The Politics of Dancing

We are soon to be faced by the spectacle of another royal wedding. The prospect fills me with a weary resignation. For weeks to come we are going to be forced fed daily a ghastly syrupy mix of sycophancy combined with a chronic sentimentality of the Hallmark variety. One needs a strong stomach for this sort of fare. This infantilism speaks volumes for the quality of our public life but you will need to look long and hard to find contrary voices on the public stage. What can be said about this event that can rise above the banal statement of the obvious? A young bourgeois couple are to marry. He from what, in the rather hideous language of our ‘therapeutic’ culture, is normally described as a ‘dysfunctional’ family, a family characterised by spite, cruelty, failed marriages and ongoing feuds in which the matriarch continues to martyr herself for the cause. This family is held up to us as something to admire and to which to bow the knee! Well for my self I suppose the correct biblical ...

In the last week or so I have felt that oddly deflating sense of despair that comes with living in an infantile culture. Whether voting rights for prisoners, the right of individuals to appeal against their lifelong inclusion on the sex offenders register or the syrup poured out by the print and broadcast media concerning the forthcoming marriage of a nondescript royal, you know that you are not living in a grown up country, a country where serious debate about such matters is possible. It can best be characterised as the ‘Daily Mail culture’, that draws an hysterical line around the permissible limits of discussion, leaving politicians cowed, cowardly and mute. Now as it happens I have worked with offenders and in particular convicted sex offenders and believe I may have a little insight here. We all knew of course that when speaking of sex offenders what was being spoken about, in code of course, was  paedophiles. Of course the reality is very different, I do not know what...

Watching some fanatic shouting insanely from a balcony, an incoherent raging rant, almost certainly to no one, as his criminal dictatorship collapsed around him. This following on from the collapse of similar autocratic regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, regimes we were informed 'we could do business with' since they were both reliable and stable and certainly impossible candidates for ‘western’ style democracy. We are having our eyes and ears stuffed with history. In Paris in the failed revolution of 1968 there was a slogan, Be Realistic Demand the Impossible, such slogans don’t just live in the imagination, we are seeing them enacted on the streets of the Maghreb.

There was a very revealing insight into an aspect of the leftist liberal zeitgeist recently in the Guardian:-www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/31/human-rights-imperialism-james-hoge. In which a certain Mr Kinzer argues that a fetish of human rights that concentrates on such civil liberties as free speech, freedom of assembly and habeas corpus, holding these to be universal, represent a form of ‘cultural imperialism!’ This argument is not new and is often used as an apologia for authoritarian regimes that, after all, ‘make the trains run on time. ’ It is an argument not shared by those currently turning out in immense numbers onto the streets in Egypt, who seem strangely attracted to such ‘western’ notions as a free press and democracy. Or could it be that a hunger for such rights is indeed universal? The events in Egypt have also provided a much needed riposte to the Islamacists, since the demand of the demonstrators, on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and other ...