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He came to my house once, many years ago.

Back in 1993, I ran a by-election campaign in Hackney for the Labour Party, occasioned by the resignation of a local councillor who was found guilty of fraud and sent to prison.  The campaign included typical canvassing activities such as knocking on the doors of local houses and flats, and talking to the residents to try to identify those voters who were likely to support our candidate.  We had selected an ambitious young activist, who was well connected in senior Labour circles, and one Sunday morning he turned up at my house, ready to go canvassing, accompanied by the MP for Hartlepool, who was the Labour Party’s former director of communications. 

To his credit, notwithstanding his national profile and reputation, this famous visitor spent a couple of productive hours talking to local electors, he completed his canvass returns accurately, and was friendly towards the six or seven others party members who were out working that morning.  Our candidate duly won the by-election and served on Hackney Council for five years, before being elected MP for Rhondda in 2001.  He has been at Westminster ever since.  His canvassing companion had an even more successful political career – as a Cabinet Minister, a European Commissioner, and more recently as Ambassador to the United States of America – at least until this week, when he was arrested and charged with misconduct in public office.  It is now more than thirty years since I welcomed Peter Mandleson into my home, to support our modest efforts in what was a minor local political campaign. I have not spoken with him since, and I have moved house three times, but his public disgrace feels a little bit personal, as if some of his taint still lingers on in my life.

Continue reading “They have more money”

In 1932, Bertrand Russell published an essay in Harper’s Magazine called In Praise of Idleness, in which he provides a clear and succinct definition of work: work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so .  The second kind, he continues, is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given.  Today, nearly a century later, the first kind of work remains very important, including energy extraction, industrial production, farming and food distribution, textiles and clothes manufacture, building construction and renovation, transportation and storage, painting and decoration, and – arguably – most professional sports, but the numbers of workers employed in altering the position of matter is proportionally far smaller than it was when Russell’s article was written.  The second kind of work – management and its ancillary disciplines – has grown significantly in scale and complexity in the last hundred years, although qualitative improvements in its outcomes remain hard to demonstrate. 

Russell set out to argue that, a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.  Idleness – or laziness – was once the prerogative of the ruling class, he wrote, whether the slave owners of ancient Athens or the aristocrats of feudal Europe.  In these societies, the small number of men and women who were rich did no work, but lived comfortably by forcibly appropriating surpluses created by the work of many others, who were left merely with sufficient to survive (and not always that much).   In his day, Russell observed that within the new capitalist ruling class, the men and their sons prided themselves on their own hard work, which they believed justified their wealth, but were determined that their wives and their daughters should lead lives of leisure.  Russell concludes his essay with the claim that technology now allows for all members of society to enjoy much greater leisure time, if only work and resources were move evenly shared: modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others … we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines … in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.

Continue reading “Work hard”

At the junction of Fournier Street and Brick Lane, about 15 minutes’ walk from where I live, there is a building that has hosted religious services for almost three hundred years.  From the mid-eighteenth century it was used as a chapel by the Huguenots, the French Protestants who congregated in the Spitalfields area after having been forced to flee their homeland following persecution by the Catholic church, enthusiastically supported by the French king, Louis XIV.  Around sixty years later, the building was taken over by the Methodists – another group of Protestants, who, like the Huguenots, dissented to submit to the authority of the Anglican Church – and was used by them for almost a century.  In 1891, the building was occupied by the local Jewish community, many of whom were recent immigrants from Russia and parts of Eastern Europe (including what are now the Baltic States, Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine), and it became known as the Great Synagogue of Spitalfields.  By the mid-twentieth century, many Jews had moved away to other parts of London and its suburbs and, in the 1960s and 70s, the local area repopulated as a result of yet another wave of migration, this time from Sylhet – a region in what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh – who came to work in the textile industry that was concentrated in east London at that time.  In 1976, the building was renamed the Jamme Masjid Mosque, and for the past fifty years it has served as a religious centre for the local Muslim population. 

Last month, I spent a few days in Köln, on the banks of the Rhine, home of the famous Catholic Cathedral, which is reported to attract around six million visitors each year.  This building was first started in 1248 – five hundred years before the Huguenot chapel opened – but was not completed until 1880 – shortly before the building on Brick Lane converted to a synagogue.  The Cathedral is huge and impressive, and thirty years ago it was designated a UNESCO world heritage site.  Despite its very different scale and grandeur, and despite its longevity – almost three times as old – and despite the fact that it was built by the same branch of the Christian church that persecuted the Huguenots, when I stood outside Köln Cathedral in the cold December air, looking up at its spectacular twin Gothic spires, I was reminded of the Brick Lane chapel/synagogue/mosque.  Not because the buildings are visually similar, but because both are suggestive of the sharp contrast between the durability of building materials and the transitoriness of human beliefs.

Continue reading “Change of use”

I went to bed last night around 10pm, after a lovely evening spent with some neighbors celebrating the new year. They have a dog about the same age as Rosie, but she’s a bit bigger, and she contracted a rare fungal infection a few years ago rooting around in the forests around our part of town which required removing her eyes. Regardless of that, however, Rosie and Sadie are best of friends – even though they live in western Massachusetts generally, and only visit Scarborough every other weekend or so – and it was fun to have them over for hors d’oeuvres and wine and conversation. The boy – it’s reaching the point where he deserves more than that, but I’ll mull that over – joined us as well and he’s showing slow but sure development as a conversationalist, which I take a certain pride in seeing.

Anyway, after cleaning up and turning on the dishwasher, putting away the bottles and leftover desserts and whatnot, I headed up to my room. I’ve been reading The Ruin of Kasch, by Roberto Calasso, and for no good reason actually read the synonymous chapter in the book, which disappointingly turned out to be a painfully constructed parable that sort of, kind of, maybe linked some of the themes of the book, which is about the dense layers of change in political, philosophical, and theological thought that took place in the late 18th and early 19th century, embodied in the life story of Talleyrand, who Calasso – in much better parts of the book – defends against the charges brought by history against him, of cynicism and faithlessness. It was late, though, and having gotten mildly annoyed reading “The Ruin of Kasch” parable, I put the book down, turned out the light, gave Rosie a quick kiss – curled up against me on a cold, drafty night – and fell asleep.

As per my usual, I got up around 5:30am – this time of year, pitch black, the gusts outside still whistling albeit a bit quieter than when I drifted off. I got up, used the toilet, got a glass of water to get rid of the dry mouth that one suffers during the sub-zero parts of a Maine winter, and then played the New York Times game suite, in my usual order: first the Mini crossword, then the actual daily Crossword (surprisingly straightforward for a Saturday); then an odd find-a-word puzzle called Strands, then Connections, then World, and finally the Spelling Bee – the last being my favorite and thus what I save for last. Rosie didn’t stir a bit; as long as it’s dark out she does not care what my nighttime distractions are.

Then, finally, getting ready to grab a couple more hours of sleep, I checked the Wall Street Journal app to see if anything had happened.

It turns out something had: the US military had attacked a sovereign nation, abducted its dubiously elected president and his equally dubiously empowered First Lady, shuffled them to New York to be indicted on some bizarrely collected criminal charges in order to placate certain constitutional scholars, and announced that the US would be temporarily running government operations in Venezuela until there were elections to replace the unpopular leftist government that we had extracted by force.

Oh my, I thought. While not at all off script for the current administration, still, this was a significant event. But I had hosted a delightful end-of-holidays get together the night before, and was tired, and my eyes closed on their own.

I woke up feeling great about three hours later, daylight now being as strong as it could manage for early January in the far northern latitudes, and Rosie being more than ready for her morning walk. That took a good ten minutes of prep time, between bathroom time, getting dressed, bundling up in boots and wool coat and toque and gloves, finding the dog bags, finding the right collar, and then getting out into the cold – -12C with windchill down to -20C for those looking for reasons not to visit Maine this month. We went for our walk and then came back to the house. I took off the outer layers, fed the puppy dog her well-deserved breakfast, and then started some chores. I unloaded the dishwasher from the prior night, cleaned the bathrooms (they needed it, should have done it before the company came over alas), and took a quick look at the fridge to decide what to do for dinner tonight.

Then I went to the living room, put on the television, and opened up my laptop for a more general look at the news.

Remember, it was now 10am NewYork time, on Saturday morning.. The US had performed its military extraction operation around 3am, so far as I could parse from the “breaking news” chain in the Wall Street Journal site. On television, it actually took several minutes to find reporting on the story – I even caught CNN between reports and it was running a fluff piece on travel in 2026 – and online, the news headlines were big and bold, and backed by little if any substance.

Oh well, I thought, it’s the morning. I made breakfast for the boy, realizing we’d need to go to the grocery store to restock some basics (a loaf of bread, bacon, cold cuts for the week, that sort of thing) which is always good: minor chores on the weekend help build father-son time organically and they also give me a window into his changing tastes in life. Which is good, because the country in which we live and whose citizenship we hold just engaged in an overt if extraconstitutional act of war against a sovereign state, signalling a risk that the boy may need to think about what will happen if he gets drafted for military service.

But it’s Saturday morning, just after the holidays; no one will think about that, especially when people need to hit up the supermarket to restock on the basics that got used up during the holiday cooking season.

We took the dog for her late morning walk and met up with our friends from the night before. I didn’t bring up the fact that the country was essentially in a state of war because, you know, that’s a bit much for a morning dog walk, and it was more than likely that they were still unaware of it. We don’t live in a world where such an event would give pause to all broadcast media to allow for a presidential address; indeed, we live in a world where wars are ideally launched in media dead times so that no one need be bothered by it. As so it was: we talked about the weather (goddamn it is cold, and will be through next weekend); the recent proliferation of birders at the boat landing (there’s some kind of small eared owl which is particularly rare and now at any given moment there are three or four birder folk with their gigantic camera lenses propped up against their cars, looking out across the marsh); the inexhaustible attempts by Don and me to figure out how the dogs decide when to pee and whether or not to match the other when they have peed. We parted ways – they’re heading back to Massachusetts, so wished them safe travels, thinking of course only of traffic and weather, not about troop deployments from the various military bases along their route back – and that was that.

I spent the afternoon reading The Ruin of Kasch at a slow pace; Calasso’s style isn’t amenable to my normal speed reading. Every now and again I’d check the news sites on my phone – updates from Venezuela, predictable shock and dismay from the louder Democrats, but little to nothing from Democratic leadership and surprisingly little flag waving or triumphantalism from Republicans. Even the coverage of Trump’s news conference – rather late in the game, coming 8 hours after the operation ended – was if anything subdued, as if he were at bit tired now that the fun bit of launching missiles into the city of Caracas was over, and he wanted to grab a burger while he waits with the rest of us to hear how the US military will now “run things” down Venezuela way.

It struck me then that this was the perfect little war at the perfect time. It wasn’t a large scale land invasion – Putin didn’t get the memo that said such things just aren’t done in the 21st century, but Trump learned that lesson well, and a quick extraction with an open ended next step was just fine. Doing so in a media landscape which is so dilute that one actually had to seek out the news made it even more palatable; by the time most Americans will be aware of the action, there will already be yellow journalism worthy pictures of Maduro and Fils in the dock, under indictment in the Southern District of Manhattan for whatever federal crimes our erstwhile Justice Department cooked up for the occasion, and more importantly, those same Americans will have watched the Steelers-Ravens game and will know who will represent the AFC North in the NFL playoffs, and whether their game day parleys on DraftKings.com have paid off or not.

The moment in history – post-Cold War, post-post-Cold War; in the limbo of moving from an ineffective but well-observed UN forum for discussion to whatever comes next in great power politics; in the shadow of a true regional war in the Donetsk basin and a hideously tangled moral and ethnic conflict in the Middle East; in a moment of hyper transition in media, both personal and institutional; and in a moment of post-holiday languor, of fading hangovers and not-yet caffeinated returns to work and school and regular parenting – this moment in history is just perfect.

And thus Calasso, and The Ruin of Kursk. The parable I should write is about the beginning of America’s next endless war in Latin America, the Marines – or in this case the Army, the Marines being largely tied up elsewhere – playing the same role they have so many times, but this time with a different context and performative meaning. Talleyrand is, once again, the man of the age. I highly recommend the book.

In the spring of 2018, I went to the Royal Ballet in London to see a performance that celebrated the centenary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein, the American composer and conductor.  One of the three items on the programme was a revival of The Age of Anxiety, first performed in 1950 with choreography by Jerome Robbins (who also collaborated with Bernstein on the musicals On the Town and West Side Story).  Robbins used Berstein’s second symphony as the setting for his ballet, which had premiered in April the previous year, conducted by the legendary music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky.   (Here is an early recording of the symphony, with Bernstein conducting, from 1950.)  This score was Berstein’s musical reinterpretation of a long, book-length poem of the same name by the expatriate English poet Wystan Hugh Auden, written in America towards the end of the second world war, and published in 1947.

Auden’s poem The Age of Anxiety was immediately recognised as having captured something of the spirit of the age of those post-war years, but more for its snappy title than for its unperspicuous contents.  Today the poem remains better known for Bernstein’s musical adaptation and Robbins’s ballet – which Auden reportedly disliked – than for the ideas presented in verse.  It is structured as a discussion between four people who meet by chance in a New York bar, but this is no simple late night conversation or pub argument.  Rather, Auden offers his readers a sophisticated attempt to analyse the problematic spiritual condition of modern western societies, characterised by the loss of traditional faith and the loss of a sense of shared community.  The opportunity to exploit these absences for our own advantage, “the temptation to sin” – which, a few years earlier, Auden had described as “what the psychologist calls anxiety, and the Christian calls lack of faith” – is contrasted with the opportunity to establish community and solidarity with others, who share both our recognition of this loss and the sense of impossibility of recovering faith or community in their tradition senses.

Continue reading “The anxiety of age”