Cassandra Voices

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  • Into the Arms of America

    I am sitting on a Frontier flight, a low-cost U.S. airline – basically the American Ryanair – my girlfriend beside me and Tiziano Terzani’s book, Lettere contro la guerra (Letters against the war, 2002) in my hands. We are flying to Seattle. I capture her attention by nudging her with my elbow to read and translate a passage in which Terzani describes, very accurately, what we nowadays refer to as ISIS. The letter I am reading is dated September 14th 2001, just three days after the Twin Towers attack on 9/11.

    I suddenly realise how one just needs to travel in order to know different cultures and realities; to understand the inefficiency of anti-immigration policies now regulating the movements of mankind. Something is just not working. Terzani understood this after a life spent in Asia, where he was a war correspondent for several European press agencies. He interacted and talked with politicians, philosophers, soldiers and even Afghan jihadists, trying to understand perspectives unknown, misunderstood or veiled in mystery.

    People put in charge of handling and regulating immigration often treat travellers with unprovoked skepticism. Is it that they have never left their native countries and experienced life abroad?

    The week before our flight to Seattle, I was detained for three long hours in Denver International Airport. They brought me to one of those small rooms that make you feel guilty even if you have done absolutely nothing wrong.

    I was subjected to an intimidating interrogation by American Immigration, and after document and visa checks, fingerprints and a retinal scan, I was told that I could not pass through because I had not booked a return ticket to Europe.

    I had not booked a return flight because I did not yet know the duration of my stay, but I assured them I was aware of the three month limit. The guards informed me that my ESTA visa requires a return flight.

    Though I have never travelled inter-continentally before, I was made aware of these types of issues. Many friends had told me of their experiences, so I carefully checked online and asked around to be sure I had everything needed for travel into the U.S..

    How could I have forgotten to check these important details? Tired and stunned by the long flight, I gently asked the officer where it was indicated that I must have a return flight. She only reiterated that it was ‘mandatory’, though I could not find it written anywhere.

    Was I being bullied? Was an Italian musician not their ideal tourist? Perhaps it was my lack of cash in hand that appeared suspicious. Whatever the reason, if a return flight is mandatory to enter the country, should it be tucked away in obscure small print?

    I next attempted to text my girlfriend so she should know I had been detained by immigration, and was running late. The guard accused me of lying and promptly confiscated my phone, arguing that I was not allowed to text while in their custody.

    They demanded I purchase a return ticket, as my backpack was meticulously inspected. The agent, half-smilingly, asked me why I had a backpack full of music gear. I explained I was a musician carrying a portable studio in order to record an album. He suggested I might attempt to work as a D.J..

    They proceeded to ask me a plethora of questions about my girlfriend, and any additional contacts I had in the U.S.. Eventually, they found me a return flight to Europe for $3,000. They insisted that I purchase it immediately in order to be given leave to enter the country. But I refused to buy a flight at that price, so they found me a $300 flight to London, which I agreed to purchase.

    Once I received my return flight confirmation, they completely changed their tune, wishing me an amazing holiday in the USA!

    Denver’s airport is located in a clearing east of the city. From the big windows, through the summer mist, you can lose yourself for miles in the outline of the Rocky Mountains. Ironically, the sound of Native American flute and drum music hums through the corridor. I find that strange, for obvious reasons of cultural and actual genocide. My contemplation of the vastness and beauty of the country I had just landed in was being spoiled by the long wait in a small cold, sad interrogation room.

    After such a welcome, I expected to find a heavily-guarded country; some sort of gigantic Switzerland, but the reality is far more chaotic.

    Areas of Denver around Capitol Hill and Broadway are full of homeless people, completely abandoned to their own destiny. There are so many of them. This is a city within a city, where people protect themselves from the burning June sun in the shade of trees. I understand even more the enormity of this country.

    Dublin, where I live, is now sadly notorious for having a homeless emergency, and this problem is evident all over Europe. But beside what I met in the U.S., it is nothing.

    Walking around town, I met various strange souls and colourful characters, which just seems to be the norm. It is as though the ‘American Dream’ shoots out in all directions, with no clear destination. There is obviously the ‘freedom’ of becoming a high level manager, or a careless financial broker with limitless riches, but then there is also the ‘freedom’ of living with empty pockets.

    The homeless pitch their tents pretty much everywhere in the big cities. In Seattle, for example, all along the coast, tents surround every column supporting the Alaskan Way Viaduct above.

    We can donate to homeless charities, and those organisations still exist, so we can help them on an individual level. But the problem is more visible than ever, and it does not seem like there is a way of escaping this social pattern.

    The Western Empire, that is the United States, has exerted enormous influence over the world over the last seventy years. Ultimately, however, its interests do not align with humanity, including American citizens.

    Supporting the idea that there is a general disregard for people, is the great American drama of discriminatory healthcare. If you can afford to pay thousands of dollars for insurance, you can have the very best, overpriced, innovative treatment in the world. If you cannot, you risk bankruptcy by paying prohibitive fees, or suffer in silence.

    Low income individuals can still apply for Medicaid, which is government-funded healthcare. They are, however, lucky to find anyone who will go ahead with it due to the excruciatingly time-consuming billing process.

    There is an unacceptable lack of government-funded healthcare in a state which, only this year, under Donald Trump’s administration, invested $700 billion on ‘defence’ programs. Are new and more powerful weapons to be the highest aspiration of the richest country in the world?

    To justify this level of government spending, you will always need an enemy. But throughout its history, the most powerful army in the world has always prevailed. Is immigration to be the new enemy? This would make sense when taking into account the devastating possibilities of modern warfare.

    As Vladimir Putin suggested in an interview with Oliver Stone, war at this level will have no winners, conflict between nuclear powers can only end with the destruction of the planet.

    Millions of people are now on the move around the world: seeking employment or just a more fulfilling life; or trying to escape the horrors of war, racial and political intimidation, or like me, simply visiting a partner.

    How can the rest of the world look towards the West with hope if these are the social dynamics? How can we pretend that this so-called democratic society of America is  the leading example of humanity, and not an arrogant menace?

  • Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš Appears Oblivious to Our History

    Andrej Babiš is a chameleon. At one point you see him on a poster beaming out a jovial smile, or handing sweet pastries at an election rally; then you watch him giving interviews to international media full of resentful claims, while ‘representing‘ the views of our country.

    So who is he and how did he get elected? Ironically, he is not originally Czech, but from Slovakia. First and foremost he is a businessman who claims to bring order to our political situation.

    An average Czech person would say a lack of political experience does not matter because he is a rich already, and hence would not be dependent on the post to generate wealth for himself. Many also believe his business experience is going to prove useful.

    But let us focus on his most recent activities, which caught the attention of Le Monde and The Guardian. Anyone can see that he is playing to the narrative of fear and hatred which chronically follows the refugee migrations. Unfortunately, a considerable number of Czechs share his views, at least according to polls. Most have forgotten how, even in recent history, Czechs have sought refuge from political persecution and economic stagnation.

    To be honest, it is surprising that people from a country with a long history of seeing people flee political oppression can show such close-minded thinking. Mr Babiš claims, which I sincerely hope do not represent the real views of people, certainly do not help improve their understanding.

    Not only are his claims manipulative, they also tend to be misleading. ‘Britain has always been an ally of the Czech Republic‘, he recently asserted; yeah well, our small country’s requests for help to our ‘ally‘ fell on deaf ears twice last century. First before World War II when the British and French conceded the Sudetenland under the Munich Agreement with the Nazis, and then again after the War when the Soviets were permitted to take over.

    Funnily enough, Czech people do not actually have much to ‘fear‘. The Czech Republic is not a place where many migrants want to settle. It is merely a transition state and to this date, only tens of people actually have actually sought asylum.

    From time to time, Mr Babiš does raise important issue, such as when he draws attention to the blood money that smugglers are making. But most of what he is saying is nonsensical, such as persuading potential migrants to stay in their countries of origin. The fact these people have decided to leave with little hope of returning demonstrates the severity of their predicament.

    That is a predicament Czechs went through multiple times throughout our history, when many were forced to leave their homes and families behind, bribe a smuggler and hope that the bullets miss their bodies when they climbed over the barbed wire fence, and run for their life – all in the hope of a better life.

    How can Mr Babiš turn a blind eye to our history and speak on the behalf of Czechs? And even if there was no historical context to rely on, do his arguments about dividing ‘our culture‘ and ‘their culture” stand up to scrutiny? I don’t think so.

    I have to give him this though, he might be on to something when he says that the media fails to report on the important issues. The ‘if it bleeds it leads’ approach in reporting certainly does not invite an average person to dig deeply, and see what lies under the surface.

    That is how you find yourself around a family table, listening to strong opinions (mostly based on news headlines) with people actually not knowing and/or not wanting to know any more. But before you let his complaints about the state of media impress you, I dare you to guess the name of the Slovakian businessman who owns the widest-circulating Czech newspapers?

    I would love to think that the close-minded and history-oblivious views Mr. Babiš throws in do not represent the majority of people’s views, but I actually don’t know. I may myself be in a sound chamber, and do not tend to surround myself with close-minded people. So I tend to think that the situation over here is not so bad.

    Then again, our feeble chauvinistic president Miloš Zeman was re-elected last year, supported by Mr. Babiš, who speaks to the international media and goes to Brussels with the kind of views I have set out. It is incredibly unfair of him to represent our country (blissfully unaware of the paradox that he is not even Czech) and offer these ideas, completely ignoring the history of Czechs and of Europe itself.

  • Don’t believe the Autonomous Car Hype – It’s a Sequel!

    Earlier this year, The Economist (March, 2018) published a special report speculating on the potential for autonomous or self-driving cars to solve the countless problems associated with today’s gasoline-powered, human operated vehicles.  Autonomous cars, they and other tech-enthusiasts argue, will virtually eliminate road accidents, revive suburban areas, solve the problem of parking, and reduce traffic in our cities.

    The naïve claim is that a single technology will solve a host of social, cultural and environmental problems, while allowing the economy to keep growing, never questioning whether the endless pursuit of autonomous mobility or economic growth is good for the planet, let alone urban regions.

    I – Appropriation of Critiques

    Ascribing commodities with magical powers is nothing new. Marx called it the fetishism of commodities. A commodity, he wrote, is a mysterious thing that achieves mystical properties, not due to its use value, but from ways in which it objectifies social relations. It is much easier, and profitable, to address the urbanizing planet’s profound socio-ecological crisis with a new technology than to question the social and cultural desire for automobile-propelled mobility.

    Like the rhetoric of the sharing economy, which appropriates the collective idea of sharing in the monetization of everyday life — driving, dwelling, and eating — the rhetoric around the autonomous car appropriates critiques of the automobile that have long been made by environmentalist and anti-car activists.

    The fantasy of this fetish object begins with its very naming as somehow autonomous (literally, outside of or beyond the law). All new technologies, be they cars or smartphones, pencils or paper, alter the existing cultural and social matrix of technologies. The question is how do they do so, who in particular will benefit from them, and how are they sold to the public because, today, all technologies are developed within the laws of capitalism — they have to make money and be profitable, and in the case of the autonomous car, further rather than overcome, the individualism that is at the core of the system of automobility.

    Critics of the car, activists and academics alike, have long pointed to not just the physical violence that mass automobility brings out, but the conceptual violence of automobility as the symbol of autonomous mobility.

    Automobility, in this sense is fundamentally contradictory. The ‘auto’ in automobility implies a coherent self, someone composing her biography in motion. Driving is the ultimate pursuit of the autonomous self. If freedom is motion, forever moving forward, then the car on the open road is the ultimate expression of autonomy.

    At the same time, the ‘auto’ in automation, automaton, and automobile implies a machine, not a human, and a seemingly autonomous machine that is, however, utterly dependent on an infrastructure for it to express the driver’s autonomy, often at the expense of other non-car drivers.

    Critical theorists of automobility have pointed out that automobility is not at all autonomous, but radically dependent on a host of infrastructure systems.  They suggest that the vast system that makes automobility both possible and desirable, ironically, if taken as an intrinsic part of automobility would call into question the very idea and practice of autonomous mobility. Their point is that it is not necessarily the individual in the car that expresses autonomous mobility, but that it is rather the infrastructure, the vast network of highways, gas stations, traffic lights, licensing and insurance systems, that fosters the illusion that movement is autonomous. Thus, the editors of a 2006 edited collection called Against Automobility write, ‘the complex infrastructure of automobility produces, as one of its effects, the appearance of independent automobility.’

    II – ‘Energy Crisis’

    Ivan Ilich, the theologian and radical activist, made the same claim when he criticized the term ‘energy crisis’ in the 1970s in his landmark essay ‘Energy and Equity’ (1974). There was only a crisis, he wrote, because of the number of ‘energy slaves’ that needed to be fed. His point was that the energy crisis revealed the opposite of autonomy: our radical dependence on networks of infrastructure and energy. Autonomy, in his sense, could not be found with a technological tool, green or otherwise, but with social and political liberation.

    If automobility as autonomous mobility is impossible on conceptual grounds, attempts to resolve such antagonisms will always fail.  In his last book, the sociologist John Urry wrote that even the car manufacturers are beginning to realize that automobility’s antagonisms might be ‘impossible to ‘solve’ in any simple sense.’

    The Economist said as much itself back in 2012. To address ‘peak car’ – saturation of the automobile market in the rich countries – car manufacturers had two options: either flood the economically poorer countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, and India with more gas guzzling combustion engines; or bring technology and car companies together to offer rich countries the autonomous car, a ‘highly profitable innovation.’

    The autonomous car, far from overturning the system of automobility that became dominant in the twentieth century, will only perpetuate it and fuel expectations for increased personal mobility, rather than collective, public mobility on public transit. The expectations that we should all have access to a private car to go, where we want and when we want, were in part produced by the infrastructure of automobility.

    III – Uber-flawed

    Uber’s former CEO, Travis Kalanick, argued that Uber was not, as might appear, in competition with taxis, although that is the most visible aspect of the clash (and the associated labour disputes of Uber’s drivers). Rather, Kalanick said that they were not competing in an existing market, but producing an altogether different one. Uber was competing against car ownership. The goal? To make, in Kalanick’s words: ‘car ownership a thing of the past.’

    Kalanick’s claim points to a key aspect of the discourse of the autonomous car: its proponents have appropriated long-held knowledge about the damage cars do to society, in order to sell autonomous cars.

    For years anti-car activists have pointed to a number of antagonisms. The response: autonomous cars will ease the antagonisms of automobility by reducing traffic, ending the over one million fatalities that occur on the world’s roads every year, cutting back carbon emissions (when the cars become self-driving), reduce parking and supplementing public transportation, or in some areas, offering a more cost-effective form of quasi-public transport. With autonomous vehicles, we find what The Economist describes as the possible saviour of both the system of automobility and the dispersed suburban form.

    For decades, anti-car and environmental activists have been drawing attention to these problems with cars. Their point was not to find a technological alternative that could, in theory, provide the same pseudo-freedom of mobility that the car provides, but to question radically that pursuit, and support collective solutions in the interests of the common good: safe and effective public transportation, cycling, and an urban and suburban form conducive to walking and hanging around.

    Today criticisms of the car are recycled by the industry because a technological alternative has become viable that does not call into question the economy of infinite growth. Those who for years persisted in supporting conventional cars because they were still profitable (and as such willingly sacrificed human lives in exchange for personal mobility and profit), now conveniently reach for the anti-car arguments.

    IV – Unsustainable Growth

    Autonomy (2018), is a book co-authored by Lawrence D. Burns, former vice-president of research and development at General Motors, and a key proponent of self-driving cars. The introductory chapter is entitled ‘The Problem with Cars’, and introduces a litany of problems associated with the ‘personally owned, gas-powered, human-operated automobile.’

    These cars he writes are inefficient. Cars are usually occupied by only one person, and in city centres cars rarely travel faster than 12 mph (3). Cars are heavy, and so dangerous, killing 1.3 million people per year, and they contribute to American dependence on oil. And given all that, they still spend 95% of their lives parked.

    ‘Years from now,’ writes Burns, ‘we’ll regard as incredibly wasteful the way we got around in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries….The system is completely irrational.’

    Adam Jonas, a financial analyst at Morgan Stanley, claims that the car industry is the ‘the most disruptable business on the Earth.’ ‘Happily,’ writes Burns, ‘the solution also happens to be better for the earth’. This is telling because it is economics, not an interest in climate change, that, in the end, drives such innovations. If it happens to pollute less, all the better, but the ultimate goal is infinite economic growth, which in today’s climate, cannot be sustained.

    There are, however, two glaring omissions in Burns’s account: no mention of the vast sums of money spent on highway building and maintenance, particularly in North America, much to the detriment of public transportation, and not one mention of public transportation as an already available, collective option to much of the problems he discusses.

    The bus does make an appearance in his narrative: co-founder of Google, Larry Page, while an undergraduate in Michigan in the early 1990s, was forced to wait in the freezing cold for buses that never arrived on time, if at all. While stuck waiting, writes Burns, Page wondered ‘how poorly we as a society had solved the transportation problem.’ The solution, was not to make public transportation more effective, but to come up with an idea for personal rapid transportation, which would lead to the race to build self-driving cars.

    Most remarkably, The Economist’s 2018 special section on autonomous vehicles, claims they will save the suburb from the car by reducing or eliminating driving and the amount of space given over to cars, thereby, ‘updating the 20th-century dream of garden cities.’ Garden Cities, they write, can again become self-sustaining, producing their own power through solar, and growing their own food. Since autonomous vehicles can be parked elsewhere and roads narrowed, car spaces can be reclaimed as gathering spaces for people.

    V – Suburbs without cars?

    Is it possible to conceive of the dispersed suburbs without privately-owned cars? The lack of sidewalks will turn into a bonus as the playing field between cars and pedestrians is levelled. What about the demise of car ownership? If car ownership is part of the debtscape of suburban neo-liberal automobility (Walks, 2015), how might the de-privatized self-driving car change this?

    For Wendell Cox, one of the staunchest supporters of neo-liberal automobility, the idea of suburban dwellers not only giving up car ownership, but sharing rides with their fellow suburban dwellers in self-driving cars is unthinkable. In other words, self-driving transportation services should not resemble in any form public transportation.

    In all of these cases, radical alternatives that were about a right to the city, are commodified and sold to us as saviours of the city. And it is unlikely these self-driving cars will benefit the places that need them most: suburbs and peripheries lacking in good public transportation.

    The current mood around self-driving cars places them in the increasingly exclusive central cores of cities like Google’s proposed smart neighbourhood, Quayside, on the Toronto waterfront, which will make use of self-driving cars.

    If the current forms of ‘tech mobility’ (Henderson, 2018) are any indication – like the privatised Google buses in San Francisco ferrying workers from the downtown to their suburban tech campuses – so-called sustainable forms of liveability that are associated with self-driving cars, carbon-free mobility, and bike lanes, will exacerbate rather than overcome the infrastructural inequities between the central city cores and the periphery, enhance the autonomous mobility of the few, not the many.

    References

    Steffen Böhm, Campbell Jones, Mat Paterson, and Chris Land (Eds.), Against automobility. Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2006.
    Jason Henderson, Google Buses and Uber Cars, The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics, Routledge, New York, pp. 439–450, 2018.
    Alan Walks, Stopping the ‘War on the Car’: Neoliberalism, Fordism, and the Politics of Automobility in Toronto, Mobilities 10 (3): 402–22, 2015.
    Lawrence D. Burns and Christopher Shulgan, Autonomy: the quest to build the driverless car–and how it will reshape our world, HarperCollins, New York, 2018.
    Evelyn Rusli and Douglas MacMillan, ‘Uber Gets an Uber-Valuation’, Wall Street Journal, 6 June 2014, <http://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-gets-uber-valuation-of-18-2-billion-1402073876>
    Wendell Cox, ‘Driverless Cars and the City: Sharing Cars, Not Rides’, Cityscape, 18, 197–204, 2016
    Ivan Ilich, Energy and Equity, London : Calder & Boyars, 1974, http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/EnergyEquity/Energy%20and%20Equity.htm
    ‘Seeing the Back of the Car’, The Economist, 22 September 2012 <https://www.economist.com/briefing/2012/09/22/seeing-the-back-of-the-car>
    ‘Special Report: Autonomous Vehicles’, The Economist, 1 March 2018 https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/03/01/self-driving-cars-will-profoundly-change-the-way-people-live

  • Post-Truth: People of the Lie

    Morality is the basis of things and truth is the basis of all morality.
    Mahatma Gandhi

    Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani was recently asked whether his boss had a case to answer arising from the conviction of his former associate Paul Manafort. He responded with the not-altogether-original, but nonetheless all-too-convincing argument that ‘truth is not truth.’ It seems we have entered a virtual reality nightmare.

    Of course times passed have been consumed with other disturbing ideologies such as, Social Darwinism, racism, Fascism and Communism. More recently we have seen neo-liberalism reign supreme, giving rise to Francis Fukayama’s foolhardy vision of an End to History.

    Just as Marxists shibboleths about the inevitability and finality of Revolution ignored reality, the neo-liberal world order is disintegrating before our eyes, a point which Fukayama now concedes; recently he meekly acknowledged there had been a decline in faith in democratic institutions, and that democracy was now moving backwards.

    So perhaps Post-Truth will be a passing affliction. Alas I doubt it.

    Post-Truth, or truth decay, has been coming for a while and its origins need to be traced as it dictates the activities of the Trump administration.

    I – Post Modern Nonsense

    First came the purveyors of nonsense, and incomprehensible prose, the Structuralists and Post Modernist poseurs of the Sorbonne.

    They united in rejection of universal values, while espousing a gospel of relativism, thereby ditching the inheritance of the Enlightenment. This led to the dismissal of evidence, rationality, science, rigour, precision, and all the integrative forces that holds society together.

    Noam Chomsky in this context wrote a passage worth quoting in full:

    It’s entirely possible that I’m simply missing something, or that I just lack the intellectual capacity to understand the profundities that have been unearthed in the past 20 years or so by Paris intellectuals and their followers. I’m perfectly open-minded about it, and have been for years, when similar charges have been made — but without any answer to my questions. Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer: if I’m missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand. Of course, if it’s all beyond my comprehension, which is possible, then I’m just a lost cause, and will be compelled to keep to things I do seem to be able to understand, and keep to association with the kinds of people who also seem to be interested in them and seem to understand them (which I’m perfectly happy to do, having no interest, now or ever, in the sectors of the intellectual culture that engage in these things, but apparently little else).

    Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I’m missing, we’re left with the second option: I’m just incapable of understanding. I’m certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I’m afraid I’ll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don’t understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I’m interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest — write things that I also don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of “theory” that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) … I won’t spell it out.”

    It is, in other words, nonsense on stilts, that degrades our culture. But it has gained traction, and power, and should not be underestimated.

    Relativism, which should never have gone beyond those flaneurs, has been hijacked by the Populist Right, including Climate Change Deniers, Anti-Vaxxers  and Creationists, who insist on balanced coverage for their ludicrous views, each one as ‘valid’ as the other, in Post Modernist hell. This reaches an apogee in the churning garbage emanating from spokespeople for the Trump administration, especially the deranged President himself.

    The gospel of relativism brings contempt for truth, reason and evidence. It entails the rejection of scientific methods, order and the Rule of Law.

    The first point to note about Post Modernism is that it encourages distrust in established truth, and generates an atmosphere of looseness and imprecision, where arguments are accorded even and equal weight, even if lacking any substance. The misplaced logic is that since all views are equal, all views should be aired and taken equally seriously.

    The late David Foster Wallace described this as ‘an epistemic free for all in which the truth is wholly a matter of perspective and agenda.’

    ‘Balanced coverage’ and ‘tolerance’ of opposing points of view in the media often leads to the elevation of nonsense, or lies.

    Balance should not permit the assertion that Climate Change is a fraud. Undue weight is being accorded to marginal opinions and minority views, which simply should not be given a platform. Abandoned is the quest for an elusive truth. The media is giving a microphone to divisive extremism.

    This nonsense is creeping into our culture, our media, our law courts and is a form of brainwashing.

    Relativistic and structuralist ideas, such as the indeterminacy of texts, alternative ways of knowing and the instability of language opens the way for Trump and his acolytes to say that every word he utters should not be taken literally. Just as a text by Derrida contradicts itself, Trump similarly can make contradictory statements, from one tweet to the next.

    II – Holding to Truth

    As a lawyer I have been trained to consider distinctions between fact and opinion. I understand how an apparently established fact can actually be the product of manipulation, distortion or outright fabrication.

    In my work for The Innocence Project in Ireland I found many instances of perjured evidence, false and fabricated claims and cognitive and confirmation bias by experts, or really pseudo-experts, leading to false conclusions and erroneous convictions. Innocent people are often incarcerated on the basis of lies and this false expertise.

    In this Post Modern zeitgeist we privilege opinion over knowledge, and feelings over facts. This includes confirmation bias where people rush to judgment and follow their prejudices, rather than properly evaluating sources.

    Indeed, with regard to so-called expert witnesses I am reminded of Wittgenstein’s famous comment, itself capable of multiple levels of interpretation: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent (Wittgenstein, 1922)

    As difficult as it is to establish the truth, and as complex as it may prove to be, we must continue to strive for it, and not succumb to relativism, or take refuge in Post-Truth nonsense.

    This pursuit is indispensable for penal and judicial decision-making, as well as the pursuit of social and economic justice. Acknowledging there truth helps inform political and personal choices arising from our interactions with banks or politicians, or indeed with respect to one’s health.

    The truth protects us against those who mislead, dupe or destroy us. Better to acknowledge ‘home truths’, and act accordingly, rather than be seduced by banalities. But it is often difficult to determine what is genuine when you are being bombarded with disinformation.

    As Pope Francis sagely remarked: ‘there is no such thing as harmless disinformation: trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences.’

    So in a sane, rational universe that is how everything should and ought to be decided. Except that is not what confronts us today.

    III – Info-tainment

    Following the degradation of so many discourses, our media is too often consumed by ideological representations of alternative truths – and at worst utter nonsense – in a misplaced quest for balance, or pandering to vested interests.

    News programmes generally adopt a Punch and Judy format, rather than providing serious analysis. We are addicted to what Susan Jacoby termed ‘info-tainment’ (Jacoby, 2009).

    In this respect it was noticeable that the intellectual level of the Clinton-Trump Presidential debates had reached a nadir. For anyone who has listened to the Nixon-Kennedy debates of the early 1960s, or indeed many subsequent electoral ones in the US and Britain, it was simply not a debate.

    It was more like an episode of the Jerry Springer show. But the vaudeville act, the circus clown that is Trump, is actually now President of the United States, having manipulated a series of communications both in the debate, and the media, which were exercises in falsity, total inconsistency, randomness and communication in proto-fascist mode: lashing out at the outsider.

    People were brainwashed into believing that he would help them. The disenfranchised working and middle class reached out to him, and he responded by appointing three members of Goldman Sachs to his cabinet; a classic instance of what Zizek terms ‘ideological mis-indentification’ (Zizek, 1989) with the marginalised voting for self-destruction.

    Print media has also dumbed down. The reasons are obvious. Vested interests have to be appeased. In addition megalomaniac owners cannot be criticised. Things are known, or suspected, but left unsaid. Independent courageous reportage, beyond The Guardian or The New York Times is increasingly rare.

    The so-called text generation, drowning in email communication and other digital ephemera, exacerbate the problem.

    Admittedly, my own emails appear like hieroglyphics – ungrammatical and unpunctuated – so I am scarcely one to talk. But in my defence, I simply cannot take the medium seriously, whereas the rest of the world seems to have lost any interest in oral conversation, or expressing themselves in permanent written form.

    The Internet is a truly poisoned chalice: the major problem is that people feel free to utter whatever they like, however bizarre, extreme or libelous. This accentuates the disentangling of truth from fiction, and facts from lies.

    The Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen has argued that the Internet has replaced genuine knowledge, but that is undifferentiated knowledge derived from the crowd, or mob, which blurs any distinction between fact and opinion.

    Established ideas are under threat and rationality jettisoned, replaced by subjectivism, the pseudo-expert, and elevation of the opinion of the equivalent of ‘the man on the Clapham Omnibus’. As Tom Nichols wrote: ‘every opinion on any matter is as good as every other (Nichols, 2017)’; I am also reminded of William Burroughs’s famous statement that: ‘Opinions are like assholes everyone has one.’

    Another problem is information overload. We are creatures of bounded rationality that can only absorb so much. We have to filter. The Internet presents us with a cacophony of competing voices, all clamouring for attention. This desensitises, and makes it impossible to disentangle valid arguments from nonsense. In effect we are being deceived by a web of deceit, semi-fact, mumbo jumbo and plain nonsense.

    III – Bad Education

    Perhaps most disturbingly, our education system is producing ill-informed, philosophically illiterate, and indeed often genuinely illiterate children. We are operating in a post-Gutenberg Galaxy, where even lecturers and teachers generally no longer read books outside their specialisms, and are insulated from intellectual cross currents. Goethe’s ideal of a civilised education, which inoculates against fascism, no longer abides

    A partial education breeds the self-righteousness of fascism. Why appeal to true argument when your thought processes stands unexamined and your prejudices go uncontradicted? In these circumstances, the gutter press finds a ready market.

    Information is not gleaned from the close reading of texts, but from online synopses. Superficial knowledge and semi-literacy accentuate the perversion that everyone has a right to express their opinion, no matter how ludicrous.

    Let us be clear, academic degrees and education are distinct from one another. We hand out qualifications like confetti, but true education is lacking. Yet, apart from foreign direct investment, the education sector appears to be the biggest growth industry in Ireland. But what kind of person is it producing?

    We find an emphasis on narrow technocratic skills and rote learning, where teachers slavishly adhere to syllabi. Books go unread, but instead are summarised on Internet sites. The standardization of learning outcomes breeds bullshit, piled on bullshit.

    As an established lecturer I have encountered increasing nonsense about balance and standardization. In the ivory tower the careful weighing up of argument has given way to an obsession with footnotes, and citation, and a narrowing in doctoral work; most baleful, is the decline of the academic as public intellectual.

    In this respect we should note the important contribution of perhaps the only acceptable Post Modernist, Michel Foucault. He argued that the more severe punishments of earlier times have been internalized, through insidious methods of control in schools, hospitals and factories.

    In a 1978 interview he remarked:

    In my book on the birth of the prison I tried to show how the idea of a technology of individuals, a certain type of power, was exercised over individuals in order to tame them, shape them and guide their conduct as a kind of strict correlative to the birth of a liberal type of regime. Beyond the prison itself, a carceral style of reasoning, focused on punishable deviations from the norm, thus came to inform a wide variety of modern institutions. In schools, factories, and army barracks, authorities carefully regulated the use of time (punishing tardiness, slowness, the interruption of tasks) activity (punishing inattention, negligence a lack of zeal); speech (punishing idle chatter, insolence, profanity); the body (punishing poor posture, dirtiness, lack in stipulated reflexes) and finally sexuality (punishing impurity, indecency, abnormal behaviour) (Foucault,1980).

    This leads to a social hygiene, wherein people are assessed not on what they have to say, or the quality of any service they may provide, but more on their attire; or whether they wear a uniform that conveys a false sense of expertise and arrogant authority; cleanliness next to a self-serving godliness. Give me someone with an occasional slovenly appearance and I see a degree of human fragility.

    Intolerance and contempt for human frailty, except of course by the power elite who act as they please, marginalises real authorities from making contributions to society.

    In our glorious colleges and universities and schools worse is happening. First and foremost there is a suppression of speech and discourse, with discussion confined within narrowing parameters, and divisive subjects omitted.

    We are in an age of conformity where obedience to authority has become a sine qua non of success. The great old days of uninhibited debate are disappearing from campuses.

    One aspect of this is the so-called ‘snowflake’ phenomenon, leading to anything remotely controversial being deemed offensive. This is used as a method of thought control, and heralds the gradual erosion of criticism of vested interests.

    Moreover, within the college structure promotion and preferment are linked to an increasingly controlled discourse, where ideas that cut across the norm are penalized. Those countervailing ideas often do not sit comfortably with elites, and are usually tinged with leftism or anti-authoritarianism, or involve discomforting truth-telling. Alas, the paradigm of discourse is neo-liberalism, and increasingly a knee-jerk conservatism, which is morphing into outright fascism.

    IV – No Platforming

    The academic community is also responsible for other outrages attacking freedom of speech. One truly sinister development is a phenomenon known as ‘no platforming’, whereby anyone presenting dissident views is barred from campus appearances.

    There are acceptable reasons for exclusion of errant views. For example the trash talk of the fascist historian David Irving, who condones the Holocaust, or at least intimates it never happened, is an obvious case in point. But he is a denier of truth, and his lies should be restrained.

    Recently the ‘no platform’ lobby barred the eminent feminist and author Germaine Greer from speaking in UK campuses, as she had argued many years ago that a man who becomes a woman can never fully understand what it is like to be a woman.

    The ‘no platform’ lobby which secured her ban was made up of transsexual academics. Take note, these are not necessarily trans-sexuals, but a lobby group. They are also proto-fascists and part of a new semi-literate cabal of arcane specialists.

    It is academic Stalinism, or Fascism if you prefer. Such groups use the immense power of blackmail, intimidation by social media and character assassination, to put fear into often squeamish academic authorities.

    V – Anti-Social Media

    Social media is unraveling our social fabric through lies, disinformation, smears and character assassination. As Pierre Omidyar, the founder of Ebay put it: ‘The monetization and manipulation of information is swiftly tearing us apart.’

    The use of trolls and bots to spread disinformation by Trump, Bannon and Cambridge Analytica undermined democratic institutions, as well as fact-based debates.

    Cambridge Analytica specialised in forms of artificial intelligence that look set to nurture a new species, a new form of human identity, who become bland consuming nodal points, and receptors of a barrage of disinformation and nonsense.

    This paradigm shift in our culture, will curtail necessary criticism and free thinking and is already afflicting the media. Before appearing on radio shows I myself have been told what I can and cannot say for fear of upsetting a vested interest. Instead, increasingly lobby groups of the most extreme nature are invited on shows and their views accorded credibility, when they have nothing of substance to say.

    We are creating a new generation of technocratic fascists: selfish, materialistic, ultra-conformist people receptive to Post-Truth. A new Dark Age looms with the Far Right gaining increasing authority, as the edifice of neo-liberalism crumbles, and social support structures are dismantled.

    Post-Truth has I fear already taken hold. The truth does not matter; what is important is convincing someone of the truth, often through advertising. Stories are planted and lines between fact and fiction disappear.

    People are buying the bullshit. The sensationalism and gossip of the gutter press is now being taken seriously. We are holding court to pseudo-expertise. Lies have become intrinsic to commercial and business interaction; The People of the Lie as in the title of the seminal book by M. Scott Peck in which he conflates evil with untruth. He contends that this undermines life and liveliness, transforming people into automatons.

    Such people are not up front but operate by covert means. Evil people, Peck argues, scapegoat others: since they consider themselves repositories of perfection, they must demonise ‘the other’.

    This leads, ineluctably, to hostility towards the foreigner and migrant, the recrudescence of tribalism, and a denial and rejection of reason; a veneration of the past and the equation of disagreement with treason; a ‘them and us’ universe.

    Evil people prevent us from exercising reasonable choices, where we grow in integrity, courage and self-esteem. Evil is also linked to a self-image of respectability and, as Peck defines it, the exercise of coercive power, often by those in authority, who undermine growth and development.

    Evil is surprisingly obedient to authority. The truly good in times of acute stress do not desert their integrity, maturity, sensitivity. They act on principle, not regressing in response to degradation, preserving empathy for the pain of others.

    *******

    Hannah Arendt would recognise our current descent:

    The ideal subject for totalitarian rule is not the convinced nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (standards of thought) no longer exists.

    The ‘People of the Lie’, the powerful and corrupt, project their deviance and criminality onto others. Morality does not apply to them, and those they disagree with are deemed enemies of the people. All that matters now is to win, and to mask untrue intentions in order to survive.

    The really important values of truth, integrity, sincerity, depth, originality, creativity are being abandoned. Alas, the lunatics have by now taken over the asylum.

    Truth is not truth. The imitation game has won. How can we retain our individuality when fact is replaced by semi-fact or worse? When we are assailed by streams of advertising; nonsensically balanced coverage; relativism and Post Modernism; bogus standards in high places; putative expertise and ass-hole opinions?

    Instead jaded rituals, religious and secular, particularly in countries like Ireland, desensitise us to reality.

    References

    Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Schocken Books, Berlin, 1951.
    Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (edited by Colin Gardner), Pantheon, New York, 1980.
    Susan Jacoby, The Age Of American Unreason, Pantheon, New York, 2009.
    Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017.
    M. Scott Peck The People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1983.
    Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Keegan Paul, London, 1922.
    Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, London, 1989.

  • There is Something Rotten in the State of Democracy

    On a recent visit to Athens I chanced upon the supposed tomb of Socrates near the Acropolis. Socrates chose to remain in the city after being found guilty on trumped up charges of corrupting youth. For this he was handed the ultimate sanction of a death sentence, to be self-inflicted with hemlock. By receiving his punishment he was making a statement to posterity to the effect that the Rule of Law was of greater importance than the individual injustice being inflicted on him. The operation of the law would just have to improve, the alternative being anarchic barbarity.

    Nearby, somewhat hidden and a tad derelict is perhaps the most historically-significant structure in Athens, the birthplace and site of Athenian democracy, and thus the birthplace of democracy itself, where the impassioned speeches of the great orator Pericles (died c. 450 BCE) set the small polity on the destructive course of the Peloponnesian War.

    More recently, Randy Newman’s song about America,‘In Defense of Our Country’ from Harps and Angels (2008) expresses a cautious, pre-Trumpian optimism that the political leaders of a decade ago were ‘hardly the worst / This poor world has seen.’ But presciently he references Caligula, the emperor which President Donald Trump best resembles at the fag end of American empire. But Trump actually democratically won the Presidential election, at least the electoral college, just as Hitler achieved power through elections, before dismantling the Rule of Law.

    I have expressed reservations in the past about democracy, and I despise demagoguery. But let me construct a few words in its defence.

    I – ‘Benevolent Authoritarianism’

    A comment often attributed to Churchill is that democracy is the least worst form of government, which I consider trite, and perhaps untrue. The enlightened despot may prove more effective, as the great Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed.

    Similarly, David Runciman in How Democracy Ends (Profile Books, 2018) endorses the concept of benevolent authoritarianism. Such is the luck of the draw, however, that a benevolent oligarchy almost invariably leads to despotism of the Right or Left, and utter disaster.

    Let us nonetheless lay out the positives of what Pericles effectively pioneered. First, in the immaculate expression of honest Abraham Lincoln ‘the rail splitter’ in his Gettysburg Address of 1863 it is governance by the people. On the scene of the Civil War battlefield that would eventually end slavery he resolved:

    these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

    So it is that “we the people” are sovereign, as opposed to governance by faceless corporations, multi-national banks and nefarious corporate law firms, purchasing our political class.

    We also find governance by the people for the people in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776), the first modern constitutional statement of democracy.

    At least in theory. The problem is our public representatives are beholden to the crypto-fascist advocates of neo-liberalism. The Irish state, for example, is effectively run by Goldman Sachs, corporate law firms, Vulture Funds and banks for their own enrichment. The people are irrelevant, and many among the judiciary, mired in debt, seem to be in on the act.

    The people are drip-fed justifications by the establishment media for austerity, on behalf of these global parasites, and conditioned to accept inflated house prices, robber baron banks, besides substandard and ludicrously expensive rental accommodation. The abolition of pensions, and death on a hospital corridor are the new reality.

    Our Brave New World of the Internet is incubating a dangerously compliant and accepting population, reflected in Trump’s ability to win over the American people, who he persuaded to consent to their own demise. This, what Timothy Snyder called ‘anticipatory obedience’ (Snyder, 2017)  involves going with the flow of home seizures and deportation of untermenschen migrants, until at last they come for you, at which point there is no one left to protect you. As Pastor Neimoller put it under the Nazis:

    First they came for the socialist and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.

    So stand up and be counted. Hopefully it won’t require you to walk out in front of a tank, but be prepared.

    II – A Final Solution

    At the Wannasee Conference of 1942 the Nazis under Reynard Heydrich decided on the Final Solution, or genocide, of the Jewish people. The transcript is available, and captured on celluloid in Kenneth Branagh’s film Conspiracy (2001).

    A modern incarnation of this is the secretive and monastic meetings of the Bilderberg Group – once chaired by our own late unlamented Peter Sutherland – where the spoils of an utterly unsustainable and unequal economic system are divided.

    The modern Wanasee meetings are no doubt attended by a phalanx of pseudo-experts, or even genuine experts, working out what to do with the troublesome poor of the Earth.

    I suspect their plan is to to undermine democracy on behalf of the world’s corporate elite. People are commodified by banks and financial institutions: there are far too many of them, and their number needs to be reduced. Liquidation can occur by degrees: beginning with withdrawal of social support and evictions, which leads to suicide, addiction, health collapse and early death. In the Third World it will be far worse for those in coastal regions when the storms hit. Meanwhile, the good ol’ boys of Steve Bannon et al will continue to reap the harvest.

    People are often ill-informed and vote stupidly. Trump was elected on a ballyhoo of promising the disenfranchised working and middle class social protection, and job creation, after stoking fears about a foreign Other. What happened both with the election and since is the most nefarious soap job since the Nuremberg rallies.

    Trump appointed to his cabinet three Goldman Sachs officials, who were responsible for much of the mess that people find themselves in the first place. He has also appointed mad dog generals, and cosies up to vile dictators. The spectre is truly frightening.

    Trump immediately set about dismantling Obamacare and tore up the Paris Climate Change Agreement. With two strokes of the pen much of the Obama legacy was lost. The smooth-talking Obama is now a political eunuch.

    The elite are intent on making ‘difficult’ decisions, which will reduce the population of the world. This will require ‘strong’ government and the maintenance of ‘public order’ when disobedience appears.

    Neo-liberal policies will certainly not be in the interest of the people who voted Trump in. As the former Greek finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis put it, ‘And the weak suffer what they must.’

    The democratic problem is that ‘we the people’ did vote for neo-liberals in Ireland and for a long time in the U.S. Even Viktor Orban in Hungary has a democratic mandate, and Brazilians have voted for a New Age conquistador in Jair Bolsonaro. Meanwhile the National Front are on the threshold of power in France. Democracy is electing fascists.

    Why? Well genuine democracy requires mass literacy and proper education, which is diminishing, as is access to accurate information. Bannon and Cambridge Analytica have used artificial intelligence to influence voting patterns, and warp the human mind. We are witnessing the dissemination of disinformation, and what Zizek calls ‘Ideological Misindentification’. People are buying the bullshit, even though, at heart, they know it is untrue.

    Nonetheless, declining adult literacy and the use of sophisticated triggers have conditioned people into buying advertising as argument and substituting soundbites for subtlety and nuance. Hysteria, semi-baked nonsense and shrillness is replacing rational discourse.

    In the Post-Truth zeitgeist appeals to emotion have replaced the importance of facts, and fascists have always enjoyed rituals and symbols. Whenever anyone talks of nationalism or the national interest I am reminded of the adage that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.’

    The Left are nostalgic and see opportunity in Austerity but, lest we forget, after the Wall Street Crash the Weimar Republic did not witness a Populist socialist insurgency but Nazism. Our present economic collapse is ineluctably leading towards a new form of corporate fascism.

    If the Left is to salvage democracy it must borrow the approach of Antonio Gramsci, the leader of the Communist Party of Italy in the 1920s, which is to construct a cultural hegemony with a receptive middle class (especially now as the distinction between working and middle class is being obliterated). This will involve an expansion of state institutions and husbandry of natural resources to bring an electable and progressive broad social democratic front to power.

    I do not think this is impossible, ‘Hope springs eternal in the human heart’ as Alexander Pope put it, but democracy needs leadership of a kind that is not apparent at this juncture.

    III – A Lost Leader

    On my plane journey to Athens I read an extract from a speech by Mr Obama about visiting the same birthplace of Periclean democracy I had visited. He expresses himself beautifully: precise, as is his want; erudite (something he is given too little credit for); and with pristine socially-democratic-convictions. But he is now disempowered, and his legacy is being dismantled by Trump.

    This brings us back to Roosevelt, and one major problem with U.S. democracy, at least. Obama was prevented from seeking a third term by rules introduced in the wake of Roosevelt’s becoming electorally unassailable, primarily because he was obviously acting in the interests of the people. If the rules had not been changed the American public would not have had to face the unenviable choice of Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump, with the former the lesser of two evils.

    We need a new Obama, or better still a new Roosevelt, a leader with vision and with purpose. We may need many of them, but few are apparent. Direct democracy and referenda by the people are also required.

    Further, we need to steel ourselves for civil disobedience to aid in the vitalisation of our democracy.  Instead we have a spectator democracy, or passive democracy, controlled by vested interests. When the institutions of state and the state itself act criminally the obligation for citizens is to fight back in proportion to the force they are confronted with.

    We also need proper information, and since it is not coming through mainstream media, which has been bullied into submission, the new radical press is the only drip feed available for the vitalization of the body politic, alongside similarly-motivated NGOs.

    The truth is indeed in some respects the only weapon as Havel put it while imprisoned under another dictatorship: ‘If the main pillar of the system is living a lie then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth (Havel, 1991).’

    IV – A False Dawn

    Ethical decisions are indeed complex: the suppression of fearless criticism is a negation of ethics. The obligation of professional ethics should be fearless truth-telling. Standing up to the power.

    Democracy dies when it denies the legitimacy of the opposition, when the Rule of Law is set aside, and when authoritarian politicians act subversively, and in a concerted fashion, to undermine civil liberties and human rights by criminalising and prosecuting dissent or opposition.

    Using the excuse of such shibboleths as national security, public order and the common good, rogue state institutions classify their enemies as criminals and subversives.

    Other characteristics of failing democracy include a breakdown in forbearance and the utilisation of constitutional hardball, such as Trump stacking and weaponizing the Supreme Court.

    Democracy is dying  because  our elected leaders rather than distancing themselves from extremists are embracing them. In fact they are the extremists. Let us be clear about this: we are seeing state fascism.

    There are insidious forms of subversion: a coup can really be governance by the grey, for the grey, where small but influential think tanks and special interests pull the strings.

    If it inconveniences these elites, the democratic will of the people is ignored, as in Greece, where Alexei Tsipras twice received a mandate to counter austerity but was ignored.

    Greeks must honour their debts even if they were induced into them by Goldman Sachs and its acolytes. The banal refrain is that Greeks do not pay their debts, but the same could be said for all the banks that have had their debts written off.

    While the Greek electorate recognised where their true interest lay, by electing a radical socialist, in most countries passivity has created a consumer model of democracy that has lost any bite.

    The real source of a failing democracy is found in vacuous digital communication, and the passivity wrought by blanket advertising. The false dawn of online democracy through social media is proving to be a chimera. The sharing of inconsequential thoughts in organisations that purport to be democratic, produce sound chambers that operate like cults as David Eggers splendid fictional book The Circle (Eggers, 2013) documents.

    A cult of mindless belonging to nothing is manifest, and it is not the only mindless cult around. We also have scientology, our esteemed religious traditions, and of course the neo-liberal cult itself.

    I fear that humans are becoming increasingly robotic, technical machines. Altruism, compassion and a concern for the plight of others is being eliminated.

    So leadership is what is needed but the Leader must like Churchill have ‘nothing to offer you but blood, sweat and Tears.’ And yet I retain faith that we will fight back against the fascism which Madeleine Albright, no less, believes has returned (Albright,2018).

    We are drifting towards this precipice incrementally, led by a coalition of interests inculcating robotic consumerism, passivity, environmental destruction and widening inequality. The democratic order has been subverted by rogue states and the corporatocracy.

    The Barbarian hordes are at the gates and a new Roosevelt must emerge to save democracy.

    References

    Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning. Collins, New York, 2018.
    Dave Eggers, The Circle, Knopf, New York, 2013.
    Vaclav Havel Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990, Faber and Faber 1991.
    Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Tim Duggan Books, New York, 2017.

  • The Slow Death of White Male Privilege

    The history books are laden with white men changing the world, from Alexander the Great to Churchill. Look at our religions- Jesus and all his disciples are white. Every saint painted on a fresco is white. The great explorers of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were all white. Every astronaut who landed on the moon has been white. Every statue we have from antiquity to the Renaissance is a thing of white marble beauty. Even the most famous wizards of all time–Merlin, Gandalf and Dumbledore–are all white old men. And of course movie stars have been white males from the Silent Era to the present. Finally, who runs and has run the Western governments since time immemorial, only old good ol’ white men.

    This may create a perception that white men are exceptional. Is it any wonder then that people of all races, religions, social status and nationalities look to white people to lead them? It’s the perception of trust that leads to a feeling of entitlement: ‘I can be President. I can be an astronaut.’ And the stereotype has been fed time and again by artists, the media, politicians, universities, military organizations, educational systems and now marketing departments.

    It has been established that people who are more attractive have a better chance of landing a job than those who are not. Given our heritage, what is sexier than a white male fueled by innate self-confidence.

    And what happens when we come across white men in history who may have noble ideals but end up killing millions?  We frame them as tragic figures with flaws that lead to disastrous outcomes (Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, Richard Nixon) or misunderstood (Julius Ceasar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lenin) and a warning to other white men not to make the same mistakes. After all it is assumed that white men in power are basically good guys, who will do the right thing.

    Is it any wonder then that we feel secure at a reptilian level when we see a white guy in power? After all, we know the history of white guys and with it the frequent narrative of progress: haven’t they done a good job for the vast majority of humanity? And if they haven’t, who are we to trust? In any case we can always (at least in liberal democracies) get rid of the white guys that are bad apples, and replace them with white guys who will do better.

    Of course this is a very Eurocentric view of the world, but who can argue that our interconnected world is not a product of the Age of Discovery (circa 1500 to 1700), the Enlightenment (c. 1600-1800) and Colonialism (1600-1900), all led by governments, leaders, and thinkers that were white men?

    We can argue about their methods, and whether we would be better off without them, but we cannot argue against the proposition that they have been largely responsible for creating the modern world. The representation of white men from history, from art, to science, to commerce is long and well-rooted, and it is there that we find the root of white male privilege.

    As a white man the odds of you getting the job, education, spouse, bank loan or a role in a major motion picture acting role you aspired to were significantly higher than if you were from any other gender or ethnicity. That is the American Dream we talk about, although what we all know is that it is really the white man’s dream. How can we question whether there exists White Male Privilege then? Indeed, if you are a white male and not in a position of power or wealth, many people will assume there is something wrong with you.

    From this perspective can you see the appeal of Trump? A rich white guy, who promises to change a broken two party system run by white men. A white guy, who promises to come in and throw out the other white guys, who have been corrupted by power and wealth. A white guy, who blames women and minorities and immigrants for the country’s woes. The country was doing dandy under the white guys, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., until that black guy came into office and some white lady became speaker of the House. Conservatives (mostly white folks) want a return to the status quo and can you blame them? America has been great for white people so far.

    If you’ve come this far thinking I am Conservative, or worse, then this next bit is gonna be a let down. I am not. In fact, my argument is that this long history is starting to crack, and indeed will crumble over the next fifty to one hundred years. Our children and grand-children could be in for a real treat, as the world moves in fits and starts out of the Age of the White Man, and into the Age of, well, whatever we call it in two hundred years.

    We have already seen the beginning of this in the twentieth century. With some exceptions, every country in Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania has thrown off the yoke of colonial white masters from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yeah, people of Spanish, English and Chinese heritage control some countries, but they were at least born in those countries and serve the inhabitants instead of a bureaucracy in Peking or London of Madrid. This means that new leaders who aren’t white are getting a chance to change the course of their country’s political history.

    How about Europe, where the leaders of he two biggest economies, U.K. and Germany are women?

    The world’s second and third largest economies? China and Japan (the EU doesn’t count as a country) are run by indigenous Chinese and Japanese.

    African and South American countries are run by local governments, increasingly at liberty to forge regional alliances that do not involve European powers.

    In the US there are black television channels (BET), Hispanic television channels (Univision), movies with all black production units and stars that are no longer on the fringes of society: they are mainstreaming.

    As for university curricula, well you can major in Spanish, Chinese, African, Asian, African American, and Women’s Studies at just about every place of higher learning in the US.

    Artists? Who are the biggest stars on the planet today? Lady Gaga, Dre Dre, Madonna, Taylor Swift, BTS? Who makes the best music? Kendrick Lamar (Pulitzer Prize). White crooners like Elvis, Sinatra, Harry Connick have disappeared, boy bands have crawled back under the rocks from whence they came, even the most popular singer-songwriters all seem to either non-white or female.

    I am not saying that white males don’t have a leg up anymore. But the system has been rigged in their favor for hundreds of years. It is going to take some time for that ebb away. Now that increasingly all kids can look up and see people of their own skin color, sex, sexual orientation, and religion make it, they can have the confidence to do so too. They will work harder knowing it is possible to succeed.

    And we are just starting to see how the crumbling of their privilege is affecting white men. The confirmation hearing of Brett Kavanaugh is a perfect microcosm. Why were Conservatives in such a hurry? After all, there were plenty of conservative white men more qualified than Kavanaugh for the job.

    Midterms are coming up, and to start the confirmation process again risked hitting the speed bump of an altered Senate, where there is no guarantee that white conservative men will control either branch. They had to get this guy and they had to do it now.

    The white male fears run deeper. With a majority of white male conservatives on the Supreme Court, white men think they can now rest more easily, secure in the knowledge they may have one remaining ally in the years to come, when white people will not longer be a majority in the country, and when Blacks and Latinos and LBGTQ and women, and Indians, and Chinese will start to win districts that were were once the preserve white men.

    The Brahmans in Congress know their time is limited, and this was the last major push to keep a hold on a power they have enjoyed since the foundation of the state. So hats off to them, but it it won’t last.

    What we’re seeing now is the last wheezing breath of old white men in power, pathetically clinging to it like an addict who cannot quit, and refuses to die, because their vanity demands they go on using others.

    Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court, but the tide of history is too powerful at this point. Instead of leaving a legacy to be proud of, they will leave a stain we will all wash out eventually, so that instead of being remembered they will be forgotten, once new leaders with vision take over.

    In one hundred years you won’t read about Mitch McConnell or Newt Gingrich or Donald Trump, but about Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama, Ruth Badar Ginsberg, Angela Merkel, Serena Williams, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Neil Degrasse Tyson. After all, they are who kids look up to these days, and certainly not George Bush or Donald Trump or Samuel Alito. Wanna know why? Because if you are white, male, grew up in Kentucky, and have an eighth-grade-education, your whiteness won’t get you where you want anymore. Republican policies will ensure you don’t have access to a proper education, healthcare, a healthy environment, or social services. Live in a city however, where you can hustle, make connections, go to college, and kill it in law school, and you will have a pretty good shot at making Partner one day, or even the Supreme Court.

    We will see the fading of trust in white power and a belief in leadership which is colour and gender blind. That is my hope anyway.

  • Casino

    Part I

    You know your father used to go to school next to the Casino at Marino, him and his friends would play around it.

    For years I would ignore my dad’s connection with the Casino, it was too incongruous a pairing to stick. Two histories known to one site but held discordant in my mind and never sitting side by side—always one leaving as the other entered. One is a topic of the history books, with its subject clearly delimited through Italianate paintings and Enlightenment-era discourse. An illustrious period of history, as we are taught, basking in the light of privilege. The other is closer to the bone, a murky memory passed down a generation. A privation I didn’t know in detail, in language, but rendered visible over time as his years crumbled away into tragedy.

    Only later when studying the history of art would the two discrete worlds surface once again in my consciousness. Following the official account propagated by the history books and further confounded by the classroom teachings, the image of my father was conjured up and left floundering, left groundless against the staunch record that preceded him.

    A casino is traditionally a small house designed for leisure and entertaining, a folly for the upper-classes typically built on the grounds of a stately home. The Casino at Marino, as artefact, took up just a snippet of the curriculum. Its teaching, however, echoed the rehashed idealism of neoclassicism, where a masterly imitation of nature was replaced by a masterly display of the idea, of the rational mind or idealised subject. The Casino at Marino was taught as any phenomenon set steadfast in the history books; its features analysed; its fashion surveyed; a few connections to important men told. I am history, it said.

    As the record goes, for about two hundred years after Poussin, Lorrain, and Rubens, the institutional practices of the academies would nurture a host of painters across western Europe and, in turn, would see them ossify in their galleries and studios, regurgitating one mythological tableau after another. ‘History painting’, after the Latin historia, meaning ‘story’ or ‘narrative’, was the most hallowed genre of painting at the time. This ‘grand genre’—so admired for its glorified rendition of myth or historical event, or a blending of the two—justified a return to old styles and a retreat from the present.

    At college we studied the revival of classical architecture as fashioned in the homes of the landed classes in Ireland. The gentry lined their great houses with columns and pilasters, their halls with Roman busts and figurative sculptures set back in niches, an erudite display cultivated from their travels on the Grand Tour. Of the Casino, I learned that it commenced construction in the 1750s and it remains one of the most admired examples of neoclassical architecture in Ireland. I learned that it was the seat of Lord Charlemont, James Caulfield, an important figure in fashioning the tastes and minds of Dublin’s high society at the time. And so on.

    Such a history—stagnant, impervious to change, insisting on grand narratives—called for a re-examining. Looking askance, I learned that the land on which the casino resides used to be called Donneycarney, but as a sense of place is so tied to a sense of class, on acquiring the estate its new owner necessarily rechristened it ‘Marino’ after his beloved Italian destination. Thus, in one stroke, it was lifted from a locale that seemed too provincial, too mundane, and repositioned in the mind’s eye of its landlord. It earned a kind of classical placelessness, a new lofty trans-setting. In their world, everything became ‘grand’: the ‘grand genre’ of history painting; the ‘grand tour’ of Europe to sites of classical history; the ‘grand style’ of Michelangelo or Raphael, to be assiduously copied by academicians.

    Over a hundred years after the Casino was founded, with that golden light of the leisure classes waning, the estate came into the ownership of the Christian Brothers—a brotherhood of lay disciples who set out to get those poor-ragged boys off the street, offer a ‘basic’ education and to prepare them for industry, but most of all to teach them the ‘value’ of ‘hard work’ and religious observance. Their institution spread worldwide, as did the abuse.

     

    Part II

    Apparently he used to write poetry when he was younger but one day decided to burn it all. He said he used to write it spontaneously, squeezed into the white spaces of bus and train tickets.

    The Casino at Marino—in a cinematic turn, as I envision it from a history lesson that breathes so close to me—was then recast in an altogether different light. Snapped out of its delusion only to confront a stark grey reality. Those inner-city boys, my father included, playing around the Casino were shunned both literally and ideologically from the gold-lit world of the Casino’s origins. That beam of enlightened thinking, so preciously preserved in the history books, entirely bypassing generations of poor boys living on the very property. For those boys who chose to notice it, I imagine, the Casino lingered about their playing grounds like an apparition — an idealised past further haunting the gloominess of their present day.

    Allegations of child abuse against the Christian Brothers would start to emerge around the 1980s. Starting with a handful of easily dismissed complaints to an outpouring from the Brother’s global institutions. In a rare and reluctant admission of guilt, in 1996 the Christian Brothers released a statement starting with the line: “There are signs of that death in our congregational story.” It continued,  “Such signs include undue severity of discipline, harshness in Community life, child abuse, an addiction to success, canonizing work to the neglect of our basic human needs for intimacy, leisure and love.”

    “Signs of that death”, a phrase that both acknowledges the insidious force of clerical abuse whilst averting a direct collision with the issue. “There are signs of that death”, a clumsy sentence, weak and faltering in its expression of something so horrid. But it is a haunting set of words all the same. Clamouring, clasping at an expression that might hold the full weight of its implications.

     

    Part III

    Like flints from a fire History sparks into being. It wilfully shoots and splinters, enlightening some and leaving others in the dark.

    Through the telling of this oft-repeated story of history, as I experienced in the classroom that day, I saw the elaborate structures of ‘history-proper’ crash into the shadow it cast upon my father and family. I was told his story without his name being mentioned. I became the child I might have been, proud of her father, and, despite everything, in defence of him. I thought, his story can be told, maybe shame doesn’t have to bury it and uncertainty doesn’t have to muzzle it. I felt the staggering height and glory of the Casino’s tale owed something to my father’s life, or perhaps, owed something to mine. Where history fell silent was the moment it laid claim to my life.

    To see him, to talk to him, is to relive that death, not a sign, but an aching reality.

    I am beginning to see my life. I am beginning to see the forces that shaped it, that weighed upon it, and nearly snuffed it out. I am beginning to see my life from the position of the end, from the imprint of a negative allowed to fester for too long, stumbling through histories and plaguing generations, fusing many to the same struggle.

     

    Leah Reynolds is an art writer based in Bristol. Her latest piece explores the genre of auto-fiction, combining her academic background in the history of art with a personal narrative.

  • Dating a Narcissist is no Tea Party

    In nineteenth century England, ‘erethism’, or ‘mad hatter disease’, was an occupational hazard for hat makers. The work involved repeated exposure to poisonous mercury vapours, which neurotoxically damaged their brains. Personality flipping, irritability, apathy, depression, memory loss and delirium were the price paid for the debonair upper-class tea-party, where guests relied on lavish hats and extravagant evening gowns to demonstrate grace, formality and decorum.

    Appearances of sophistication and elite living were produced through the sacrifice of human spirit and mind. In many ways sharing life with a narcissist is like a Victorian tea party. It is a sham, a show, a veneer masking a pit of perverse and senseless suffering. It is a curated paragon of romantic union, an enviable promised land of relationship bliss. Happiness promised but never delivered.

    The Hatter in the story of Alice in Wonderland is trapped in time, in punishment for failing to impress the queen with his song. He had tried but was not good enough, a self-esteem-shattering-back-story all too familiar to those who eventually lose their way in life. He is eccentric, critical, charming, welcoming, exclusionary and at times, a wonderful host to Alice, who quickly finds her ‘in’ by flattering him for his singing.

    All ears, he draws Alice close and encourages her with a big smile to tell her story. Then suddenly he bellows, ‘Those are the things that upset me!’. He interrupts her, reprimands her, twists her words and angrily blames her for upsetting the mouse. In just a moment, his mood switches, and he is once again hospitable and engaged. He recites nonsensical prose and delivers unanswerable riddles, and when Alice repeats his own words back to him, he points at her in terror and labels her insane. On a whim, he demands that the whole party move their seats so that he can drink from a clean cup, he being the only one who deserves the privilege. Meanwhile Alice, though repeatedly promised tea, gets none.

    I feel like a fool when I look back on the dynamic between my ex-boyfriend and I. Of course it wasn’t normal, of course I should have left him, of course I should have recognised what was happening. The reality is though, when you are in love with someone your brain becomes a masterful tool of self-deception, and it can take forever to see that which does not match your own model of the world.

    Even now when I hear about friends meeting him at social occasions I imagine the serene, affable, friendly, popular gent that people love, and I question whether I over-dramatise it all.

    It seemed worth enduring the pain of arguments three times over during the times we spent in our blissful joy, and I did not have the strength to remove myself from the nourishment of his love, when he chose to show it to me. I felt that we were so close to happiness, and he was working on himself. If we could just mend the holes as they appeared then perhaps soon there would be no more. I believed him when he told me that, because what we had was almost perfect. Almost.

    I thought that my true boyfriend was loving and kind, and that the demon infiltrating his body when he ‘went dark’ had nothing to do with him. What I realised (far too late) with horror, disbelief and sadness, was that I had it the wrong way around. It was his narcissism that played the lead in his life, at least when it came to me, and though he had likable sides, his charm was mainly a means to an end.

    Unless we travel through the looking glass and see for ourselves that our world is reversed, backward and upside down, it is natural to believe in the illusion of the Tea Party.

    Nobody has prepared us for the madness of the truth. And the truth beckons an unwelcome question: if opening up to love can bring such pain, does seeking a partner make us all just lambs for the slaughter? How could I have protected myself from what I could not detect?

    When I reflect with what I know now, I can see with a sense of dismay (and of relief) that his behaviour was not as random – or I as powerless – as it seemed. I simply did not know what I was looking for. For there were signs, a dozen signs, that this would be no ordinary adventure.

  • A Life in Love with Music

    It is a river vast, both wide and deep that corrals out joy and sadness; lulls to sleep the fretful child, and transforms the darkest landscape of a man depressed into a golden glowing cape.

    It is not just the spice of life, but our very life blood, perhaps the central issue in human and animal wellbeing, giving complete absolute freedom, psychologically, inwardly, then outwardly, through singing, dancing or playing instruments.

    It arrives with humour, typified by Enbie Blake, the ragtime pianist who, when asked, aged ninety, by Alastair Cooke, for his ‘Letter from America’, what he attributed his longevity to, replied: ‘I guess it was them French fries’. Or Jimi Hendrix, who before he died at twenty-seven quipped: ‘Once you’re dead, you’re made for life’. Likewise Thomas Beecham, the internationally acclaimed British conductor, who once suggested at a choral recording: ‘if the ladies will look more closely at their parts and see where the gentlemen come in, it will make for better reproduction.’

    It also inspires poetry, such as the ‘Dance and Provencal Song and Sunburnt mirth’ of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ – ‘While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad in such an ecstasy’

    As my friend Jan Skrdlik put it: ‘Music is a special language to communicate everything from the heart’. Just hear him and his consummate pianist Petra Besa play with a passion, almost unheard-of in contemporary Classical music, to see how valid is that epigram.

    Go back two hundred years to the Rev. Sidney Smith, who the American ambassador called ‘the wisest man, if he had not been deemed the wittiest’: for Sidney music was ‘the only cheap and unpunished rapture on earth’, the former unfortunately no longer, considering the price of a ticket to Glastonbury Festival, or Grand Opera.

    It is a dazzling world, from the first known song, the Hurrian Hymn no. 6 from 3400 BCE in Syria (would they have song now instead of bullets) to the 1264 pop variants of 2018 AD; if those first singers could see the variety of the folk/ethnic/jazz/blues/soul/RnB/Classical/electronic spheres they would surely gasp in awe. How quickly did it grow?

    Of the three main strands, Classical and Rock come from the folk of cottage and hut. Classical Indian ragas, arrived well before the monastic parchments of Europe, which engendered late medieval composers like Lassus (listen to his glory on the Christ Church College Choir recordings, conducted by Simon Preston).

    The stream of the Renaissance gave way to the Baroque era of Bach (1650- ) and Handel’s legendary Messiah, a river flowing into the torrent of the Classical Age of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (c. 1800); surely the latter brought us to the high water mark of musical expressiveness.

    I wonder had any among the thirty thousand who flocked to Beethoven’s funeral heard all nine of his symphonies (including the 9th with its ‘Ode to Joy’), the last five string quartets (Op. 135 the final one, with a slow adagio movement that arrives from no where, has a beauty so simple and pure that perhaps only the Busch, Amadeus and Hollywood quartets have captured its sublime essence in a recording), or his piano sonatas, thirty-two in all with the Op 111 at the end giving one a vision of Paradise, as played by the Jewish-Austrian Artur Schuabel, whose preeminent gifts were expressed in his comment: ‘the notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the resides.’?

    The rich Romantic nineteenth century saw a spread of greatness from France to Belgium – Cesar Franck’s violin sonata is unmatched – Spain, Russia (including the universally loved Swan Lake ballet of Tchaikovsky) to Italian opera. No way will we ever have another chain of composers like Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini; nor Belcanto singers who grew out of their greatness: Melba and Caruso are the best known, but can they rival Claudia Muzio the soprano, Fernando de Lucia the tenor, or Mattia Battistini the baritone?

    I – The Irish Mist

    Before looking in more detail at outstanding singing, let me dwell on the Irish miracle. From peat bogs, sparse sunlight, tragic potato famine, English oppression, less than five million living there today, the Irish have swept the world with intoxicating jigs and reels: so deft, poised, and elegant in set dances or even integrated with disco dancing, which I discovered at one New Years Eve party in Dublin that is burnt into my memory. It brought to mind Robert Herrick’s poem ‘When as in silks my Julia goes / then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows / the liquefaction of her clothes’.

    Did one man, Sean O’Riada, mainly, inspire, from the 1940s and 50s, a flood of famous bands like De Danaan, Planxty, The Chieftains, the Bothy Band and instrumentalists like Jackie Daly who almost reinvented the melodeon; at a recent Milton Malbay Festival I listened to sixteen playing slow airs, with Jackie, Sam Burke and Brendan Begley having me in tears. Also there, during an Irish Set Dance ceilidh, Martin Hayes played such spine-tingling fiddle solos of fantastic grace and fluidity that it is scarcely surprising that his new group ‘The Gloaming’ should have elicited such critical responses as ‘Brilliant’, ‘Exceptional’, ‘Blissful’ and ‘Exquisite’.

    At a pub in Spiddal, near Galway, you will find Johnny Óg Connolly, often with his Dad, playing melodeon; after Milton Malbay, you would not dare dream of encountering such rich tone colours, patterns so delicate, and virtuoso runs celestial, imbued with a poetry, arising from his great humanity, characteristic of the Irish in all walks of life. One cannot conceive how many instruments they can play from the utterly haunting uilleann pipes, via bodhrán (with its gentle and imaginative beat) to the tin whistle of Mary Bergin and Packie Byrne. And weekly, you can hear sessions for free in pubs throughout the land, from Kerry to Donegal.

    As a singer, both for ballads, lieder and opera, John McCormack alerted with his unsurpassed natural tenor voice how deeply the human voice can delve in to one’s spirit, this mantle now assumed by those like Mary Black, Tommy Fleming, Dolores Keane, along with a unique group of sean-nós singers, uniquely expressed in Gaelic and unaccompanied. The discovery of the year for me was Marianne McAleer at the Sidmouth Folk Festival in England. One of her song moved me to the extent that she stepped forward to hold my hand. No greater testimony to the unifying force of music, and generous Irish nature.

    II – Rock ’n’ Roll

    Cross the Atlantic for a twentieth century musical revolution, led mainly by African-Americans and Jews. Beginning with the 1920s New Orleans Jazz of bands like Jelly Roll Morton, simultaneously of Leadbelly and other formerly enslaved Blacks who sang the Blues to combat sadness; there sprang up gradually the modern jazz of men such as Charlie Parker, Tamla, Motown, Atlantic Soul, R&B, Trance, Dance, Rap and onwards.

    Leadbelly’s ‘Goodnight Irene’, is magnetic like so many Blues numbers, and inspired Johnny Cash and folk supremo Pete Seeger to sing and perform it.

    A high point of traditional Jazz was highlighted to me by an Exeter estate agent I once knew bursting into tears after listening to ‘Blue Horizon’ from the 1945 Blue Note recordings of Sidney Bechet, then on the crest of his soprano sax playing career. Dancing to the English Traditional band of Chris Barber in the late sixties, was also an unforgettable experience, confirming what joy Afro-Americans have bestowed on mankind.

    From the Atlantic soul most must know the enveloping power of Percy Sledge’s ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’, but few can have sat down to supper with a daughter, Acacia, thinking the cream would be an eight-year-old bottle of Chablis, only for her to press the repeat buttons so as to hear Otis Redding’s ‘Those Arms of Mine’, twenty-seven times!

    The legendary Louis Armstrong, trumpet hors concours and entertainer, becomes a symbol of the African-American love of life and laughter, with words like: ‘all music is folk music – I ain’t ever heard no horse sing’.

    Erykah Badu is a sublime example of her community’s musical talents; aged seven, given a piano, she wrote twenty songs in the first week, crying ‘Music is kind of sick’. So free from modern constraints that she had three children by different men, home educating them in subjects like quantum physics and rare languages.

    But is music now in poor health? And does technology help or hinder?

    The early years of American pop/rock/country saw not only Buddy Holly, John Denver, but also Otis Redding die in plane crashes, in part down to having to play too many gigs. Since then, how many stars, and their fans have ruined their lives with drink and drugs, which is almost unthinkable in the folk and Classical spheres?

    The deafening, distorting sound of PA equipment is another downside, or thrill, depending on how you respond. The plethora of songs and possibilities for delight is illustrated by my son Hawthorn pointing out how I can put four hundred thousand songs on a hard drive, which he worked out would take thirty-four years, listening three-and-a-half-hours daily, to get through. The fever of this passion is shown by almost two hundred thousand tickets for the Glastonbury Festival selling out within fifty minutes.

    III – Musical Contrasts

    Two countries can act as a sublime contrast. Have you been lucky enough to hear French chanson or the mystical, almost metaphysical sound of Indian sitar or sarod, grounded by the drone of a tambura, which with the light intricate drumming of a tabla leads to a deeply relaxed meditative state?

    Thanks to my third daughter Natasha (you need family, as well as friends, to make you explore music), I tried to learn how to sing. Then sing in a classical raga mode. Talk about a revelation: going back to the first few words about complete absolute freedom, it is almost what singing Indian classical ragas allows, except that you move in the seven note, Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Da Ni scale.

    I was taught by a Frenchman Gilles Petit, who can sing, dance, play any instrument from sitar to trumpet like an angel: but then he gives music by many routes a spiritual dimension. However, to learn how to sing ragas is a lifetime’s devotion, as with sitar. So beguiling an instrument that the Beatles combined with Ravi Shankar.

    Taking their elegant language, their refinement, joie de vivre, the French gave in Charles Trenet’s ‘La Mer’ an incomparable lightening of heart. Could this be what the seventy-percent of English people, who are reportedly depressed at some point daily, require?

    As a young man seeing Maurice Chevalier at the Paris Olympia sing not only with voice but elbow took me into shocked joy; listening to Gilbert Becaud’s ‘Et Maintenant’ was dramatic, thrilling, statement about despair: ‘And now what I am going to do with the rest of my life … All the nights for what, for who / And this morning  returns for nothing … I’m going to burn all these nights / In the early morning I will hate you … I really have nothing to do’.

    Hardly understanding a word, I was, nonetheless, rivetted. The great signposts in this exhilarating genre are Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’, and Jacque Brel’s ‘Ne me quitte pas’, which offer romanticism gone wild: ‘I will offer you pearls made of rain, coming from countries where it never rains …. I will ride right there to see you dancing and smiling … Let me become the shadow of your shadow.’

    Ignore French musical culture at your peril!

    IV – Belcanto

    An Italian baritone born in 1856 at the crest of the Belcanto age, whose voice was marked by coruscating runs, and an ever-golden tone, Mattia Battistini shone in the French opera of Gounod and his singing of Gomod’s song Le Soir is perfection.

    Alas Ed Gardner’s description: ‘Opera is when someone gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding he sings’ only hints at how exciting, ravishing that world can be. Through withdrawing from the stage for the three summer months, Battistini, uniquely, practised seven hours a day: how many could have matched his thirty-seven encores after one legendary recital?!

    Sadly what was Grand Opera is now a shadow of its spectacular singing: the last truly great tenor Jussi Bjorling died in 1960. But at least the English Touring Opera still capture its magic through superb direction and staging.

    I suggested you find De Lucia, the tenor, and Claudia Muzio, the soprano, to discover how expressive this art form can be.

    Rarely nowadays one has the luck of hearing a throwback to the golden nineteenth century in the form of Ileana Cotrubas. In an almost unknown opera at Glyndebourne, her singing of Cavalli’s ‘Calisto’ was so warm, beautiful, captivating that she became the recipient of a case of vintage champagne (Louis Roederer, Blanc to Blanc, 1966).

    Like Clara Haskil, and Alan Hacker, she has a sublime affinity with Mozart. If you are switched off by Classical piano, I doubt you could have resisted Clara’s playing it, I was certainly converted – in Chartres’s Cathedral Museum!

    V – Czech and English

    How does one yield to another musical genre? Is it great music or wonderful playing that is the key to Aladdin’s Cave?

    Alan Hacker, the clarinetist and conductor, is a glowing example of what is possible. Rather than giving up after being paralysed by a virus from the chest downwards as a young man, he became what William Mann in The Times called ‘a musician to be treasured in our midst’. He was surely the equal of Anton Stadler and Richard Mulhfeld for whom Mozart and Brahms wrote renowned clarinet quintets, equally adept on an 1804 boxwood clarinet and the modern Boehm.

    He inspired modern composers, taught so wisely at York Univeristy and Dartington, conducted both symphonies, some with original instruments, and opera – including Mozart in Stuttgart.

    When interviewed by the BBC, in saying there were too many notes nowadays, he pinpointed how virtuoso fast runs by players had sidelined the prime of music: tone colour. The descending triplet in the finale of his first recording of Mozart’s Quintet is an exquisite example of his playing. But as the saying goes, ‘Behind every man …’ there is no doubt that his wife Margaret contributed hugely.

    If you feel reluctant to move from orchestral to chamber music, begin with Schubert’s String Quintet (the first one that hit me) live from Prades with the Vegh Quartet and Casals, or a 2015 recording of Franck’s violin sonata in its cello version with the aformentioned Jan Skdrlik and Petra Besa. These Czech artists, like many from that land, are quite out of the common run; so don’t visit Prague only for the beer! The Lobkowitz Palace there has both two Canaletto paintings of London in the seventeenth century, and Beethoven manuscripts, surviving there after the court supported him at a critical moment.

    Due to Rock/Pop dominance the extraordinarily rich and human folk scene, except in Ireland, is marginalized. However, the English put on almost three hundred folk festivals annually, much enlivened by new young talent and encouraged by the ground-breaking Spiers and Boden.

    The breadth on offer is enthralling: Roy Bailey, an Emeritus Professor at Sheffield University, became a pioneer in songs about social justice – ‘Alyandabu’ with haunting harmonica from Rory Mcleod, is about an aboriginal woman who, when her rich husband died, and having had her children confiscated, fights back, is a marvel. Similarly Pete Morton’s ‘Two Brothers’.

    I don’t care who started it, I just want to see you play
    I just want to see you smiling in the glory of his day
    … Israel give him his hall back. Just stop all the noise
    I can see your two very overtired little boys
    … Palestine I saw you kick him, Israel sit still
    … Put aside all your anger, all the sorrow and all the pain
    … One day in the future this won’t mean a thing
    …. …. , as brothers you’ll sing

    A tour de force of a prolific, rhythmically-alive singer-songwriter who has transformed traditional songs like ‘Little Musgrave’.

    The Folk World in the U.K. breathes balance, with song and dance, moderation and harmony, after the miracle, around 1900, of Cecil Sharp collecting, in only fifteen years, six thousand songs and dances; Rev Sabine Baring Gould got a further thousand plus, while Alfred Williams accumulated hundreds.

    Sharp shows what we need to recover in music by noting that at the end of the nineteenth century folk song in rural areas was still an unbroken tradition. Whether labourer, thresher, cowherd, ploughman, pinder, goose woman, woodcutter, shepherd, cress-gatherer or bird-scaring boy, all trudged home to the accompaniment of song. Indeed in 1800, the poet John Clare’s father knew by heart over one hundred ballads.

    But English folk’s salient feature is humour. Thus Colum Sands between songs always tells funny tales, including one about his aunt, who, aged seventy-five after getting electricity for the first time, would only turn on the light to find the matches to light the oil lamp. Or when playing to the Inuits of Northern Canada, he met a woman who told him that in her tribe the men outnumbered the women ten to one. So he said: ‘The odds are good then’. She quick as a flash, riposted ‘Yes the odds are good but the goods are odd’. The same element is evident in Roy Bailey’s famous children’s songs: Kangaroos like to hop / Zebras like to run / Horses like to trot / But I like to lie in the sun.

    And of course there is Martin Wyndham Read, the great discoverer of Australian folk music, which he sings almost Belcanto; he has a store of hilarious stories from sheep shearers.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8WXnewzk1M

    VI – Musicals

    In the world of musicals does ‘Singing in the Rain’ not stand supreme, for making you feel happy? And is that what we seek from it? But as with all music, hearing it live is so much more entrancing.

    Umojo, a two hour explosion of South African black singers celebrating a century of music, caused the entire audience to go wild with applause at the end when I went to see it. For your romantic hunger, there is ‘Le Concert’, a French film featuring Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concert;  just as pulsating is ‘Strictly Ballroom’ where the pasodoble reigns, amidst much humour.

    Without the Jewish people, music would be a shadow of itself, in pop/shows/Classical: Bernstein’s ‘West Side Story’, is one such marvelous testament. Try not to miss hearing Fritz Kreisler the violinist, revered in his time; will one of his stature ever appear again? His 1926 recording of the Beethoven violin Concerto is superlative in a field of one hundred or more versions. Might he give you a longed for musical breakthrough?

    *******

    A rounded perspective on music is incomplete without surveying other animals. The moving and beautiful film ‘The Story of the Weeping Camel’, set in the Gobi desert of Mongolia features yurts and people in magnificently bright clothing. When a she camel after a long and difficult birth refuses to suckle her new born the small village calls in the town musician with a small cello-like instrument to play, whilst a woman sings. Within minutes a magical transformation is achieved!

    Recently Kathryn Roberts began her Cornish recital with the sad tale of the whale that sings at 52 Hertz, a frequency making it impossible to find a mate. And you can hear dolphins in Valencia, City of Arts and Sciences through a PA system singing to one another. How many other living creatures share this staggering gift of ours?

    As a farewell, let Beecham take the stage once more. Probably the finest and certainly the wittiest conductor from the UK, and much loved on the Continent by composers and concert-goers alike, at his seventieth birthday celebration the telegrams read out included one from Richard Strauss, whose operas he brought to Covent Garden and Sibelius whom he championed, after which Beecham cried ‘Not Mozart?!’ Has there ever lived a more vivid interpreter of that man’s perfect music? I doubt it.

    The featured image of Richard Wilson sitting on the shoulders of his son Hawthorn was taken by Toby Sirota at Meribel in Les Trois Vallees, France this year.

  • Animal Proteins Make Cancers Grow No Matter What the Original Cause

    The possibility of an association existing between animal protein and cancer goes back at least to the 1960s.  At that time in the Philippines, a slowly increasing incidence of liver cancer was taking place amongst children that carried a high mortality rate. Because such cancers were very rare in this age group, news of the outbreak spread to the USA and prompted Virginia Tech. University to send a young nutritional scientist over there to see what was going on. His name was T. Colin Campbell.

    Even before this visit took place researchers had already come to the conclusion that dietary factors were the most likely cause of the cancer, as the onset of the disease appeared to coincide with the discovery that large areas of the peanut crop had become infected by a fungus. It was, therefore, believed that the fungus was carcinogenic for the liver, and this theory was considerably reinforced when it was discovered that new cases of the disease plummeted as soon as children were instructed to avoid peanuts from fungus infected areas.

    I – Campbell in the Philippines

    That was how matters stood when Colin Campbell arrived on the scene. By then, not alone were researchers confident that the exact cause of the cancer was known, they were also satisfied that they could prevent new cases developing, simply by ensuring that peanuts from fungus-infected-areas were not eaten. In fact, all that seemed to remain for Campbell to do was to familiarize himself with the research that had taken place, and to read some of the case histories that had been documented.

    It was while this evaluation was taking place, however, that a very puzzling statistic came to the researchers’ attention. It was discovered that it was only children from wealthy families that were dying of the disease; children from poor families, although they appeared to eat just as many peanuts as rich children, did not develop the cancer, much less die of it.

    This was such a strange finding that doctors were forced to consider the possibility that factors other than peanuts might also be playing a role in the development of the cancer. It was decided, therefore, to identify all the major dietary differences that existed between the two groups of children. It was a task that proved surprisingly easy as it quickly became apparent that the main dietary difference between them was in the amount of animal protein being consumed.

    Children from rich families ate lots of animal protein in the form of milk, cheese, eggs, poultry and all sorts of meats and these were precisely the foods that poorer families often could not afford.

    It was a bit of a dilemma. If indeed it was only children of the rich that were developing liver cancer then one would have to conclude that there existed an association existed between the proteins that rich children were eating and the growth of the cancer. Few doctors could have felt entirely comfortable with this assumption, however, as it had long been acknowledged that animal protein was the most nutritious food that money could buy.

    When shortly thereafter Campbell headed back to the USA these were the thoughts that were buzzing about in his head. Certainly there was convincing evidence that the liver cancer outbreak in the Philippines was primarily due to a fungal infection of the peanut crop, but what then was one to make of the fact that it was only the children of the rich, eating lots of animal protein, that were dying from the disease?

    Bewildering questions sometimes turn out to have very simple answers and this was one such case.  It was Colin Campbell that solved the riddle. What occurred to him was that if indeed animal protein was so wonderfully nutritious for the cells of humans and many other animals, then surely they would also be highly nutritious for these same cells should they become malignant. Indeed one might even suspect that cancer cells, with their inherent characteristic of out-of-control-replication, might actually require the nutritional power of animal proteins, if they were to thrive and grow.

    II – Laboratory Tests

    Once back in the United States, Campbell set to work and began by checking the medical literature, in case some research might have taken place on the subject of liver cancer that had previously escaped his eye.

    To his surprise he found that there was one scientific paper published by two Indian researchers in ‘The Archives of Pathology’ from February 1968. These researchers, Madhavan and Gopalan, must have been on much the same track then as Campbell was now. They too were interested in the apparent association between animal protein and liver cancer, and they had carried out research that involved setting up experiments using laboratory rats.

    All the rats were first exposed to some well known carcinogens with the intention of causing at least some of their liver cells to develop cancer.  One group of the rats was then kept on a diet containing 20% animal protein in the form of casein from cows’ milk, and a second group was fed 5% casein. The results were remarkable in that the cancer cells in every rat fed on the 20% diet began to grow while little change occurred in the cells of rats on 5% casein.

    On the strength of this scientific paper from India and his own experiences in The Philippines, Campbell wrote a large number of articles on the subject for top scientific journals in the USA. The articles received a lot of attention but much of this was critical as his suggestion of there being an association between animal protein and cancer was considered too farfetched to be accurate.

    Campbell’s reaction was to set up his own experiments using, laboratory rats and the results were almost identical to those achieved by the Indian researchers. By this time he had become Professor of Nutrition and Biochemistry at Cornell University, where he remained for twenty-two years, and while there he carried out many more experiments on rats for the benefit of his students.

    One of the more important findings he made during these experiments was that it was entirely possible to switch the growth of cancer on and off, simply by varying the amount of animal protein in the diet. When plant proteins were used in these experiments no such results were achieved.

    III – Resistance of Vested Interests

    By now Campbell had come to believe that he had a very significant discovery on his hands and attempted in every way possible to get his message across both to the general public and to the medical profession. He continued to write articles and lectured widely on the subject in many universities. He also wrote a number of books. His first and most famous book, The China Study (Dallas, 2005) sold well over two million copies, and was reviewed favourably in The New York Times. Even so, and notwithstanding the fact that he was now a full professor with tenure at one of the major universities in the United States, his work remained unread by the vast majority of medical doctors.

    In The China Study Campbell makes no bones about the vested interest groups that confronted him whenever he brought up the subject of a relationship between animal protein and cancer. He listed three main groups.

    The very powerful pharmaceutical industry with its enormous influence in practically all areas of medicine headed the list. Their immense wealth comes from the vast sums of money they earn from producing drugs to combat disease. Cancer drugs rank high in this research and so in monetary terms at least, the pharmaceutical industry would have most to lose should Campbell’s ideas prove correct.

    Next on the list of vested interests came the farming community and the associated food industries. It was these that produced most of the animal protein that we consume, and needless to say they were none too pleased to find that their products were now being accused not alone of making cancers grow, but also of contributing to the greenhouse gasses responsible for Climate Change.

    Ranked third on Campbell’s list of vested interests came the medical profession itself. The surprise here was that doctors were not ranked at number one as down through the years  Campbell and his theory had been completely ignored by cancer specialists.

    My own feelings are that the entire medical profession have made a very big mistake in not researching the subject. It would have been so easy for them to do so, and all relevant findings could then have been fully established.  But such is life, and we all make mistakes. Overwork amongst wealthy, specialist doctors is widespread and while practice sometimes makes perfect, rushing headlong in the wrong direction helps nobody.

    IV – Family Doctoring

    My credentials are that I had been a family doctor in Ireland for many years and in 2005, after reading The China Study, I became convinced that some sort of relationship existed between animal protein and cancer.

    I was sufficiently impressed to ask some cancer specialists that I knew what they thought about Campbell’s theory, but they all had more pressing problems on their minds. It was their lack of response that forced me to consider the possibility of carrying out some research myself. Cancer being such a common disease a busy family doctor could expect to have about seventy cancer patients, at various stages of the disease, attending the practice at any one time. So I had plenty of material to work on.

    What I did was simply to bring up the subject of a possible association between animal protein and cancer with every cancer patient that passed through my office. I explained to each of them how I had been influenced by Colin Campbell’s book and suggested that they too should not alone read it, but should seriously consider going on an animal protein-free, plant-based diet, straight away.

    It was a big ask, but people generally listen to what a family doctors has to say, and most of my patients decided to give the diet a try. As time went by and everybody became increasingly aware of just how difficult it was to give up eating their favourite foods, attitudes began to change and this was not helped by a lack of support for the diet from cancer specialists. For a time it began to appear that my whole research effort might go down the drain.

    V – A ‘Eureka’ Moment

    What was becoming evident was that the diet was just too difficult for many people and there did not appear to be much that I could do about it.  Making the diet more palatable was the only solution that came to mind but this didn’t appear very realistic. Or was it?

    I had a sort of eureka moment when I began to realise that for those that were struggling with the diet, no great harm could be done by allowing fish to be eaten a few times per week. It was not something that I had read about in Professor Campbell’s writings, or anywhere else for that matter, but I had always wondered whether fish might be in a different category to other forms of animal protein.

    I explained to patients that little or no direct research had been done on the subject of fish eating and cancer, but pointed out that people living In Japan and other parts of the world with strong fish eating cultures were amongst the most long-lived on the planet, with very low cancer rates. There was also the fact that recent evolutionary research was suggesting that mankind appeared to have evolved walking in or around river estuaries eating plants and shellfish. Perhaps this could offer some explanation as to why fish protein might be an exception to the rule.

    It was a bit of a gamble but it appears to have paid off.  Certainly the diet with fish included became much easier to follow, and soon it was not only the strugglers that were eating fish a couple of times a week, most of my cancer patients were doing so also while otherwise strictly adhering to a wholefood plant-based regime.

    Patients welcomed this small change in the diet, and few if any now lapse. We are all learning as we go along.

    Many patients recount how they experience an improved sense of wellbeing after being on the diet for only a matter of weeks. This may just be in the head, but I suggest that improved wellbeing reflects how the cancer cells inside them have stopped replicating.

    Improved wellbeing also appears to be associated with a good long term prognosis, and I now suggest to patients that most of them should be able to return to their normal pre-cancer lives, within a matter of weeks and broadly speaking this is what I have seen.

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    My hope for the future is that all patients diagnosed with any form of cancer will automatically stop eating animal protein as soon as the diagnosis is made. This is a risk-free form of treatment, and far from interfering with treatments given by cancer specialists, makes recovery more rapid and assured.

    I also emphasise to patients that by staying on an animal-protein-free, plant-based diet indefinitely that not alone are cancers very unlikely to return but that they also have a much better chance of avoiding most of the chronic diseases we are prone to, including coronary heart disease.

    Over the years I have put together a short book explaining why I have gone down the path that I have taken. The book recounts a number of case histories that readers should find helpful. The title is Stop Feeding Your Cancer and it is available for purchase on Amazon.

    Dr John Kelly MB.BCh.BAO.DCh.LM.MRCGP
    jkellypiat@yahoo.com