Dadblog

I’ve been reading AC Grayling’s masterly collection of columns from the Guardian Saturday Review, collected in the book The Reason of Things. Grayling is wise and witty and pungent, and his liberal philosophy and respect for the Enlightenment is a beacon on dark days. Take this, for example:

So to be an arms manufacturer is to be guaranteed a rich, happy and peaceful life, free from care. Arms manufacturers can eat well, take pleasant holidays and sleep contentedly, knowing that the money they make from selling ever more guns keeps them well away from the harm those guns do.

But let us hope that a small voice disturbs that sleep at times, saying that the existence of guns - of instruments designed, engineered, polished and oiled for the purpose of killing things, mainly people - is a scandal, an evil, a strange, profoundly disturbing comment on human nature.

Adorno remarked that the illusion of human progress is exposed by the difference between the spear and the guided missile, showing that humans have grown cleverer, but not wiser, through history. It is a devastating reflection on our moral health that guns are not rarer than gold, and harder to find than peace in the present gun-infested misery of the world.

And how wonderful to work for an organisation that built the Saturday Review in the first place as a repository of thinking and enlightenment, then commissioned Grayling to write a weekly column, then put all those columns on the Web in an archive that people can access for nothing.

Having said that, this is my last day at work before a week in the Algarve. I don’t love it that much….

How enchanting, to find myself agreeing with George Monbiot wholly and without qualification:

Guardian Unlimited | Columnists | A life with no purpose: But it also fascinates me because natural selection is such a barren field for the fundamentalists to till. For 146 years Darwinian evolution has seen off all comers. There is a massive accumulation of evidence - from the fossil record, to genetics, to direct observation - that appears to support it. Were they to concentrate instead on the questions now assailing big bang theory, or on the failure so far to reconcile gravity with quantum physics, or on the stubborn non-appearance of the Higgs boson and the abiding mystery of the phenomenon of mass, the Christian conservatives would be much harder to confront. Why pick on Darwin?

It is surely because, as soon as you consider the implications, you must cease to believe that either Life or life are affected by purpose. As G Thomas Sharp, chairman of the Creation Truth Foundation, admitted to the Chicago Tribune, “if we lose Genesis as a legitimate scientific and historical explanation for man, then we lose the validity of Christianity. Period”.

We lose far more than that. Darwinian evolution tells us that we are incipient compost: assemblages of complex molecules that - for no greater purpose than to secure sources of energy against competing claims - have developed the ability to speculate. After a few score years, the molecules disaggregate and return whence they came. Period.

As a gardener and ecologist, I find this oddly comforting. I like the idea of literal reincarnation: that the molecules of which I am composed will, once I have rotted, be incorporated into other organisms. Bits of me will be pushing through the growing tips of trees, will creep over them as caterpillars, will hunt those caterpillars as birds. When I die, I’d like to be buried in a fashion which ensures that no part of me is wasted. Then I can claim to have been of some use after all.

Beautifully said and beautifully thought. Read the whole piece (which also includes some terrifying stuff about museums in American teaching kids that dinosaurs “coexisted with humans”).

Earlier today, I was reading a lovely anecdote on the Rocking Vicar email about a chap who ordered all his LPs in the early 60s from a local shop and picked them up once a week - stuff like Otis Redding and the Beatles and the Stones and the Who and the Kinks. He’d take the records home in the morning and had them learned inside out by the evening.

This confirmed a theory of mine - that the music you listen to in your mid-teens never, ever leaves you. If, like me, you buy too many records, you’re probably more than half aware that you don’t listen to any of them with the intensity you listened to music when you were 15. Oh, every now and then a track or a CD might hit you foursquare, and you’ll play it endlessly until it’s seared into your cortex, but your brain just isn’t wired in the same way anymore. When you’re 15, the bits of the memory that deal with music and songs are blank and smooth, waiting to be etched like vinyl. And once the memories are in there, they don’t move.

Which is why the music choices you make when you’re in your midteens are so completely, intrinsically essential. The music you choose to listen to at this age is a lifelong companion, so choose it well. Because I did not. My friends did. Some went down the punk route, and now have The Clash to keep them company in those times when there is no other music playing. Others chose reggae and ska. Others went northern indie and adopted New Order and the Smiths. All can now talk comfortably about their favourite music, safe in the knowledge that their choices tick all the right music cognoscenti boxes.

But not I. For I chose hard rock. Someone played me Rush’s first live album, All The World’s a Stage, when I was 13 or so, and it was like I was hooked into a pompous 4-4 beat for the next three years. When English music went through perhaps its greatest period since the 60s, I was listening to Def Leppard. When Morrisey appeared on Top of the Pops with gladiolae in his pocket, I was complaining that Rainbow had only made it to number 4 and this clearly showed the inbuilt BBC bias against metal. I was lost to music that was difficult, or complex, or poetic. If it wasn’t loud and the rhythm didn’t shake my ribcage, I wasn’t interested.

And it’s stayed with me. Although I purposely retaught myself music in a desperate and ultimately successful to get a girlfriend, the metal stayed in my bloodstream. Even now, I can have excited nostalgic conversations in pubs about the merits of mid-period Rush. Even now, Die Young from Ronnie James Dio-era Sabbath can come up on shuffle play on iTunes and I’ll be taken right back, to my bedroom on the school French exchange, listening into the early hours to Heaven and Hell over and over again.

And now my son is approaching the same period. He was 13 last Friday. His current mix CD contains Guns of Brixton (excellent), Gorillaz (excellent) Eminem (excellent if occasionally alarming) and Vanilla Ice (oh my God). It could go either way. But each generation is damned to repeat the previous generation’s mistakes.

Back in the day, I spent several sanctimonious weeks boycotting WH Smith because they banned an issue of Private Eye from their shelves - the one with the cover that mocked the media hysteria following Diana’s messy car journey in Paris.

Well, now there’s a new reason to boycott Smiths: the fact that they’re selling Playboy-branded stationery to girls aged 10-14.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | ‘It’s porn, innit?’: So WHSmith has just jumped on the Playboy bandwagon. The difference is that, unlike other retailers, it is clearly marketing its products to children, not adults. Its Playboy stationery range which, in my local branch in Wood Green, London, shares a stand with Bratz and Funky Friends, includes pink and glittery pencil cases, pink ring-binders, mini pads, diaries, zip files, gel pens and eraser sets. I know a five-year-old who’d just love the set of cute bunny rubbers in a row. Pencil cases are largely used by schoolchildren. Pink and glittery is largely favoured by girls from 0-16 years. By placing the bunny logo on school equipment, underage children are seduced into buying into the pornographic brand - an adult, top-shelf brand that sells women as sexual commodities. But WHSmith denies that Playboy means porn.

“Playboy is probably one of the most popular ranges we’ve ever sold,” says head of media relations for WHSmith, Louise Evans. “It outsells all the other big brands in stationery, like Withit [a range of cute cartoon animals], by a staggering amount. That should give you an idea of how popular the brand is. We offer customers choice. We’re not here to act as a moral censor.”

Has no-one at Smiths considered that the natural human rights of parents who quite rightly loathe Playboy and all it stands for are being violated here? When my daughter asks me why I object to her carrying Playboy imagery around, I’ll need to be honest with her - which means having a conversation with an 8-year old about pornography. Thanks, Smiths, but no thanks. I’ll find it infinitely easier to shop somewhere else.

Back in the Eighteenth Century, they had a little thing going on called the Age of Enlightenment. They also had an abject political fear of “factionalism” - people generally bemoaned the development of a professional political class and its divisions into factions. This was seen as a bad thing because people chose their factions, and then stopped thinking: they simply started taking positions on everything according to their faction, rather than according to what they might actually think.

Fast forward 250 years or so, and what do we find? Well, factionalism is now so prevalent that it’s the common mode of political and, to a lesser extent, cultural debate. Which is why the whole Iraq-terrorism debate has been so corrosive, particularly on the left. Lots of left-wingers, including myself, have found themselves having to ask difficult questions of their beliefs, and come up with difficult answers. And we’ve also found ourselves accused, by such class-A thinkers and commentators as Peter Wilby and George Monbiot, of some kind of tribal betrayal.

But you’ve got to be careful. I have found, for instance, normblog an interesting corrective to what I would class as my former way of thinking. He’s been clear and articulate and learned. But even he’s now falling into factionalism, this time of a pro-war kind. He criticises Jason Burke of the Observer for having supported the original invasion (for reasons which read like a personal manifesto to me) but for then saying the war had increased the likelihood of terrorist attack:

But I’d say there was at least a certain tension between the earlier piece and this passage - which has a critical, if not accusatory, ring, and is unaccompanied by any explanation that, since the war was right, the increased terrorist threat said to be the result of it (and which Burke himself anticipated) is one that must be ‘countered’, just like the misguided views - and the apologias for them - that fuel it.

Not true, of course. You can perfectly well hold the view that the war was, on balance, the right thing to do, while acknowledging it increased Britain’s vulnerability to attack. I hold that view myself. It doesn’t excuse or even explain the attacks (which were also fed by religious insanity, a lack of education and pure evil). But it’s still true. normblog falls into the trap of attacking a point of view that he even suspects might be factionally incorrect.

All of which is as nothing to George Monbiot’s latest comedy piece, this time on patriotism and why it is a *bad thing*. He begins his piece thusly:

Out of the bombings a national consensus has emerged: what we need in Britain is a renewed sense of patriotism. The rightwing papers have been making their usual noises about old maids and warm beer, but in the past 10 days they’ve been joined by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian, Tristram Hunt in the New Statesman, the New Statesman itself and just about everyone who has opened his mouth on the subject of terrorism and national identity. Emboldened by this consensus, the Sun now insists that anyone who isn’t loyal to this country should leave it. The way things are going, it can’t be long before I’m deported.

Classic Monbiot. Set up a position that doesn’t exist (in this case, a national consensus for patriotism) and then demolish it. This reminds me of watching an England football match with a woman I used to know, who to our surprise was supporting the opposition. When asked why, she said “oh, I never support England in anything.” Right on, sister. That’s a really challenging, thought-provoking and incisive point of view. And as an example of factionalism it really can’t be beaten.

From Slate:

Losing the Iraq War - Can the left really want us to? By Christopher Hitchens: Question: Why have several large American cities not already announced that they are going to become sister cities with Baghdad and help raise money and awareness to aid Dr. Tamimi? When I put this question to a number of serious anti-war friends, their answer was to the effect that it’s the job of the administration to allocate the money, so that there’s little room or need for civic action. I find this difficult to credit: For day after day last month I could not escape the news of the gigantic “Live 8″ enterprise, which urged governments to do more along existing lines by way of debt relief and aid for Africa. Isn’t there a single drop of solidarity and compassion left over for the people of Iraq, after three decades of tyranny, war, and sanctions and now an assault from the vilest movement on the face of the planet? Unless someone gives me a persuasive reason to think otherwise, my provisional conclusion is that the human rights and charitable “communities” have taken a pass on Iraq for political reasons that are not very creditable. And so we watch with detached curiosity, from dry land, to see whether the Iraqis will sink or swim. For shame.

Wherever you stand, he’s absolutely right, you know.

From the Telegraph:

Telegraph | News | Cumbria falls off the intergalactic UFO map: Chris Parr, the Whitehaven-based co-ordinator for Bufoh, warned yesterday that he and his helpers will have to call it a day if the decline in sightings experienced over the past few years continues for much longer.

“In Cumbria we have gone from 60 UFO sightings in 2003 to 40 in 2004 and none at all this year,” he lamented.

“It means that the number of people keeping their eyes on the skies is greatly diminished. There are only a handful of us now.

“We are a dying breed in this part of the country. I put it down to the end of the X-Files, a lack of military exercises in the area that would produce UFO sightings and a lack of strange phenomena.” Mr Parr has tried to keep the extraterrestrial flame alive. He has three camcorders and whips them out whenever he hears of sightings elsewhere in the country in the hope that the flying saucer in question takes a wrong turn up the M6. But it never does. He doesn’t exactly sell his subject, though. About 90 per cent of sightings, he says, are due to nocturnal military activity.

Of course, there are people on the middle-class left right now in Cumbria blaming all this on Tony Blair and the Iraq war.

From the Telegraph:

Telegraph | News | Can the crustless loaf persuade children to eat their sandwiches?: Britain’s first “crustless bread”, a sliced loaf that stays white all the way through, was unveiled yesterday.

Hovis said its Invisible Crust was aimed at the one in three parents who have to trim sandwiches before their children will eat them.

The reluctance of children to eat bread crusts is one of the great mysteries of parenting. Like hairy armpits and vulnerability to Spectres, willingness to eat crusts seems to be something that only appears with puberty. Not enough research has been done into this. Is there some deeply-held human instinct which makes crusts foul-tasting and unattractive in our childhood years? I think we should be told…

lily and the strongwoman

Originally uploaded by lloydshep.

We went to see Circus Oz at Queen Elizabeth Hall. It was fabulous and satisfyingly deranged. Lily got her picture taken with the amazing strongwoman afterwards. And yes the amazing strongwoman is wearing a light-up bikini. You have to see it in the dark to believe it….

From White’s of Henry Lane:

Sometimes I switch it up like “no, no, no, don’t stop a rockin”!:

I’m blowing the whistle. Despite what you may have read, the real danger of the iPod is not hearing loss, social isolation, or even aural hallucinations. The real danger is that 60G of rock may just be too much rock for one person to handle.

I saw the danger manifested myself yesterday. As I left my office I noticed a guy swinging his head violently from side to side while standing on the sidewalk. At first I thought either the gnats that were all over the downtown had driven him to distraction, or he was a crazy homeless guy. Then I got a look at him. He had that greasy front-man-for-Jet look which could be why I thought he was homeless. But he had slick shades, nice clothes, a Fred Perry satchel, and a slick bike. Clearly not homeless.

He switched up his moves for a second, and that was when I noticed the white cords dangling from his ears. And I got it. He was dancing. To his iPod. Dancing hard and very publicly. He had been overcome by the rock.

Overcome by the rock. I can feel a t-shirt coming on.