Resist in Peace Tony Benn

Paul Foot on Tony Benn in the LRB:

For nearly a century, Labour MPs have been going to Parliament to change the world, but have ended up changing only themselves. Tony Benn is unique. He went to Parliament to change himself, but has ended up determined only to change the world. This extraordinary conversion has taken place not on the backbenches, where a young socialist’s revolutionary determination is often toughened by being passed over for high office, but in high office itself. Indeed, the higher the office Tony Benn occupied, the more his eyes were opened to the horror of capitalist society, and to the impotence of socialists in high office to change it.

And in his book, The Vote:

Any workers fighting redundancy, any school standing up for the comprehensive system, any persecuted foreigner seeking asylum could rely on his active support.  Again and again, he deliberately abandoned his base in Parliament and worked among those who, he hoped and believed, would one day trigger a new Chartist agitation, and a revolution from below.

In 1999, after two years of the Blair Government, he made a historic announcement: he would not be standing for Parliament in the 2001 general election.  He would be leaving Parliament 'in order to devote more time to politics'.  His own enormous experience in the highest places in the land drove him to the conclusion that the place to fight was in the lowest: that any future for an egalitarian socialist society rested not on what happened in Parliament but on the resistance and determination of the workers and the poor.

***

Despite his age and the cruel death from cancer of his wife, he continued resolutely down the path he had set himself: to argue and agitate for change from below.

Toy Stories

From the reminiscences of Eleanor Marx:

To my sisters — I was then too small — he told tales as they went for walks, and these tales were measured by miles not chapters. “Tell us another mile,” was the cry of the two girls. For my own part, of the many wonderful tales Mohr [Marx] told me, the most wonderful, the most delightful one, was “Hans Röckle.” It went on for months and months; it was a whole series of stories. The pity no one was there to write down these tales so full of poetry, of wit, of humour! Hans Röckle himself was a Hoffmann-like magician, who kept a toyshop, and who was always “hard up.” His shop was full of the most wonderful things — of wooden men and women, giants and dwarfs, kings and queens, workmen and masters, animals and birds as numerous as Noah got into the Arc, tables and chairs, carriages, boxes of all sorts and sizes. And though he was a magician, Hans could never meet his obligations either to the devil or the butcher, and was therefore — much against the grain — constantly obliged to sell his toys to the devil. These then went through wonderful adventures — always ending in a return to Hans Röckle’s shop. Some of these adventures were as grim, as terrible, as any of Hoffmann’s; some were comic; all were told with inexhaustible verve, wit and humour.

And Mohr would also read to his children. Thus to me, as to my sisters before me, he read the whole of Homer, the whole Nibelungen Lied, Gudrun, Don Quixote, the Arabian Nights, etc. As to Shakespeare he was the Bible of our house, seldom out of our hands or mouths. By the time I was six I knew scene upon scene of Shakespeare by heart.

On my sixth birthday Mohr presented me with my first novel — the immortal Peter Simple [adventure novel by the English writer Frederick Marryat]. This was followed by a whole course of Marryat and Cooper. And my father actually read every one of the tales as I read them, and gravely discussed them with his little girl. And when that little girl, fired by Marryat’s tales of the sea, declared she would become a “Post-Captain” (whatever that may be) and consulted her father as to whether it would not be possible for her “to dress up as a boy” and “run away to join a man-of-war,” he assured her he thought it might very well be done, only they must say nothing about it to anyone until all plans were well matured.

The Adventure of the Irritated Narrator

It was in the spring of 18-- when I returned to Baker Street after a lengthy sojurn in the wilds of Dorsetshire.  It had been some months since I had last called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes and so I found myself quite anxious to renew that acquaintance which had, over the years, led to my involvement in various grotesque and singular events, many of which I have subsequently recounted for the interest of readers. 

I was let in by Mrs Hudson and climbed the 19 steps up to the rooms which I had once shared with Holmes before my marriage, the old wound from the jezail bullet troubling me but a little. 

I found Holmes slumped in an armchair, smoking a long clay pipe and seemingly locked in a brown study.  He barely responded to my halloas, giving only the faintest twitch of one of his eyebrows to acknowledge my arrival.

Well used to my strange friend's extremes of mood and temper, and the sullenness which was wont to affect him during fallow periods when he happened to have no case to stimulate his restless desire for intellectual work, I did not take offence.  Instead I sat myself down opposite him before the fireside and regarded Holmes with a watchfulness which I found it hard to disguise.

How well I recalled the years when I, a bachelor in those days, had shared these rooms, these chairs, this fireside with the most brilliant consulting detective in the world. 

It seemed an age before Holmes took full notice of my presence.

"Watson," he said through the gritted teeth clamped around the stem of the pipe, "you have been in Dorsetshire, I see.  How was the 12.22?  I usually find it rather inclined to be tardy.  I observe that you stopped by at Romano's on the way here.  Did you enjoy your kippers?"

"Oh fuck off Holmes," I said.  And walked out.

Glug Glug Glug

Read this.  Please.

Want a taster?  Here are some sentences from the article:

Almost as soon as it took office, this government appointed a task force to investigate farming rules. Its chairman was the former director general of the National Farmers' Union.
...

Thanks to a wholesale change in the way the land is cultivated, at 38% of the sites the researchers investigated, the water – instead of percolating into the ground – is now pouring off the fields.
...

The crop which causes most floods and does most damage to soils is the only one which is completely unregulated.
...

We pay £3.6bn a year for the privilege of having our wildlife exterminated, our hills grazed bare, our rivers polluted and our sitting rooms flooded.

I propose a new fly-on-the-wall docudrama: 'Benefit Farm', detailing how the feckless, greedy, welfare-guzzling farmers are to blame for "Sunken Britain".

Catching Them at Their Best

The Pex Lives boys have done a supplemental podcast about the Star Trek movies.  Got me thinking about why I like Star Trek IV so much.  I decided to try writing something about it, since anything that even vaguely twitches my interest is worth grabbing hold of at the moment, what with my blogging mojo being critically ill and lying, sobbing and wailing, in a deep dark pit.

I don't like the movie because it's 'tongue-in-cheek' or because I have any sort of ideological attachment to the idea that SF in general (or Trek in particular) should be 'self-aware' or anything like that.  I like it because it is, essentially, a movie about a bunch of old relics from the 60s wandering around Regan's America and disapproving of it heartily.

This is not a deep movie.  It isn't hard to parse.  No great leaps of interpretation are needed.  Just look at what happens.

In order to survive in 80s San Franciso, Kirk must sell his beloved spectacles, a gift from Bones.  He, a man who - as we learn from this film - comes from a culture without money, must commodify something precious to him.

In order to achieve their aims, Bones and Scotty must - essentially - bribe a sexist business manager with promises of the untold wealth which will come from a new commodity.  Commodification again.

In the course of acquiring some radiation (or something) Chekhov gets arrested by the US Navy, gets interrogated, called a "retard" and a "Russkie" by paranoid officers, and is chased to the point where he sustains a life-threatening injury.

In the course of rescuing him, Bones encounters an elderly woman, in need of dialysis, waiting unattended and forgotten on a gurney in a hospital corridor.

Kirk and Spock encounter a representative of a moribund counter-culture where the best the 'rebellious youth' can offer is loud anti-social music which screeches that "we're all bloody worthless".  (This is, admittedly, rather unfair on Punk.  The depiction is, at best, a clueless and curmudgeonly parody... but then, by this point in the 80s, the real remnants of Punk were, at best, commercialised and decontextualised parodies of the Punk movement.)

Kirk and Spock must team up with a right-on scientist who seems to be the only person who gives a shit about the whales.  Just as the animals are likely to be slaughtered for commercial reasons once they are sent back into the wild, so the reasons for their being so sent are implicitly commercial: they're not enough of a draw to make them economically viable for the cash-strapped institute.

As if all this weren't enough, how does Kirk justify Spock's eccentric behaviour?  He places him in the context of the 60s.

Diegetically, Kirk et al are from 'the future'... but, in this film, the future = America's past.  Specifically, the crew are played as displaced representatives of the culture from which they extra-diegetically come: the 60s.  They are remnants of utopian Kennedyish 60s liberalism.  Now, however much wrong there may have been with utopian Kennedyish 60s liberalism (and there was a fuck-ton wrong with it), it was mostly preferable to Reaganism, and - more importantly - certainly entailed popular ideas that were far in advance not only of Reaganism but also of its own actual practice.  Similarly, however much old Trek may have frequently failed to live up to the best principles and promises of utopian Kennedyish 60s liberalism (Josh Marsfelder is especially good on this), it also entailed popular ideas far in advance of its own actual practice.  One way or another, the widespread popular idea of Trek that emerges from the mixed-truth of its original 60s run is a progressive and idealistic one.

So these ageing progressives from another time come to Reagan's America.  They encounter resuscitated Cold War paranoia, decaying hospitals, underfunded science, omnipresent commodification, etc.

In this context, they stick out like sore thumbs.  And, as mentioned, Kirk passes off the noticeably hippyish behaviour of Spock (he wears robes and swims with whales) as echoes of his past in the 60s counter-culture.  He speaks of the "free speech movement" on US campuses, associating them with the Civil Rights movement - implying that he sees the entire rebellion as all of a piece and part of a struggle for democracy.  Even the druggie counter-culture is referenced as being bound up with this "free speech movement".

The 60s meets 'Save the Whales' and builds a bridge between the past and the future (the film archly reverses them and pretends that the past is actually the future).

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not about to plonk down my DVD copy of this and call it my manifesto.  There are lots of problems with it... not least the grumpy emphasis on anti-social people in the streets, and the pessimism that means that Dr Gillian Taylor (the right-on cetacean biologist) has to escape back into the past/future because there's nothing left for her in the 80s.  But it's a thing of melancholy beauty nonetheless.

Another repudiation of popular 80s ideology there.
(Image stolen from http://trekkiefeminist.tumblr.com/post/56691910508/dr-gillian-taylor-star-trek-iv-the-voyage )

"You're not exactly catching us at our best," says Kirk.

I beg to differ.

The aliens... They're just so... alien

J.K. Rowling recently reignited the Potterite shipping-wars by saying that she should never have coupled Ron with Hermione.

Among the things she apparently doesn't regret putting into the world's most widely-read/seen Fantasy franchise of recent decades are the following:

• Gold-obsessed Goblin bankers with big noses and a nigh-communistic inability to comprehend or respect 'human' notions of private property.

• A race of willing slaves with brown skin, huge rolling eyes and 'pickaninny' speech patterns.

• Giants who are born savage and thick, and who live in 'primitive' tribes.

Lest it be thought that I'm singling Rowling out for special snark, let me broaden this out immediately.  The SF/Fantasy genre, as a whole, contains a discourse of race that represents a peculiarly insidious reflection of racial ideology.  Race pervades these genres as a category.  Tolkien's Middle Earth is full of different 'races'.  The world of Star Trek is full of different 'races'.  The world of Doctor Who is full of different 'races'.  Just think how often we are assailed with 'races' in Fantasy that can be told apart by both physical characteristics (the blonde hair of the Thals, the crinkly noses of the Bajorans, etc.) and apparently inborn social characteristics.  The Doctor pronounces the Jaggaroth "a vicious, callous, warlike race" (my emphasis).  A social trait (the tendency to make war) is thus ascribed a racial origin.  And the ones I've mentioned are just some of the best known and most mainstream. 

Let's look at another extreme example, which shows a particular kind of Fantasy worry about race:

There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today—I don’t know how to explain it, but it sort of makes you crawl. You’ll notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of ’em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain’t quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shrivelled or creased up. Get bald, too, very young. The older fellows look the worst—fact is, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they must die of looking in the glass! Animals hate ’em—they used to have lots of horse trouble before autos came in.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow over Innsmouth, written in 1931.

This is particularly interesting because the story is about 'race-mixing', expressing Lovecraft's bigoted horror of 'miscegenation'.  But he wasn't writing in a vacuum.  He was a product of the late-19th and early-20th centuries...  and, indeed, being a man stolidly stuck to the past, he was also a distillation of much of the American 19th century.

The American 19th century was a period of intense construction of race and 'races' as a social category (which is what 'race' is with reference to human ethnicity; as a biological idea it's essentially meaningless).  To quote Richard Seymour:

Historically, the act of oppression that produced the category of race preceded the systematic pseudo-scientific classification of human variation along racial lines. This was true, according to Theodore Allen, in Ireland under the Protestant Ascendancy, and it was true in colonial America. What happened first was that a group would be singled out on the basis of some characteristic or other, and excluded from the normal citizenship rights enjoyed by the rest of society no matter how poor. Then, that group would be racialised – a process known as ‘race-making’. As David Roediger points out, this was a very efficient way of stratifying labour markets – colour-coding them, dividing them, making them politically more manageable, and increasing the rate at which it is possible to exploit them. In the history of US industrial relations, ‘race management’ is thus a prominent strategy.

And once this process begins, it doesn’t simply stop and ossify. It transforms in response to new political developments. So, new immigrant groups to America such as European Jews, Italians, the Irish, Poles, Hungarians, etc., would always be initially racialised. But as they consolidated their position in civil society, improved their bargaining power as labourers, and achieved political representation, they became ‘white’.

Look at this positively Lovecraftian bit of racial pseudo-science:

The yellow, sunken, cadaverous visage; the greenish-colored eyes; the thick, protuberant lips; the low forehead; the light, yellowish hair; and the lank, angular person, constitute an appearance so characteristic of the new race, the production of polygamy, as to distinguish them at a glance.

U.S. Army Surgeon Robert Bartholow, 1858.  

Could almost be a quote from Innsmouth.  But Bartholow was talking about the Mormons.  The idea that the Mormons represented, or were giving rise to, a 'new race' arose from the social practice of 'race-making' and was justified with reference to the ostensibly degenerate breeding practices involved with polygamy.  Note how Mormons are no longer considered a racial category.  Instead of remaining isolationist, the Mormon Church integrated itself into American capitalism.

This is how such acceptance tends to be achieved in SF/Fantasy too.  The Doctor accepts the Thals as people because they prove to share 'our' moral concerns.  The return of the king entails the alliance, by marriage, of humans and elves... though, of course, such inherently evil races as the goblins and orcs remain outside this integration.  In Rowling's last Potter novel, her lumpen Potterdammerung, the house elves are integrated into the fight against Voldemort, with Kreacher becoming acceptable when he leads the other house elves against Voldemort, crying loyalty to his former master.

Notice, also, that Rowling links race-mixing to social integration.  On the surface, this is the exact reverse of any fear about 'mixed blood'.  Hagrid is the product of a union between human and giant that would've horrified Lovecraft (and probably have given Martin Freeman an excuse to make another rape joke).  On the other hand, Hagrid's acceptance as a 'human' (despite his 'mixed-ancestry') is both nowhere near as important within the novels as the acceptance of muggleborns or half-blood humans, and is also linked to his utter passivity and subservience... his integration into the social order.

The Wank Delusion

Sexist image alert.

Dom Kelly brought this to my attention, with his pithier comment: "*vomits*"

Okay, let's examine this in what some might say was far too much detail.

Reason is sexy because one conventionally 'attractive' woman reads books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al, and throws away a Bible.  In the nude.

Right...

1.  It is assumed that this picture - i.e. the person in it - represents 'sexiness'.  But the whole concept of what is sexy is subjective - far more so than is admitted by consumerist media culture, to which this image owes its entire idea of sexiness.  The image is catering for only one idea of what is sexually alluring: the idea of the straight, cis-het male.  He's probably assumed to be white as well.  The image, including the person in it, is arranged for the gaze of this intensely privileged group.  This is 'reason'?

2.  Because one sexy person is an atheist, that doesn't make Atheism itself sexy.  Systems of thought, ideological doctrines, persuasions of belief, scientific theories and hypotheses... in short: ideas... are not open to judgement based on the perceived sexiness of the people that hold and/or espouse them.  Ideas are to be judged on their quality, consistency, persuasiveness, empirical backing etc.  Otherwise, there's not much point separating them from purely aesthetic categories.

3.  Beliefs can be held by people of widely divergent levels of attractiveness.  China Mieville is a Marxist.  So was Diego Rivera.  Do a Google Image search if you don't know what that means.*

4.  People's level of attractiveness changes.  Engels was pretty dashing when he was a young man.  He became a crusty, wrinkly old fart with a straggly beard.  Was Marxism sexy when he was young and hot, but stop being sexy when he got a paunch and a big beard (assuming that you don't think paunches and big beards are sexy - which would mean you're not Ke$ha).

5.  What does it mean to call an idea 'sexy' anyway?  Even the idea 'let's have sex now! is only sexy when proposed at the appropriate time and place, by someone you'd like to have sex with. 

6.  It's difficult to see how Atheism could be said to be sexy.  It might possibly be propounded and espoused by sexy people, but that still doesn't make the ideas themselves sexy. I personally find Helen Mirren in Excalibur so sexy it almost hurts to look at the screen, but if she suddenly started reading the works of Robert Ingersoll, that wouldn't make the works of Robert Ingersoll sexy.  At best, if the process were repeated often enough, I might develop a Pavlovian fetish for the works of Robert Ingersoll... but we have now long passed the breaking point of this analogy.

7.  God is Not Great and the other books of the 'New Atheists' were not, generally, written by conventionally sexy people.  Hitchens was a bloated, nicotine-stained, red-faced, bug-eyed blowhard with questionable personal hygiene.  Dawkins resembles a vicar from an Agatha Christie book, crossed with ageing bird of prey and a Gerald Scarfe caricature of Bernard Ingham.  Sam Harris looks like Ben Stiller, to the point where you wonder if they've ever been seen in the same room at the same time. Okay, these things might float your boat... and, if so, fair enough... but they don't belong in the same category of conventional glamour as the young woman in the photo.  (This point is mainly spite.)

8.  The young woman in the photo is a young woman, not an old bloke.  Of course, there are lots of young women in Atheism and the Sceptic's movement... but the model is reading the best-sellers of the 'New Atheism', representing a strand of modern Atheism that is aggressively dominated by crusty blokes.  Dawkins and Hitchens are both famous for sneering at women and feminism out of the other side of their mouths.

9.  This image is certainly extremely sexist.  It objectifies women.  By 'sexy', this image means 'sexist'.  Reason is sexist?  In other words, sexism is reasonable?

10.  Some will argue that she's reading clever books and making an intellectual choice, claiming that this gives her agency... forgetting that she's pointlessly naked.  (See 1, above.)  This is the same kind of 'agency' that female characters in Steven Moffat scripts are permitted.

11.  Atheism automatically involves disdainfully handling the Bible (and, presumably, other books that have immense spiritual significance for many people... as well as being of immense scholarly, historical and literary interest) as though its a snotty hanky, and throwing it away? Umm, nope.

12.  Reason = Atheism?  Specifically the narrow, ahistorical, politically retrograde, male-dominated, theologically-illiterate, Islamophobic, determinist, reductionist, vulgar-Atheism of those books?  That's how we define 'reason'?  Christopher Hitchens - who supported the invasion of Iraq - gets to define 'reason'?  Funnily enough, if that's what 'reason' is here assumed to mean, then the sexist nature of the image is perfectly apt!

13.  Nothing that this image says, either in its top meaning or in any of the various assumptions underlying it, sounds very much like 'reason' or 'scepticism' to me.  It's exactly the kind of thing that makes women in the modern Atheist movement feel undervalued and under-heard.  Given that so much of the bluster of the 'New Atheism' was tied up with appropriating things like feminism and women's rights - as sticks with which to mindlessly bash religion in general, and Islam in particular - the irony itself also shows up the deeply ironic hypocrisy of Hitchens oft-repeated lament about fundamentalists lacking irony.


*Always bearing that aforementioned subjectivity in mind.  Diego Rivera did okay.