I enjoyed TMWSLV very much indeed last night [see below]; and this morning enjoyed reading Steven Lubet’s discussion in the UCLA Law Review of what might have happened if the case of The People vs TMWSLV had gone to trial.
It’s a fun article, one of whose merits it that it’s probably the law journal article with the highest ratio of words to footnotes you’re ever likely to encounter. Don’t read it, though, if you haven’t seen the film.
Norman Geras has too much time on his hands, but my goodness he uses it well.
And, on a related note, as part of my long-intended but never-really-acted-upon plan to watch more Westerns, I’m looking forward to watching The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance this evening. This is the film which, as Victor Muniz reminds us, is the unlikely case study in an excellent essay by Christine Korsgaard – which I’ve mentioned before – on Immanuel Kant and the right to revolution.
It’s no wonder, really, that we sometimes call the subject I try to teach the History of Western Political Thought…
 |
This advert appeared in the 14 March 1998 issue of Billboard magazine; the photo itself was taken during the famous 1969 San Quentin concert, during a spat with some people from Granada TV.
This wasn’t the only time Johnny Cash placed abusive adverts in the music press. Back in the 1960s another full-page ad heaped scorn on the DJs and radio stations which were refusing to play his recording of “The Ballad of Ira Hayes“, a Peter La Farge song about the Native American marine on Iwo Jima who ended up after the war drinking himself to death in a ditch.
The New Labour Government is not entirely useless. If you haven’t already, you can download the Government’s consultation document on same-sex civil partnership (oddly enough, it comes from the Department of Trade and Industry website). Having studied it carefully, you can then email civil.partnerships@dti.gsi.gov.uk to say that, for example, you think these are, on the whole, enlightened proposals, but that, come to think of it, you don’t see any terribly good reason as to why opposite-sex couples shouldn’t contract civil partnerships or same-sex sex couples civil marriage, if that’s what they want to do.
But hurry!, the Government is only anxious to hear your opinion before 30 September 2003 (so you’ve plenty of time both to talk like a pirate [see below] and to contribute to progressive social change). Those of you who’ve read the document most carefully of all might like to address the questions on p.65 when they send in their thoughts.
If you’d like a bit more information, Stonewall and Outrage! both have pages on the subject, and you can read more about Red Ken’s splendid scheme in London here.
A date for your diaries: this time next week, Friday 19 September, is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Full details — including a detailed account of how to TLAP — are here (or, alternatively, from, you’ve guessed it, talklikeapirate.com).
Johnny Cash has died, aged 71.
“When I was just a baby, my mama told me, son,
Always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns,
But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die:
When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry.”
I started listening to Johnny Cash about five years ago, starting with the Man in Black compilation, and there are now a dozen Cash CDs in my collection; and the older I get and the more I listen to his songs, the more excellent and important a musician he always seems to me to be, for all kinds of reasons.There’s the remarkably harmonious fusion in his music of a surprising number of American traditions � country, rock�n�roll, gospel, folk, a bit of blues — in a career stretching from the million-dollar quartet of the 1950s (Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash) through to the new millennium; there’s the combination of his own excellent songwriting (“Folsom Prison Blues”, “I Walk the Line”, “I Still Miss Someone”), with marvellous covers of songs by his contemporaries (Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, Bruce Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman”, Kris Kristoferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down”), with older American classics (“Wreck of the Old ’97″, “Cocaine Blues”, “The Great Speckled Bird”, and so on). It adds up to a body of work which treats of the most important, most difficult subjects of them all — love, God, murder, prison — with immense humanity, most remarkably displayed on Johnny Cash At San Quentin, the finest live recording I possess. And he could be very funny, too, and not just on “A Boy Named Sue”.
He had been ill for a while, though the longstanding diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease later turned out, as I recall, to have been mistaken (it was just a surprisingly long hangover, or something); his most recent album (American Recordings IV: The Man Comes Around) was alarmingly poor, its recordings of “Danny Boy” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” showing that he’d lost the plot a bit; his darling companion June Carter Cash died earlier this year: this seems to be a good time for this life to draw to a close.
But what a life — and what fantastic music.
[A few words in defence of the "Yes, but..." reaction to the events of 11 September 2001 follow. If you think that no defence is possible, you may want to stop reading now.]
The second anniversary of the atrocities of 11 September 2001 has come around, and there has, of course, been a lot of media coverage. There’s also been a bit of coverage in the media I read (other people’s blogs, really) critical of what we might call, because it has often been called, the “Yes, but…” response to the attack on the World Trade Center from many on the liberal and left end of the political spectrum, at home and abroad.
Many people, it is charged, said things like this, that “Yes, the attacks were awful, but we shouldn’t forget that the Americans have done bad things in the world before then”. And it is often contended that saying things like this has the effect of mitigating the atrocity, explaining it away, excusing the perpetrators, blaming nobody, blaming the victims, and other bad things. These attacks on the “Yes, but…” crowd are often – not always – meant by those who make them to constitute an indictment of what is sometimes called “the Left”, by drawing attention to its moral blindness, relativism, postmodernism, pathological anti-Americanism, and so on (fill in various other failings here).
Amid the more polemical contributions on this subject, there’s some reasonably temperate discussion of the matter today over at the Crooked Timber blog, in response to one of Chris Bertram’s characteristically thoughtful posts, and it is reading this that has prompted me to write this. (His new Rousseau book, by the way, is a fine piece of work: I’ve read a little bit more than half of it, and I’ll have more to say on this subject, probably, soon).
For it seems to me that if we’re to pick over the contextualising “Yes, but…” language that was around — and it was around — in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 (some of it, I am sure, falling from my own lips) we need to do some work in turn to remember the context in which that kind of language was itself used.
In the days following the Twin Towers atrocity, there was an awful lot of talk in the press and from the politicians which had the effect of decontextualising the shocking events of that day: “The planes came out of a clear blue sky”, we were told, repeatedly, as if the attacks themselves came out of the blue; there was a press discourse of America’s “innocence” being shattered by the violent destruction and loss of life; commentators were quick, too quick, to say that “everything changed” on September 11, and so on.
This kind of discourse was politically highly useful to a White House which decided very quickly to reverse its hitherto reasonably isolationist policy and adopt a new and highly interventionist foreign policy stance — one which has brought us the War Against Terrorism, the attack on Afghanistan and, more recently, the war against Iraq (as well as the US Patriot Act, etc.), and all of whose effects, for good and ill, are yet to be felt. The President, furthermore, had his own explanation for why what had happened had happened: “They hate our freedom; they hate our democracy”, he told us, in his speeches which set out and sought to justify this new American foreign policy.
Thus it was only to be expected that those who contested the policy — and there were lots of reasons for contesting the policy, as we all know — also sought to contest the underlying series of claims and justifications underpinning that policy, which included already-politicised claims about the causes of the events of 11 September. Against a President who rested content with over-simplistic (if not entirely stupid) public explanations for what happened, his critics had to explain that things were, as they saw it, a bit more complicated than that. But, in the circumstances, that was something which was very hard to do without saying things that could, either at the time or subsequently, be considered a piece of “Yes, buttery…”, for the “but” marked, as it were, the moment when the speaker began to set out at least part of the grounds of his or her political disagreement with the Administration’s view of things.
And that’s how, it seems to me, that troublesome “but” needs to be understood in most cases: not as the product of a morally defective desire to excuse atrocity, but as part of an (as it turned out) politically ineffective attempt to resist the drumbeat of war.
Of course, in the circumstances, some people on both left and right did say some pretty stupid things, and some people, both for and against the Bush administration, said some things which some of those who heard them found offensive. But that’s what happens in a politics of high stakes, and the stakes were extraordinarily high in September and October 2001.
UPDATE: Marc Mulholland has some sensible words on Yes Buttery, too, over at his Daily Moiders.
I haven’t been paying much attention up to now to the WTO meeting currently underway in Canc�n in Mexico. So I was pleased to read the various briefing papers prepared by my excellent friend and co-conspirator Raj Patel at FoodFirst, which patiently explain why the current proposals on liberalising trade in agricultural products spell disaster for small farmers in the developing world, and, partly for this reason, why this week’s talks are likely to collapse without an agreement.
His “Citizen’s Guide to the WTO Agreement on Agriculture”, written three weeks ago, is here, with updates tracking the twists and turns in the global agriculture negotiations in the run-up to Canc�n here, here, here and here.
Salvador Allende, President of Chile: born 26 June 1908, died 11 September 1973 in the violence surrounding the coup which brought General Pinochet to power.
Today’s New York Times carries a timely reminder of what it calls “the other Sept. 11″.
Also Nikita Khrushchev, b. 17 April 1894, d. 11 September 1971. (Neal Ascherson’s recent LRB review of William Taubman’s Khrushchev book is here).
Here.
Go and play the distributive justice games, if you haven’t already. The results, though, aren’t especially surprising.
It turns out that I’m a Rawlsian, after all.
Mao Zedong, 1893-1976.
According to the programme notes for John Adams’s splendid opera, Nixon in China, “Chairman Mao was probably the closest thing to Plato’s Philosopher King that the world will ever see. He was a brilliant peasant autodidact who played up his thick Southern accent, spat, belched and scratched himself. He wrote great poetry in the classic Chinese forms, and later banned those forms. In a country he had made puritan, he was an inveterate womanizer. His enemies destroyed one another; millions died who opposed his thought.”
I wander over to right-wing hack Stephen Pollard’s blog, and there I find a badly-written post called “The EU kills one person every 13 seconds“.
It’s advertising a think-tank report which he’s co-written against EU trade rules, and in his post he restates the claim and makes it slightly more precise: “EU protectionism kills one person in the third world every thirteen seconds”.
Curious as to how these figures were calculated, I follow the link to the press release put out by an outfit Pollard works for called the Centre for the New Europe, and there, in a summary of “Key Findings”, I read that “6,600 people die every day in the world because of the trading rules of the EU. That is 275 people every hour”, and then, with a bullet point all of its own, that, “In other words, one person dies every 13 seconds somewhere in the world – mainly in Africa – because the European Union does not act on trade as it talks.”
Still curious, I download and skim-read the report, and about two thirds of the way through a pop presentation of the case for free trade attached to some rude remarks about the EU I find this:
The Human Cost of Protectionism
24,000 people die every day from starvation, or from causes directly related to malnutrition. Let us make a reasonable assumption – erring on the side of caution – that 20,000 of these people do not die from the purely local causes of civil war and crop failure.
In a world of potential abundance that could be made actual by more open trading rules, the European Union accounts for a third of trade protection. Thus – given the earlier assumption – 6,600 people die every day in the world because of the trading rules of the EU. That is 275 people every hour of the day.
In other words, one person dies every 13 seconds somewhere in the world – mainly in Africa – because the European Union does not act on trade as it talks. (p.10)
And, er, that’s it. That’s the sum total of the pathbreaking reasoning and demographic analysis employed to produce this conclusion. It seems to be slightly more respectably generated that the figures about global child abuse which Michael Jackson tosses around whenever he’s given the chance, but not much.”These are questionable, if not unreasonable figures…”, the writers recognise in the sentence that follows on from the chunk quoted above, but they don’t go on to question them. And, regrettably for the credibility of the report, this flash of self-awareness fails to percolate through to the trumpeting of “key findings” in the press release, nor to one of the co-authors’ own breathless blogging of his own achievements.
EU agricultural subsidies produce grim results. There’s no disagreement there between people like me and people like Pollard. (Lots of others, though).
But there’s a part of me which likes to think that so-called think tanks are supposed to raise the level of public debate, sponsor interesting research papers and produce real “findings”, rather than churning out tabloid-esque shock headlines which turn out to be underpinned by little more than tabloid-esque arguments.
Another part of me wonders whether the entire output of the Centre for the New Europe is as silly as this, or whether it’s just this report, or just the stuff that Pollard works on; but having spent the time reading one of their efforts this morning, I’m not sure I can be bothered to invest the energy to find out.
Here’s the first question-and-answer from this morning’s press conference…
QUESTION: Prime Minister, the last couple of days there have been a lot of changes around Downing Street, new structures, Alastair Campbell going, Trade Unions come in for coffee and cup cakes, if not beer and sandwiches… What was it that went wrong that you felt the need to change and work on over the last few days?
PRIME MINISTER: I think it is important that we – especially 6 years into government – not that we change our course and direction because I do passionately believe that that course and direction is right and I think that the changes that we have made on the economy, and that we are making in the Health Service and schools and on crime, are the right changes.� But I also think it’s important that we are engaging with people and explaining to them why we are making these changes and allowing people to understand that whatever the understandable preoccupations with the Hutton Inquiry are, there is a basic domestic agenda out there that we continue to work upon, and I think centring our operation, making it more accessible, is an important part of that.
So that’s that cleared up, then.This exchange is quite entertaining, too:
QUESTION: I understand you say it would be improper to comment on the outcome of the Hutton Inquiry, and I accept that, however can you clarify a point of logic for me? … Last Thursday you told Lord Hutton that you chaired a meeting of Downing Street officials to discuss how you would go about naming Dr Kelly, and yet on 22 July when asked on your plane on the way from Shanghai to Hong Kong, why did you authorise the naming of David Kelly, you replied “That is completely untrue”…. Asked whether you had authorised the leaking of the name of David Kelly, you replied “Emphatically not… I did not authorise the leaking of the name of David Kelly.”…Â How can both those statements on 22 July and last Thursday both be true?
PRIME MINISTER: Well I think Julia I am afraid I am going to say to you, let the Hutton Inquiry make judgments about these things.� I could go into a long and detailed answer, but I won’t. Sorry.
Shame.
Prime Minister of Italy and songman.
[US Senator Orrin Hatch also, and even more entertainingly, but you already knew that].