Some songs

Some songs have a sort of immortality, or the nearest we can get to it, they’re like DNA, they just go back and back. They change the whole time, like water flowing into water, ripples cutting across ripples, but they still have their ancestry, different families, different nations. And no matter how far back they divided from the songs we know, the songs of our own ancestry and childhood, we human beings, as we listen, still recognise those alien vocalisations as song.
Songs are the only sure form of time travel, they take us back to an epoch before history, so far back that we were not yet quite human, we didn't yet have speech.
Robin Dunbar - the name should belong to a singer, and maybe he’s that too, but he’s a Professor of Evolutionary Psychology - speculates* that language did not evolve in the way usually supposed, by a proto-genius pointing at an elk and going “Ug”, and at a horse and going “Ug ug”. That’s a pretty unlikely story of the evolution of human language.
Instead, Dunbar thinks that language evolved from singing - not a romantic notion, there’s statistics and neuroscience in his argument; basically social apes sustain the peace and coherence of the group by mutual grooming; once feeding and sleeping has been done, there are only so many hours for grooming; and as the social group gets bigger, there is just no longer enough time for all the grooming needed to hold the group together. Yet human groups went on growing. What was the binding force that kept them from continually splitting into little apelike bands?Dunbar suggests that singing, way before articulate language, did what grooming had done before; but now the binding force was song; first choric contact calls, but transmuting over millennia, or maybe quite suddenly, over a few sunrises and sunsets, when that first one heard it inside her own head as well as through the ears, looked another in the eyes and repeated it, and so on, for ever, into music. Maybe it’s that distant music we can still hear in today’s song, way down beyond mere language.

I want to work on an opera, most likely a film opera, around the evolution of song and language. Dull? It won’t be. It will be moving, spine tingling, sometimes funny. I do know what I’m doing, I’ve had plays on already, among other places at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith and West Yorkshire playhouse. So I’m looking for a composer of genius, but so far hardly known, maybe totally unknown. If you are such a composer, or know such a composer - not necessarily coming up through the ranks of a school of music, but one who knows what you’re doing - and you want to write an opera, get in touch and we’ll talk about it.

*The Human Story by Robin Dunbar, Faber

That fine man of religion

The the moral and intellectual squalor of the world of politicians, like the banality of evil, is so tedious and repetitive that I had not intended... OK, one more time, and then never again.
The Prime Minister, according to the lead story in the Guardian, is completing his tour of duty as Baroness Thatcher’s second son by trying to reprise the al Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia. In return - it’s like a fairy story - Blair has to do three things. He has to send back a couple of Saudi exiles for torture and beheading - no problem there, unless those fucking (Anthony’s word) judges interfere. He has to call off the Fraud Squad’s investigation into the Saudi/BAE corruption case - the same one which might eventually get round to exposing the Maggie/Mark/Saudi corruption issue; so Anthony will be doing double good there, as long as those fucking (God-loving, Creation Theory supporting Anthony’s word again) judges don’t lay their shrivelled stinking libertarian necks on the line over this one. And, completely trivial, the prime Minister has to make BA start landing in Riyadh once more. Terrorist threats? Tony lands in Riyadh quite a lot, so what’s the problem?
My main puzzle over this is not that Blair should behave in such a way. Not at all. That is Blair, the whole Blair, and nothing but the Blair. The puzzle is that I know decent, and I mean this seriously, good people, the kind of people who will not invest in shares because they don’t believe in capitalism, who still support Blair, or at least support his government, as if the majority of Labour MPs, who keep Blair in power and will no doubt today give him one of those unbelievably demeaning and ridiculous standing ovations - as obscene as were they to shed their clothes, face their idol, and masturbate in unison - as if that fawning rabble were any better than the mere negative of their boss.
The reason these good people, who work hard for Amnesty and believe in Human Rights and Civil Liberty, give for such apparent moral schizophrenia is that this government has put much more money into hospitals, schools and so on than the last government. So they have, but only it seems to fatten them up for private sector profit. That is happening and will continue to happen at an accelerating rate. When it has happened, when we are in the condition of America, Old Labour Blair supporters will say, “We did not understand, because they said they wouldn’t. Patricia Hewitt said she wouldn’t privatise the National Health, so how were we to know that she was lying?”
How indeed?
It is assumed that when Blair leaves Government, the remains of the Labour Party, and perhaps our shores, he will become immensely rich. How is not specified, but both the above ventures should be worth a few tens of millions to that fine man of religion.

The good things

Just looking back over the previous post, it raises the question of, if politicians are a necessary evil, because of the way we human beings are; a necessary evil like religion and police; how come that here in Britain, and everywhere else, there are things, many things, which are good, and admirable, and sometimes downright marvellous, like the Muslim medical doctor who came to lunch last Sunday who had started a school for the profoundly deaf in Mirpur?
And that's the answer. What is good on this planet in the human as opposed to the natural realm is done by people, millions upon millions of us.
Sometimes politicians can act as people. But it's not usual.

Scorched earth

Sometimes when I am standing at the bus stop I think that Tony Blair may turn out to have been one of the most destructive prime ministers of the last hundred years. I don’t think this only at the bus stop but I do think it with particular intensity if the bus I am waiting for is late or absent, because then I think of all that he has not done, transport, appropriate future technology, anything involving thought, energy, insight, hard decisions, rather than piffling, strutting, the easy business of killing people far away or slagging off workers in the public sector.
I do have a car in fact. It’s a car suitable for its purposes, capable, I believe, of more than a hundred and twenty miles an hour and with a fuel consumption, according to the onboard computer, of fifty one miles to the gallon. That’s one of the bad things about buses round here. It would be much cheaper to drive my car the three miles into town and back than take the bus. I know that an economist would say this is not so, but economists, like Tony Blair, don’t live in the same world as you and me. Economists are going on the total cost of the car over the period I own it, and dividing that by the journey into town, and coming out with something ridiculous like £7.20. Whereas I am not in a position to not have the car, and to have never had the car, for and only for the time I am catching the bus into town, and then to have the car again in the evening when I want to go and see You and Me and Everyone we Know at the NMFTP. Either you have a car or you don’t. And as I have one, it's cheaper to pay the fuel cost - 70 p as against £2.30 to £3.00, depending whether you get the fascist lady - and drive into town like all the rest of the twats with big credit cards and those Vauxhall Vectras with all the silver trim on the boot.
But I don’t, I catch the bus:

1. Because I can read the London Review of Books on the bus. I used to find that I spent so much time reading the LRB that I never had time to read the books it reviewed (part of this is that the reviews are often so long and so absorbing that by the time you’ve finished one you’ve more or less read the book anyway.) Now I confine the LRB to the bus. This rationing system is such that LRB-wise I am just turning the corner into this millennium, but that in itself dishes up an ironic take on recent history. Did you know for instance that the Americans first became directly involved in Afghanistan in 1979. They wanted the Russians to invade so they could knock the shit out of them. To bring this about they supported an insurrection against the régime of Hafizullah Amin. The insurrection the Americans supported was triggered by the Afghan central government’s intention that girls should be educated equally with boys. It was a fundamentalist Islamic insurrection against sex equality in education that the Americans supported.
That was a cracking idea, was it not?
And that's the kind of thing I think about in connection with Tony Blair when I am standing at the bus stop and the bus for which I am going to spend £2.30 to get to town and back (unless I get the fascist lady) fails to come.
2. Then I don’t have to park the car anywhere. (Still on reasons why I take the bus). I get off in the middle of town. I get back on again near where I happen to end up.
3. Public transport is a good thing, not only environmentally but socially. It would stop twats of both sexes in Vectras, Tigras, Volvos, BMWs, Mercedes &c retaining their totally irrational and unjustified sense of self esteem. The admiration for the modern car and metonymically for its driver is a form of pornography, a specious appetite feeding on itself, impossible to satisfy.

The reason that Tony Blair does bad things (almost exclusively) and fails to do good things (almost exclusively) is that he taps into the kind of irrational self esteem that not just the twats in cars (in a condition of almost religious exceptionalism, I am not a twat when I am in a car) suffer in excess, but into the even more turbo-charged self-esteem of “businessmen”, off-the-scale corporation bosses, major criminals, and all the other alpha people to whom Toady is a creepy-crawly groupie. Listen to him talking to Murdoch about the BBC’s coverage of New Orleans. Just how sick should any politician make you feel?
This was going to be about how Tony Blair’s withdrawal strategy from Iraq may be presenting him with some problems, but his withdrawal strategy from British politics looks simple and effective. Scorched earth. Provided it’s done thoroughly it never fails.

God - the placebo effect

We are sometimes told, even by non-religious people, that religious people are better people than non-religious people. What? The Pope, Tony Blair, Mullah Omar? I don’t think so. However, when extensive and well set-up studies indicate that members of an organised religion, any organised religion, tend to be healthier, happier, longer lived and richer than we poor atheistical sods, then we may have to accept that that is true. But what to do about it? It’s another of those placebo effect problems. Suppose I have a searing pain in my left leg. I go to the doctor and she prescribes a new wonder drug specifically designed to remove not only the symptom but the cause of a searing pain precisely and only, by lucky chance, in the left leg. I take the capsules and my ill is, OK not cured, but considerably alleviated. I ring the doctor and say, “That worked,” because I believe in scientific medicine and the necessity of feedback. She says, “Interesting... because in fact that was just saline solution in a brightly coloured capsule.”
Next week the pain returns. What do I do? I now know that the contents of the capsules cannot physically connect to my pain. They may have gone some way towards curing it when I believed they were the newest wonder drug, but now I know they’re salt and water, they’re not going to work. I may half believe that they’re half going to work this time because they worked the last time, but this will be a very attenuated placebo effect, and will probably be extinguished by scepticism and a growing sensation not unlike agony in the left leg.
The placebo problem applies equally to religion. Suppose, with the aim of upping the health, wealth and longevity counts by a significant factor, I decide to turn a blind eye to the woman-murdering, child abusing and genocidal tendencies, and join an organised religion. There is still the problem of belief. In practice I’m enough of a sceptic to know that you only have to fake the belief to get the benefits of social networking and support which a religion provides, but that’s not enough. I want the whole package. I want the the buoyant sense of self-worth and well-being that can be derived from the knowledge that I am truly and eternally significant in the great scheme of things; and this requires true, not feigned belief.
How do people do that, believe truly and sincerely?
It is a commonly held view among Muslims that the fatwa was put upon Salman Rushdie’s *Satanic Verses* because the novel suggests that the Prophet went with prostitutes. But that is only a blind, a safe explanation for the unlettered rabble. What was really troubling about Satanic Verses was that in it the Prophet’s amanuensis started making little changes as he wrote down the Revealed Word; first just like changing an “a” to a “the”, but a little more adventurous each time as he established that the Prophet didn’t notice the errors when he read it back.
This suggestion was Rushdie’s crime. All great religions are finally dependent on the word of God, as revealed by his prophets (and the occasional angel), and if the word is corrupt in a detail, then it is corrupt in all, for God cannot be Wrong (Clerics try to get round this by saying it’s not God who’s wrong, it’s human understanding of his intentions, but that’s a hopeless fallback position, because then they personally have to claim exemption from this faulty understanding, and if they’re talking the same old bollocks, we’re unlikely to believe them). In the first centuries of Christianity men and women of faith fought out at great length, by burning each other at the stake, what the Word of God had been, precisely and exactly, and they had a finalising ratification (oh, the vanity of human aspirations) at the Conference of Nicea in the year 325 of the Christian calendar. Thence the Creed.
Maker of Heaven and Earth?
Bollocks is a strong word with which to characterise all religious belief, but really! If anybody ever reads this post, and they are religious, let them give me an example of a religious belief that is not claptrap and tommyrot - that is, something about God and His sphere of operations, not about humanity; “Thou shalt not kill” is not a religious belief.
See, it’s a weakness of God (He’s like Tony Blair in this, unsurprisingly) that He has powerful notions about everything, and thinks He has the moral and political authority to impose his notions upon everybody else. At the moment He’s very interested in prawns (God, not Blair). He’s still thinking about it, but He’s more or less decided that Muslims can eat prawns if they are coastal dwellers, where prawns are fish; but not if the live far from the sea, where prawns are insects. There are two worrying things about this. The obvious is that with all the ills of humanity God should be working on the ethics of prawn consumption. But the other is that the Muslim clerics who discuss this weighty topic don’t recognise that there is something slightly odd, given the well-inland provenance of their Prophet, about devoting so much time to the dietary laws of a people who dwelt near the coast of Palestine some way to the north and several thousand years ago.
And this burst of activity among those who became the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims in Western Asia raises other questions about God. There’s a cracking review of *God: An Itinerary* by Régie Debray in the London Review of Books 17/02/2005, and I quote Brian Rotman the reviewer:

“But first, He who started it all: why did the Eternal One arrive so late? What was He doing during the 1.4 million years since the Acheulean carvings in Africa? Or the half million years since humans harnessed fire? Or the stretch of time since the cave paintings? Or more immediately, why didn’t he appear earlier in the four thousand years of human religious practices - of burying the dead and believing in an afterlife? Why did he wait for Abraham to make His covenant with (a portion of) mankind?”

Rotnam finishes his review with an assessment of the present state of play of the most lethal Religion of the Book:

“In thrall to the Bible and convinced once again of its Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism continues to remake the world in its own image. The Jewish claim to be chosen by Yaweh, appropriated by the Puritan founders, ends up as America’s inevitable - God-ordained - global mission.”

Life, with added health, wealth and longevity? Not worth the price.

Heave

I don't notice many adverts, but there's one of those romantic autumn holidays in the Highlands sequence - sailing boat across the stormy loch, skirling muzak, moody gazing over hills and glens - which must be set to become a classic. I can't describe the foreground precisely because that's not where my attention is; it's something like a girl in a Jaeger-style woolly hat, tendrils of dark gold hair stirring in the gentle Highland breeze, gazing rightwards, probably moodily and romantically, out over the water with just the intimation of dusk or more properly gloaming, anticipating peat fires, whisky in fine cut lead crystal and maybe a touch of the most soigné carnality after the salmon and grouse, when her boy friend, in the distance beyond her profile, walks towards the waterside and with perfect timing, seconds before the end, bends double and throws up all over the pristine Scottish pebbles.

Last Post

Actually, forget that. I think we'll be able to go on glorifying terrorism as we always have. I hadn't spotted that Charlie had wheeled out the Blunkett gambit; you know, where you produce four clauses which march in step with New Labour post-democratic authoritarianism with such military precision that the Conservatives can do nothing but applaud, and then a fifth too preposterous even for that angenda, which you can then drop with much trumpeting about public debate and listening to the electorate.

Glory to terrorism

OK chaps, last chance to glorify terrorism.

Glory, glory, in no particular order, to:

General Augusto Pinochet of Chile
Islam Karimov of Afghanistan
President George W Bush of the US of A
President Ariel Sharon of Israel
Osama bin Laden of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe
Prime Minister Anthony Blair of Great Britain
Mohammad Sidique Khan of West Yorkshire
President Vladimir Putin of the USSR
That Christian git who wanted to murder President Chavez
Radovan Karadic and Vlatko Mladic of Serbia

Please add to the list. Candidates for glorification must conform to the definition of terrorism proffered by the United States' ambassador to the United Nations:
“We affirm that the targeting and deliberate killing by terrorists of civilians and noncombatants cannot be justified or legitimized by any cause or grievance. And we declare that any such action intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such an act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population or to compel a government or an international organization to carry out or to abstain from any act, cannot be justified on any grounds and constitutes an act of terrorism." [lifted from A big stick and a small carrot].

Kevin Pieterson

No, wrong, wrong, wrong, I never said Kevin Pieterson looked like Jeremy Clarkson. A man who can wear a skunk on his head while scoring a century for England, on a knife edge, when all about him are losing theirs, is nothing like a... What I actually said was Clark Kent.

Extradition

Kali Mountford MP
House of Commons
London SW1A 0AA
10 September 2005

Dear Kali Mountford,
New Labour’s non-reciprocal extradition agreement with US
Thank you for your letter of 08 September 2005.
I note that the non-reciprocal agreement with the US to extradite UK citizens to the US on the say-so of a US court is dealt with by the Minister of Trade and Foreign Affairs.
I’m afraid that whatever his reply, it may be inappropriate to our new circumstances. Then, we regarded all things American, their foreign policy, their homeland policy, their prison system, their educational system, with stars in our New Labour eyes.
Now we see little but corpses, corpses in the streets of New Orleans, corpses in Iraq, maybe soon corpses at Guantanamo Bay.
Iraq - Haliburton. New Orleans - Haliburton.
However, I look forward to Ian Pearson’s reply. Maybe it will after all dispel my doubts.
Yours sincerely,

How can love last?

Oh my sisters and my brothers, is it choice which makes us unhappy. Like Imelda Marcos with her countless shoes, too much becomes an illness. And so with our choice of partners, there is so much gorgeousness out there. But each one in some way flawed, or wrongly specified, or underperforming on some parameter, or liable to sudden malfunction, or in breach of the Trades Descriptions Act for designated soul-mates, or scuffed or damaged, or too loud, or too faint; or just something you can’t quite put your finger on.
Seems it wasn’t always like this.
Lawrence Stone in Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 puts happy, or at least tolerable, marriage-type partnership during most of that time down to just two things: one, late marriage; two, the early death of at least one of the partners, usually the man (Stone confines himself to heterosexual relationships, we needn't)
Romeo and Juliet mislead us. Most men couldn’t afford to get married until their thirties. And then they mostly died in their forties. Their widows tended to be younger and still bouncy. And merrier - there were a lot of unattached young men around.
Stone reckons ten years or so was about as long as a couple had to be able to stand each other before death superseded the need for marriage guidance.
So how to account for a long and apparently happy partnerships today, for Golden Weddings and those Darby and Joans in their nineties, aliens to our world, but still apparently happy in theirs?
At a party back a while there were a few of us in the kitchen, discussing big rows we’d had, the depths of marital or quasi-marital excess and violence, saucepans so badly dented they needed replacing, doors requiring serious carpentry, the thrown egg still on the wall a week later because neither launcher nor target saw it as their role to remove it - how angry must someone be guilty of making you before you throw an egg at them?
Among all this battle-scarred rabble was one sweet faced angelic girl who said, “Me and John have never had an argument.”
“What?” We said it in unison, and a little too loudly.
“There never seemed anything important enough to argue about.”
Within three weeks, with hardly a word no doubt, the angel and John had parted for good.
If you are together for a long time, and you are not zombies, then this is probably going to happen. You are each going to grow apart from the other, and after seven or twelve or however many years, you are going to really fall out, and go your different ways, and hate each other. And then with luck you are going to talk, and go on talking, and gradually discover the person that the other has become, and it will all be very painful, but if you are lucky you will like, maybe love the person the other person has become, and vice versa, even maybe love them better than the person you liked or loved all that time ago, if you can quite remember who they were.
And that is maybe how it works; a bit like an arranged marriage, only not at the beginning, at half time, or the first interval. I’m not advocating arranged marriages, though I have relatives and friends for whom they have worked very well. But I’ve never quite believed the slogan “What people want is more choice” either.

Freedom and Democracy

Maybe some of the many millions of readers who make their daily pilgrimage to this blog have been puzzled by President George W Bush’s Freem Moxy. Courtesy cartoonist Steve Bell, Freem Moxy is the way Bush's pronunciation, and his understanding, of Freedom and Democracy sound to English ears. Thus Freem Hain Turrs, or merely Hairs of Freem; and their opposite, Frensa Freem (the British New Labour party).
Had an excellent weekend with Nephew and wife from Seattle (see Injun Country below). They were stunned by and admiring of the depth and energy of the BBC’s coverage of the New Orleans catastrophe, human and geographical, of the reporters’ horror and anger at the suffering of those left behind, at the callous, arrogant and cowardly behaviour of the US authorities - “just as if they were in Iraq” - which would be intolerable in a Western European country. Then we went to Fox news, which showed only water and fires, no human beings at all. Then to UK CNN, which was introducing a statement by the Mayor of New Orleans - one we’d already heard on the BBC. The Mayor was angry, critical, and black. After about thirty seconds there was a cut back to the studio and a disturbed looking CNN anchor woman talking silently into her mike. Then she said “We’re having to leave that story early,” and went on to something less newsworthy. In the USA itself this kind of censorship is apparently more smoothly done behind the scenes. Our American relations (Seattle is a city that dissents from the Cheyney agenda) were ectstatic at these revelations of the way Freem Moxy works.
They were ashamed of Bush and all that he stands for. We had to keep saying no, no, don’t worry. We understand. We have Blair.

Mohammad Sidique Khan

Mohammad Sidique Khan’s video performance exemplifies the downside of religion. People of religious conviction, whatever it is, will deny this, they’ll say, no, that is only a perversion of religion; the true religion (whatever it is) has no part in these extreme, outrageous and criminal beliefs and acts. But clearly murder and partial genocide are as much a part of any effective religion as love and charity. Not that the religious would want them to be, but that they are. All you have to do is look at the corpse count racked up by any major religion.
Robin Dunbar in The Human Story ascribes four functions to religion:

Providing coherence for the world in which we live
Allowing us to feel we have greater control
Enforcing rules about how we should behave in society
Allowing a minority to exert political control over the community

All this is arguable, but it looks accurate to me. And from this it is pretty clear that religion and politics are difficult to distinguish once you leave out the bollocks. Tony Blair, George Bush, Mohammad Sidique Khan, Arial Sharon all sing from the same hymn sheet. It’s just that Sidique, having no armies or missiles, didn’t have the technology to kill nearly so many people.

So it’s worth looking at what Mohammad Sidique Khan was saying, for it’s major logical flaw.
He said, in a nutshell, that “you” - meaning me - are responsible for the death of “my” - meaning Sidique Khan’s - brothers and sisters, his co-religionists. And therefore "I" am going to kill "you" (clearly not the actual me in this case, or not yet, because I am alive and listening to Sidique’s video). "I" am going to go on killing "you" (clearly not I, Sidique Khan, since he is now dead, but the “I” of what he pretends to be true Islam) until "you" stop killing my brothers and my sisters.
It sounds logical. And yet there flows directly from it the unforgivable stupidity of killing not only the infidel, but Sidique's own “brothers and sisters”. Whatever his apologia for his acts, they in practice constitute, not glory, but the hysterical fascism of the adolescent male in emotional extremis.
And yet, by all accounts, Sidique Khan, except for this one deviation - and clearly it was a deviation which built over the years - was an admirable, kind, generous, well liked man.
The logical flaw in his argument, compared to what he did, is trivial, and I’m sure if it had been pointed out to him it would have made no difference. But it is this.
If I am responsible for Blair’s invasion of Iraq, for Blair’s enthusiasm for the policies and person of George W Bush, by extension for the extremes of Israeli policy - and I am - how does that responsibility come about? It comes about because I was born into an electoral democracy (the severe limitations on our elective dictatorship is another question.) You cannot choose where and when you were born. You cannot choose who you are. Sidique acknowledges this in his unconditional assertion that I am responsible.
And where was Sidique born? West Yorkshire. By his own argument he is as responsible as I am. And his own argument is correct.
And this is where the fascism of religion comes in, the legitimising of racial or religious exceptionalism and a higher calling which overrides all other ethical codes, charity, love, neighbourliness, which overrides every human virtue. And all effective religions share this fascism as a central component, a “special power”.
So Mohammad Sidique Khan, this kind and admirable man, appealed to this “special power” in order to justify his project - like Blair, like Bush, like Sharon, like the House of Saud, like bin Laden, like the Pope, like all true religionists. Mohammad Sidique Khan is no better than the rest of them.

Lovely daughter

Meanings change. Fathers have “lovely daughters”. They didn’t always. They used to have just daughters. Then one or two alpha males, celebs, business-men, started having lovely daughters, especially when they were talking to the media. It was about the time recovered memory syndrome was rampant. “My lovely daughter” sounded a bit creepy. But the fraudulence of recovered memory syndrome was exposed, and lovely daughters survived and flourished. Now they are standard. In fact it’s a bit churlish to refer to just “my daughter”. What’s wrong with her? If you talk about “my daughter” you are damning her with faint praise, even condemning her to unconditional unloveliness. So it becomes a cliché, a pseudo-tautology. And this is mylullydaughter. M’l’l’ydorer.
It’ll be like President George W Bush’s “Freem Moxy” [which apparently means spectacular Yankee-style corruption, slaughter in the streets, and the destruction of public services]; a construction whose origins are lost. Lovely daughter. L’l’ydorer. Ludora. Ludra. Meet my ludra. He has three ludras.
I suppose there’s nothing wrong with ludras. They’re better than Freem Moxy.