy speech in favour of fixed terms which went drearily unchallenged. A member of the audience, evidently hoping to galvanise the other panellists to the same level of agitation as Sir Menzzzzzies (I know that makes no sense as a spoken pun), asked if there were arguments against fixed term elections. Here, I thought, was George Osborne's chance to prove he knew something. Depressingly, Osborne offered only a mathematical argument: that occasionally elections might be too close and who wants weak governments to hang around for four years when you can have another poll? This was rightly swatted away by Dimbles, who pointed out that coalitions must be built rather than telling the electorate that they got it wrong and they'll just have to have another go.

No-one mentioned the following: that fixed terms make politics much more expensive and much less productive. When the Prime Minister calls an election, as far as I know it must happen within six weeks. That is, within six weeks of an election being called, a new government is being formed. This keeps campaigns short and cheap. If, on the other hand, on the day of an election everyone knows exactly when the next one will be, four years thence, then campaigns will get longer and longer, and more and more expensive. The more expensive campaigns get (a cost that is met by the parties themselves, of course), the more the parties will be in the debt of the rich people who fund them: the more they will be beholden to them. Less time to concentrate on the job they were elected to do, and more corruption in the doing: this is the result of fixed term elections.

The August Placeholder

Well, a little more than that.

This stretches credibility to the limit. Can there really be no-one even tangentially connected to the "War" on Drugs who is prepared to stand up and call this theft? Is the fear of being painted "soft" on crime now so intense that highway robbery is now tolerated as necessary in this tableau of epic futility?

Assuming he gets the money back in a year, and even assuming it doesn't cost him a cent to achieve that, does anyone seriously imagine that the DEA will pay him a year's worth on interest at commercial rates on $24,000? 5% is $1,200. Even if it doesn't cost him anything else, his full and pleasant cooperation with the DEA on that weigh bridge will cost him $1,200 and a year spent proving he isn't a criminal. Way to get the average citizen on your side, DEA, you fuckin' dolts.

Playing catch-up

Another slack summer. I have once again become embroiled in energy-sapping debates with utilitarian friends and have expended considerable keyboard wear on attempts to elucidate my objections to the ban on smoking in "public" places that has recently come into force here: a curiously depressing crusade, particularly when, having stated quite clearly that my objections were meta-legal in nature and not rooted in my being a smoker (for comparison I noted my contempt for the ban on hunting with hounds, which I nurse, and of which I actively support the flouting, despite having never so much as sat on a horse and moreover finding hunting rather unpleasant), the first reply I received asserted that of course I would object: I was a smoker, and if I weren't a smoker I couldn't object. Even when we were able to get past that little reading comprehension stumbling block, the attitudes shown by my friends towards legitimate legal procedure, their faith in democracy as a positive power and consequently their apparently unquestioning acceptance of democracy as sovereign, when taken together, offered a rather bleak picture.

This is also my first post under our new Dear Leader, whose accession highlights once again the procedural flaws in our constitution (such as it is). Constitutionally it is unexceptionable, as many Brown cheerleaders have been at pains to emphasise. We do not elect a PM as such (otherwise he would a President): we elect individual representatives of particular parties and that party with the most elected representatives is invited by the monarch to form a government, and traditionally (though not necessarily), the leader of that party becomes Prime Minister. If the leader of the majority party were to change, so would the Prime Minister, and it cannot be denied either that Brown has precedent on his side under both Labour and Conservative governments.

But technicality is not a strong enough argument. It must be accepted that most people vote for a Prime Minister by proxy. The party leaders are the focus of the national election campaigns; it is they who appear in the party political broadcasts, they who are the subject of vilification by the opposing parties in national advertising campaigns, and they who appear in the print media offering their vision of (of course) a better Britain. When people go to the polls they go with this in mind - certainly closer to the fronts of their minds than are the invariably soporific and anonymous campaigns of their constituency candidates. If they like a party leader, they vote for that party: it would be most illuminating, I suspect, to discover what proportion of those who voted at the last election are actually able to name their MP off the tops of their heads.

This goes double for the Blair government: not only was that administration coincidental with an unprecedented explosion of media access and coverage, which it encouraged and exploited to the full and which served to highlight yet more the role of the Prime Minister and diminish yet further the role of the constituency representative, but also the reforms enacted by Blair and the attitudes entrenched by his style of government (often accused of being presidential, with his contempt for Parliament and his close circle of advisers) have concentrated the focus yet more closely on the Prime Minister alone. In the light of this circumstance, to defend Brown's accession on the basis of its strict constitutional propriety is to dismiss perfectly legitimate concerns about the extent to which he has, in what you might call "real terms", the authority and consent of the people to govern. Wisely, he appears to recognise this, and while many of his acts thus far as PM have most decidedly warranted Simon Heffer's vision of the "Brown terror", he has also taken welcome steps to head off accusations of unmandated power by returning some long-lost authority to Parliament. But he will also know that nothing will solidify his moral authority like winning an election as leader of the Labour party, and the longer he leaves it the weaker he will appear to believe he is. Here, too, though, precedent is on his side, as John Major had practically to be dragged, heels leaving wavy lines on the floor as it were, to Buckingham Palace to seek permission to go to the country, at the very last minute, in 1992, so unconvinced was he of the prospects of a win following his similar accession to PM. Yet win he did, although whether Brown can count on the same degree of indiscipline and incompetence from David Cameron's Tories as Major could from Neil Kinnock's Labour Party is questionable.

And so to Boris. Boris for Mayor. That's the rumour. I would welcome Boris for Mayor (I don't think it would surprise my extensive and devoted readership that I would welcome one of Ken Livingstone's newts as Mayor over Livingstone himself, but I would particularly welcome Boris): he is, as I read recently, one of that rare breed of politician who is not merely tolerated but actively liked. Even people who are essentially lefties (like some of those friends mentioned at the top of this post) like Boris. Although I am not a Conservative, I would far rather see a Conservative Mayor (and government, for that matter) than a Labour Mayor (or government), and Boris I would like to see most of all. The only worry I would have about a Johnson mayoralty is the Olympic Games. It is doubtful whether anyone could rescue the Games from the trough of spiralling expense and the widespread apathy or pessimism into which they have fallen. Livingstone's grubby fingermarks are all over this imminent embarrassing failure, and there's a part of me which would rather like him still to be in office when they happen, just so we can all be quite clear whose fault it is. If Boris were elected in 2008 he would be saddled with the responsibility for someone else's stellar incompetence.

Denying the bleeding obvious

The switch to fortnightly refuse collections has left many people in need of a service that, naturally, the market has begun to provide.

This is the spontaneous order in action. We can't necessarily predict exactly what people will want or need (although in this case it was a fairly easy call that fortnightly rubbish collections weren't going to cut it), but by examining post hoc the behaviour of the market, we can quite well determine to order of events and their motivations. In this instance, we can conclude that people feel that fortnightly rubbish collections are thoroughly inadequate so are prepared to pay privately for extra collections, and that they exist in sufficient number that others are prepared to undertake to provide such a service in the belief that they can meet the costs they will incur and perhaps even make a small profit. The comparative absence of the profit motive serves only to highlight the inadequacy of the fortnightly collection: this service is being offered on environmental and public health grounds.

Naturally, therefore, the head of waste and something called "street scene" in the district has raised his head from his busy work to announce to the world his ignorance of these simple economic concepts: "People living in the district pay council tax to have their waste and recycling dealt with; there really is no need to be paying any extra."

Clearly there is, you dolt. If there weren't, you would be able to point to the fact that no-one is bothering to pay any extra to make up for the shortfall in service. But since people are paying extra to make up for the shortfall in service, your statement is remarkably stupid.

The banners, they'd all flown in the last war

Joss Whedon has been making a bit of noise recently about what he has taken to calling "torture porn". Initially this took the form of a letter to the MPAA requesting that they remove the rating from the film Captivity, the central conceit of which is the abduction and torture of a young woman. At this point, it seems likely that Whedon had not seen Captivity but was, as he makes clear in the letter, objecting simply to the advertising campaign which was occupying large and prominent hoardings all over Los Angeles.

I noticed this at the time, but it didn't interest me a great deal. I'm a great admirer of Whedon's work as a writer, director and creative force behind some of the greatest American TV of the last decade (a parameter into which some of Buffy no longer fits, but heigh-ho. Memento mori) but I don't belong to that peculiar genus of fanboy who will take up arms on an issue merely because someone I admire raises it: in fact I thought it was slightly bogus. In the letter Whedon attempts to head off accusations of censorship by citing his support of the First Amendment (referencing his history as a maker of horror stories) and his distrust of those who recommend banning something "for the good of the people". Then he tramples over the First Amendment and recommends a de facto ban for the good of the people. Removing the MPAA rating from Captivity dramatically reduces the number of US cinemas that are prepared to show the film. Since all the major studios are signatories to an agreement to submit all their films to the MPAA (the process is technically voluntary), the cinema chains they own will not show unrated (or even NC-17) films. Refusing a film a rating is therefore a functional means of restricting it to independent and arthouse cinemas, thereby ensuring that its audience will be minimal. Whedon calls for this action explicitly to protect people: because "this ad [and by implication the film] is part of a cycle of violence and misogyny that takes something away from the people that have to see it."

Yesterday he posted a rather longer tract to the Whedonesque website, discussing initially the "honour killing" of a 17 year old Iraqi girl, Du'a Khalil, and the facts that it was filmed with mobile phone cameras and that the footage was available on CNN, and later drawing this into his theme of torture porn and his continuing quest to have Captivity in some manner banned or censored. This was rather more interesting to me, because of what I consider to be the entirely specious moral equivalence he draws between the practice of killing your daughter or sister or cousin for perceived infractions of a barbaric, mediæval, repressive and misogynist creed and filming it as sport; and the practice of making fictional, nonreal films with some, though by no means all, of the same themes.

Let's, as Michael Howard once began, be clear. I have no disagreement with Whedon when he says that the phrase "honour killing" is a breathtaking oxymoron. There is no honour, and certainly no manliness, in the violent subjugation of women, whatever the religious or anthropological justification. (I am reminded here of a scene in the TV series Nip/Tuck in which a Somali woman has a procedure to rebuild her clitoris following her religiously-motivated mutilation as a girl in "a place where men are such pussies, they have to neuter their women to get a hard-on", as Dr. Troy says.) I offer no demurral, either, of his revulsion concerning the filming, for posterity, pour encourager les autres, of this subhuman act and its subsequent availability on the website of a major news network. (No, I haven't checked it out, and I won't be linking to it.) But I'm afraid that's where he starts to lose me.

I could start a rant about the level to which we have become desensitized to violence, about the evils of the voyeuristic digital world in which everything is shown and everything is game, but honestly, it’s been said. And I certainly have no jingoistic cultural agenda.

Perish the thought, Joss. Let nothing come between you and your relativism. An "agenda" that dares to posit a link between burying a woman up to her neck in sand and throwing rocks at her head, or (say) holding her down at the age of twelve, hacking off her clitoris and sewing her labia shut with coarse twine, and the "culture" (for which read religion) that enthusiastically condones these actions as the natural order of things is, like, obviously nothing more than dumb jingoism and clearly has nothing to do with the contravention of civilised ideals like freedom, justice and individual rights that transcend mere nationalism. We are better than that; let's not be afraid to say it.

Moving on to Captivity, or more accurately its trailer:

The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.

Much of the rest of Whedon's piece seems to grow from this (slightly meretricious) revelation. He takes great exception to the fact that the first words (in the trailer, anyway) that we hear Elisha Cuthbert scream are "I'm sorry."

It's worth knowing, at this point, that Whedon has a great affinity for what he calls "strong women". That phrase is unbearably trite these days, and there was never a time when it didn't by implication dismiss other women not granted such a label as weak and inferior. Contrast with the (both pejorative) uses of "strongman", who is either a circus freak, all brawn and no brains, or a tribal leader, exercising power through fear and impervious to reason from we sophisticated intellectuals: a strong woman is universally a positive thing, so by interpolation a mere "woman" is inferior. To talk of "strong women" these days is to make the same error as Diane Abbott made on This Week on Thursday, when she chose as her moment of the week the fact that Lewis Hamilton, F1's first black driver, had assumed sole custody of the top of the Championship table. Diane is still fighting the battles of the 1970s and so probably thinks that there has been some great conspiracy to keep black drivers out of F1, but the simple fact is that motor racing generally seems to have relatively few black fans. No doubt when he sits in a McLaren, Hamilton is a racing driver first and a black man second, and if I were he I would have found being made part of Diane's superannuated race agenda insulting and patronising. So it is with Whedon and "strong women". Brought up largely by his mother (it's unclear why this was the case), he cites her as a strong influence in his writing and his identification as a feminist, but the battles she was fighting when she brought him up are not the same ones that are being fought now. A woman that some years ago would have merited the epithet "strong" is these days simply a woman.

Anyway. "I'm sorry" sends Whedon off on some riff (well, in music metaphors, more of a slightly disorganised progressive jam that lasts twenty minutes) about how society sees women as wrong, as something that needs to be corrected. This meme is apparently perpetuated despite, as he makes very clear, more than half the population of the world being women. Must be a conspiracy. We don't even know, of course, when or why Elisha screams, "I'm sorry". It probably isn't the first thing she says. It may have been taken completely out of context. She may have done something terrible.

Oooh. No, I don't wish to indicate that she could have done something to warrant or justify her abduction and torture. That's why we'll be on her side, something I can say without ever having seen Captivity. Elisha is the protagonist, she is the focus for the audience's projection. We root for her. But she might still be legitimately sorry about something.

But no. Whedon prefers to assume that she is being made to apologise for being a woman, and as such is merely yet another cipher in the code that runs through society's intellectual and social fabric that suggests women are inferior, manipulative, "morally unfinished". (Er, what?) From here he descends into a mass of contradictions. Misogyny is rife, but misandry doesn't exist (here's a clue: Blogger's spellcheck knows the former but thinks by the latter I meant "Sandra"). Women are tough, the equal of men - but we can't show them being tortured. Where was Whedon's campaign about "taking something away from the people who have to see it" when Hostel and Saw (and sequels ad nauseam) were being released? Ah, these depict the torture of men. Men deserve it.

How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.

Oh boy. As a connoisseur of horror, one would have thought that by now Whedon would have mastered the technique audiences were advised to practise when viewing Last House on the Left: "keep repeating, it's only a movie". For someone as well-versed in the simulacra of film as Joss Whedon so casually to gloss over the differences between the two pieces of footage defies belief. The "upcoming torture-porn" is available for our viewing pleasure because it is not real, and we know it; it was made by consenting adults who weren't harmed, and we know it. The murder of Du'a Khalil is not available for our viewing pleasure. It is available for our viewing horror. It is real, and we know it. A girl is actually losing her life at the hands of her family in casually brutal fashion, and we know it. It documents a grotesque act of repression and retribution for imagined crimes, an act seemingly committed with the full knowledge and consent of what passes for the community or the society in question. It is another appalling testament to the use of violence and fear of a closed society, and if we can bring ourselves to watch it at all we do so with churning stomach and rising fury. We don't sit down with a bucket of Coke and put our feet up.

The irony is that in fighting the last war, as it were, Whedon is just as guilty of patronising women as Diane Abbott is of patronising Lewis Hamilton. Does he think that Elisha Cuthbert was in some way forced to make this film? She's a successful actress who is short of neither a bob or two, nor the means to make more. She made Captivity because she chose to. Is Whedon suggesting that she is misguided or somehow complicit in the imagined subjugation of her sex? Is it not more important that she be free to make a film that he disagrees with, however indefensibly, than that his rather outdated views on gender politics be given sway over art, however unpleasant or transgressive?

You think there's a difference between a reason and an excuse?

Well, yes, actually.

This rather hysterical Grauniad article makes an astonishing admission (astonishing, that is, for the Grauniad) then immediately tries to gloss over it.

The roots of the international conspiracy to mount a bomb attack in the UK,
which was intended to kill and maim as many people as possible and cause
unprecedented disruption, can be traced to a point long before the war in Iraq.

Really? So what you're saying is that when Islamists try to blow us up, it's not because went dictator hunting in Iraq and ended up getting the blame whenever Sunnis and Shias kill each other with that special, indiscriminate bloodthirstiness of which only the truly devout are capable? Indeed not:

Several of the plotters had come together in 2001, some had discussed "hitting"
British targets before the invasion, and at least one had undergone terrorist
training before 9/11.

So the war really has nothing to do with all this? But then, whatever else can be the cause, oh Grauniad? Surely the war in Iraq is responsible for anything and everything? Ah, well, quite:

The war, however, clearly provided the impetus - or at least the excuse - for a
plan to target the UK.

I like that: "the impetus - or at least the excuse". In other words, let's get back to what we do best - ignorantly blaming the war in Iraq for troubles here that have been brewing for up to half a century. Because there's really no difference between a reason and an excuse, right?

Well, just because the guy in Traffic says so, doesn't mean it's the case. There is a difference between a reason and an excuse. An excuse is what you offer when you don't want to give the reason. "The dog ate my homework" instead of "I couldn't be bothered to do it". "My phone was dead" instead of "I knew you'd call, and didn't fancy spending the next hour listening to your self-absorbed dissection of your relationship troubles, so I switched it off". "They were perfectly peaceable until we started gratuitously killing them in Iraq" instead of, oh, gosh, I don't know, "They are fanatical adherents of an acquisitive, repressive, bloodthirsty creed that finds nothing but contempt for the decadence of the Western liberal tradition, and they're still stinging from being kicked out of Spain 500 years ago, and this kind of shit is just the excuse they need to wage their campaign of terror with the tacit approval of the America-hating, Jew-baiting left-wing media."

"But if ALL those shows get canned, we might have a chance."

I've been thinking a lot about the scene at the beginning of the Family Guy episode North by North Quahog, which was the first episode shown after FOX renewed the show in 2005. Typically parodically, the show opens with Peter receiving news of their cancellation. "We just have to accept," he says, "that FOX needs to make room for shows such as Dark Angel; Titus; Undeclared Action; That 80's Show; Wonderfalls; Fastlane; Andy Richter Controls the Universe; Skin; Girls' Club; Cracking Up; The Pitts; Firefly; Get Real; FreakyLinks; Wanda at Large; Costello, The Lone Gunmen; A Minute With Stan Hooper; Normal, Ohio; Pasadena; Harsh Realm; Keen Eddie; The $treet; The American Embassy; Cedric the Entertainer Presents; The Tick; Luis; and Greg the Bunny."

What these shows have in common is that they were all commissioned, produced, aired and cancelled in the time that Family Guy was off the air. A few made it past Season 1 (Dark Angel, for example) but most were cancelled before the end of their debut season, and some (notably Girls' Club) were cancelled after as few as two episodes had been shown.

FOX is notorious for this cavalier, scattergun, moronic approach to TV success. I was personally affected by several of these untimely calculations (Dark Angel, Firefly, Wonderfalls) and read many similar tales concerning other shows. The fabled, unicornesque regular reader of this blog will know that I am the last person to criticise the practices of capitalism, and I accept if a TV show isn't successful, you stop spending money on it: but the problem is, FOX seems to have forgotten how to make a show successful. Apart from 24, now limping towards its sixth season finale and trading heavily on former glories (as I understand it: I don't start watching a season of 24 until it's finished, then I watch the whole season in a weekend), FOX seems to have very little success with scripted drama, and I wonder if their inability to give a show the time and support it needs to build a following has anything to do with this. Again, 24 is the exception, but what better advertising for a show about Americans defeating terrorists than for its excellent first season to start weeks after 9/11?

This week, after airing a mere four episodes, FOX cancelled Drive, the new show from Ben Queen and, more importantly for me, Tim Minear, who along with Jeff Bell gave us those two incredible seasons of Angel, 3 and 4, which were ultimately retconned into one long arc. Minear must be starting to feel personally insulted by FOX, since it did much the same to his Wonderfalls. But here's the point. I do not know this personally, since I don't live in the US, but consensus seems to be that FOX didn't exactly push the boat out advertising Drive. It wasn't on the air long enough for FOX to start bouncing it around the schedules (another favourite ploy to drive viewers away; see also Firefly) and at least they weren't airing the episodes out of order (see, again, Firefly). But they didn't exactly get behind this product they'd spent so much money on. And then they're surprised that nobody's watching?

But even more fundamental than that is this consideration. FOX now has an entirely deserved reputation as a network with no respect for fledgling TV shows or audience expectation, and no concept of audience development. As a number of people on various message boards have said explicitly this week, they keep away from new FOX shows for precisely this reason. No-one wants to get invested in an interesting new TV show that shows considerable potential for future development only to have the Evil Prince of Numbers yank it because they can't sell enough ad space. People who were, all other things being equal, interested in watching a show like Drive were steering clear of it because it was so likely that FOX would cancel it that they felt it wasn't worth bothering with. This is not the way to develop and maintain a loyal audience, FOX, you fucking idiots. Get a grip.

In Soviet Russia, art draws you!

I am, as may perhaps be obvious, more than occasionally embarrassed by the behaviour of people, groups or organisations who are in many ways my ideological stablemates - economically, say, or geopolitically - when the discussion turns to the role in society played by graphic (that is to say "explicit" or "violent") art.

Hayek wrote that the search for meaning is innate: it is an instinct to which we are little more than slaves, much of the time. It is a fundamental component of constructivism (I have covered this before in the context of religion): the search for meaning, the relentless analysis of effects in search of causes inculcates the belief, or more accurately the unconscious assumption, so ingrained as to take on a degree of certainty quite alien to a belief, that design is inherent and that it can thus, quite naturally, be refined if a greater intelligence is brought to bear than has been hitherto.

This search for meaning seems to catch everyone out at one point or another. Most destructively (pun intended) it is in the constructivist economic ethos; for some, as mentioned, it is religion. And some people like to blame art when people go on kill-crazy rampages. Distressingly, as I say, it is often those who avoid the other pitfalls of constructivism who fall for this one.

The Virginia Tech shootings have prompted an entirely predictable rash of debate and recrimination. I do not intend to rehearse the vastly entertaining argument I am having with a friend via email about gun control, my views on which are briefly outlined in this post. It was only a matter of time before some sharp-eyed, dull-witted hack noticed that the pose in which the perpetrator Cho held a gun to his own head in his ridiculous "multimedia manifesto" was remarkably similar to that in which the protagonist of the Korean film Oldboy held a gun to his own head. The notion that perhas there is pretty much only one way in which one can hold a gun to one's own head appears to have escaped him, and many others subsequently.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is not, for once, to indulge my penchant for rambling, self-righteous discouse; rather it is to draw attention (insofar as this blog is at all capable of that) to this excellent article by Sam Leith (which oddly enough had quite a different headline when it appeared in Saturday's paper, something like "You might as well blame the Bible for these shootings". I wonder why that was changed. The constructivists strike again, perhaps?). Mr Leith, despite being, I suspect, a candidate for that select (though very large) group of journalists who owe their career success to something more than innate talent, is nonetheless an exceptionally talented writer, and although he occasionally writes drivel, I am unable to think of where I have seen better repudiated the constructivist view that we are all slaves to the hynpotic ugre to violence that is inherent in violent art.

More cultural doublethink

I'm greatly enjoying the second season of Life on Mars, which I've just started watching. I marvel at the writing of Philip Glenister's character DCI Gene Hunt, for sometimes it seems as though these days the BBC is the kind of place where you'd get excommunicated for even thinking up lines like Hunt's. Despite the fact that they are delivered as it were ironically, through the prism of early 21st Century mores, with a knowing wink to the audience for whom the humour derives (or is supposed to derive) from the exquisite agony of remembering there was ever a time when people were so "unreconstructed", and certainly not from any empathy with the character; despite, in other words, the seal of modern, progressive disapproval being stamped all over Hunt, Glenister has managed to make him a genuinely likeable character whose bluntness merely defines and characterises rather than condemns him. It is not clear to what extent the writers wanted to ignite the audience in a fervour of "progressive" zeal, but to whatever extent it was their intention, they have failed. Audiences like Gene Hunt because he reminds them of a time when the everyday processes of life weren't so stultifyingly micro-managed by the paranoid rigours of political correctness, a time when the police "service" was a police force and a joke was a joke. They have embraced the programme without buying into the myriad PC pieties which pervade it. (Most of them, at any rate: this chap has a different take on thinly-veiled progressivist TV/film.)

But you just can't keep a good progressive agenda down. There have been at least three references to Margaret Thatcher so far, which for a show set in 1973 can only be to provide dramatic irony-derived humour for the 2007 audience. The first two (that I can recall) one might be tempted to let pass: both were essentially the same, that is to say a 1973 character voicing disbelief or disapproval. Hunt scoffs at the general notion ("there will never be a woman Prime Minister as long as I have a hole in my arse") and later his boss, Supt. Woolf, is more specific, reacting with horror when Tyler says "by the time Maggie Thatcher becomes Prime Minister". So far, so what: Hunt is casually sexist and Woolf, for all we know, may be a socialist red in tooth and claw. Neither of them knows the future so their reactions are entirely understandable, even if the writing is somewhat uninspired.

The third time is different. WPC Annie Cartwright, who might as well be a representative figure called Emancipation, recently groundbreakingly (of course) promoted (of course) to WDC by Tyler (of course), reflects, after someone mentions that pretty soon she'll be Commissioner, that she might even become Prime Minister - after all, a woman couldn't do a worse job than the blokes have been doing. Cue laughs all round, then Tyler, the only person in the entire 1973 world who actually knows better, tells Annie that she might live to regret saying that. In other words, Tyler affirms to the expectant audience that yes, in fact, the woman did do a worse job than the blokes had been doing.

This kind of cognitive dissonance is astounding. The entire premise of the show is to highlight the differences between 1973 and 2006/7, to show the degree to which British life has changed in the intervening three decades. The person most directly responsible for those changes is Margaret Thatcher, in the teeth of opposition from almost everyone, including many in her own party. That Life on Mars can present those changes as overwhelmingly positive (as it does when it invites us to disapprove of all the aspects of life which are now gone forever) yet have its protagonist, the only person who knows what changes are coming and why, state that the woman Prime Minister will be the worst of the lot, is simply unfathomable. Nothing may be permitted to infringe on the cultural assumptions of the progressive agenda, prime among which is the caricature of Maggie as the Great Satan, not even when writing a show that highlights all the positive changes she wrought.

Implacable insanity

Nepotistic sinecure though it may well be, Celia Walden's Spy column in the Telegraph has an astonishing little snippet. The BBC postpones Bob Dylan's Old Time Whiskey-Soaked Rambling Hour in the light of the Virginia Tech massacre because he was going to talk about guns.

Right. Now is not the time to talk about guns. Obviously.

Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow

A year ago I had a great deal more time for David Cameron than I do now. While I am not instinctively a Conservative, I am realistic enough to understand that the party most likely to promote and apply policies I am prepared to support, while remaining at all electable, is the Conservative Party (the Liberal Democrats having, with a few uninfluential exceptions, almost entirely abandoned all political philosophy remotely related to their name), more specifically the Thatcherite wing of same. (Although Mrs. Thatcher was a Hayekian liberal economically, she remained morally authoritarian; but as Hayek himself makes clear, it is economic freedom that is the prerequisite to all other types of freedom, on the basis of which I consider it more important to support a party of economic freedom and questionable moral authoritarianism than to support a socially liberal but economically ignorant party.) There are, of course, many schools of thought within the Conservative Party, of which only few are instinctively liberal in outlook: the Tory tradition of paternalism is esentially statist in character, for example.

Unfortunately David Cameron has demonstrated not only a worrying degree of naïve faith in the benign power of the state in the economic arena, but also he has from the very beginning shown himself to have a healthy self-righteous moral authoritarian streak, not least in his dreary and transparently psephologically-motivated homilies about the environment. Not one to shy away from a cause du jour, he has parlayed vague and generally ill-informed watermelon rhetoric into a moderately successful favour-currying machine. The practical result of this, combined with his bewildering belief in something called "sharing the proceeds of growth" between tax cuts and "public services" (which serve only to ensure there will, in fact, be little or no growth of which to share the proceeds), is that now there is no aspect of the modern Conservative Party which the average voter of less than 35 would recognise as remotely Conservative in any respect.

That is, of course, the point, but it makes it pretty strange that Cameron should arrange to have Arnold Schwarzenegger address the party conference this year. This is the man who introduced Milton Friedman's TV series Free to Choose in 1980, the man who voluntarily recorded nearly five (perforce hysterical) minutes of to-camera speech praising the socio-economic views of one of the most powerfully anti-state thinkers of the last century. If indirectly, Friedman was almost as potent an influence on Mrs. Thatcher as Hayek was - and now Cameron invites his disciple to address the Tories. They're united over their environmental "concerns", of course - although Arnie doubtless favours more freedom-friendly non-statist measures. I wonder to what extent he'll discuss that, and to what extent his speech will consist merely in evasive platitudes that are the hallmark of Cameron's tenure as leader.

Cashback

My sporadic updates to this bloggette notwithstanding, I enjoy writing. This is largely because I'm good at it, my occasionally insufferably self-regarding style also notwithstanding: generally we don't enjoy things we aren't good at, and if we do we tend to do them in private, my non-existent readership still again notwithstanding.

I've been thinking lately about why this is. I have a reputation among friends, built largely on my wholesale ignorance of myriad Eighties children's TV programmes, for a childhood spent reading Proust. I have never, as it happens, read so much of a page of Proust, but I enjoy the reputation nonetheless, because like all the best caricatures it is essentially, if not strictly factually, accurate: my childhood was a literary as opposed to televisual one. I certainly wasn't banned from the TV but I was pushed as a reader by my parents from an early age, such that by the age of, I think, six I was introduced to the first of two people who taught me more about writing than any others: Richmal Crompton (there is a particularly fatuous essay linked at the bottom of that page which I urge you to ignore). Her William series is well summed-up by Miles Kington on the back of every book: "Probably the funniest, toughest children's books ever written." Crompton wrote as though for adults, intruding on the action with adult-perspective asides: in other words, she never talked down to her juvenile readers, preferring to challenge them, not caring if she sent them to a dictionary twice a page, and certainly not caring if they couldn't be bothered with the dictionary. Equally inspiring was her technical gift: even today my approach to control and structure owes much to her example, for technically her writing was flawless.

It was through her that I came to meet my second great influence. At the age of seven I insisted that I follow my sister, two years my senior, to the prep department of a nearby independent school only a year after she had gone. I duly passed the exam, and so it transpired that a month shy of ten, in February 1988, I sat the entrance exam for Newcastle-under-Lyme School, for admission that September. Part of the exam was, of course, a creative writing piece, and mine borrowed heavily from Miss Crompton. It also included the phrase "he cursed his lack of vigilance and swore silently", lifted wholesale from Robin May's Robin of Sherwood tie-in book, Robin of Sherwood and the Hounds of Lucifer. The man marking my essay was clearly not a habitual reader of Robin of Sherwood, for later he singled out this phrase, when discussing my entrance exam performance with my parents, as an example of the unusually mature manner of my writing. My mother gleefully reported that he had written across the top of my essay, "I want this boy in my class." For all I know he wrote that of ten or more boys a year, but I remain grateful to this day that he wrote it of me.

Like Miss Crompton, he refused to talk down to his first-year English class, and he insisted on teaching technique as well as appreciation. I learned to parse sentences and was acquainted with such arcane concepts as synecdoche and hypallage. I have never heard of a first-year English class learning such things anywhere else. He transmitted his love for language and its possibilities to even the most lumpen of boys, a feat which in my opinion was founded not only on his contagious enthusiasm but also his respect for his pupils, which manifested itself not only in what he chose to teach but also in how he interacted with us - generally with the gentle, affectionate ribbing that is the hallmark of all relationships of equals.

I was only fortunate enough to be taught by him in my first year. (I had another two English teachers at Newcastle before I changed schools, neither of whom was really any good; at my new school, Adams' Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire, I had a further two, the latter of whom, a master of condescension by the name of Neil Gibbs, managed in two years to drive all love of studying literature out of me, and drove me towards the sciences at A-Level.) Nonetheless, his teaching has stayed with me, to the extent that, 18 years later, I am furious to learn of his sacking from Newcastle. He is Peter Cash, apparently sacked "partly" for poor exam results, though as this letter to the Board of Governers makes clear, the standard of results is comparable with those of any other department in the school, and even if it was a relatively poor year by Mr. Cash's standards, the school is unlikely to have any better luck with his replacement, particularly as this fiasco spirals and damages yet further the reputation of what I remember as a fine school. Other factors may be at work, as the commenter GWS points out here (comment 4). (I suspect this is my former Mathematics teacher, Graham Swift.)

The aspirant literature students of Newcastle and Stoke on Trent, and particularly those who do not yet know they are aspirant literature students, will only be the poorer for this vindictive act.

"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.