NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS MARCH 2012
David Cameron is getting increasingly rattled at Prime Ministers Question time and when he gets rattled he gets nasty, the mask slips. His arguments increasingly reduced to shouting at Ed Miliband “and you’re a crap leader of your party.” You feel that if there was a bread roll at hand he would sling it, aiming for the head. It seems that you can take the man out of Bullingdon* but can’t take Bullingdon out of the man.
The funniest moments on the campaign trail were when one candidate was asked a simple question aboutLibya
Obama occupies a different intellectual and moral planet than these guys.
Currently reading selected chapters from a library book, Michael Scammell’s biography of Arthur Koestler, it is a great doorstop of a book and I am reading so much else at the moment. I am cursed by being a slow reader.For me there are three outstanding public intellectuals to emerge from the ‘low dishonest decade’ of the 1930’s, George Orwell, Victor Serge and Koestler.
Koestler is perhaps the most interesting of the three, which is saying a lot, and certainly the most flawed. His writing from the period still has the power to hit home with considerable force. ‘Darkness at Noon,’ not his chosen title incidentally but his partner Daphne’s and what a great choice that was, remains one of the seminal works of the period, though some of his other writing from this time, ‘Spanish Testament’ and ‘Scum of the Earth,’ still stand out, whilst his autobiographical writing, particularly ‘Arrow in the Blue’ provide incredibly interesting insights into the intellectual ambience of the age. One of the most interesting is the difference in moral and intellectual climate betweenBritain Europe winning an argument decisively sometimes implied somewhat more terminal consequences.
Of his later work, which attracted a great deal of attention from the flakier wing of the New Age Movement, I know little. I think I have avoided this material for fear of disillusionment. For, for all his considerable flaws, Koestler remains a fascinating character and the themes he engaged with, intellectual dishonesty, totalitarian thinking, the struggle for liberty, the need to speak truth to power, and the balance between the individual and the state, are themes we need to address in our own rather intellectually shabby time.
The Leveson enquiry continues to grip with more and more poison seeping out of the moral cesspit of News International. On my Facebook page I see that I described Andy Hayman’s contribution as ‘priceless.’ I would not from this remark wish it to be believed that I thought he could not be bought.
It is cold in the mornings again now and I have stopped going for my brisk morning walks. This means I have put on some weight since Christmas and I am now back watching my diet again. All diets they say are useless, though it is hard to see what else I can do to avoid turning into a great lump of lard!
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The farce that is the race to become the Republican nominee for President ought to provide much room for observation and comment, particularly for those like me with a taste for the absurd; however I find the whole thing deeply depressing. The Republican Party have not put forward a reasonably sane and well adjusted person since Eisenhower. Gerald Ford seemed to inhabit the same planet as the rest of us, though of course was never elected. I always thought the remark that he had played Football once too often without a helmet should have been directed at Ronald Reagan, the liberator of concentration camps after the war! Err, no Ronnie you dreamt that one; though it should never been forgotten that it was on Ford’s watch, with Kissinger as the puppet master, that the people of East Timor were so cynically sacrificed.
Now every electoral cycle the party seems to be involved in a crazy experiment to get ever more flaky individuals into the highest office on the planet. You can almost see groups of Republican plotters huddled together, “what about this one, he believes the world is 6,000 years old and that the immediate descendants of Adam and Eve engaged in line dancing with the local dinosaur population,…. too flaky? Nah, let’s give him a shot.”The funniest moments on the campaign trail were when one candidate was asked a simple question about
Obama occupies a different intellectual and moral planet than these guys.
Currently reading selected chapters from a library book, Michael Scammell’s biography of Arthur Koestler, it is a great doorstop of a book and I am reading so much else at the moment. I am cursed by being a slow reader.
Koestler is perhaps the most interesting of the three, which is saying a lot, and certainly the most flawed. His writing from the period still has the power to hit home with considerable force. ‘Darkness at Noon,’ not his chosen title incidentally but his partner Daphne’s and what a great choice that was, remains one of the seminal works of the period, though some of his other writing from this time, ‘Spanish Testament’ and ‘Scum of the Earth,’ still stand out, whilst his autobiographical writing, particularly ‘Arrow in the Blue’ provide incredibly interesting insights into the intellectual ambience of the age. One of the most interesting is the difference in moral and intellectual climate between
Of his later work, which attracted a great deal of attention from the flakier wing of the New Age Movement, I know little. I think I have avoided this material for fear of disillusionment. For, for all his considerable flaws, Koestler remains a fascinating character and the themes he engaged with, intellectual dishonesty, totalitarian thinking, the struggle for liberty, the need to speak truth to power, and the balance between the individual and the state, are themes we need to address in our own rather intellectually shabby time.
The Leveson enquiry continues to grip with more and more poison seeping out of the moral cesspit of News International. On my Facebook page I see that I described Andy Hayman’s contribution as ‘priceless.’ I would not from this remark wish it to be believed that I thought he could not be bought.
It is cold in the mornings again now and I have stopped going for my brisk morning walks. This means I have put on some weight since Christmas and I am now back watching my diet again. All diets they say are useless, though it is hard to see what else I can do to avoid turning into a great lump of lard!
*’The Bullingdon Club…………members of an exclusive dining society whose raison d'être has for more than 150 years been to afford tailcoat-clad aristocrats a termly opportunity to behave very badly indeed’. Guy Adams The Independent, 13th Feb 2007.
