ETTL had the pleasure of viewing the classic Bob Dylan documentary Don't Look Back last week, and aside from some fantastic performances in both prose and song from the great man himself, he was struck by how shitty the United Kingdom came across.
Provincial Britain in 1965 seems a million miles away from the propaganda of swinging London. Frankly nothing looked much different in the Northern cities than when they were being bombed by the Luftwaffe every night. All the kids had terrible teeth and clothes, the people seemed dull and conservative. Indeed one surreal scene - amongst several - had Dylan being invited to the mansion house on his next visit by a ridiculously posh and uptight mayor of Newcastle, no Geordie her.
So when did Britain pull itself into some kind of modern society? Certainly the era of early Harold Wilson appears to have less colour and character than even ETTL suspected. It is one thing to have homosexuality and abortion illegal; another, rather more complex, to have such illiberal positions reflected in the very appearance of a nation itself.
Modern Britain has its flaws. But they are the spillovers from a liberalism that allows the masses to make mistakes as well as liberating them from the kind of conformity Dylan and others broke away from. And these spillovers are a millions times better than the kind of drab banality nations which are scared of change conform to. The generations after those who made these changes owe our forefathers a great deal, not the least of which is music like Dylan's.
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
Wednesday, 21 January 2009
Ich bin ein not dead yet
For a few terrible moments yesterday ETTL thought Ted Kennedy was going to follow the girl he killed at Chappaquiddick and ruin Mr Obama's big day by dying at lunch. Apart from being terribly rude it would remind everyone of an era when rather more privileged men than Barack got the Presidency, and thus assassinated Presidents, and then it gets really rather depressing, no?
And what a day it would have ruined! Even the Presidential Cadillac - surely the only car Detroit builds which anyone buys these days - looked great. The fact that Dick Cheney was quite literally crippled for the day made it all the sweeter - ETTL hoped some plucky Democrat, possibly one of the cute little Obama girls, would tip Dick off the platform into the arms of the baying left-wing mob below. Alas Dick scuttled off, probably to to an undisclosed location.
Sadly the removal of Bush means everyone on the American, and possibly world, Left will fall out more than usual. He was a convenient bogeyman who we could be united against but when it comes down to it the man was merely one of many shitty conservatives who like to ruin everyone else's lives. I hope the elevation of a man as cool as Obama to the Oval Office will not blunt progressives' anger, as there is much to be done - as much as there ever was under Bush.
But it's nice to have an ally at the top.
And what a day it would have ruined! Even the Presidential Cadillac - surely the only car Detroit builds which anyone buys these days - looked great. The fact that Dick Cheney was quite literally crippled for the day made it all the sweeter - ETTL hoped some plucky Democrat, possibly one of the cute little Obama girls, would tip Dick off the platform into the arms of the baying left-wing mob below. Alas Dick scuttled off, probably to to an undisclosed location.
Sadly the removal of Bush means everyone on the American, and possibly world, Left will fall out more than usual. He was a convenient bogeyman who we could be united against but when it comes down to it the man was merely one of many shitty conservatives who like to ruin everyone else's lives. I hope the elevation of a man as cool as Obama to the Oval Office will not blunt progressives' anger, as there is much to be done - as much as there ever was under Bush.
But it's nice to have an ally at the top.
Tuesday, 13 January 2009
Ken Clarke needs you!
Lordy lordy the Tories are having a reshuffle! Don't get too excited!
Seriously though don't. ETTL was a bit thrilled to hear that that great rotund mass of rather sensible Toryism, Mr Ken of Clarke, could be getting Alan "My big fat gay Tory wedding" Duncan's job but that would mean appointing an actual person rather than PR horrors like Osborne and Michael Gove. I thus doubt it, despite it being a shrewd move - Duncan being quite magnificently shit and irritating all at the same time, reminding people why they held their noses and went for Labour three times on the trot.
Clarke is precisely what Cameron needs - the people actually think he is a fairly funky bloke, a rare assessment for nearly all prominent Tories. He is a reminder of an era when, for better or for worse, Tories were real characters and had lives pre-Parliament, rather than the cloney blandishments that currently make up the shadow cabinet.
The appointment of Clarke as Mandelson's shadow would also be the most exciting contest since Prezza and William Hague stood in for their respective leaders in the later Blair era. Labour may say that serious times demand serious people; ETTL thinks that serious times require a return to those with practical, not PR, experience, and those who make Parliamentary democracy that bit more exciting. So let's hear it for Ken!
Seriously though don't. ETTL was a bit thrilled to hear that that great rotund mass of rather sensible Toryism, Mr Ken of Clarke, could be getting Alan "My big fat gay Tory wedding" Duncan's job but that would mean appointing an actual person rather than PR horrors like Osborne and Michael Gove. I thus doubt it, despite it being a shrewd move - Duncan being quite magnificently shit and irritating all at the same time, reminding people why they held their noses and went for Labour three times on the trot.
Clarke is precisely what Cameron needs - the people actually think he is a fairly funky bloke, a rare assessment for nearly all prominent Tories. He is a reminder of an era when, for better or for worse, Tories were real characters and had lives pre-Parliament, rather than the cloney blandishments that currently make up the shadow cabinet.
The appointment of Clarke as Mandelson's shadow would also be the most exciting contest since Prezza and William Hague stood in for their respective leaders in the later Blair era. Labour may say that serious times demand serious people; ETTL thinks that serious times require a return to those with practical, not PR, experience, and those who make Parliamentary democracy that bit more exciting. So let's hear it for Ken!
The obligatory anti-Islam post
In the interests of fairness ETTL feels compelled to slag off a (small) segment of the pro-Palestine movement always present in demos whenever Israel goes off on one of its biannual rampages: the Islamo-fascists.
ETTL used to love pro-Palestine and anti-Iraq war type demos - everyone read the Guardian and lived in Hampstead. Their members would march for gay and women's rights as well as the aspirations of oppressed Arabs. I was one of them, though I found Hampstead somewhat out of my budget range.
How things have changed. Now the Palestinians have the worst of representatives, predominantly angry young men from East London who seem to be reluctant to defend Muslims unless Judeo-Christians are killing them. Indeed they have more in common with their fellow Muslim anti-democrats in Saudi and Iran than the secular and would-be Westerners in Palestine.
There is a real issue of piss-poor PR here for the Left to consider: images of lots of beardy types shouting "we are Hezbollah" pushes middle England right into the arms of the Israeli lobby and their increasingly more sophisticated attempts to sell their nasty colonial war as some grand pro-democracy struggle. If such men really are members of Hezbollah they should leave these shores and fight in Lebanon or wherever they feel less pathetic. Britain does not want them; and Palestine does not need them or their representations.
ETTL used to love pro-Palestine and anti-Iraq war type demos - everyone read the Guardian and lived in Hampstead. Their members would march for gay and women's rights as well as the aspirations of oppressed Arabs. I was one of them, though I found Hampstead somewhat out of my budget range.
How things have changed. Now the Palestinians have the worst of representatives, predominantly angry young men from East London who seem to be reluctant to defend Muslims unless Judeo-Christians are killing them. Indeed they have more in common with their fellow Muslim anti-democrats in Saudi and Iran than the secular and would-be Westerners in Palestine.
There is a real issue of piss-poor PR here for the Left to consider: images of lots of beardy types shouting "we are Hezbollah" pushes middle England right into the arms of the Israeli lobby and their increasingly more sophisticated attempts to sell their nasty colonial war as some grand pro-democracy struggle. If such men really are members of Hezbollah they should leave these shores and fight in Lebanon or wherever they feel less pathetic. Britain does not want them; and Palestine does not need them or their representations.
Monday, 5 January 2009
Why bother?
ETTL notes the dramatisation of Anne Frank and her diary on the Beeb tonight. Did anyone actually demand it? Surely this has been transferred to the screen on many occasions, and so what does this new version add?
ETTL should confess he never got very far into the source diary. I found Ms Frank to be an extremely irritating teenage girl who needed a good slapping. By the time I gave up on it I was practically gagging for the Nazis to gas her, such was her preciousness. I simply couldn't give a toss which of the boys fancied her and found JD Salinger a much better narrator of what it means to be an adolescent.
But that said the book is thought to be only just behind the Bible in sales and readership. So its adaptation is of cultural importance - at least the first time. But TV seems obsessed with new versions of everything, especially old favourites like the Dickens canon or anything with "costume" in the genre description. One wonders what the cash could have been spent on that is truly original. How many Twin Peaks does it cost to make the latest A Christmas Carol? Licence-fee payers deserve better...
ETTL should confess he never got very far into the source diary. I found Ms Frank to be an extremely irritating teenage girl who needed a good slapping. By the time I gave up on it I was practically gagging for the Nazis to gas her, such was her preciousness. I simply couldn't give a toss which of the boys fancied her and found JD Salinger a much better narrator of what it means to be an adolescent.
But that said the book is thought to be only just behind the Bible in sales and readership. So its adaptation is of cultural importance - at least the first time. But TV seems obsessed with new versions of everything, especially old favourites like the Dickens canon or anything with "costume" in the genre description. One wonders what the cash could have been spent on that is truly original. How many Twin Peaks does it cost to make the latest A Christmas Carol? Licence-fee payers deserve better...
On a proportionate response
ETTL need hardly remind the intelligent reader that Israel is a horrible, paranoid little country that has no real right to exist besides that necessitated by European guilt over mass murder not committed by any Arab state. The recent events in Gaza may have been the latest war crime of the Israeli state but there is clearly precedent for them; Deir Yassin in 1948, Sabra and Shatila in 1982 - the history of Israel is a history of war and conquest of appropriately biblical proportions.
And so it is proportions to which I would like to turn. Much of the media, particularly in the US, would have us believe that Israel's actions against the people of Gaza are "proportionate" given the rockets Hamas periodically fires at Israeli border towns. If this is taken literally then, given the relative death tolls, Israel believes a Jewish life is worth 100 Arab ones (five IDF soldiers and 500 Palestinians are dead as this is being typed).
If memory serves me, another aggressive regime once determined Jewish lives as not being 1 for 1 in relation to non-Jews. But it is one thing to engage in conflict with similarly powerful nation-states, and quite another to use the world's fourth largest army and a ready supply of US arms to kill kids throwing stones and bomb hospitals. At its heart Israel is a nation of cowards, and this cowardice, in creating future killers through its killing, will ultimately be its undoing.
And so it is proportions to which I would like to turn. Much of the media, particularly in the US, would have us believe that Israel's actions against the people of Gaza are "proportionate" given the rockets Hamas periodically fires at Israeli border towns. If this is taken literally then, given the relative death tolls, Israel believes a Jewish life is worth 100 Arab ones (five IDF soldiers and 500 Palestinians are dead as this is being typed).
If memory serves me, another aggressive regime once determined Jewish lives as not being 1 for 1 in relation to non-Jews. But it is one thing to engage in conflict with similarly powerful nation-states, and quite another to use the world's fourth largest army and a ready supply of US arms to kill kids throwing stones and bomb hospitals. At its heart Israel is a nation of cowards, and this cowardice, in creating future killers through its killing, will ultimately be its undoing.
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