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 ...

I have just come from a period in exile in Weston Super-Mare, a town in which the sky so often becomes slate grey, the sea slate grey and the atmosphere of the town slate grey, that you feel like you are living in a disused slate quarry. Growing older in this culture is a process of experiencing a growing sense of victim-hood; one is increasingly viewed as the slowest in the herd. I have just been watching Nick Cohen being interviewed by a rather appallingly prissy woman by the name of Deborah Orr on Youtube,  'Nick Cohen interviewed by Deborah Orr. ' I tried to focus on the debate but in the end I had to give up, I could no longer put up with her rritating ‘excuse me’ style. It also made me loose patience with Cohen, a man I admire. I longed for a Christopher Hitchens/Gore Vidal style put down, which we don’t do so well in this country, good manners seem to prohibit, which is I suppose why I find it so refreshing when I encounter it. I have been listening all morning to Ra...

When greeting my closest friend one of my first questions is invariably what are you reading at the moment? Indeed this strikes me as far better means of introduction than the more asinine and much ruder what do you do? Currently I am reading Gore Vidal’s memoir Palimpsest. A memoir if is any good ought to leave you feeling a little envious, a wish that you too could have met those people, been in that situation. With Gore however he has been successful in all that he has done, met everyone and been in every imaginably desirable situation, so that you are moved beyond envy into a state of credulous incredulity as he skips lightly from sitting by the pool with Princess Margaret to seducing Jack Kerouac. You know that he has done these things since it is a matter of record but are still left wondering at it all. It is also an immensely funny book, I have not laughed aloud so much since reading Scoop, and yes he knew Waugh, disliked him personally though enjoyed his writing. His descripti...

Prejudice against Muslims has "passed the dinner table test" argues Barones Warsi Co-chairman of the conservative party. BBC News 20/1/11 The term Islamaphobia has become a big bird now, it now sits squat upon the nest refusing to budge, it is here to stay. That said the Baroness needs to be made aware that in this country people are free to express dislike of any religion. I for one dislike all three monotheisms intensely and though it is a long time since I attended anything that could be remotely described as a ‘dinner party’ should I be invited I would feel free should the topic arise to give vent to this dislike. The Baroness describes this dislike as prejudice, i.e. an adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts. This may indeed be the case, though given that presumably she has not been present at these dinner parties how would she know? However should our hypothetically ignorant dinner party guest choose to disabuse ...