Author: Mark Hannam

The United States is currently pulling its armed forces out of Afghanistan.  Unsurprisingly, the European nations are following close behind, having neither the resources nor the resolve to remain and fight once their American colleagues have departed.  The chaos at Kabul airport portends what might happen next across the entire country, as the American-backed Afghani government disintegrates, and the Taliban and its associates move in to fill the power vacuum.  In a speech given in early July, President Biden argued that “… after twenty years … a trillion dollars spent …” it was the right time for American troops to come home.  In this text I am not going to take a view about whether his decision to bring the war to an end now is sensible, nor whether the decision by one of his predecessors to start the war in the first place was justified, rather I want to reflect on the price-tag associated with the endeavour.

The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, at Brown University, has provided some analysis of the costs of the “War on Terror”, launched back in 2001 in response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.   In a paper published in November 2019, which takes account of budget forecasts for the fiscal year 2020, they estimate the full costs of the various wars to be just over $5.4 trillion dollars.  Add in their estimate for medical and disability costs for veterans (a liability that has been incurred already, but not yet budgeted for) and the total rises to just over $6.4 trillion dollars.  This bill includes not just the costs of the war in Afghanistan, but also the war in Iraq, as well as spending on homeland security, and probably the costs of running the Guantanamo Bay Detention Centre too.  It is an impressively large sum of money: $6,400,000,000,000. 

Continue reading “Welfare versus warfare”

When I was a teenager, I had a friend whose father ran one of the local churches.  Sometimes I went to the house where my friend lived and remember being slightly surprised to discover a small white statuette on a corner table in a reception room used for informal meetings with church members.  It was around 25cm high and showed a man and woman, seated, unclothed, embracing each other, and kissing.  It’s location appeared somewhat incongruous: when would an evangelical Protestant minister make use of such an object, when giving advice or instruction to members of his congregation?   To my uneducated taste, it also appeared kitschy: a sentimental, unworldly representation of sexual desire.  To repeat, I was a teenager: I knew little about art or passion. 

There is a full-size version of the same statue, just under 2m high, currently on view at Tate Modern in London outside the entrance to The Making of Rodin exhibition, which runs until mid-November.  “The Kiss” is one of Auguste Rodin’s most famous works, a monumental sculpture which merits close attention and admiration: the adjacency of the couple’s left feet, the muscle definition of the man’s back, the matching ninety-degree angle bends at the woman’s left elbow and knee, and the book in the man’s right hand.  What was he reading, I wonder, before she sat next to him and kissed him?  I now know better than to consider the work to be kitsch, but I remain puzzled about why a small copy was on display in a Guildford vicarage. 

Continue reading “Statues of liberty”

I used to own two cars – one that I kept in London, the other in Ireland – but last year I sold them both.  They were useful on occasion and one of them was enjoyable to drive, but I did not use either of them often and the cumulative cost of buying them, taxing them, insuring them, paying for parking permits, servicing them, and repairing them when they broke down, became disproportionate to the benefits I derived from my ownership of them.  From an economic point of view, it made sense to sell them and make use of rental cars when needed, thus saving significantly on operating expenses.  From an environmental point of view, it also made sense because now I use public transport or walk more often, reducing by a little the global rate of consumption of fossil fuels. 

Living in London without a car is very practical, not just because the city has plenty of public transport options and is comfortably walkable.  There is also a very good car-sharing club to which I belong.  If I need to use a car or a van for any reason, I can book online and pay an hourly rate (which varies from around £9 to £15, depending on the day, the time, and the type of vehicle) or a daily rate.  The club has parking bays all over the city and the vehicles are booked and accessed using a phone app, which make the process very convenient.  Last weekend I hired a van for three hours, to move some large items – a few paintings, some large terracotta pots, and a desk – from the flat I have been renting temporarily to the property I bought earlier this year, which is currently being renovated.  This weekend, I booked a car for three hours to move some smaller items – my desktop computer, printer, CD player and miscellaneous other items – in preparation for moving into my new home.   I have temporary need of the use of a van and a car because I am in transit.

Continue reading “In transit”

Playing Monopoly as a child, I soon learned that being sent to jail was disadvantageous early in the game, since it prevented me from landing on unowned sites and taking the opportunity to buy them and build up my property empire.  By contrast, spending time in jail was highly advantageous later in the game since it offered me a safe-haven from where I could avoid the risk of landing on property sites – heavily developed with houses or hotels – owned by my competitors.  Being in jail, from time to time, was just part of playing the game, there was no shame involved.

Later in life, I learned about people who had gone to jail for reasons of principle.  Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison for his opposition to the Apartheid regime, more than half of which were spent on Robben Island where he was forced to undertake hard labour in a quarry, and where he was allowed one visit – for thirty minutes – per year.  Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an open letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963, which became a key document of the American Civil Rights movement.   Mohandas Gandhi, one of King’s role models, had been a regular guest of British jails in South Africa and India, deliberately breaking unjust laws and accepting imprisonment as the consequence, to draw attention to the iniquities of colonial rule.  In 1846, Henry David Thoreau, from whose writings Gandhi would draw inspiration, spent a night in Concord jail for refusing to pay his taxes, which he feared would help to fund the American war against Mexico, to which he strongly objected.  If we assume that the laws are just and that the courts follow due process, then imprisonment is badge of shame, but there are occasions when the laws are not just and the legal processes are faulty, and in these cases, I came to understand, being sent to jail might be considered a badge of honour. 

Continue reading “Go to jail”

Not far from where I live in London there is a small museum dedicated to modern Italian art.  It was founded to display the collection of Erik and Salome Estorick, who lived in England for some years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, from where they travelled regularly to Italy to meet with artists and buy paintings and drawings.  In the museum’s permanent collection there are several works by Giorgio Morandi, the greatest European still-life painter of the twentieth century and, whenever I visit the museum, I like to spend some time in the room where his work is on display.  His etchings achieve a wonderful sense of depth by means of simple variations in the density of the lines, while in his paintings, with their narrow range of creamy blues, greys, and whites, he generates a curious combination of calmness and vitality. 

The English term “still-life” refers to paintings that portray neither the human figure nor the landscape, but everyday household objects: vases, glasses, and pots in Morandi’s work; other painters have included cutlery, bowls, dishes, flowers, fish, vegetables, fruit, musical instruments, pens, ink, manuscripts, and books. Still-life painting draws attention to the technical skill of the artist – the ability to represent light and shadow on a wide variety of shapes and surfaces – while also drawing attention to everyday objects to which we often pay little heed.  One of the best books of art criticism that describes the history and characteristics of the genre, by Norman Bryson, is called Looking at the Overlooked, which nicely captures the sense that these paintings are designed to remind us of what is familiar but routinely neglected.  Sometimes these artworks include hourglasses or clocks, to signal to the viewer the importance of the passage of time, and in other cases they include human skulls, to signal that life is finite.   The French name for the genre, nature morte, translates literally as “dead nature”, which make this point rather more bluntly than its euphemistic English equivalent: inert matter might sometimes be overlooked in its stillness, but organic matter is always in transit from birth to death.

Continue reading “Selfie”