The Politics of Dancing

Turning right outside my front door and within a minute you see it, as space clears between the trees, a dark presence on the western skyline. If you move closer you see a grotesque black and grey Skelton, the accusing wreckage of a block people called home as recently as Tuesday evening. It’s a monster now, twisted and horribly deformed, no, not black, black has a dignity and grace, but a dirty  sullen grey, the colour of ash, of lives turned to dust. I have seen this colour before, in Mostar after the fratricidal attack on the city in the early 90s. It is an image belonging to a war zone. And in some respects, it is, though hyperbole of this kind feels best avoided today. “ About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;” W H Auden ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ Auden, as he so often does, gets it right. The mother mourn...

‘What Is Populism?’  by  Jan-Werner Muller If ever there was need to stop and pause, to stop and consider how we, on both sides of the Atlantic, got into the terrible mess we now find ourselves in, that moment is now. Just two years ago the world was a very different place. Obama was US president, whilst in the UK Cameron looked unlikely to obtain an overall majority and, though not well led, the Labour Party was still a significant electoral force. However, as the band played and children slept, the ship was gliding steadily toward the iceberg. If we should wish to name that iceberg it would surely be populism. Few words have been bandied about with such little regard to whether there exists a shared understanding of what the term means. This makes ‘What Is Populism?’ by Jan-Werner Muller [1] a timely [2] contribution to a developing debate. As so often the case with ambiguous terminology it proves easier to designate what populism is, than what it is not, an...

I Corbyn who sabotaged the remain campaign  The case for remain was poorly made, this was a consequence of several factors, one of which, incidentally, was the deliberate undermining of the Remain camp by Jeremy Corbyn and a small coterie around him. This does not explain the lacklustre campaign. At heart was the simple fact that the case for remaining in the EU was so glaringly obvious, rational and in the country’s best interests, that making it proved a mountain to climb. It is much harder to summon up the energy and intellectual rigour to persuade people that jumping off a cliff into the spray covered rocks below is not a good idea, than it is to make a more difficult and nuanced case. Rational arguments, as the rational minded are oft having to relearn, rarely make themselves. The forces that shape our world are complex, subjective, random and ‘irrational.’ One only need examine one’s own inner and outer life to see how this is; sensible eating, regular exercise, n...

Trump Brexit And The Politics of Illusion  ‘[Nazism] involved, perhaps first and foremost, a love of self, not the reality of the self but the self that is reflected in the mirror. This narcissism was projected into a political movement and eventually came to encompass an entire nation. The reflection in the mirror the Nazis had of themselves – blond, blue eyed, strong as Krupp steel, eternally youthful, with a Nietzschean will to power - that was the myth… Nazism was an attempt to lie beautifully to the German nation and to the world. The beautiful lie is, however, also the essence of Kitsch. Kitsch is a form of make-believe, a form of deception. It is the alternative to a daily reality that would otherwise be a spiritual vacuum…” ‘ Rites of Spring, The Great War and The Birth of The Modern Age.’ Modris Eksteins I The past is perhaps just as much an imagined country as it is another one. As Pessoa reflected, the greatest of all nostalgia's is the nostalgia for ...

Is viewing paintings more than a comfort, a way of plugging into a wider, deeper, more profound perspective during troubled times, or is it merely escapism? I found myself thinking these thoughts the other week as I stood before one of the Canaletto’s in the Wallace Collection. These are magnificent pictures that can, if you stand still, focus and absorb the Venetian scene, the placid water and the active inhabitants, transport you back to early 18 th Century Venice. For moments on end I was mesmerised and as we left the gallery and later, as my friend and I sat in the cafe on the ground floor, I felt somehow different about Brexit, Donald Trump and the gloomy international prognosis.  In what way ‘different’ it was hard to pin down, perhaps it was no more than having glimpsed another world, in which these concerns were not only absent but incomprehensible.  It was an emotion akin to envy, - most certainly misplaced, - of a simpler better age and a more profoun...

‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.’   The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852 History does not of course repeat itself in such a neat manner, as Marx well knew as he wrote his famous diatribe against the preposterous figure of Napoleon III. What periods of time sometimes do possess is something more akin to flavours, colours, echoes even smells, of another era. Thus, anyone from late Belle Epoch Paris or the 1920’s  avant-garde  would recognise the vibrancy of the 1960’s. [1] Similarly, the members of the Paris Commune were imbibing the same intoxicating perfume of 1848, as their reactionary opponents. So, as we enter the new year, a year that will be dominated by the populist neo fascism of Trump, that will be scattered with references to the 1930s, Hitler and the collapse of Wiemar culture we need to keep our antennae attuned to what is actually happening now. First statements of the obvious.  1. Trump i...

“For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning." TS Eliot The Four Quartets I To look back on a year like 2016 feels like looking back upon a devastated landscape, already decaying after the storm, already a wasteland. A year, to mix my metaphors, strangled by the forces of bitter reaction, with the recently impoverished and dispossessed, fed on the lies of opportunists, cynics and demagogues, providing the coup de grâce on the prostrate body. It is a world in which, at least in the UK, those who feel cheated, have been led by those who have cheated them, rose in rebellion and rejected the post war pan European social democratic settlement. In the US even darker forces have prevailed, a Mussolini style rabble rouser has attained power in the world’s most powerful democracy.  Even before he has taken the oath of office terrible portents cloud an ever-darkening sky. Th...