Third Avenue

Bucolic dreams

Massachusetts in May. A green and pleasant land indeed, with more clapperboard houses and manicured lawns than is strictly decent. Still, there remain things that the Brits do best. Yesterday I visited an establishment billed as this state's 'most famous pub'. Please. It wouldn't have got a runner-up prize at the 'moderately dull boozer competition for south east Chingford'.

A lot to comment on at the moment - the French referendum not least. I hope to have time to post properly soon.

National treasure

I'm talking, of course, about Melanie Phillips, columnist par excellence for the Daily Mail. Where would we be without her? If she didn't exist, she surely would have to be invented.

Writing a Melanie Phillips article is fairly simple. There is one fundamental rule: Britain is the 'degenerate' home of 'degradation' (to use her choice of words) where, by definition, nothing good can ever, ever happen. She takes one incident that reflects badly on the country, then extrapolates it to come to the inevitable conclusion that 'since Mrs Miggins of Oldham once stole a can of coke from the local Tesco, this proves that Britain as a whole is a cess pit of evil for which no redemption is possible'. Wherever possible she will throw in the fact that the US is vastly superior to Britain in all ways (not difficult, considering the contempt with which she holds good old Blighty).

Melanie Phillips has also been writing in support of overturning the AUT boycott against Israel. The AUT is a British union of university lecturers that recently decided to drop all links with certain Israeli institutions. This caused huge controversy in Britain and beyond.

Yesterday, the AUT, following what was seen by some as considerable grass-roots pressure, overturned the boycott by an overwhelming majority. Clearly, in Ms Phillips' eyes, this should be good news. But, according to the fundamental principle of Phillipsonian philosophy, nothing good can ever happen in Britain. So, how does she cope with this potential short circuitry?

Well, of course, the conclusion she draws from the overturning of the boycott is overwhelmingly negative. Silly me for thinking otherwise. Because, as Melanie Phillips has discovered by some sort of telepathy, even the people who voted against the boycott were, in fact, just as anti-Israel as those in favour of it.

Isn't Ms Phillips' world a wonderful one? When things are bad, they are bad. When things are good, this is merely a smokescreen disguising the fact that they are in truth incredibly, dreadfully awful.

(Updated at 16.30EST)

A real US holiday

Contrary to popular European belief, the American calendar is in fact littered with what Brits might call Bank Holidays. They come thick and fast. Unfortunately, a disconcerting number of them are more honoured in the breach than the observance, and pass without in any way ruffling the American obsession with going to work.

Not so Memorial Day, which is celebrated this coming Monday. The banks will be shut, cafes closing early, and the Henry Hudson Parkway will be packed solid with exiting Manhattanites.

Third Avenue will be relocating to a small town in Massachusetts for the duration, but I hope that more or less normal service will continue, Internet connections willing.

Bias at the Beeb

Over at Biased BBC (for those of you not in the know, this is a site dedicated to exposing everyone's favourite Auntie as a hotbed of left-wing propaganda), they've got very excited about a piece in the Wall Street Journal by Scott Norvell. Mr Norvell, you may be interested to find out, is the London bureau chief of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News.

Norvell's article starts with the news that a former BBC reporter, Robin Aitken, has come out as a Tory and accused the BBC of being a rabid lefty breeding ground. Norvell states:

Those of us who pay the BBC's annual £120 license fee but grit our teeth every time we watch one of its news programs have floundered for some time in search of a term to describe what ails the corporation. Mr. Aitken, a 25-year veteran reporter now retired, has put his finger on it: institutionalised leftism.

The phrase is a play on one -- "institutional racism" -- currently in vogue among the professionally aggrieved. It's frequently lobbed when the forces of multicultural goodness can't point to specific proof of racism in an organisation but just know deep down that something is amiss.

Ah, the sweet irony. When the left moans about 'institutional racism', they are classed as the 'professionally aggrieved' who can't point to 'specific proof'. When the right moans about institutionalised leftism, well, it's common sense, innit?

Norvell sums up the Beeb's attitude to America to his largely non-British audience thus:

The BBC's world is one in which America is always wrong, George W. Bush is a knuckle-dragging simpleton, people of faith are frightening ignoramuses, and capitalism is a rot on the fabric of social justice. Through this prism, the United Nations is the world's supreme moral authority, multiculturalism is always a force for good, war is never warranted, and U.S. Republicans sprinkle Third World children over their Cheerios for breakfast.

This is, of course, the same BBC that, according to a fact-based (remember facts?) academic study on the media response to the Iraq war, was found to be the most likely of all UK broadcasters to swallow the pro-war government line (even more likely than Sky News!). But far be it from Biased BBC or Fox News to sully themselves with such niceties. After all, as self-confessed 'professionally aggrieved', they don't need to point to 'specific proof'. They just 'know deep down' that the BBC is against the war and against the Americans.

Norvell then points to BBC treatment of two stories as 'proof' of the Corporation's evil intent. The first is a piece on the Terri Schiavo case by Justin Webb. Norvell quotes Webb as saying:

America is often portrayed as an ignorant, unsophisticated sort of place, full of bible bashers and ruled to a dangerous extent by trashy television, superstition and religious bigotry, a place lacking in respect for evidence based on knowledge.

I know that is how it is portrayed because I have done my bit to paint that picture .. and that picture is in many respects a true one.

Unfortunately, as even the writers at Biased BBC have to concede, this out-of-context self-mocking quote disguises the whole point of Webb's posting, which is to stress the maturity, good sense and decency of the American people. His last paragraph is hardly a racist tirade:

It is common to mock at American attempts to export Jeffersonian democracy, but after these two weeks the mocking should stop.

So, the BBC is saying, stop poking fun at the neo-cons in Washington, exporting democracy is a great American gift to the world. One might well ask in favour of whom that is biased.

His second story is about the takeover of Manchester United by US tycoon Michael Glazer. Football is not my thing, so I will refrain from commenting in too much detail here. But the BBC website does say how Glazer has used his business skills to 'turn around' the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and describes him without irony as a 'shining example of the American dream'. Also, it can hardly be claimed that the BBC is inventing the overwhelming hostility towards him - and I find little difference in their reporting to that of, say, this article on Murdoch-owned Sky News.

Norvell then continues on the 'BBC is undoubtedly leftist' line for a few paragraphs - with no attempt at proof (he does after all 'know deep down' that he is right). He ends by returning to Robin Aitken:

Mr. Aitken is said to be the first BBC insider ever to come out of the conservative closet ...

If for nothing else, Mr. Aitken deserves high accolades for his contribution to the lexicon and his willingness to challenge a status quo that serves no one except the people who perpetuate it.

So the BBC, in existence for over 80 years, has only produced one conservative willing to state what a rotten organisation it is. One.

There are three possible interpretations for this:

1. Mr Aitken is the only conservative in 80 years to have worked for the organisation
2. The BBC is so ruthless that it employs people to execute retired journalists who want to speak out
3. Er, the problem of left-wing bias might not be that bad.

Of course, none of this will cut any ice whatsoever with the anti-BBC brigade, for whom the very existence of the Corporation is a blot on the landscape. For my part, I'm happy to come out as a small-c conservative on this one. The BBC is a British institution that sets the UK apart from the rest of the world and, for all its many faults, is something we can be deeply proud of.

Survival of the fittest

Rush-hour in a Manhattan supermarket, and human nature is not seen in its best light.

My trolley being distinctly fuller than that of the lady behind me, and my manners being, of course, impeccable, I smile, offer her my place and say:

'Do go ahead of me'

She looks at me with a withering expression mixing pity and scorn.

'I can tell you're not from round here,' she sneers, before coolly taking the offered place. If this were a jungle, I'd definitely be extinct by now...

From one who knows...

Check out this excellent piece on education over at Shuggy's Blogspot. Witty, informative and also contains a swipe at Melanie Phillips. So superb value for money.

Constitutional conundrum

This is just up on the Sharpener.

Referendum rights

Via Cabalamat Journal, I see that there is a proposal here in the US to force legislators to read the laws they are passing. The proposal states:

We hold this truth to be self-evident, that those in Congress who vote on legislation they have not read, have not represented their constituents. They have misrepresented them.

And since Congress has repeatedly committed “legislation without representation,” strong measures to prohibit these Congressional misrepresentations are both justified and required.

To this end we have created the “Read the Bills Act of 2005 (RTBA).” RTBA requires that...

• Each bill, and every amendment, must be read in its entirety before a quorum in both the House and Senate.
• Every member of the House and Senate must sign a sworn affidavit, under penalty of perjury, that he or she has attentively either personally read, or heard read, the complete bill to be voted on.

All well and good. Equally, before anyone gets to vote in the possibly upcoming UK referendum on the EU constitution, they should be required to make a similar declaration on pain of prosecution that they have read every last word of the weighty tome.

That should at least keep turnout nice and low.

The sin of death

As popular historians never tire of reminding us, for Victorians, the great taboo was sex. Death, on the other hand, was constantly discussed. For modern society, it is the other way round. Sex is everywhere. Death is now the greatest sin.

People can no longer be said to die. They 'lose their long battle with cancer', as if a bit more moral courage would have pulled them through. Death is failure. Death is for losers.

Until recently, of course, death was not seen as the end. It was merely the portal to something greater. It therefore could be faced with equanimity, if not positive joy.

Since religion faded from the scene, however, we are left with only life, and clinging to it at all costs is our number one preoccupation. For the Victorians, our current attitude, where every orifice must have a tube attached to it, every vein pumped full of the latest drug, every organ removed, replaced, repaired in order to preserve any flicker of life, would have seemed grotesque. When the body gave up the ghost, this was God's work, after all. Alleviating pain was fine, but surely our present one-track obsession with life would have struck them as little short of heretical.

Not that Victorians had all the right answers either. Their attitude to people with disabilities, who were often allowed to die of neglect, benign or otherwise, was truly repugnant. The rich would let their Down syndrome offspring wither in distant wings, while deaf children were frequently consigned to asylums.

But we have now reached the stage where our modern obsession with preserving life come what may meets modern medicine's new found ability to keep us going more or less indefinitely. Soon, no doubt, we will be able to remove the brain from a dead body and keep it alive in a tank for years on end. But that we could does not mean that we should, and does not make us murderers if we decide not to.

A debate is now urgently needed about how we marry our new-found absolute attachment to life with the realities of modern medicine and, yes, the realities of finite resources. There are no easy solutions.

What are the rights of patients and of doctors? What constitutes medical treatment? If artificial feeding is not medical treatment, what about respirators, dialysis machines, pacemakers, indeed, any kind of life support machine? Are they all to be kept going for ever?

My fellow blogger Laban Tall sees it simply. For him, the General Medical Council are 'cheerful Mengeles', angels of death from the concentration camps. Laban may want to portray the people who have in no small part been responsible for the greatest rise in life expectancy that humanity has ever seen as no different from the most grotesque tortures and murderers in history.

For me, they are men and women, flawed like the rest of us, trying to come up with answers to some of the most difficult moral questions that modern society faces.

Cheering up the left

A site has come to my attention today which has boosted me no-end. It glories under the name of topleftybaiters.com. Still can't quite work out whether it is a spoof. Either way, it is great fun.

They have a list, as the title suggests, of top lefty baiters. No 1 in the UK is Frederick Forsyth, followed by Norman Tebbit.  About 20 years out of date, but hey.

But more hilarious is their list of the most appalling lefties around the world. As I write, at No 1 for the UK is, er, Shaun Woodward. Yes, really, that flash in the pan ex-Tory who has in all likelihood been forgotten even by his own butler. This is the UK's most dreadful lefty. God, what scaredy-cats the right must be. Even Andy Pandy must have them hiding behind the sofa.

More astoundingly, the aforementioned Mr Woodward is No 3 on a world-wide list of appalling lefties. Fidel Castro, you might be interested to know, is No 6.

And they say the right has no sense of humour.