Third Avenue

The darling of the right

Scott Burgess at the Daily Ablution has a long posting, followed by a rather interesting comments section, on the right's favourite intellectual, George Orwell. There's a lot of stimulating stuff there. It's always fascinated me that the right should so like Orwell, although it's not all that surprising given his love-hate relationship with the left.

The first quote in the posting is this one:

The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia may be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly ['daily', today] papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power.

I wasn't around when Orwell wrote this, so will make no judgement as to whether it is true or not. But, with one small change, it seems an accurate portrayal of contemporary British journalism. Just replace the 'left-wing' for 'right-wing' in the first line and it reads pretty well, I think you'll find.

'Negative, querulous attitude' - as I've written many times on this blog, the contemporary British right-wing press loves nothing more than negativity and querulousness, loves nothing more than telling the world what a dreadful place Britain is. As I wrote a while back at the Sharpener, there is a strong strand of what I might call 'patriophobia' in some parts the British right, where being proud of contemporary Britain is a sign of delusion, an aberration in need of correcting. Where one can only be proud of some mythic Britain that existed at some never-specified point. Today's Britain is something one can only sneer at in disgust.

And of course, for the foreseeable future the right certainly can 'never expect to be in a position of power'. Perhaps that's just as well...

Must sign off now; I'm about to put on my blue stockings to bicycle to communion in Harlem, followed by warm beer and cricket at this little pub I know in Queens.

Another tradition bites the dust

Hyperactive legislating to counter problems that don't exist carries on apace in my native land. I despair at this: banning inconvenient demonstrations from high-profile areas of central London. I imagine it's one of those issues that will unite the UK blogging world on the right and the left.

Terrible, depressing legislation.

Political correctness ruined my plasterwork

Over at the Sharpener, Blimpish has a thought-provoking post on political correctness and religion.

Political correctness is one of those phenomena that one can only admit to being against, and one that is blamed for so many of society's ills.

A particular anecdote comes to mind. A number of years ago I spent a week or so shadowing an MP. I followed him around at Westminster for a few days, after which came a trip to his constituency.

An irate elderly gentleman called at his Saturday-morning surgery complaining of subsidence at his house caused by the building of the local by-pass. As his house was only around the corner, we decided to have a look for ourselves. We were chaperoned into the living room and exultingly shown a hairline crack down one of the walls.

The MP looked sceptical.

'Look, look,' cried the man, pointing at the blemish. 'It's political correctness gone mad!'

Good dissidents, bad dissidents

We all know that countries that abuse human rights are bad, no? And that people from those countries whose families have been tortured and murdered by the state, and who have themselves been subjected to attempted 're-education' following political protests should be at least given a sympathetic hearing on seeking asylum in a Western state?

Well, that's all fine and dandy unless the country that has abused you is actually rather powerful and possessing increasing business clout.

So pity this poor Chinese man, turned down for asylum without so much as an interview in Australia. And his story is beginning to make waves in the US, as the American authorities too, it seems, are too embarrassed to give him haven here. Don't want to offend our new friends in Beijing.

So before you become the victim of state oppression, do remember to make sure that the state that oppresses you is not a trusted trade partner of the oh-so-principled West. All victims are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Life and death issues

The story that dominated the headlines here in March now returns centre stage: the results of the post mortem on Terri Schiavo have just been published. She was the brain damaged woman whose feeding tube was removed after a long and bitter legal battle between different members of her family, and in whose fate the US Congress and President Bush tried to get involved, causing widespread concern across all sections of American society.

The results are no surprise: the overwhelming medical evidence considered at the various legal hearings has turned out to be correct.

For me, the principles behind this case (going beyond the tragic family dispute) were always about the right of the individual, together with their family and doctors, to decide their own medical treatment, without the heavy hand of the state getting involved.

A large majority of the American people are of the same view.

Criminal ingenuity

This is one that Laban Tall will like...

I can't find reference to this in the British press (anyone heard of it?), but it is cited in this week's Le Monde magazine.

It seems twelve criminals sentenced to community service in Rotherham were tasked with planting a flower bed in the town last autumn. Come the spring, and the fruits of their bulb arrangement became clear as the floral display announced, in the Monde's translation:

Allez vous faire foutre

Which, roughly translated, means something exceedingly rude.

Nice to see that literacy levels are high amongst the criminal classes.

Fan mail

Compliments are always pleasant to receive, even if they come with a barb. So it is nice to know that Laban Tall likes me. That's not to say that he approves of me: he does, of course, think that I am wrong.

He describes me as someone who:

thinks you can take away the cultural underpinnings (chiefly liberty and Christianity) from Western society without it crumbling

I am at a loss to know where or how I have advocated the removal of liberty from Western society. Perhaps Laban and I have different views on what liberty entails.

As for Christianity - I do not know how one goes about removing it as one of the 'cultural underpinnings' of our society, anymore than one can remove 1066 as one of the defining moments of our history. It is true that Britain is one of the most secular countries on earth, and has been for some time. Indeed, I would argue strongly that part of Britain's make-up and personality is the questioning and probing of religion that came with the Enlightenment.

I suspect Laban sees the problems that beset modern society as a result of the crumbling of active Christian faith in Britain. Yet here in the US, Christianity holds sway like nowhere else in the developed West. But divorce rates, crime levels and births outside marriage are all higher than those of heathen Western Europe. So the correlation is at the very least not a direct one. In my view Western society is a healthier beast than the delicate sapling that Laban seems to think it is.

So what do I think of Laban's blog? I read him regularly and, of course, I think he is wrong (and he doesn't allow comments, which is very frustrating). He seems to me to have dined too frequently at the table of Peter Hitchens, taking large side orders of Melanie Phillips and Theodore Dalrymple. The House of Hitchens is one where every negative anecdote or statistic is pored over with lugubrious schadenfreude, while every positive development is dismissed as a trick of the light perpetrated by those evil liberal elites trying to hoodwink people into believing that their lives consist of anything other than unmitigated misery. I find such negativity quite frankly exhausting - and rather fruitless. Banging on about how dreadful a country Britain is, how degraded its population and how debased its culture doesn't really get us anywhere (quite apart from alienating people who have the temerity to think that, shock horror, Britain might actually be quite a nice country that one could, every now and then, be proud of).

How far Laban himself shares these views is hard to judge. From comments he leaves on other sites, I suspect he takes a rather more nuanced view than his own website might suggest. But then, perhaps I'm being excessively charitable...

Books, etc

Blogging really does bring people together. How else could I count someone like Blimpish amongst my most respected interlocutors?  He has done me the honour of passing on the current book questionnaire that is doing the rounds.

There is always the Desert Island Discs temptation here - hide the Bay City Rollers albums under the bed, and pretend to be a devotee of Stravinsky and Mahler.

But here goes.

Number of books I own

By a happy combination of events, almost my entire book collection is in a windowless room on the Rue de Torcy in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. But I would guess it's around 500-600.

Last book I bought

Er, a tourist guide to Massachusetts. The last book I got out of the library was James Joyce's Ulysses. I rather think it's destined to be returned unread (yet again).

Last book I read

The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera. A stimulating examination of the roots and the current problems of the modern novel.

Five books that mean a lot to me. Tricky to narrow it down, but nonetheless:

Don Quixote by Cervantes. An easy choice, as this is the novel - the one that started it all and the one most often cited as the best ever. But I still wasn't prepared for just how good it really is. I almost wish I hadn't read it, as it can now make all too many other novels seem like rather feeble attempts to rewrite it.

Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. A rip-roaring detective novel and a supreme dissection of the interaction of faith, emotion and rationality. In the spell-binding monologue of the Grand Inquisitor, we get a brilliantly depressing examination of the relationship between the individual and authority. A sublime creation.

The Trial by Kafka. Dostoevsky for the 20th century. An individual searches for moral justification for his existence in a modern, sophisticated society. And finds he has none. Spine-chilling.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. A dream-like examination of the meaning of existence amongst the terminally ill of Europe at a Swiss sanatorium in the years leading up to the Great War. The sense of an era coming to an end is palpable, as is the bitter-sweet nostalgia. A dazzling dance of life and death.

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. Not everyone's favourite Austen, perhaps because its romantic couple is not all that romantic. But for me the most stimulating of all the works of England's greatest novelist (and I will tolerate no dissent on that classification of Austen). The description of Fanny's arrival back at Mansfield Park following her visit to her parents is the epitome of effortless genius in action. Read it and weep (I did).

More bias at the Beeb

I'm rather surprised to see that no-one at Biased BBC has spotted the latest blatant example of Auntie's unashamed partisanship. I'm talking, of course, of the Today programme's attempt to rewrite the now-defunct European constitution.

Who have they chosen to start the task? Er, none other than arch Eurosceptic David Heathcott Amery. Surely they've also got an Europhile on board too? Someone to put the alternative side? Well, the answer to that would be no.

Another example of the BBC's flagrant right-wing and anti-European bias, I think you'll agree. Or am I missing something?

In search of West Lothian

My latest post is up on the Sharpener.