This is a message to some good American friends who had warmly commended to us Barack Obama's address at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, on 20 January 2008. It comes from a life-long admirer of America who has lived, for years at a time, in the US and who has watched for a longish lifetime the different rates and directions of change of our American cousins and of us Europeans respectively, a phenomenon observed on my part without pleasure. I wrote this in reply:
Those of us who have read, seen and heard Barack Obama's speech, or sermon, at the Ebenezer church in Atlanta on the 20th are bound to have been hugely impressed by such powerful and evocative eloquence. Personally, though, I was even more strongly impressed, and depressed, by the huge gulf that it revealed between the conventions of US politics on the one hand and those of virtually the whole of the rest of the western developed world (not just the British) on the other. The sentiments he expressed were, as we can all agree, lofty and admirable. A clergyman (or clergywoman), or a university lecturer in ethics, or even a political commentator over here expressing similar sentiments would be either applauded or, perhaps more likely, ignored as preaching the obvious to the converted. But a campaigning politician in western Europe who delivered a major speech in such terms would, I suspect, be ridiculed, or if not ridiculed, at best bombarded with the obvious question: that's all very fine and high-minded, but what are you actually proposing to do about it in hard policy terms?
Then there's the paradox that while you in the United States have constitutional provision to ensure separation of church and state, while we in Britain actually have an established church (the Church of England being the legally protected religious arm of the state), in practice even devout religious believers like Blair are forced to try to keep religion out of their political utterances because in this profoundly secular society, religion is a big turn-off for the majority of the adult population: as Blair's press secretary and alter ego, Alastair Campbell, hastily interjected when his master was asked about his religious beliefs, "We don't do God."
It's sad because it's another example of the steadily widening gulf between the political culture in the US and that in the rest of the west, exemplified by the Iraq war (leaving aside, if possible, the UK's culpable complicity in it), the so-called "war on terror" and its implications for civil liberties, extraordinary rendition and Guantanamo Bay, the role of religion, attitudes to capital punishment and the treatment of prisoners, demonstrative patriotism, and now the role of the US sub-prime market in bringing about the impending recession which will engulf the rest of us as well as the United States. Alas, it's no longer the case that the rest of the civilised world looks to the US as its moral and political leader. And I fear that the causes of this ever-widening gulf go much deeper than just the consequences of the catastrophic presidency of G W Bush: whoever succeeds him will not be able to build a durable bridge across it. Many of us small-L liberals used to feel that we had more in common with our American cousins than with our historical enemies just across the English Channel, the French and the Germans, and even our slightly more distant historical friends, the Scandinavians and the Dutch. I don't think that's true any more.
I stress that I don't write this in any spirit of holier-than-thou: I view our own political (and economic and commercial and social) system in the UK as grievously flawed, and in urgent need of repairs that it's clearly not about to get. I'm not talking only about our hideously mistaken collaboration in the Kosovo and Iraq war crimes, but also about the gross and growing inequality in our society, the subordination of human and social need to the unscrupulous demands of the market, the reduction of most of our fellow-citizens to an army of stressed, weary wage slaves, the political and constitutional illiteracy of much of our population, the poisonous effects of large parts of our unprincipled and degraded media, the cowardice, puerile tribalism and tunnel vision of most of our politicians, the subversive consequences of our still rampant class system on our schools and health care, the commercial corruption of popular culture, the emergence of football (i.e. soccer, and to a lesser degree other kinds of sport) as a national religious cult, the concerted assault on our ancient liberties on the pretext of a stupidly misrepresented terrorist threat, the disgusting and shameful state of our prisons, the collapse of family life in our inner cities and the violence, drunkenness, teen-aged pregnancies and other self-destructive anti-social behaviour that it generates, the xenophobia and sentimentalised WWII nostalgia that disfigures our patriotism, the lack (since the treacherous perversion of the Labour Party by Blair and his associates) of a major political party whose principles are founded on a generous-spirited democratic socialist philosophy, and our gruesome climate. I could go on…. and on…
So I'm as far from proposing Britain 2008 as a role model for the United States, or indeed anyone else, as it's possible to go. You can probably put it all down to the pessimism of old age and the universal conviction of the senile that the place is going to the dogs, to hell in a handcart, down the drain, etc. (Except that it is.)
Sorry to be so gloomy: it must be the time of year.
PS: The one bright spot in the landscape for us on this side of the Atlantic seems to me to be the possibilities opened up by the growing expansion of collective action by the Europe of the EU. Notwithstanding all its faults and occasional comical shortcomings, the European adventure has the potential for developing a genuinely humane and sophisticated alternative to the rampant free-market capitalist model to which most of the English-speaking world has capitulated since its enthusiastic adoption by the likes of Reagan, Thatcher and Blair. Already the Union has evolved into a wholly new kind of relationship between sovereign nation-states which preserves its members' national identities and cultures while equipping them to act collectively and constructively across a wide range of issues, from climate change to third-world poverty, in a way that would be impossible for any of us acting in isolation. Even here, though, there are sadnesses: the further that the European Union strikes out in new and more hopeful directions, the wider the gulf separating us from the United States seems likely to become; and the pathetic, paranoid chauvinism of large parts of our media and its accompanying political culture in Britain seem destined to continue their shabby mission of resisting every inch of the way along the road to enlightened European collective action. Still, at least it offers a faint, if flickering, gleam of light.
Brian
It's early days yet, but we had all better start looking more seriously at Senator John McCain to see what may be in store for us all. There's good reason, as matters stand 
after Iowa and New Hampshire, to expect him to win the Republican nomination against Romney (suspect in the more liberal states and among independent voters as a Mormon) and Huckabee (ditto as a fundamentalist Christian conservative); he would represent a change – the key word in this contest — from George W Bush; he has experience and a spectacular war record, perhaps enough to offset his "great age": he was born on 29 August 1936 (almost two years after me!); and he's no party hack, with a record of frequent Senate votes against the GOP party line. For the GOP the most cogent argument for McCain is that he's the Republican who looks at present most likely to beat either Hillary Clinton (not a change but a reversion to the Clinton White House; divisive; widely disliked; possibly too left-wing in US terms to be electable; a woman; unpopular with male voters especially; query over her real experience) or Barack Obama (extremely inexperienced, a special handicap with a recession and virtual defeat in Iraq looming; weak on policy detail; little or no record of achievement in the Senate, and signs of negligence there; black but not mainstream civil-rights background Afro-American; foreign — Kenyan — father).
Of course things can and probably will change radically between now and November, and only a tiny proportion of the delegates to the nominating conventions has been mandated so far. Nevertheless most of the factors listed above seem unlikely to change. So we had better not harbour any illusions about Senator McCain. A useful corrective to a few current myths is made by the New York-based website FAIR ('Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting') in an incisive demolition job on a piece in Time magazine [several links in this are also well worth reading]:
Time: The Voters' Revenge (1/10/08) by Nancy Gibbs & David Von Drehle
A typical media rendition of "straight-talking" John McCain:
"He entered the campaign a year ago as the apparent front runner, an awkward role for a free-ranging, fence-jumping, kick-the-corral maverick. McCain never got the hang of it, breaking with his party's mainstream on tax cuts, immigration, harsh interrogation of terrorist suspects—the list goes on. By July his bank account and his poll numbers were in a race to zero, which turned out to be a blessing."Of course he doesn't "range" much at all from his party's line. Take the first issue listed—tax cuts: He voted against the Bush tax cuts because there weren't enough spending cuts to go along with them, which in a way is a more "conservative" approach than Bush's. He supports them now, and thinks that when you cut taxes you increase revenues. That's standard right-wing crazy talk. As FAIR founder Jeff Cohen pointed out way back in 2000, McCain is
"conservative on almost every issue of social, economic or foreign policy except campaign finance and tobacco…. He votes consistently anti-choice on abortion and against gun control measures like the Brady Bill and the assault-weapons ban. He opposes a minimum wage-hike. [in 1999], the League of Conservation Voters ranked McCain's environmental voting record at 11 percent, up from zero in 1998."FAIR does not endorse every opinion expressed or vouch for facts presented here, except by ourselves. Send link suggestions to jnaureckas@fair.org.
A sobering record, worth bearing in mind.
In the personal opinion of this column, far away on the other side of the Big Ditch, Hillary Clinton is by far the most attractive and promising candidate of those who currently appear to be in with a chance, followed at some distance by John Edwards (whose prospects look pretty dim as of now, unless Hillary and Obama both come terrible croppers before the nomination is decided, not impossible eventualities). On his record, McCain is a reactionary conservative and an unpredictable maverick: undoubtedly an improvement on W, but not a huge one. And incidentally, contrary to much UK media sniggering at Hillary's allegedly 'teary' or 'tearful' emotional moment in New Hampshire, widely and implausibly held up as having persuaded a few thousand women voters to switch their votes to her, she didn't shed a single tear — not una furtiva lagrima, as even the majestic El Pais couldn't resist calling it.
If John McCain wins the Presidency of the United States in 2008, remember: you (may have) read it here first. If he doesn't, don't.
Update, 16 January 2008: Perhaps the most obnoxious attack on Hillary Clinton (accompanied by unreserved praise for Barack Obama) to appear recently in the UK media has been the long article in the [London] Sunday Times of 13 January 2008 by Andrew Sullivan. Any self-respecting editor of a prestige Sunday newspaper, even one of Richard Murdoch's, should have hesitated about allowing this piece to appear. Sullivan, English-born, a former President of the Oxford Union with a first-class Oxford degree, still a UK citizen, has long lived in the US and is a Roman Catholic 'libertarian conservative' whose colourful background is readably described in Wikipedia (there is also an undeniably impressive and frank biography of him on his own blog here). His blog is only a little less vitriolic than his Sunday Times article about Hillary Clinton, and almost equally effusive about Obama, as even some of Sullivan's right-wing fans seem to be admitting. I think we can safely give this kind of stuff a miss.
Brian
J and I spent five days over Christmas with son O and daughter V in Brussels, and were very pleasantly surprised. I was last there with a large, predominantly Canadian military and civilian group in early 1978, and took away with me a rather negative impression of a city of ponderous architecture and even more ponderous cuisine. I was wrong on both counts: although admittedly the architecture has become, if anything, more ponderous since 1978 with the addition of the huge numbers of EU buildings, from the amazing .JPG "The Berlaymont")
Berlaymont building, home of the EU Commission, to the EU parliament building (one of them, anyway), offices of committees and commissions, a museum, massive apartment blocks for the Eurocrats, and many more. I quite liked them; most of the rest of my family thought them overbearing, even Stalinist.
As for the cuisine, there's certainly a lot of it, but there's plenty of choice, and no need to get up feeling stuffed from every meal. There is a vast variety of restaurants, cafés and bars, some of the international/European type that one finds anywhere in the continent these days, some more flavoury. To walk down the narrow rue des Bouchers (or, its more challenging Flemish name, Beenhouwersstraat) with dozens and dozens of restaurants lining both sides of the road, each with boards outside advertising almost indistinguishable menus, is quite an experience. Most are predominantly sea-food establishments, rather oddly for a city so far from the sea. One feature common to almost all is what must be Belgium's unofficial national dish, moules frites. We ate a lot of those, generally washed down with quantities of pole-axe-strong Belgian beer, ranging from Guinness-black through brown-ale brown to the pale yellow of tasteless English pub lager — except that Belgian 'blonde' beer actually tastes of beer too. The pick of the .JPG "La Mort Subite")
bars, a little off the tourist beat, seemed to us to be La Mort Subite, little changed from its establishment in 1928 and serving a variety of beers so wide-ranging as to blow the mind; excellent omelettes, too. Jacques Brel, that famous Belgian, rara avis, used to drink here. A drink at the Sudden Death is, we think, an obligatory feature of any visit to Brussels, however fleeting.
In the evening of Christmas day, after an excellent dinner at Chez Léon in the rue des Bouchers, we wandered along to the Grand' Place to watch a brilliantly innovative son et lumière display projected on and from within the glorious Hotel de Ville to the sounds of the Grand March from Aida, Nessun Dorma (Pavarotti of course), La Donna e Mobile and Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, among other familiar favourites. It was a crisp clear night with a bright full moon smiling benevolently down on the scene and the lights glowing on the giant Christmas tree in the middle of the square, changing colours in time to the music. There wasn't a policeman in sight, no-one was vomiting or fighting, there was no sign of booze, just politely enthusiastic clapping for the more spectacular lighting effects and the crescendos of the music; clusters of people all over the legendary square quietly listening and watching, entranced. The Europeans aren't by any means finished yet.
When I was in Brussels for those few days in 1978, the British ambassador to NATO, resident in Brussels like his two British ambassadorial colleagues (ambassadors to what was then the EEC and to Belgium respectively), was the late and much missed Sir John Killick, who had earlier been my ambassadorial boss when I was a lowly first secretary at the embassy in Moscow. With typical generosity, Killick came and picked me up from our hotel in his official chauffeur-driven Rolls on our one free evening and spirited me away to his residence somewhere on the outskirts of Brussels for an extremely boozy family dinner, after which he drove me back at very high speed in his own sports car to the hotel. My Canadian fellow course members of the Canadian National Defence College were gratifyingly impressed. (So was I, actually.)
The whole idea of a visit to Brussels is transformed utterly by Eurostar and the tunnel: for us Brits to be able to board a train at St Pancras International in the heart of London (sadly for us south Londoners, no longer so easily accessible as its original terminus at Waterloo) and to get off after a comfortable trip just two hours later in Brussels (or Paris or Lille) is a hearteningly European experience. The security checks and immigration controls are thorough but not intrusive and the whole thing easily beats flying: no contest. Altogether an extremely agreeable way to pass a few days, without needing to set foot in a ship or a plane, in the welcoming capital of the European Union, whose name alone is enough to make our pathetic mesolithic Europhobes foam at the mouth (and probably from several other orifices, too).
You can see some more of my pictures of our five days in Brussels by clicking here — in case by some remote chance you're sufficiently interested. If you do, I recommend viewing them in 'Slideshow' mode — click 'slideshow' above the first of the columns of thumbnails.
Brian
Literature is alright, still
— Heading of Guardian column by Maya Jaggi, one of the judges of the 2007 Orange prize for Fiction, Guardian, 13 Dec 07. But the booby prize no doubt goes to her sub-editor.
['"[A]ll right' is right; "alright" is not all right (but note the Who song, much loved by generations of headline writers, was The Kids are Alright)' — Guardian Style Guide, http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/page/0,,184844,00.html]
— Edward Luce, 'A High Price to Pay', FT magazine, 1-2 Dec 2007
In reneging on that tradition, the Government risks alienating a large section of the pubic sector.
— Bernard James Luckhurst, 'The Government is alienating the public sector', Letters, The Times, 13.12.07
The US media is gripped by election fever (Heading)
The mainstream media dances dutifully… (Gary Younge, Guardian 5.ii.07).
["Media... is the plural of medium but is sometimes used in the singular when it refers to the communication media: press, radio, TV; this usage is not generally accepted." Peter Harvey, A Guide to English Language Usage for non-native speakers.
"When in doubt, use the plural." Robert Burchfield, Fowler, third ed.]
During Brown's 10 years as chancellor he did nothing to reign in Britain's status as a tax haven for non-domiciles…
— Guardian letter, 28 Dec 07
General Pervez Musharraf… made little secret of his contempt for the civilian politicians whom he believed had nearly ruined Pakistan.
— Jason Burke, Obituary of Benazir Bhutto, Guardian, 28 Dec 07
The former Lady McCartney, Heather Mills, yesterday denied reports that she is planning to write a sex manual…
— People, Guardian, 21 Dec 07
["Former"?]
"Too many people are still flaunting [sic] the law and endangering lives by using their mobile [sic] behind the wheel."
— Jools Townsend, road safety charity Brake, quoted in Guardian, 21 Dec 07
It is the Christians who are … fermenting an outraged sense among the mainly secular population that they had better call themselves Christian…
— Polly Toynbee, Guardian, 21 December 07
