Birth Pangs

It's a day for fifty-dollar German words. A small dose of schadenfreude is supposedly a stress-reliever, which may be true but it does nothing to assuage whatever residue of Judaeo-Christian guilt I feel about laughing at the misfortunes of others. Unholy glee at the shenanigans of an ex-President of the USA caught with his trousers down is hollow compared to the misfortunes of the citizenry of  Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Algeria...pick one. The overthrow of despotic or politically inept regimes carries with it a certain moral authority, a condition that the masses capitalise on in the world media and the more the authorities attempt to prevent information flow, the colander of information that is the Internet finds ways of releasing it to the world. It is becoming increasingly clear that a young, often educated but jobless, media-savvy generation in possession of the electronic tools of rebellion are flexing their collective muscles and learning how to use them. The authoritarian, monarchical rule of the Al-Khalifas in Bahrain, whose Parliament is dominated by members of the Royal Family is beginning to look arcane, bloodstained and mediaeval in the light of the groundswell of democracy however imperfectly understood expressed by those whom they purport to govern. A new Arabic, perhaps global zeitgeist seems to be emerging. Overthrow might be comparatively easy, reconstruction is not and  how these power vacuums will ultimately be filled is at present nothing more than a crapshoot, which makes me nervous since it is the politics of illusion and immediacy which is the language most fluently spoken by the young. Many of these birth pangs may very well subside, but their repetition is inevitable, next time with greater intensity. The Old Guard feels it has the right to power, the young guns would take it from them by force. Why can't they just kiss and make up. Naive of me.
The image is detail from Brancusi's 'The Kiss' Happy birthday Constantin. See you in Paris.

Bunga-Bunga

I know very little about the shadowy world of corruption which I've always understood to mean the procurement or solicitation of money for real or imaginary favours. I was speaking with a Lebanese colleague the other day who was stopped at Alexandria airport and the customs official quite openly invited him to pay money in order for his luggage to pass through Customs unmolested. To his credit, the man refused, whereupon he was subjected to a humiliating search and his luggage confiscated for an hour for 'further examination', all of which was clearly designed to inflict maximum inconvenience on a perfectly innocent, if stubborn traveller.
Silvio Berlusconi has an extensive record of criminal allegations, including Mafia collusion, false accounting, tax fraud, corruption and bribery of police officers and judges. He has been tried in Italian courts in several cases and in three of them, accusations were dropped by the judiciary because of laws passed by Berlusconi's parliamentary majority shortening the time limit for prosecution of various offences and making false accounting illegal only if there is a specific damaged party reporting the fact to the authorities. It does look as if crime does pay after all. Not bad for a former vacuum salesman and night club singer. But, like Al Capone, an Achilles heel seems eventually to have been found and since the man is arrogant beyond description he may well be brought down by that simplest of temptations - a little bit of friction. Prostitution is legal- it is not mentioned in the Penal Code as such - brothels and pimping are illegal and sex workers working from apartments are 'tolerated'. Loitering is permitted but soliciting ('unabashedly inviting clients on the street’) is illegal. If the 'firefly' is only seventeen, however, charges can and indeed have been brought. Berlusconi is of course, unrepentant, indeed he said after the initial allegations in November last year  "I am a man who works hard all day long and if sometimes I (use to) look at some well-looking girl, it's better to be fond of pretty girls than to be gay". OK, Silvio. Two out of ten for tact and a rather scary indicator of the degree of power you hold that you can make such remarks without fear of censure or even reprisal. It's been suggested that absolute power tends to lead to absolute corruption, whether moral or financial. Those at the pinnacles of power who believe themselves impervious to litigation, it appears, develop an opiate-like addiction and reconfiguration of brain chemistry. The anti-corruptioneers may have the last laugh, it would appear, but just because Berlusconi may be brought down it will not take place out out of righteous repudiation of corrupt behaviour which his enemies have alleged for years but because he supposedly paid for sex with a teenage girl, subsequently using his influence with the police to get her out of a bit of bother. The Italians won't be fooled, I suspect, as along as they don't care about tarnishing the reputation of their country.
Good political morality cascades down to ordinary people - like airport workers - so they are not tempted to abuse their position in order to make an honest living. In the Church, we used to talk a lot at one time about accountability, where our behaviour and decision-making could be moderated by the counsel of the wise. Parochial Church Councils, I imagine, are supposed to operate under this, the Jethro principle. Such requires humility, however, in short supply not only in Rome, but in Cairo where police power is virtually unassailable and corruption and brutality is endemic, indeed the same sorry tale could be told almost anywhere in the world where one group holds absolute sway over another.

Ripples

A month ago, Tunisians were quietly selling camel rides to tourists on Hammamet beach. A week or so ago, Tahrir Square was a place on a map, not a place of pilgrimage. Watching Egyptians dancing like children in the square last night  - I found myself wondering how many are really there because of deeply held political convictions - perhaps fewer than the media in its quite unnecessary feeding frenzy would have us believe. The square has become a refugee camp, with mosques acting as makeshift hospitals and doctors treating patients on the street. Mubarak’s promise to step down in six months and hold free elections seemed to me, at least on the surface, to be a reasonable concession that could clear the protestors from Tahrir square and the streets of Alexandria and elsewhere, get people back to work and return some sense of normalcy to the country. Washington, initially coy, now seems to agree.

It’s understandable why the protestors wouldn’t take a tyrant with thirty years experience at his word, but the country needs normalcy and stability desperately, and with each passing day the population became more and more hungry, exhausted and angry – with their patience for the protestors quickly running out.  Did they really believe that by sheer volume of noise or weight of numbers the monoliths of power could so easily be persuaded to melt into the shadows on the whim of a minority? Cynical, wily old moi has the impression that there's a devilishly subtle manipulative spin to all of this.  The Egyptians have long memories and a history of post-colonial unrest. The overthrow of King Farouk, the British puppet king by military coup, Anwar Sadat's accord with Menachem Begin at Leeds Castle in England for which he paid with his life and the thirty year rule of the present incumbent all have the thread running through them of the ending of despotic regimes as their apparent objective. Yet, power vacuums have a habit of allowing less stable, even worse ideologies to surface. The Israelis are, quite rightly, very nervous since Mubarak at least allowed neutrality on the Sinai Peninsula and the Muslim Brotherhood, or worse, will almost certainly not be so tolerant. It would be instructive to be a fly on the wall at Cairo mosques over the coming weeks. In any event, a pincer movement of Islamic states on three sides is going to make Jerusalem a little twitchy, and possibly even trigger-happy.

Listening to 'Something Understood' on the World Service this morning, the presenter used circular ripples on a pond as an analogy of life, intersecting and flowing mostly peacefully through each other. The same might be said of nations, until a seismic shift, a tsunami of bad-tempered change turns normally smooth ripples into a maelstrom of chaos, their waves breaking on the bulwarks of rigid, inflexible political rocks.

But, hey. Who am I to comment? I have never waved a protest flag in my life and watched student protests with detached amusement. We are informed with tedious and monochromatic regularity that the entire country, all eighty million, is behind Mubarak’s overthrow; this is a completely righteous protest movement supported by most, if not all, of Egypt’s more than 80 million people. H’m.  What of the seventy-nine million bystanders like me, the non flag-wavers?
The narrative gains frills and flounces as it unfolds. All Mubarak’s hirelings are, we’re told, paid thugs, secret policemen in civilian clothing, or the poor unwashed masses that the state has threatened and extorted into hitting the streets. Either that or they’re the upper-class, traitorous collaborators who have benefited from Mubarak’s rule.

Has anyone sought proof? Of course not. Proof requires time, persistence and determination which the media is reluctant to acquire. In the propaganda chaos, it reports those who shout loudest, regardless of either the truth or accuracy of the noise they make. Have we seen any proof that all of the supporters were government agents or cowed peasants? Has anyone really begun asking what the other seventy-nine million Egyptians who didn’t take part in the “million man march” believe, or are they all either being paid off or hung up by the fingernails?  In its excitement, the world media has dropped the ball. It’s understandable and morally correct to side with democracy and human rights, but not enough hard questions were asked at the right time. If the media cannot control its emotions it should keep its mouth shut.

Peevish Whining and Other Rambling Conversations with Myself

I don't often write about sex. Which isn't the same thing as thinking about it. Living in the Back of The Nether Regions, with  sand dunes for inspiration, one's imagination occasionally develops a quantum leap of fertility. Which brings me to the first point. Reported recently in the British press was the remarkable and rather tragic story of the Kenyan mother who has, it would appear, been providing comfort to a variety of gentlemen resulting in six sets of twins. This would appear to be 'a series of unfortunate events' since the production of twins in her tribal grouping is considered a curse. The Bukusu people, to which her family belongs, believe twins bring bad luck - and that unless one of them dies, it means certain death for one or both parents. The Bukusu tradition of eliminating the second twin is no longer practised, though occasional cases of infanticide are still reported in rural areas of western Kenya. Her serially polygamous lifestyle counts for less, it seems, than her genetic misfortune.

It would seem that the small spikes of 'curious behaviour' in other words 'not like ours' which attract the attention of the media and lead us to the conclusion that there's a vast diversity of culture around the world whose surface we rarely brush and when we do, it elicits oohs and aahs since our cultural or moral feathers are ruffled. I can still remember interracial dating being considered perverse, and the discovery that African blood was just as red as mine was a revelation to a culture-curious six year old. I was once asked - by my father, of all people, if I knew what the word 'transvestite' meant. I informed him with fourteen-year old loftiness that 'of course I did, it was another word for 'lesbian''. Many years later, I discovered, I found out that he had asked me because one of his closest Church associates, a churchwarden and reader, had been caught dressing up in his wife's clothes.
All of the above is a demonstration that ignorance, stupidity and political myopia is endemic and morality evolves as a function of cultural necessity, a maxim Pope Benedict might do well to heed. The issue of 'gays in the military' is a case in point. On the Senate floor, critic and war hero John McCain ignored the advice of generals in uniform, he talked of “elites” and “liberals” who have no military experience. I’m one of them. But I don’t need military experience to have both common sense and a sense of decency. So Senator, when you were caged in that Vietnam hellhole, if a flaming drag queen swooped in with some artillery and a butch lesbian choppered you out of there, would you have objected? I think not. Imagine a soldier in Afghanistan, on patrol in a hostile village. Suddenly, he hears yelling in a language he doesn’t understand, and there’s a small explosion ahead, then a second one just yards away. The two guys he's with  - would he prefer them small and straight, afraid of loud noises; or big and gay, one who’s been working out since he was fourteen, and the other a Tom of Finland lookalike who happens to speak Pashtun?

Iceland has now criminalised all strip clubs. Even quaint little topless bars with triple priced drinks; the repression of the 1950s is looking positively progressive, as the law makes it illegal for a business to 'profit from the nudity of employees'. No girlies draped over Audis at the Rejkyavik Motor Show, then.
What makes this law particularly ambivalent is the crowing of self-proclaimed “feminists” and “women’s advocates,” who seem unable to grasp the simple notion of adult, thus, one might suppose, by definition, self-aware and responsible, choice. Member of Parliament Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir said, “It is not acceptable that women or people in general are a product to be sold.” Ah, so David Beckham PLC should be shut down, then. It's a fact that people make money out of others, sometimes the morality of their earnings is questionable and sex trafficking is repugnant to all but the most depraved. Most people might not choose to go to a lapdancing club, myself being one of them - not necessarily for high moral reasons but because I think it's a waste of money, in much the same way as drinking oneself senseless. Both of which are unobtainable here. Allegedly. The little red building bottom right of the image might have been a lapdancing club, now it's either a Pizza Hut or a mixed sauna.

The Astonishing Benefits of Educational Television

Television is the final resting place of the terminally bored. Shrouded in a bathrobe, one lies on the sofa, listening to cerebral cells die. Kuwait's English Channel Two is sometimes quite educational, however. Today, during a programme  called 'How It Is Made', I learned how to make what the Americans call 'particle board'  and the English 'chipboard' which, as the programme told me helpfully, is a cheap alternative to natural wood and how it is turned into furniture. It was a tutorial in how IKEA  production lines work, from the moment the tree is sacrificed to the moment the final product arrives in-store.
There was then a little potted history of ice-skating, and I learned that ice skates were used as early as 200CE. Fascinating. Furthermore, there are 145 separate pieces in a modern ice-skate and I now know how to make one, including alignment and balance, where the white plastic insole goes and why the sole of the boot is sanded for good adhesion. It's riveting stuff. We then had a little intermission while the mullah reminded us all that it was prayer-time, just before the really interesting part when we got to find out how the blade was attached to the carbon composite sole.
I wonder why I didn't turn over. Channel-hopping, I chanced upon Channel Two right in the middle of a detailed tutorial on industrial winemaking. It included how much yeast to use, how the grapes should be prepared and crushed, the fermentation temperature (17 degrees Celsius for white, 30 degrees for red), how long the fermentation process takes and how to remove particulate matter on completion. I learned how to test for sugar during the process,  how to use a hygrometer to check for alcohol content plus the expected range, the benefits of corking and why green bottles are normally used.

Ah.

Voices of Compromise

Finally, Israel’s independent investigation into the May 31, 2010 interception of a Turkish-backed flotilla trying to break the maritime blockade of the Gaza Strip has been concluded. In summary, both Israel’s action against the flotilla and the blockade itself were legal under international law. Much good will it do them.

Headed by retired Supreme Court judge Jacob Turkel, the investigative committee found that “the naval blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip – in view of the security circumstances and Israel’s efforts to comply with its humanitarian obligations – was legal pursuant to the rules of international law.”

If this is so, then Israel's incursion into Gaza in an attempt to curb Hamas rocket attacks a year ago was also justified "in view of the security circumstances, under international law".

Israel had the right to enforce that naval blockade, just as other nations have imposed naval blockades in international waters in the past (as Britain did during World War II and the US during the Cuban missile crisis).
It's unfortunate that she's damned if she does and damned if she don't. A flotilla - the word sounds so inoffensive - of little boats sets sail from Turkish waters to bring much-needed aid to the beleaguered Gazans, as the world gazes down in sympathy. On board are 'dissidents', 'activists' and sundry other persons who, it would appear, engorged with moral outrage at the despicable Israeli tactic of preventing weapons smuggling, intend to deliver the contents personally, where, it was alleged, a hero's welcome awaited them. Smoke and mirrors, froth and bubbles. Whoever is running Hamas' propaganda unit, he or she is the one deserving a Palme'd'Or.

I wonder whether the anniversary of Dunkirk was deliberately chosen.

I found myself wondering at the time what course of action was presented to the politicians who made the decision and what analysis was made of the consequences of using live fire in any confrontation. Some claim that the demonstrators attacked IDF commandos with guns and other weapons, which is policyspeak for 'the bastards fired on us'. This shifts responsibility from the political and military decision-makers to the soldiers, who acted in the heat of combat and quite properly fought back. No point in sending armed men if all they have to do is be reasonable. It may be convenient to Netanyahu and his partners in government to present the battle as a local incident that escalated – but they cannot, unfortunately, escape responsibility. Exactly what Hamas wanted. The clumsier and more politically inept  Israel can be made to look, the more sympathy is garnered toward  those who seek to bring her to her knees. It should not be forgotten that the rulers in Gaza are classified as a terrorist organisation. If a minority authority elects such people to attempt to govern it, they have only themselves to blame if those whom they have sworn to drive into the sea reciprocate using men with guns.

Operationally, Israel came out on top; of course they did - they have superb tacticians. Moshe Yaalon, and the defense minister, Ehud Barak, are both former chiefs of staff. Between them, they have almost matchless experience of military planning and combat. Netanyahu - a former elite commando - has a formidable intelligence and operational record. Of course the Israelis will win tactically if they bring Hamas to battle, but their very superiority on the battlefield is what brings about the propaganda losses they invariably suffer. The world wants a Palestine and doesn't understand why Israelis can't give it. The problem here is mindset. Both Hamas and Israel see themselves at war and the world has made a choice based on what looks like fairness, but is spectacularly ignorant of the cultural milieu on the ground.

The Turkel Committee took over seven months to meticulously collect and process testimony and other data. By comparison, the Turkish investigation into the incident took three weeks and concluded by accusing Israel of state terrorism.

Also by way of comparison, the Turkel Committee investigation was entirely transparent, having set up a public website where all milestones and findings were published and regular press conferences held. The Turkish investigation was held behind closed doors.

Israel now waits to see if UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will accept the findings of the Turkel Committee. I think it unlikely, but, watch this space. The world will not be satisfied until the Palestinians get as much as they can, but, even this may paradoxically work against them, since they make political capital from victimhood, with which the rest of the world as well as Hillary Clinton may ultimately lose patience.

Footnote. The publication of the so-called 'Palestine Papers' yesterday reveals that there are voices of compromise somewhere in Palestine.
Concessions the Palestinians made behind closed doors would never in reality have been accepted by the Palestinian public, negotiators at the time Abbas and Olmert knew this, evidenced by the fact that they talked a lot but never actually signed an agreement. The Palestinians never intended to conclude the negotiations; it has served them too well to stay perpetual victims, participants in a Greek tragedy.
It is also a clever negotiating tactic. Yesterday, Abbas openly called on Netanyahu to return to the negotiating table on the basis of what Olmert previously offered, omitting what the Palestinians offered in return. But if Olmert’s offer was sufficient, why didn’t Abbas conclude a deal with him?
Surely, most Western power brokers involved in the negotiations can see through the ruse, even if they don’t admit as much in public.

True Grit

It's not often that I get to see two films in a day both of which, different as they were, could be described as masterpieces. I had avoided watching Joel and Ethan Coen's finely tuned, beautifully crafted "True Grit" since I had thought that Jeff Bridges as the one-eyed marshal Rooster Cogburn could never replace John Wayne in the original 1969 version. Fortunately, he doesn't have to, this is really not a remake. Casting is more 'primus inter pares' and Bridges gives the other characters much more room in this darker, harsher interpretation than in the original. The beauty of the movie is in the weighty precision of the prose, lifted wholesale from Charles Portis' original novel, as authentic as if reading Mark Twain and wonderfully offset by the landscapes of Santa Fe and Texas. The Coen's have taken a "formal, reverent approach" to the Western genre, with its emphasis on simplicity, adventure and high quest. The stilted patois of the characters and the love of language that suffuses the film, makes it similar to their other work, but without irony. A man's "yea" was indeed "yea" and his "nay" "nay" in those days of strength and wilderness, without a whisper of tongue in cheek.
Kim Darby's Matty Ross has a worthy successor in thirteen-year-old Hailee Seinfeld. There is something fractious, irritating yet deeply admirable about Matty, in particular the Presbyterian-Protestant ethic so strongly imbued in a 14-year-old girl. "Is your every utterance to be indecipherable, Marshal? Your vocalisations are less words than outhouse rumbles after overconsumption of whiskey and chicken wings. Does your throat retain an unfortunate tumbleweed?"
The role that the soundtrack plays in rhythmic distancing of perspective lends the film a powerfully memorable breadth and the alternation of traditional orchestral “western” music with intimate folk gives it a spare, accurate feel. We become particularly aware of this in the final scenes, when the epilogue is set to a honky-tonk solo piano, a striking contrast from the mythic sweep of the stars as  Cogburn, exhausted, saves her life and  brings Mattie “home”.  What follows the epilogue is Iris DeMent’s haunting version of Elisha Hoffman's 1887 classic from Deuteronomy 33:27 Leaning on the Everlasting Arms which plays over the credits and appears at intervals throughout the movie. I was spellbound and close to tears. Unmissable.