I love many things about the US and I often feel sorry for those people, including several of my cousins, who live there. Because the media is so tightly controlled by the interests of advertisers their democracy is unable to protect the interests of most ordinary people. I think that’s why they still have such a primitive and brutal penal system, a health care system that could have been dreamed up by a 19 century mill owner and a level of public debate that would embarrass even the semiliterate inhabitants of the worst public housing projects in Paris.
I have always had the feeling that they only had themselves to blame for this situation, but watching The State Within on television this week I started to realise that the United Kingdom might have more to gain from, and should possibly take more responsibility for, the plight of the US than I had previously thought. After all, we benefit a great deal from a mighty economy full of eager consumers who all happen to speak the language of our ancestors.
Americans work much harder than British workers and they get shorter holidays. Their social conditions could be said to be harsher than those over here, that’s why their law enforcement needs to be so much more repressive. Americans have been forced to give up many freedoms that we enjoy, in particular those relating to Unions and striking, that’s why their working lives are so much harder. In fact, you could argue that 1776 didn’t change things as dramatically as might have first appeared. You’ve still got the colonists toiling away while those back home have it easy. No wonder they dislike us so much, no wonder the villains in films are always British. You can’t really blame them.
Archive for the 'Politics' Category
Laura St. Claire, the ‘journalist’ who wrote a blog about her road-trip across the US parking only in Wal-Mart car parks, but kept secret the fact that the trip was paid for by Wal-Mart, has now written a whiney defence of what she did. I’m not convinced, what do you think? Wal-Marting Across America
I really can’t make my point about Oliver North any better than Mark Weisbrot in Z Magazine.
Imagine Osama bin Laden visiting the United States ten or 15 years from now, telling Americans who to vote for if they want to avoid getting hurt. It would never happen, but in Nicaragua something very similar is happening in the run-up to their election on November 5.Former US Lt. Col. Oliver North, who helped organize and raise funds for a terrorist organization that decimated Nicaragua in the 1980s, returned to that country’s ground zero in late October to warn the citizens there against re-electing Daniel Ortega.
The irony doesn’t end there. Now that Ortega has won, the US will no doubt be carrying out its threat to cut off aid to Nicaragua because the people there didn’t vote for a pro-US candidate.
Do you remember back in 2004 during the US presidential campaign when the Guardian launched a letter-writing campaign, getting people from around the world to write to voters in a swing state? The campaign didn’t go down too well with our special friends, who objected vigorously to this intrusion into their precious democratic process. Need I go on?
It is black history month and the year three children at my daughter’s school were all asked to make a poster about a famous black person they admire. The only famous black person my daughter knows about is Mary Seacole but she’s already done loads of things about her so her diligent mother set her to researching Nelson Mandela. She did an excellent poster but I don’t think she’ll win the prize because her friend Hiab did a poster about Pushkin who had Eritrean ancestors!
On my way out of school this morning there were two Afro-Caribbean mums, who were both double parked, screaming abuse and threats at each other at the tops of their voices. It made me laugh because they were so undignified and they were doing it right in front of the school, but then I noticed the sad, crestfallen face of another black mum who was trying to hurry her little son away. I’ve always wondered how I’d cope if I had a black son or daughter, trying to make them proud to be who they are in the context of a predominantly white society. But I’ve never really though about the problems that other black people must present for black parents.
I was driven home last week by a taxi driver from Somalia. He’s very interesting to talk to because he’s mad on news and politics. He was telling me about how he lived in Brixton when he first came to the UK. He hated it because he doesn’t like the way that Afro-Caribbean people behave. He told me that he said to a friend of his, “You people must inhale the drug from the air when you are babies or you must get if from your mother’s milk, that’s why you are so crazy.” His friend said, “You should be grateful to us, we are the front line soldiers for all black people.”
Andrew Marr made some interesting comments recently about the liberal culture at the BBC.
…the BBC is not impartial, or neutral. It’s a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias: it’s better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.
I think that it is a cultural liberal bias that has prevented there being a public debate about the damage that certain aspects of Afro-Caribbean culture do to the wider black community. A while ago it was considered risky to talk about the issues of Muslims and integration, until Jack Straw bravely brought the whole discussion out into the open with his comments about veils. Maybe we still haven’t gone far enough in our discussion about how Afro-Caribbean culture fits into our society. We do after all have a responsibility to all those black parents who’d like to see their children appearing on posters during Black History month.
Some anti-road people hung banners from bridges on the M1 today saying www.nowideningm1.org.uk. When I saw a picture of one it looked to me like it said Now Widen M1. Don’t they know you can put capitals in a URL? BBC News story
I was mixing a programme for a slot called Analysis on World Service radio last week. The programme was written by a BBC Correspondent called Kim Ghattas who works in the Middle East and it was about the changing security situation in Saudi Arabia. The programme opened with Kim saying “Two years ago, on the streets of Rijad, a westerner pleaded for his life as he was hunted down by a militant linked to Al Qayda.” She had sent us a sound recording of the man being killed. It had the phasing, edgy quality of poorly recorded camcorder audio that’s been recompressed too many times, but you could clearly hear someone shouting ‘no, no’ and then several gunshots. I mixed it so that it started underneath her last few words and then became clearly audible for the shouting and the first gunshot, then it faded down again under her next bit of script. Have a listen to the final result - Ghattas- Saudi killing
At the time I was thinking that this was pretty strong stuff but it seemed justified by the short duration and the context. She was talking about that particular murder, not using the sound to illustrate a general point, and although it was quite shocking I wouldn’t describe it as a graphic depiction of the murder nor would I say it was being used gratuitously. Here is what the BBC editorial guidlines say about the subject.
We will always need to consider carefully the editorial justification for portraying graphic material of human suffering and distress. There are almost no circumstances in which it is justified to show executions and very few circumstances in which it is justified to broadcast other scenes in which people are being killed. It is always important to respect the privacy and dignity of the dead. We should never show them gratuitously. We should also avoid the gratuitous use of close ups of faces and serious injuries or other violent material.
Yesterday I found out that one of the producers in the Newsroom had cut the start of the programme off because he thought it was too disturbing. He told me “We don’t do that sort of thing.”
This is why I sometimes wish that I worked for Al Jazeera. There are too many people in BBC News who feel that their job is to impartially and accurately report what is going on and that’s all there is to it. They don’t feel that they need to excite their audience, to sell the stories, to make people say “Wow!” I think they’re complacent. It is a privilege to be given access to the 42 million people who regularly listen to the World Service in English. Some of the things we have to talk about aren’t very nice. Some of the things we have to say aren’t very interesting. In both cases we have to be creative in order to encourage people to understand the complexity of the stories we’re covering. We have to be engaging and sometimes that might mean being shocking, sometimes it might mean being silly. But being boring, there’s no excuse for that.
The BBC has produced an excellent guide to the several degrees of headscarf that different Muslim women wear. I had a good search through the sites of the Muslim Council of Britain, the Islamic Human Rights Commission and the Protect Hijab site. There was plenty of material on them about fighting bans on the Hijab and some on why women choose to wear it, why it’s not sexist and so on but none of them even make an attempt to explain the different types of scarf. I suppose it would be unfair to suggest that it seems like Muslims are more interested in fighting for their rights than explaining their culture, but have a look around, see if you can find anything.
I did find one article about Islamic Clothing Definitions on a site called Central Mosque. They also had an article answering the question “How is it that Islam allows Slavery?” It starts off with a damming description of the practice of slavery by the ancient Egyptians, Romans and “Western European Nations” before going on to explain that “…under Islam regarded as fundamentally equal, the slaves in Muslim society could and did live in secure possession of their dignity as creatures of the same Creator…” It is a good example of the kind of dishonest sophistry that passes for theological discussion in many parts of Islam. You can find equally hilarious nonsense in Christian literature, of course, but not generally published these days. I think that’s because they know they couldn’t get away with it because they’d be rightly lampooned. Unfortunately satire is still a very dangerous activity in most of the Muslim world and so nonsense reigns supreme.
As far as veils go, I don’t think much of them, as I’ve said before, but I find them much less offensive than SUVs. In fact, if I had to put them on a scale I’d say I like them a bit more than shell suits and a bit less than platform shoes. On the other hand, a well-cut chador or shayla can be pretty damm sexy.
After Gordon’s excellent performance in his interview with Andy Marr this morning I’m feeling a bit more optimistic about Labour’s chances in the next election. He’s got a bit of a delicate balancing act to do. On one hand he doesn’t want to look like Blair’s chosen successor because Blair is so unpopular at the moment so he needs to appear as though he has deposed Blair, to some extent, and given him a kick on the way down. On the other hand, nobody like a regicide and in any case he still wants to take credit for all Labour’s positive achievements. I think he’s getting it about right at the moment.
My girlfriend was saying today that one of the reasons she likes Brown is that he’s a bit dark and brooding - slightly unknowable. It made me think that the next election might look a bit like Bridget Jones’s Diary with the electorate as Bridget (Fags today: 168 million[1]), Brown as the upright and slightly inarticulate Darcy and Cameron as the charming but disreputable Daniel Cleaver.
I had never been particularly interested in seeing the cartoons about the holocaust that Iran commissioned as a reaction to the Danish Muslim cartoons brouhaha. However, now that a Danish newspaper has published them and there’s no doubt going to be a fuss all over again I thought I’d have a look. A search with Google took me to a page produced by the Israel News Agency in which they publish the Iran cartoons in tacky juxtaposition with photos from the holocaust. The cartoons seem thoughtful, I didn’t find them offensive. The bullying and dishonest text pasted over the cartoons by the INA, however, is as revolting in its own way as their misappropriation of those tragic photographs.
Watching Michael Radford’s 2004 film of The Merchant of Venice a couple of days ago had made me feel a bit more sympathetic towards the Israeli government. It’s a heavy-handed film and I didn’t think much of it but Shylock’s dilemma at the end of the play highlighted for me the difficulty of Israel’s position in its current war with Lebanon. Portia tells him that he is legally entitled to take his pound of flesh but that if he takes more or less than a pound, even if he’s off by a fraction, or if he spills any blood in the process then he will be killed. I can see how Israel might feel that this is what is expected of them in their response to the aggression of Hezbollah. They are allowed to react but if they go too far, as indeed they did, or if they spill any innocent blood, as inevitably happened, then they are suddenly very unpopular.
Yeah, right on BP, you’re so environmentally friendly. Workers blow the whistle on your polluting Alaskan oil wells, you shut down the wells while you investigate, the price of oil goes up again, you get richer. Have you seen that Howies T-shirt, “New Logo, same shit company”?
BBC NEWS | Business | BP shuts down 12 Alaska oil wells
Plus, more good news. The World at One on Radio 4 commissioned a survey about whether people are happy with the criminal justice system. The headline that came out of the survey was that just over half of the people they questioned (56%) feel that they are more at risk of being a victim of crime than they were ten years ago. Apart from the fact that if you look at the detailed results you’ll see that just over a third of people (32%) felt that things were about the same, isn’t that just a result of people getting older? Doesn’t everyone worry more about crime as they get richer and more settled? Funnily enough BBC News Online have that result much further down their story. Their headline is about the fact that “most people want more prisons and are prepared to face a tax rise to pay for them.”
They didn’t report the fact that most (52%) respondents were over 45 years old and only 11% were under 24. According to the Prison Reform Trust the average age of those sentenced to custody in 2003 was 27. A quarter was aged 22 or less.