Marbury

labour's tight spot

(Photo: Richard Pohle/The Times)

The coalition is at the beginning of what may be the most politically tough and unpopular programme of reform since the early 1980s. Lib Dem support has imploded. Labour has a new, young, and likeable leader - yet it lags in the polls. Even Michael Foot was ahead at this stage. An interview with Alan Johnson in The Times (£) reminds us how hard it is for Labour to gain any purchase in opposition at the moment:

His aim is to slow the Government down. “We are not saying we will live with a fiscal deficit indefinitely, but we are saying we must reduce our debt more slowly as the economy grows. The signal says ‘proceed with caution’ yet the coalition have opened up full throttle. We are saying speed kills. Go carefully and gradually.” Mr Johnson warns that no other country is attempting to reduce its debt as fast as Britain. “If every country did, there would be a serious global problem. The coalition is risking a double-dip recession.”

"Vote for us, we want to do the same stuff, just a bit more slowly," is not what I call an inspirational rallying call, or a clear dividing line.

I actually think Johnson and Miliband are right to make this argument, rather than protesting that the cuts are unnecessary. They must hope that in the end voters will reward them for being responsible. But it's awfully hard to campaign on an issue of technical competence rather than ideological choice, especially when your last term in office left some big questions about said competence.

count tolstoy at home

From The Atlantic's archives, an 1891 profile of Leo Tolstoy:

The count, who had been mowing, appeared at dinner in a grayish blouse and trousers and a soft white linen cap. He looked even more weather-beaten in complexion than he had in Moscow during the winter, if that were possible. His broad shoulders seemed to preserve in their enhanced stoop a memory of recent toil. His manner, a combination of gentle simplicity, awkward half-conquered consciousness, and half-discarded polish, was as cordial as ever. His piercing gray-green-blue eyes had lost none of their almost saturnine and withal melancholy expression.

The author, Isabel Hapgood, paints a vivid picture of Tolstoy's life on his estate and evokes a passionate and opinionated man who nevertheless can't help but listen to and absorb the opinions of others. Hapgood delights into getting into arguments with him, and knows she has changed his mind when he "retreats into silence". Or maybe he just wants her to shut up. Anyway, there are many delights here:

One day, during a chat in his study, he had praised Dickens. “There are three requisites which go to make a perfect writer,” he remarked. “First, he must have something worth saying. Second, he must have a proper way of saying it. Third, he must have sincerity. Dickens had all three of these qualities. Thackeray had not much to say; he had a great deal of art in saying it; but he had not enough sincerity. Dostóevsky possessed all three requisites..." He declared that America had not as yet produced any first-class woman writer, like George Eliot and George Sand.

And here is Tolstoy's theory of how to live:

Men should divide their time each day between (1) hard labor unto perspiration and callosities; (2) the exercise of some useful handicraft; (3) exercise of the brain in writing and reading; (4) social intercourse, sixteen hours in all.

Does tapping at a laptop count as hard labour? No, thought not.

philosopher clown

Slavoj Zizek, in case you haven't encountered him before, is a Slovenian philosopher, sort of an existentialist neo-Marxist or something like that, and a bit of a global star on the lecture circuit. He has a huge appetite for popular culture, contrarian aphorisms, and - unusually for a philosopher - jokes. (You can read a fascinating, long profile of him here.) As this brilliant little sketch of Zizek at a book signing conveys, the man is a walking gag machine, and an unstoppable gossip. It's hard to know which bit to extract:

He said he was looking forward to a trip to Jenin next spring and had recently met with a group of Palestinians he would be visiting there. "They're not Islamic fundamentalists. They're normal people like us. We started exchanging dirty jokes. They told me one. 'Why do Iraqi women not sleep with American soldiers? Because they always talk about pulling out but never do.'

"Beneath every Communist," said Mr. Zizek, "there is a secret bourgeois snob. At least I admit to it."

The man with the camera asked him about politics in the Balkans. Mr. Zizek said that his native Slovenia was in disarray but that he saw hope in Montenegro, where many Albanian refugees had settled without upheaval. The Observer admitted that he had an Albanian grandmother. Mr. Zizek said he liked to tell ethnic jokes about Balkan nationalities. Montenegrins, the jokes held, were famously lazy.

"How does a Montenegrin masturbate?" Mr. Zizek asked. "He digs a hole in the earth, puts his penis in and waits for an earthquake."

He also tells some very unreliable anecdotes about Ralph Fiennes and Nicole Kidman.

a very french protest

This must be what you get when you cross student riots with The Sartorialist. The scarf is a nice detail.

unfriendly bombs

When General McChrystal took command of the Afghan war he drastically scaled back the use of air power. His whole strategy was based on building stronger relationships between the Afghan people and the Americans, and he figured that bombing them from above wasn't the best way to form friendships. As Wired's Danger Room reports, General Petraeus has reversed this strategy:

The U.S. and its allies have unleashed a massive air campaign in Afghanistan, launching missiles and bombs from the sky at a rate rarely seen since the war’s earliest days. In October alone, NATO planes fired their weapons on 1,000 separate missions, U.S. Air Force statistics provided to Danger Room show. Since Gen. David Petraeus took command of the war effort in late June, coalition aircraft have flown 2,600 attack sorties. That’s 50% more than they did during the same period in 2009. Not surprisingly, civilian casualties are on the rise, as well.

The bombing is part of a general rise in the aggressiveness of American military operations and seems to be aimed at softening up the Taliban for a peace deal.

Link to Wired report.

has america caught the british disease?

Berkeley professor Barry Eichengreen compares the history of Britain's decline since 1870 - as the emerging powers of Germany and America started to grow much faster and eventually overtake it - to America's current situation. He discounts all sorts of previously mooted parallels (decline of managerial quality, the educational or financial systems) before settling on one that works:

A final explanation for Britain’s failure to keep up makes economic policy the culprit. Britain failed to put in place an effective competition policy. In response to the collapse of demand in 1929, it erected high tariff walls. Sheltered from foreign competition, industry grew fat and lazy. After WWII, repeated shifts between Labour and Conservative governments led to stop-go policies that heightened uncertainty and created chronic financial problems.

Herein lies the most convincing explanation for British decline. The country failed to develop a coherent policy response to the financial crisis of the 1930’s. Its political parties, rather than working together to address pressing economic problems, remained at each other’s throats. The country turned inward. Its politics grew fractious, its policies erratic, and its finances increasingly unstable. In short, Britain’s was a political, not an economic, failure.

This chimes with James Fallows' brilliant (very long) article about American "decline". Fallows - who lived in China for years - concluded that rumours of the end of America's economic and military dominance were much exaggerated, and that it retains big advantages over China, India and other emerging powers, the most important of which is its openness as a society (and therefore its ability to attract and assimilate talented people from around the world). But America's biggest problem, he concluded, is that its deadlocked political system is unable to deal with the country's long-term problems:

America still has the means to address nearly any of its structural weaknesses. Yes, the problems are intellectually and politically complicated: energy use, medical costs, the right educational and occupational mix to rebuild a robust middle class. But they are no worse than others the nation has faced in more than 200 years, and today no other country comes close to the United States in having the surplus money, technology, and attention to apply to the tasks. (China? Remember, most people there still live on subsistence farms.) ... That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.”

Arguably, the strength of Britain's first past the post system and its strong executive branch is that, as in the 1980s, it's able to make painful, unpopular adjustments from time to time. As Nick Clegg and David Cameron would tell you.

(Ps talking of British and American diseases...)

social twits

This is probably only funny if you've seen The Social Network (original trailer here). Is there a more self-loathing medium than Twitter? Even the name is self-deprecating.

And if you're interested, here is a great post on the anthropology of Twitter's "Follow Fridays".

clams vs oranges

The New Yorker under its legendary editor William Shawn is still renowned amongst writers for being the platonic ideal of a writerly magazine. This anecdote is taken from a lovely Paris Review interview with the great non-fiction writer John MacPhee:

Let’s say I wanted to write about clams. I’d go to Shawn with that idea, and he would say, Oh no, no. That’s reserved in a general way for another writer. That’s reserved in a general way. Isn’t that amazing? Shawn never mentioned one writer to another. Shawn operated at the hub of an old-fashioned wheel, with the spokes going out all over the place, and the spokes were the writers and no one ever touched another. He kept this amazing thing going. He had thought beforehand about an amazing number of subjects, so the odds were if you brought something up, Shawn had pondered it in some context before. He always knew what he thought immediately. Sometimes he said that it was reserved for another writer, and sometimes he just wasn’t interested. If that was the case, he’d say, Oh no, that’s not for us.

At any rate, that first month, January of 1965, I go in there and we’re having this conversation—Oh no, that’s not for us. Again and again. And then finally I said, Well I have another idea. It’s a piece about oranges. That’s all I said—oranges. I didn’t mention juice, I didn’t mention trees, I didn’t mention the tropics. Just—oranges.

Oh yes! Oh yes! he says. That’s very good. The next thing I knew I was in Florida talking to orange growers.

MacPhee went on to write a whole book about oranges.

reagan vs obama; responses to adversity

Ronald Reagan's party received a whacking in the 1982 midterms, as the country struggled to get out of recession. But as Andrew Sprung notes, Reagan's response to this setback forms a contrast with Obama's. This is from a New York Times report from January 1983, when Reagan's popularity was at its nadir (his approval rating was 35%):

(President Reagan) hailed his first two years in office today and insisted that he now had ''America on the mend.''

''For all our troubles, midterm finds this Administration and this country entering a season of hope,'' the President said at a White House news conference...''We inherited a mess, we didn't run away from it and now we're turning it around'...'My biggest regret is that because the accumulated damages piled up so high for so long, putting America's house in order has been a tough and painful task,'' Mr. Reagan said at a brief televised news conference designed to focus on his claim of success.

The tone is bold, undaunted and optimistic, the language forceful.

Here's Obama in the 60 Minutes interview he recorded a few days ago:

People I think expect that we would have made more progress than we have on the economic front...I do think that what was also true was that there are a lot of folks in this country who voted for me, hoping that we were gonna be able to get Washington to work again. And what they've seen over the last two years is a lot of partisan bickering. A lot of the same chronic problems that we've seen in Washington over the last several decades now...

I don't know about you, but I'm depressed already. Obama then goes through a list of policies that worked (the middle-class tax cut, infrastructure, health insurance) but offers no narrative to join them together - no "putting America's house in order". He does a lot of this kind of checking off of "components":

And so, our goal has to be to try to bring the parties together and see if we can move forward on some areas that we know will encourage growth -- like education, investment in research and development, investment in science and technology. Make sure that government continues to do the things that people think are important. Social Security. Making sure there's a safety net. Making sure that Medicare is there for future generations. Making sure that we have a strong defense. Try to find those areas where we're engaging in a lot of waste and eliminate those. But there's one last component to this, Steve. That that is, I think, people want to see Washington work. And what they mean by Washington working: It's transparent. It's accountable.

Still awake? I don't know, but I have a feeling that much as people are frustrated with Washington, they are not longing for their president to address the issue of transparency in government. The tone of the interview as a whole is apologetic, as if, you know, those Republican folks may exaggerate a little but they're making some really great points.

There's a fine line between "humility" and coming off like a wet blanket.

People want jobs, and a feeling that America is on the move. Of course, there's only so much that Obama can do about that. But what he can do - what he ought to be able to do - is give them a vision of where the country is headed; one that makes the pain and the waiting worthwhile.

before facebook, the phone book

 

This is from a fascinating review of what sounds like an excellent book, about a superficially unpromising subject:

The phone itself was a pretty big deal, of course, helping intimacy transcend proximity. But phone books provided a crucial element to the system: intrusiveness. In the beginning of 1880, Shea writes, there were 30,000 telephone subscribers in the U.S. At the end of the year, that number had grown to 50,000, and because of phone books, each one of them was exposed to the others as never before. While many American cities had been compiling databases of their inhabitants well before the phone was invented, listing names, occupations, and addresses, individuals remained fairly insulated from each other. Contacting someone might require a letter of introduction, a facility for charming butlers or secretaries, a long walk. Phone books eroded these barriers. They were the first step in our long journey toward the pandemic self-surveillance of Facebook. “Hey strangers!” anyone who appeared in their pages ordained. “Here’s how to reach me whenever you feel like it, even though I have no idea who you are.”

The review opens with a top fact: last year the US movie industry generated $10 billion. The US yellow pages industry generated $15 billion.

on being a person 1.0 in a 2.0 world

I haven't read any of Zadie Smith's novels (for no particular reason) but I love reading her essays. This NYRB piece, on The Social Network and the meaning of Facebook, is a fabulous example:

It seemed significant to me that on the way to the movie theater, while doing a small mental calculation (how old I was when at Harvard; how old I am now), I had a Person 1.0 panic attack. Soon I will be forty, then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan. Can you have that feeling, on Facebook? I’ve noticed—and been ashamed of noticing—that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX

When I read something like that, I have a little argument with myself: “It’s only poor education. They feel the same way as anyone would, they just don’t have the language to express it.” But another part of me has a darker, more frightening thought. Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?

Link to essay.

"he won't even make a good former president"

Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's former speechwriter, is one of America's best and worst columists. She is capable of writing the most embarrassing guff, but when she's on her game she writes with a verve and penetration unmatched by her peers.

This week's offering displays her coruscating best. Her smackdown of Sarah Palin for making a silly comparison of herself with Reagan has been much blogged. But the column's most brutal paragraphs are reserved for the president. Now, I don't think that Obama is, as Noonan suggests, a busted flush (although I did think he displayed a worrying lack of pep at his press conference). But this sketch of him is so well-drawn, so funny and so elegantly savage, that it all but sweeps you along with it:

On Wednesday, President Obama gave a news conference to share his thoughts. Viewers would have found it disappointing if there had been any viewers. The president is speaking, in effect, to an empty room. From my notes five minutes in: "This wet blanket, this occupier of the least interesting corner of the faculty lounge, this joy-free zone, this inert gas." By the end I was certain he will never produce a successful stimulus because he is a human depression.

Actually I thought the worst thing you can say about a president: He won't even make a good former president.

His detachment is so great, it is even from himself. As he spoke, he seemed to be narrating from a remove. It was like hearing the audiobook of Volume I of his presidential memoirs. "Obama was frustrated. He honestly didn't understand what the country was doing. It was as if they had compulsive hand-washing disorder. In '08 they washed off Bush. Now they're washing off Obama. There he is, swirling down the drain! It's all too dramatic, too polar. The morning after the election it occurred to him: maybe he should take strong action. Maybe he should fire America! They did well in 2008, but since then they've been slipping. They weren't giving him the followership he needed. But that wouldn't work, they'd only complain. He had to keep his cool. His aides kept telling him, 'Show humility.' But they never told him what humility looked like. What was he supposed to do, burst into tears and say hit me? Not knowing how to feel humility or therefore show humility he decided to announce humility: He found the election 'humbling,' he said."

What Democrats have to learn from this election: Cut loose from that.

Link to column.

the sweetshop problem

I'm not where I am on this question but Stefan Collini makes a very good case, contra the Browne Report, that our university system should not be a market ruled by consumer demand. Here's a good extract:

The character, but perhaps also the confusions, of this model come more clearly into focus if we return to the statement I quoted earlier which says: ‘Students are best placed to make the judgment about what they want to get from participating in higher education.’ Looked at more closely, this statement reveals itself to be a vacuous tautology because of its reliance on the phrase ‘want to get’. By definition, individuals are privileged reporters on what they think they want. The sentence could only do the work the report requires of it if it said something more like: ‘Students are best placed to make the judgment about what they should get from participating in higher education.’ But this proposition is obviously false. Children may be best placed to judge what they want to get from the sweetshop, but they are not best placed to judge what they should get from their schooling. University students are, of course, no longer children, but nor are they simply rational consumers in a perfect market.

(h/t Tom Chatfield)

the anthropology of elevators

Scientific American has a meditation on elevation by Krystal D'Costa that is a lovely blend of anthropological observation and social history:

Sociologist Joseph Gittler proposed that Americans initially resisted the elevator for personal use because they didn’t quite understand how it worked and this opacity contributed to fear for their personal safety. People were asked to put their trust in a system they could not see...Not even Elisha Otis and his “safety elevator” design were initially well received. Although, in truth, his unveiling at the 1853 New York World’s Fair was perhaps a bit dramatic and may have contributed to the elevator’s worrying reputation. Otis’ design included a mechanism that would stop a falling car - a version of which is still in use today. At the World’s Fair he essentially stood on a platform rigged with his device, had someone cut the rope holding the platform up, and dropped spectacularly before coming to a complete stop. While this did wonders for his business, and helped launch Otis Steam Elevator Works, it did not necessarily discourage public concern...

...Conversation in a full elevator encroaches on the personal space of other riders, which is already greatly reduced. The closed space imparts a sense of intimacy, and the riders who aren’t participants in the discussion are left feeling like eavesdroppers. That’s not to say that no conversation occurs, but that conversations with strangers are kept to a minimum. Conversations themselves are somewhat awkward things - you never know how they’ll go with the other person if this is a first meeting, and in the close quarters of an elevator cab it can feel as though you’re under close scrutiny. Lingering uncertainty about the elevator - its mechanics are well hidden from the rider - encourage riders to keep their business in the car as short as possible. Conversation can also be distracting - what if you missed your stop? Then you’d be forced to spend more time on the elevator! And that increases your chances of something going wrong. The repeat button pushers are likely trying to accomplish the same thing: to disembark as soon as possible. They have little control over the elevator itself, but repeated pressing their floor number or the “Door Close” button helps maintain the sense that they are doing something.

The neo-Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek has suggested that the "Door Close" button is a metaphor for voting in Western liberal democracies - it gives the user a "false sense of effective activity".

Link to Krystal D'Costa's piece.

(h/t Vaughan Bell)

still in the tank

The writer Curtis Sittenfeld declares that she "still loves" Obama:

You might say, to borrow the accusation frequently levelled at the media then, that I've remained in the tank for him. The only problem is I seem to be in the tank by myself.

How quickly we forget! After an excruciating eight years of George Bush, the thrill still hasn't worn off of once again having an intellectually nimble president, not to mention one who doesn't pride himself on going with his gut when it comes to foreign policy. Whenever I watched Bush speak extemporaneously, I'd feel alternately embarrassed by and for him. And whenever I interacted with someone from another country, I'd feel compelled to mention that I hadn't voted for Bush. But when I see Obama on television, I'm unfailingly struck by his intelligence and charisma, by his easygoing humour, by the magnificence of his megawatt smile.

Despite my criticisms of Obama, and my recognition that his inexperience as a politician has cost him in office (Hillary was at least partly right) my sympathies are still on the Sittenfeld side.