Rowan Williams (Easter Sunday address), focusing on ageing and mortality but lending his remarks a wider range of reference:
'Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can't do, fear or even disgust at growing old … A healthy human environment is one in which we try to make sense of our limits, of the accidents that can always befall us and the passage of time which inexorably changes us' … He says an 'unhealthy' environment is one where people look for 'someone to blame and someone to compensate us, and struggle to maintain fictions of our invulnerability to time and change'. The Archbishop will say the message of Easter offers a new vision of life by proclaiming that 'we shall not find life by refusing to let go of our precious, protected selves.' BBC News
Listening to the extraordinary voice and songs of Antony and the Johnsons, originating out of the alternative cultures of New York, I came across the above and then these articles in the latest issue of the LRB:
- Here's Jenny Diski, reviewing The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade by Piers Morgan, on Tony Blair and Piers Morgan (the disgraced former editor of the Mirror):
Blair comes out of this as Morgan’s twin brother. Mirror images you might say. Blair, like Morgan, promises and evades, sulks and blames others. He cajoles, whines, ducks out of sight and makes threats based on his position. Blair and his advisers might as well be Jordan, Fergie and Patsy Kensit flirting with Piers in the hope of getting more of the right kind or less of the wrong kind of coverage. They might as well be editors of tabloid newspapers offering perks to their mates and doom to their enemies. I had thought that the obsession with celebrity and PR was just the idleness of the newspapers and television providing what was easiest to sell for an audience who wanted what was easiest to absorb. I imagined that there was some more solid substance beneath the mental lassitude. But it seems from these diaries that it is actually the way the world is. It is the real world. I do live in cloud-cuckoo-land. Politics and reality TV are one and the same at present, if the Piers Morgan experience is anything to go by. Popularity is the only thing. Numbers are what count. Getting elected, getting the paper bought by as many people as possible, is all that matters. The readers are always right whether or not you think them repulsive, racist and ignorant, so policies and front pages will be tweaked to give them what they want. There’s no point in having unpopular policies, I remember being told by Paul Boateng before the 1997 election: Labour would never get into power to put them into practice. What he didn’t go on to mention was that if you have popular policies that get you into power, you have to keep them, in order to stay in power – that votes are the same as newspaper circulation figures and profit margins. He was the one who told me I lived in cloud-cuckoo-land.
- To be closely followed by John Lanchester, reviewing David Blunkett by Stephen Pollard:
In a few weeks from now, Labour will have been in office for eight years, and we will be in the middle of an election campaign which seems certain to win it at least four more. The party’s record in government evokes a range of responses on the left – from mild gloom to clinical depression, from irritation to rage, from apathy to horror – but one of the most consistent things it provokes is disorientation. This is a Labour government? This is what we were looking forward to for those 18 years of Tory rule? War, tuition fees, house arrest, wholesale subservience to American foreign policy, talk of services being ‘swamped’ by refugees, the deliberately manipulative use of fear, the introduction of ID cards, the suspension of habeas corpus – and these are the good guys. What happened? …
There is no contradicting Blunkett’s talents, or his determination, even his heroism. He is one of the most remarkable people ever to have achieved high office in Britain. This makes his record in office all the sadder. Here are some of the things Blunkett did. He announced a state of emergency, as he legally needed to do to suspend the rights of the Belmarsh internees; prevented the publication of the names of the detainees, the nature of the evidence against them, and the nature of the charges; declared that concern for civil liberties in the current climate was ‘airy-fairy’; announced the abolition of the double jeopardy principle that defendants can’t be tried twice for the same offence; advocated extensive use of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, which among other things employ hearsay evidence of a kind hitherto forbidden in English law; extended the abolition of the presumption of innocence, by allowing judges to tell jurors in certain types of case about the defendant’s previous convictions; announced that the children of asylum seekers would be taken into care when the parents had exhausted all chance of appeal; spoke of his wish to ‘open a bottle’ to celebrate the death of Harold Shipman; announced new restrictions on demonstrations outside Parliament; extended the powers of Police Community Service officers to tackle beggars, and angrily denied that this meant people would be being arrested for dropping crisp packets; said that failed asylum seekers would be put to compulsory unpaid work in return for the right to claim benefits. … No home secretary since Roy Jenkins, and hardly any before him, has presided over an extension of our liberties. Blunkett did not buck this trend. At a time when, it turned out, Britain needed a home secretary with a keen understanding of the balance between liberty and security, we instead got an instinctive authoritarian who seems to have no conception at all of the importance of liberty.
… it’s going to be a strange election. Labour looking likely to win will cause people to be tired of Blair, which will cause a swing towards the Tories, which in turn will cause a swing back to Labour. Either party’s strongest issue will cause a backlash in favour of the other party. And we have a couple of months of this still to go. Invited to choose between a sensible but unelectable party of the centre, a nasty and (please God) unelectable party of the right, and a party of the centre right whose only function is to get elected, it’s hard not to wonder: is this what democracy is meant to be like?
- And then there's Rory Stewart's appraisal of the state of affairs in Iraq ('No foreigner really knows what is going on in Iraq') in a review article entitled 'Degrees of Not Knowing'. And Thomas Jones on Michael Jackson:
… the contradictions of being both a star and a human being, in terms not only of what constitutes the good – dying young v. living an ignominiously long life, for example – but also of the expectations of the crowd, who want their (our) heroes to be above common human frailties, but all the same can’t help probing for weaknesses, and are both sorely disappointed and gleefully reassured when we find them. This isn’t a new phenomenon – look at Ovid’s Metamorphoses, full of unedifying and salacious gossip about the sex lives of the gods (who are explicitly compared in the poem to Rome’s ruling elite) – though there may be more appetite now than there used to be for scandal about those who are famous only for being scandalous.
British politics and public life seem very, very mediocre right now: not a lot here about recognising limits, errors, truth … I'm going back to Antony's haunting, unworldly voice and riddling songs (part proffered, part withheld) which evoke a world I can believe in — something both about limits and loss, in the midst of a troubling sense of transcendence and ecstasy:
When the swan flies to heaven
Soaring through the utmost fear
There's a feeling that lingers in the afterwards
Will you ever return? ('Twilight')
