Brontides

Apologies for the lengthy silence. I’m currently in the process of winding up my current job and looking for a new one; I finish here in central Government on Friday and, at present, am facing unemployment. Activity on the blog may spike next week if, as seems likely, I find myself with a lot more free time.

They kept that quiet.

OPERATION Flintlock has begun. American special forces have been descending on Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania and Senegal in a joint exercise, expected to last another week or so, to combat Islamist terrorism in the region. It is the latest stage of an evolving partnership between America and much of west Africa.

They should probably be wary about that, given what US Special Forces did to Somalia in the name of “Islamic terrorism”.

I’m working up the energy to make my final two long posts on the parties, their policies and their manifesto pledges – we have foreign policy, my personal pet peeve, and social policy, which promises to be highly subjective. I’ll get around to those, hopefully over the weekend, but first I’d like to speculate about endorsements.

It’s customary for each of the major newspapers, and many of the main weekly news-based periodicals, to endorse a party or candidate at election time. In the coming week we can expect to see all of this swing into action, which means that it’s prognostication time.

Expect the Murdoch press to go blue this year. The Sun is historically opportunist and has thrown its weight enthusiastically behind Cameron and the Tories. The Times has been more measured but is unlikely to be able to resist the pressure to obey the corporate line.

They stuck by the Blues through the lean years, and they’re sure as hell not going to turn on him now that he has a sniff at power. They have too much access and too much influence within the Conservative party to make a principled rejection likely or desirable. Expect all of these to stay reliably right-wing.

The flip side of that soin is the question of what happens to Labour’s pet press, when Labour is heading for the worst crushing they have seen since 1983. The Mirror has a phenominal amount invested in its support for Labour, particularly Labour’s left wing – it is largely bankrolled by the Unions and has a great deal of access to Charlie Whelan, Ed Balls and the rest of the “Old Labour” remnant. In 2001 Mirror readers were 60% more likely to vote for Labour than the general populace, making them by far the most supportive constituency for the Government. In 2010 they will have to continue that trend. The Guardian is less dependent and thus less dogmatic, and may well go for the Lib Dems. Uniquely, they have an open endorsement process, in which all members of the production team can have a say and in which the readership can make their opinion felt; by most accounts the Lib Dems got a heavy majority of the support this time around. They have form; the Guardian embraced the Lib Dems in the European elections last year. If the Guardian were to go Labour then it would entail a dramatic editorial intervention. The Independent will almost certainly go Lib Dem, despite its generally more left-wing editorial policy.

On the face of it, these two fairly serious publications are straightforward left-wingers in the UK arena. But this really reflects the nature of British politics over the last decade; the Tory party has been a decrepid wreck since 1995, and the Economist and FT have accordingly, grudgingly, kept their weight behind Labour. When the Economist tepidly switched to Labour in 2001 it was a bombshell; it was the first time in 40 years that the paper had gone red, and served to underscore the dramatic intellectual collapse that the Tory party had suffered following the collapse of Thatcherism. It is crushingly unlikely that the Economist will repeat this trick. The question is: have the Lib Dems made a pragmatic enough attempt at credibility this time, or will the Economist revert to form and go Tory? As an institution, the Economist is small-c conservative, and may be content to revert to the safety and familiarity of the two-party system. Intellectually its tendencies are far more Lib Dem, however – although the Tories’ school reform plans are meat and milk to the magazine, their record on civil liberties and economic populism will have dismayed many of their staff, and the Lib Dem’s ideas on Trident and immigration liberalisation will have pleased them. The FT should stay on the left, and will likely either endorse the Lib Dems or not endorse at all.

There’s been some chatting about a push-poll that YouGov allegedly put out as part of its daily tracker for News International. It was a quiet weekend so I can forgive that but it’s not plausible for any number of reasons.

Here’s the question:

Nick Cleggs says the other parties are to blame for the MP scandals, he has taken money from a criminal on the run, many of his MPs have been found guilty of breaking the rules and his own party issued guidance on how to fiddle the expenses system?

Firstly, that’s not a question. It’s a statement that has had a question mark stuck to the end. Secondly, YouGov would be out of their mind to publish such a flagrantly misleading question – it would trash their reputation and shut down their main competitive advantage: that they are the only firm posting daily poll results, which has gained them a phenomenal amount of publicity in this cycle. The key to this story is in today’s Guardian, where one of YouGov’s top brass have come out and stated that the question’s not actually from the tracker poll:

Anthony Wells, the YouGov political analyst running the poll over the weekend, said: “We test lots of messages and ask people in different ways to see which are the most effective ways to sell an idea. I cannot say who the client is but this was not part of the work we do for News International.”

The key point there is that YouGov (like every pollster) tests messages for whoever pays them to do so. This is part of their commercial business and is perfectly legitimate; they usually go out to small samples and are designed to see what happens to a generic voting intendion question when it is prefaced with the message in question that is to be tested. Polling firms are commercial businesses and political polls are usually posted at a significant loss; they are done as a form of advertising, to enhance the prestige of the firm doing the polling (especially if the polls turn out to be accurate) and to attract message testing work of exactly this sort. It’s not unreasonable to expect that all three parties are doing it, or have done it in the recent past; the Tories were just deeply unlucky to get caught out. I seem to recall that an episode of the West Wing dealt with this exact scenario.

Why the Tories? Well, whoever wants to test the message is testing the ground for a smear attack on the Lib Dems, and Labour don’t have any money. Another helpful clue is that the Tories have already overtly stated that they are using YouGov for message testing. It doesn’t take a genius to thus ascertain that someone in CCHQ is planning an assault on the Lib Dems’ change credentials. Whether this leak will deter them or not remains to be seen.

Nick Clegg’s rise could lock Murdoch and the media elite out of UK politics:

Make no mistake, if the Liberal Democrats actually won the election – or held the balance of power – it would be the first time in decades that Murdoch was locked out of British politics. In so many ways, a vote for the Lib Dems is a vote against Murdoch and the media elite.

Actually, you won’t find female empowerment halfway up a pole:

Pole dancing is grim and I don’t see anything empowering about learning it. Even if you say that it’s just dancing and good exercise, surely it would be more empowering to learn a dance that can be employed in contexts other than strip clubs? And if, as Francisco claims, it’s “not intended to be sexual”, why is it only for women?

h/t Kevan.

Very amusing Dr Seuss style song about Copenhagen.

Sadly I missed the debate last night – I was busy being wined and dined at Gary Rhodes’ swanky restaurant in Tower 41 – but it looks to have had as much impact as its advocated hoped.

There were quite a load of sketchy push-polls from various media outlets after the debate last night which will reflect the bias of their readership – the Sun, the Mail and Sky News all have particularly egregious entries. Happily, three proper polling outfits also took the temperature last night: YouGov, whose daily tracker has been the default for the election thus far, ComRes and Angus Reid. A slightly incredible poll from Populus also appeared in the Times – Populus are a legit outfit but their claim of a 61% Clegg victory just isn’t credible. That Clegg carried the night isn’t really in question but that lead is just a bit too fantastic.

The top-lines are as follows: YouGov has NC51, DC29, GB19. ComRes has NC 46, DC 26, GB 20. Angus Reid has NC48, DC20, GB18. Over the span of the three pollsters that’s probably strong enough to take with a degree of confidence – it’s worth noting that the YouGov panel didn’t allow for respondents to select “Undecided” or “None”, which is why Clegg and Cameron have slightly higher scores (and which suggests that Brown’s 20% is pretty much stable).

Angus Reid has released its table – which is still being updated so you’ll have to excuse me if the numbers have shifted slightly in the interim, although I’m fairly confident that the themes will prove to be static. You’ll immediately see that Clegg has by far the most support from his own party – 81% of Lib Dems got behind their leader, while the Labour faithful backed Brown only 51% of the time. What should really worry Cameron is that he only kept 46% of Tories with him. Conservative panel members were slightly more likely to approve of none of them than Lib Dems or Labourites, but couldn’t match the skepticism of those who went into the debate undecided. Clegg drew over 30% of each of the other major parties’ support, suggesting that any poll bump will be drawn equally from both sources. He also hoovered up over 50% of the independents on the panel.

All in all, 43% said that they would be more likely to vote for Clegg in the aftermath of the debate. The post-debate analysis may push that number up, especially if a dominant media narrative springs up and starts to drive some momentum in the Lib Dem’s direction. The Dems can also probably expect a bit of a funding boost off of the back of this. There’s talk this morning of the Lib Dems having a credible shot at second place; at the moment I think that’s fanciful, but there are still two more debates and plenty of events ‘twixt cup and lip.

Straightforward question: y/n. What do you think?

Hopefully I’ll do some proper blogging over the long weekend. In the meanwhile, please enjoy the following clip of an idiot being eviscerated by someone significantly smarter than him:

The problem is, most climate change deniers are no more coherent than that. And yet it’s infinitely self-perpetuating. The mind boggles.

This isn’t a tech blog, obviously, but the new Photoshop looks incredible

Lots of people (apparently galvanised by the New South Wales Government) are claiming that Australia is the first country to recognise ‘non-specified’ gender.

This is nonsense. Even if we ignore simple iterations of cultures with a third gender, there are hundreds of examples stretching into prehistory of ambiguous gender specifications. India has an ancient and firmly established tradition of non-binary gender which Pakistan has recently adopted. Indigenous North American cultures had Two-Spirit, which allowed for an array of gender roles to be filled – or dispensed with altogether. Ethiopia, Kenya and Congo all recognise non-gender, as do Indonesia, Polynesia and the Phillippines. Going back into history, Mesopotamia and Sumeria recognised non-gender states, and Sumerian myth even speaks of the goddess Ninmah, who fashioned a being “with no male organ and no female organ”, for whom Enki finds a position in society: “to stand before the king”. In Akkad, Enki is remembered as instructing Nintu, the goddess of birth, to establish a “third category among the people” in addition to men and women, that includes demons who steal infants, women who are unable to give birth, and priestesses who are prohibited from bearing children. Ancient Egypt had a third gender category for “non-gendered” while Indic cultures – including the ancient texts of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism – all refer to non-gender thanks to the influence of Vedic culture.

So: yes, well done Australia, I’m very pleased that you have taken this step. But let’s have less of this blinkered Eurocentricism!

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Last night, the US House of Representatives passed a controversial healthcare reform bill. This is the final, decisive part of a process that has been rumbling away ever since the election of Barack Obama, over a year ago, and has been the focus of one of the bitterest and most devisive political fights in recent history.

The background to this is that America is, according to the Institute of Medicine of the United States National Academies, the “only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not ensure that all citizens have [healthcare] coverage” – in other words, unlike most other wealthy contries, America provides no medical care to its citizens, forcing them instead to procure expensive health insurance to ensure that they are able to pay for any treatment they may need. Most middle-class workers get healthcare as a perk from their employers, and the very poorest citizens are covered via. a government programme called Medicaid, but there remain many who fall between those two stools – particularly the self-employed – who have been historically uncovered, as well as many who commercial insurers rejected on the basis that they had pre-existing medical conditions. In 2007, that corpus included 15.3% of the population, or 45.7 million people. Meanwhile, even for the rest, American healthcare was disproportionately expensive and somewhat substandard when compared to that of Britain, France, Germany, Japan and Scandinavia.

The bill that was passed last night actually fixes very little of that. It will make healthcare in the US somewhat cheaper – The Congressional Budget Office’s estimate is that the bill will decrease the federal deficit by $138 billion over the 2010–2019 period, generating more savings further out. It does this by taxing the commercial health insurance providers, and specifically high-value “Cadillac” health plans – in other words, taxing the rich. Medicaid has been extended up the property ladder, meaning that those somewhat above the poverty line are also automatically covered. Another programme subsidises healthcare for those somewhat wealthier – those earning up to 400% of the poverty line can now get insurance at a reduced rate.

The bill also makes it harder for health insurers to reject applicants with pre-existing conditions, as well as criminalising employers with more than 50 staff who do not provide health insurance to their workers. What it does not do, however, is provide a mechanism by which the state can offer healthcare; this does not establish an American NHS or anything like it. Finally, abortion is explicitly excluded from any public spending; subsidised plans may not be used to pay for such procedures.

Dryly, it seems uncontroversial. It costs less than the status quo ante, extends coverage and doesn’t kick any sacred cows. Instead it has inspired vitriol, and not all of the arguments have been entirely insane.

Conservative objections
The Republican Party, institutionally, has a nuanced position on healthcare despite the shrill tenor of the Conservative debate. They do not oppose the concept of universal healthcare reform, it just opposes the current Bill’s methods. The problem with healthcare in America, they say, is not a lack of government regulation; it’s the lack of a free and open market. Both sides agree that the main reason why healthcare is the US is so expensive is because most of it is procured via. insurance, which is expensive and invites waste. To the Republicans, this means that a system of tax credits should be set up and patients should be enouraged to shop around before spending their tax dollars, providing an incentive to consumers and providers to demand better-quality and lower-cost protection. The bill that passed last night is the opposite to that; by ensuring that money is transferred, directly and impersonally, from an insurance company (or government body) to a healthcare provider, it actually reinforces the perverse incentives that drive costs up and quality down. This is the argument that has been obscured by allegations of “socialism;” a Republican looks at institutions like Britains NHS, and sees that while it may be cheaper and better than what is offered in the US, it can be made cheaper and better still by removing government intervention.

They further object on the grounds that the excise tax on high-end insurance premiums reduces the amount of money available to invest in developing new medical discoveries – new vaccines, better machinery, and scientific research. There is some evidence to suggest that this may be justified.

Slightly less justifiable is the complaint, from some Conservatives, that a nationally funded healthcare programme is obligated to fund coverage “self-inflicted” ailments – the effects of drink and drug abuse, diet-related conditions, so on – which is arguably not in the public interest.

Finally, there’s the usual raft of demented and religiously-inspired objections – death panels, abortion funding, anything said by Glenn Beck etc.

Liberal objections
Liberal opposition has mostly coalesced around the opinion that the current proposals don’t go far enough. And, in truth, they don’t. The money saved by the programme is too little over too long – $100b over a decade may seem like a lot, but over the same period the programme will actually cost ten times that, and it can be substantially cheaper. The lack of a public option means that some will still miss out, and the Conservative complaint that the bill continues to prop up the insurance companies that have parasitically leeched off of the healthcare industry ring true.

So between those two poles – the orgiastic carnival of the ruling Democrats’ wishes that the bitter restraint of the Republican objections – was strung a bill that, really, no-one wanted. The process of passing it was ugly, but eventually the electorial arithmatic demanded that it be pushed through. For the Democrats, not least amongst them the President, the magnitude of the process demanded an outcome to avert electorial disaster. And in truth, while it’s not a great bill, passing it was the right thing to do. It’s statute now; it can be improved, its provisions can be extended, the backroom deals and inefficient compromises can be weeded out.

The big loser in all this is Congress; not necessarily Congressional Republicans, but the Congress as a whole. Otton von Bismark said that laws are like sausages; you don’t want to see how either are made, and in this case Congress has been the sausage factory. In some ways the whole business has demonstrated Congress at its worst, its most corrupt, disfunctional and venal, and while the President’s ratings may have slipped during the passage of the Bill, the Congressional leaderships of both parties have tumbled to sickening lows. But in another sense this is unfair. Heathcare wasn’t easy to pass because no consensus existed for it. Congress simply reflected the will of the people who elected it.

But the role of the politician is to lead as well as to follow, and the debate was ineptly framed by both sides. The Democrats must carry much of the blame for that – theirs was the duty to push for their policy; they had all the advantages, but squandered their goodwill on dead-end compromises and ephemeral policies that were doomed to fail, leaving their most evangelical advocates disillusioned and unenthused. The Republicans had fewer responsibilities but their conduct was deeply dishonourable. Instead of making a reasoned case for a free market intervention, and thus allowing a proper debate about the healthcare choices that America was presented with, they dragged the discussion into the mud, and suffered heavily for it.

Further reading:
The Economist’s Democracy in America
Matt Yglesias
Outside the Beltway
Fivethirtyeight

Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

Two more bits of bleg that surfaced this morning:

First, a typically overwordy piece of analysis by Stratfor sees signs of weakening in Al Qaeda. A video offered by as-Sabab, AQ’s media outlet arm, on March 7th is the usual treat for counterterrorism cryptologists, and does appear to signal a weakening of central AQ’s efforts to cause havok – advocating, as it does, individual and “lone wolf” activity rather than a reliance on big, centrally-planned schemes.

It has come a long way from the early days of as Sahab, when bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders issued defiant threats of launching a follow-on attack against the United States that was going to be even more destructive than 9/11. The group is now asking individual Muslims to conduct lone-wolf terrorist attacks and to follow the examples of Hasan [the soldier who perpetrated a massacre at Fort Worth in Texas] and Mir Amal Kansi, the Pakistani citizen who conducted a shooting at a stoplight outside CIA headquarters in January 1993 that killed two CIA employees [...] this video is a clear indication that the trend toward decentralization is continuing.

While lone-wolf terrorists remain a threat, research – covered previously in this blog – suggests that, without a sense of cohesive community, the terrorist spirit may find fewer and less fruitful purchases.

Secondly, Ayatollah Akhbar Rafsanjani, the massively influential, famously mercurial and ruggedly individual Iranian cleric and politician, has finally pinned his colours to the mast, throwing his weight behind Khamenei and the government at the expense of the Green Movement. At this stage he had little choice – the Green Movement has more or less run out of steam and no longer possesses the will or capability to project its power onto the streets. But it is not a cause for untrammelled pessimism for Iran:

Rafsanjani has much in common with mainstream conservatives who have long supported Khamenei, but he will never align himself with the new generation of influential hard-liners, led by Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

[...]

In exchange for Rafsanjani’s loyalty, the supreme leader appears to have given him power over a new bill that will establish a National Elections Commission to reform the electoral process. Not only is this issue at the heart of Iran’s political crisis, but the commission would also determine the eligibility of individuals to stand as candidates in elections. And the Expediency Council, which monitors legislation and is responsible for any conflicts that might result over Iranian laws, will also decide the members who serve on the National Elections Commission.

That’s a huge change, and wrests a significant amount of power away from the hard-liners and the Guardian Council. Instead of being a defeat, Rafsanjani’s decision to throw his lot in with the Supreme Leader can be seen as a pragmatic compromise, which has a good chance of bearing greater fruit than the spent reform movement – whose capacity to persist as a political actor he has, effectively, killed.

The Course of Empire: Desolation, by Thomas Cole

There’s a great article in the current edition of Foreign Affairs by Niall Ferguson, the British economic and colonial historian. It’s called Complexity and Collapse, and it deals with the idea that civilisations face a “life cycle” – that they must, inevitably, began, expand, reach an apex then decline and collapse. You can’t read it unless you’re a member, sadly, but it argues quite successfully that the cyclical view of empirical supremacy may be misguided.

The crux of the argument is that, while trends can build up over time that make an empire susceptible to collapse, the collapse itself is virtually always sudden, swift and decisive. Therefore, the long-standing trends that contributed to the collapse event in question cannot be usefully thought of as being factors of causation in the collapse; they are, in fact, common features in a complex system – which an empire will successfully encounter, navigate and expurgate plenty of over the course of a multi-century lifespan, potentially indefinitely. Thus, long-term trends of weakness that, in retrospect, appear to have presaged a collapse are in fact not signifiers of a structural weakness in systemic power nor proof that empire decline is cyclical or inevitable.

These seems to fly in the face of established reason and observed experience, but Ferguson shows that destabilising trends are only really noticeable when they successfully destabilise. Even then, their effects can be over-interpreted. Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire describes takes a long view, ascribing said fall to factors ranging from the personality disorders of individual rulers to the rise of monotheism. Certainly, one factor that he highlights did play a significant role: the trend towards civil war, following the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180AD, never really went away. But to say that Rome’s decline stuttered along for 200 hears seems to misunderstand the nature of complex human society. By the time Rome got to the 4th Century it was no more collapsed than it had been in 180; it was simply changed, as a complex adaptive system should, from a normally functioning society dealing with one set of circumstances to a normally functioning society with another. Political intrigue, barbarian migration and Sassanid ambition were features of the times, but even at this stage the collapse of Rome was not a fait accompli.

The actual collapse of Rome can, according to Oxford historians Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins, be measured more or less exactly from 406, when Germanic invaders crossed the Rhine into Gaul and then Italy. Within 5 decades, the Western Roman Empire was dispossessed of most of its most valuable properties – including Carthage, Britain and most of Spain – and the population of Rome had collapsed by almost 75%.

This may seem like a slightly deterministic attitude. The drive to narrativise history compels us to question: can we really accept Sassanid expansion and civil war as simple influencers? Should we not also examine which Roman policies may have led to those trends achieving the prominence that they did? A fair question, as in its development Rome certainly provided space and encouragement for these trends to develop. The distinction is not to simply allow that “things happen”, however, but to differentiate between events that are the product of a complex system behaving normally (even if they produce outcomes that may appear to be desirable) and events that are the cause or product of a period of systemic collapse.

However fuzzy and ephemeral that distinction may appear, it’s important. States do not drift serenely from Arcadia to Apogee to Armageddon. The complex system that we call “Rome” encountered and subsumed many problematic factors in the course of its development – the threat posed by Hannibal of Carthage, or the transition from Republic to Empire. It survived those, but eventually succumbed to a sudden and catastrophic malfunction. From the perspective of learning from history, then, we can look to the civilisations of our own times – particularly the US – and think more broadly about the signs of impending collapse. There have been occasions when kingdoms have risen, dwindled, and then risen again; but final collapse tends towards the swift and definite.

50 years ago, the CIA drove a small French town mad for a day by spiking its bread with LSD.

In an ideal world, that would be totally made up. Sadly, it is apparently “for realsies”.

The site’s undergone some pretty major cosmetic changes. Opinions?

Hayek and Keynes were undeniably dudes.

I used to do far more of this, but inspired by K-Bax and the incomparable Jen, I felt like it was time to do a quick round-up of January’s reading.

Travels With Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Ryszard Kapuscinski was a gift from my aunt Gaynor. She gave me The Emperor, The Shah of Shahs and The Soccer War when I was a teenager, and I was blown away. Kapuscinski was a fascinating man and a personal hero of mine. It was said of him that he had personally witnessed or reported on no fewer than twenty-seven revolutions and coups, been jailed forty times or more, and had survived four different death sentences. The Emperor narrated the fall of Haile Selassie; Shah of Shahs told of the Islamic Revolution and the last days of the Pahlavi dynasty. Questions have been raised about his depictions of Africa and about the authenticity of some of his details, but one dirty secret of journalism is that the odd fabrication can be excused, especially in the interests of revealing a greater truth. He is not an academic; he was a poorly-educated boy from behind the iron curtain, plucked almost at random and hurled into the world with scarcely any preparation at all. And in the end, when it came to the collapse of empires, Kapuscinski was the twentieth century’s foremost authority, a primary witness of unimpeachable experience.

Travels is more of a memoir, and is thus somewhat unsatisfying. To give this slight tome a hook, Kapuscinski grounds it in the battles of ancient history, focusing his narrative on the copy of Herodotus’ Histories that he was given as upon departing for his first assignment. The subtext is clear;  one gets the uncomfortable feeling that, by overlaying the story of the ancient traveller, narrator and seeker of truths, Kapuscinski – old and dying – was using his last work to try to frame his own epitaph.

If so, this book is affected detrimentally for it. Gone is the piss and vinegar, and the lonely sense of alienation and abandonment, and the sheer uncompromising fear that formed the combustive fuel for his earlier work; this is a mellow, peaceful, reflective book, still beautifully written and gently humorous, and lacking the insight and power of his documentary works. The real star of the show is Herodotus, whose stories of the clashing armies of Persia, Greece, Scythia and Egypt caught the imagination in a way that Kapuscinski’s slightly parochial descriptions of revolutionary China and post-war Khartoum did not.

It’s a good book, but not a great one. If you want to see a truly fitting testament to the talent and verve of one of the world’s greatest reporters, though, then you should read him at the height of his powers – in Iran in 1979, Angola 1975, and Ethiopia as Sellassie’s power erodes beneath him. When you are truly great, your epitaph looks after itself.

Sunnyside by Glen David Gold

Carter Beats the Devil was another firm favourite from my university days. A richly detailed prewar setting mixed with the exoticism of the life of the professional stage musician, infused by the inherently fascinating story of Charles Carter, the book was exciting and enjoyable – an adventure story for the more refined palate.

Sunnyside is exactly the same book, except that it has Charlie Chaplin instead of Charles Carter, and isn’t as good.

Let’s be fairer than that; it may well be that I am glamourising my memory of Carter, and that it’s actually just as accomplished. But if that’s the case then neither of them are very good, and this write-up becomes more complicated, so let’s stick with the facts at hand: Sunnyside is, simply, not all that good.

Its problems are several. Firstly, of the three interweaving storylines, only two actually interweave and only one is really worth your time. The first is the story of Hugo Black, a private in the section of the American army which – for no very justifiable reason – continues fighting World War One well after the Armistice, against the Russians, from their own city of Archangel on the north coast. It’s mostly divorced from the rest of the plot, being almost entirely tacked on, and doesn’t really resolve in anything like a satisfactory manner.

The second concerns Leland Duncan, whose story arbitrarily links in with the third story but which is much more thematically sound. Leland Duncan was a real person; in the first world war, he rescued two dogs in a bombed-out barn in Normandy, one of which would go on to become Rin Tin Tin, movie dog extrodinaire. As a slightly more likeable character, Leland carried his plotline in a way that Hugo simply fails to do.

The third plotline is by far the strongest, and on its own would have made a lighter, but much more compelling, book. It’s the story of Charlie Chaplin as he seeks to avoid the draft, find a mode of working that he can take pride in, and stave off the machinations of a Hollywood aligning itself against him. It includes several well-written passages, including a couple of fascinatingly ornate set pieces. These sections reveal Gold at his most comfortable, and somewhat work to the detriment of the weaker storylines that surround them.

Another problem that besets Gold’s work across all of the plotlines, however, is Gold’s lack of talent at writing for female characters. The females in Sunnyside are jarringly mannequin-esque – and are almost all reduced to romantic interests for the three male leads. It remains disappointing to me that male writers, as a class, seem to be incapable of overcoming this single, basic hurdle to narrative believablility.

Sunnyside is not a total failure. It has some charm, some adrenaline-inspiring passages, and some almost touching moments. But at its heart, it’s still not very good. It’s too long, and the quality is too diluted. Perhaps I’m just too old for this?

Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

African literature is a hard market to excel in. On the one hand, there is no shortage of stories to be told; from the cradle of life and the birth of civilisation, to the war-torn and fractious borders of today, Africa deserves voices who are prepared to represent it in its totality. On the other, it must be acknowledged that the main audience for African literature is, and remains, white Europeans and Americans (not to mention their publishers and editors), who will happily apply and enforce their own – often arbitrary – benchmarks of quality and authenticity. To be an African author who can successfully balance those competing demands is a nontrivial task.

Ngugi wa Thion’o is one such. This latest book gives some hints as to his approach; it is defiantly anti black universalism, proudly feminist, and as celebratory of the individual as it is of the crowd. This is a remarkably warm, human novel, despite being born out of an impossibly sad event – in 2004, Ngũgĩ ended his exile to return to Kenya as part of a month-long tour of East Africa, but during the trip, robbers broke into his apartment: they stole money and a computer, brutalised the professor, and raped his wife.

This is not a novel of recrimnination, however. The Africa of Wizard Of The Crow is an Africa on the cusp of a renaissance, held down only by the infinite venality of its ruling class. With one hand, Thiong’o paints a vivid picture of the benefits brought to African society of the possibilities generated by affordable Indian advanced education, the richness of the intellectual awakening of Africa’s own dissent, and the small ways that populations can, in their own fashions, make dictators accountable. On the other, though, he excoriates the political elites, with their absurd modes of deference to power, their “white-lust”, and their ever-more ornate and elaborate ways of deflecting attention from their true activities.

The story is that of a fictional African nation called Abruria, which exists under the heel of an otherwise-unnamed Ruler. Meanwhile, the heroes of the piece – Kamiti and Nyawira, each foreign-educated, each poor and shiftless – adopt the identity of the Wizard of the Crow. Tales of their magical healing exploits proliferate amid a fog of rumour, mythmaking and political spin.

In the New Yorker, John Updike called it “too aggrieved and grim to be called satire” – but I found it to be full of hope and remarkably free of bitterness. At more than 700 pages, its flaws, of obsessive reiteration and prolixity, arise partly from its bold experimentation with oral forms, and from giving rein to the pathologies of the corrupt at the expense of the more intimate dilemmas of those who challenge them. But the poisonousness of its targets never infects the author’s vision, nor his faith in people’s power to resist. Perhaps that in itself is a triumph.

Samarkand by Amin Maalouf

I will be up-front about this book and freely admit that this is one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read. There’s a degree of inbuilt bias, there – it’s a book about the height of Persian culture and civilisation, and it’s a book about books; my interests rest perfectly in the venn overlap of these themes. But there’s also a lot of objective truth in it, too. This is an excellent book at any speed and deserves to be read.

The story splits into two parts. The first tells the story of Omar Khayyám, the 11th-and-12th Century Persian  mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, physician, poet, mechanic, geographer and musician. Khayyam is a fascinating subject to begin with; a disciple of the great Avicenna, he was a celebrity in the royal and imperial courts of the Islamic world at a time when most Europeans were living in dung huts. He lived his life in the intellectual, cultural and political capitals of the world – Nishapur, Samarkand, Merv – and, in a relationship that forms the centrepiece of this novel,  was part of a set that included two men who influenced their world possibly more than any others. On the one hand was Nizam al-Mulk, the vizir of the Seljuk Empire, author of the still-famous Siyasatnama (The Book of Government), and probably the most powerful single man in the world at that time. On the other, however, was Hassan i-Sabbah, master of Alamut and the founder of what would come to be known as the sect of Assassins.

Not that it matters overmuch, but while this section of the book deals somewhat with fact, it remains heavily fictionalised. There is no actual evidence that Khayyam, al-Mulk and Sabbah ever met, other than an apocryphal story often linked to Jorge Luis Borges; but in this book their relationships are close and personal. The bare bones of the historical narrative are true – the movements of Khayyam can be traced fairly closely, the foundation of Alamut is a matter of record, and the relationship between al-Mulk and his King have, at the very least, the ring of truth – but Maalouf’s skill is in putting flesh on those bones. This book is absurdly successful in this aim. The symbiosis of the fascinating characters and the alluring, evocatively described settings make for gripping reading.

The second part of the book moves to turn-of-the-Century Iran, and somewhat more towards the wholely fictional. We now follow a young American who is on the trail of Khayyam’s Rubaiyaat – the supposed original document in which Khayyam transcribed his quatrains, rather than the speculative and heavily editorialised FitzGerald anthology and translation. This quest lead him into the political imbroglio of 1900s Iran, an era of revolution in which democracy briefly flourished, only to be ruthlessly crushed, in one of Europe’s more shameful moments, by the colonial powers of Britain and Russia. The main characters in this section are somewhat less absorbing than in the first; they’re not bad, and a lesser book (like, say, Sunnyside) would be better for their inclusion, but they lack the draw of Khayyam and his coevals. But the themes remain compelling.

The grand sweep of history has Iran, once again, chafing under the yoke of enforced tutelage. The book speaks with an empassioned voice about the limits of nationalism, religion and fanaticism to drive change, but also stands as a paean to human spirit under oppression. It’s a book about art and culture, and the enjoyment of life’s pleasures. It’s probably one of the best books I’ve ever read.

I read this on the way back home this evening, and it was interesting – a paper by a pair of Zurich-based economists who set out to demonstrate how the decision to become a suicide bomber can be rational, and doesn’t necessarily run counter to economic principles of utility.

The whole thing is worth a read, but its chief interest for me was that it came as a reminder that insanity is to psychoanalysis as dark matter is to physics – something hazy and indistinct used to fill the chasm that exists between what we can measure, define and understand, and what we can observe as extant but not explain. While it may briefly satisfy a theoretical gap, it doesn’t absolve the inquiring mind of the duty to push deeper for more worthy explanations. The most common reasons suggested for suicide terror are madness and hate, but the paper successfully argues that these are minor influences in the decision-making process that leads to an attempted suicide bombing. The paper sets out some of the (many and varied) alternatives, splitting them out into three distinct categories:

• posthumous effects: rise in the social and monetary status of the attackers family; immortality of the attacker; accomplishment of political, religious and social goals.
• announcement effects: admiration and rise in status of the attacker before the attack.
• defection effects: negative consequences arising in case the attacker does not carry out the attack.

Aside from that, the paper also carries the stories of Wafa Idris, the first female Palestinian suicide bomber, and Dareen Abu Aysheh, who detonated a bomb at an Israeli roadblock a month later. Since Idris, the Palestinian territories have become the area second most targeted by female suicide bombers, but at the time, cases such as Idris’ were a rarity. In her book, Army of Roses, Barbara Victor describes Idris as “talented… married and divorced because she was sterile”; of Abu Aysheh it was said by her brother that “[s]he was sure that [she] would be killed for nothing, maybe at a roadblock or when our houses are bombed, and she used to say that it is better to die for a reason”. In the absence of the suicide-bombing industry that would come to utilise the effects outlined above, these two women – and many others besides – used suicide bombing as a way to validate their own lives and their positions within society. Even by strictly utilitarian standards the logic makes pernicious sense.

This is the outrage that underpins the claim – briefly fashionable in the media, now thankfully on the wane, although still prevalent, at least on the British street – that Islam is a violent religion. The simple truth is that any population – even the most stoic, resolutely middle-class British or American WASPs – will, when placed in conditions similar to those under which the Palestinian population has laboured, eventually turn to violent resistance and extremism. The solution to this isn’t bombs, roadblocks and walls, it’s to remove the depredations (which, unerringly, tend to be found in the form of bombs, roadblocks and walls) that drove that population to its extreme in the first place.

Finally, this footnote – of all things – perked my interest. The writers say:

…the terrorist activity level is not modelled as a continuous variable with the maximum level being suicide attack (see eg. [J.P.] Azam [Suicide bombing as inter-generational investment] 2005).

Two thoughts emerge from this – first, why should suicide bombing be modelled on a continuous scale with other acts of terrorism? There’s no evidence to suggest progression – that a sufficiently hardened terrorist will, eventually, commit a suicide attack. And secondly, this leads to the idea that suicide bombing and other forms of terror are strictly non-analogous. To be a terrorist is to be a killer, a murderer, a methodical, calculating – and unsacrificing – designer of plots to cause havoc and death. A suicide bomb, however, is an act of desperation, a statement of self-sacrifice, and ultimately inward-facing. As this paper proves, suicide bombing is, more often than not, a strictly utilitarian decision, which is a somewhat sanitised way of saying that, for the bombers, the benefits of dying outweigh the negatives. Idris and Abu Aysheh would never have considered “conventional” terror, because any act of terror that did not result in their deaths would have missed the point. What horrors must a community suffer to make that course of action a rational one?

Anyway, the paper’s a good read, so I recommend at least glance.

On the tension between Israel-as-Democracy and Israel-as-Ethnocracy.

An interesting question addessed honestly.