Chris Bertram

I m pleased to see that “Norman Geras is linking”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/02/going_over_yond.html to “an interesting essay by David Carithers on Steve Earle”:http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2005/carithers.htm . The essay links Earle to the pragmatic tradition, and especially to Emerson. Though the essay verges on the pretentious, it is certainly worth a look. As Geras mentions:

bq. Section II of Carithers’ essay is about Earle’s opposition to the death penalty. He discusses two of his powerful songs on the subject, ‘Billy Austin’ from The Hard Way, and ‘Over Yonder (Jonathan’s Song)’ from Transcendental Blues.

As Geras doesn’t mention, section III of the essay is about John Walker’s Blues, Earle’s disturbing meditation on the fate of the 19-year-old John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban”. If I recall correctly, Earle’s own son was the same age at the time, a fact that gave Earle a different perpective on the calls for vengeance and retribution that were widespread after Lindh’s capture.

It seems that even his familiars must be careful when supping with the devil.

Of whom was this said? And where?

bq. Beneath his leftist pseudo-sophistication X is a manipulative intellectually dishonest person, … and his like masters required to guide the rest of us poor great unwashed to achieve their utopia dream – which is a documented nightmare to date built on hundreds of millions of human corpses.

and

bq. typical Fabian Society International Socialist that will never say a bad word against a fellow leftist such as Noam Chompsky [sic].

Details via “Matthew”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2006/02/oliver-kamm-interview.html .

Over at 2 Blowhards, Michael Blowhard has “a nice piece about Jane Jacobs”:http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/002592.html . It was kind of hard to stop myself writing ‘about “the great” Jane Jacobs” in that last sentence”! There’s a useful set of links too. I’m kind of surprised by some of them. I know that Jacobs defies left–right categorization, but Jacobs as an unwitting reproducer of “Austrian” economics? That’s hard to square with her somewhat nutty views on import substitution. It illustrates something, though: that people are so taken with Jacobs’s brilliance in “The Death and Life …” that they really really want to believe that she simply must fit into their own worldview somehow. Usually, she doesn’t. She’s just too angular to fit neatly into anyone’s system or ideology.

Ken Macleod has “a sharp and interesting post”:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/ on what he calls “the liberalism of fools”:

bq. If anti-semitism is, in an important aspect, a rage against the machine, against progress, is there an opposite rage: a rage against reaction, a fury at the recalcitrance of the concrete and the stubbornness of tradition? A rage against what is sacred and refuses to be profaned, against what is solid and doesn’t melt into air, against ways of life that resist commodification, against use-value that refuses to become exchange-value? And might that rage too need a fantasy object?

Ken discusses the way in which the Catholic church met that need in the 1930s.

After that Superbowl nonsense, time to get back to the sports that really matter! I just watched the “second semi”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/africa/4683448.stm in the “African Nations Cup”:http://www.egypt2006.com.eg/english/ . The referee bottled it just before time when Senegal had a stone-wall penalty denied, so Egypt are through. Will Mido play in the final after squaring up to the Egyptian coach after being substituted and then looking a prat as his replacement put the ball in the back of the net? Who knows? My money’s on Egypt in the final, since they’re the home nation, but with Drogba upfront Ivory Coast will always carry a threat. Predictions?

And while we’re about it, the “6 Nations”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/international/default.stm is wide open after favourites France were turned over by Scotland at Murrayfield. Italy look a lot better than usual too and gave Ireland a scare. So my guess: a grand slam for England with last year’s winners Wales competing with the Italians for the wooden spoon.

UPDATE: I see that Mido has been “chucked out of the Egyptian squad”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/africa/4692714.stm .

I’m just going to reproduce this, which I found at “Lenin’s Tomb”:http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/02/charming.html . “John Derbyshire at the the Corner”:http://corner.nationalreview.com/06_01_29_corner-archive.asp#089253 wrote the following:

bq. In between our last two posts I went to Drudge to see what was happening in the world. The lead story was about a ship disaster in the Red Sea. From the headline picture, it looked like a cruise ship. I therefore assumed that some people very much like the Americans I went cruising with last year were the victims. I went to the news story. A couple of sentences in, I learned that the ship was in fact a ferry, the victims all Egyptians. I lost interest at once, and stopped reading. I don’t care about Egyptians.

Compassionate conservatism anyone?

I’m offended. Those people, by their actions, have demonstrated the essentially corrupt nature of their society and culture. Their behaviour, which all right-minded people should be offended by, should be universally condemned. If anything shows that we are right and they are wrong, this is it. And I call upon all of those who agree with me to take action, while there is still time. To those who say that our side has also erred, I agree: there have been errors of judgement. But if anything our mistake has been to do too little and too late. We now need to wake up and respond to the danger that confronts us. In any case, to suggest that what we have done bears comparison with what they have done is itself deeply offensive and such sentiments betray the inner corruption of those who utter them. Some principles are absolute and this is one of them. Some have suggested that it is hypocritical of me to take offence at what those people have done whilst ignoring or excusing what some other people have done. Such critics thereby reveal their own inability to distinguish between those people and the other people (who have surely suffered enough and deserve a break). Others have intimated that I spend my time trawling the internet looking for obscure TV clips and articles in foreign languages to be offended by. Frankly, I find such comment offensive: the price of what we hold sacred is eternal vigilance and someone has to take on the responsibility of telling our people about the grave danger they face from those people.

Over at the “Spectator website”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/index.thtml , the following text is currently being displayed in their Spectator Live! section below a reproduction of one of the cartoons.

bq. European newspapers reprint Muhammad “bomb turban” cartoon, but as European populations die and Muslim populations grow, and as more and more European students are taught Foucault and “literary critical theory”, the balance of power shifts every day….

They’ll be attacking entartete Kunst for sapping the cultural vitality of the race next.

I’m puzzled by some of the reaction to the Jyllands-Posten affair. In free speech debates over the last few years I’ve often encountered “so-called libertarians”:http://junius.blogspot.com/2002_07_07_junius_archive.html#78784004 who argue that speech ought to be absolutely protected from state interference but that private individuals may legitimately do what they like when it comes to sacking people whose views they disagree with or boycotting products. That isn’t the way I see things, but it is hard to see how someone running that line can object to a private company sacking an editor for reprinting the cartoons or to Muslims boycotting Danish goods in protest. Of course, not everyone takes the view that the state should keep out of speech. Norman Geras, for example, “recently linked”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/06/criticism_not_n.html (I can only assume approvingly) to a report of a court decision in France which condemned the publisher of Le Monde for “racist defamation” against the Jewish people, an article that goes on to condemn the Western media quite generally for anti-semitic representations of Israel, including in cartoons depicting Ariel Sharon and described the court decision as “a major landmark”. Yesterday Geras linked to a piece approving of France Soir’s action, his blog headine being “France Soir takes a stand”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/02/france_soir_tak.html . I take it, then, that Geras would disapprove of any similar court decision against France Soir. No doubt those wishing to distinguish the cases would claim that cartoons of Sharon eating babies are racist but those depicting Muslims as ignorant towel-heads and suicide bombers are merely engaged in the legitimate criticism of ideas: the images may looke like they come from Julius Streicher but the motive comes from Voltaire … or something like that.

So what does Chris think, you ask? Well I was mildly heartened by the recent defeat of the UK government’s proposed law on religious hatred. Only mildly though, because it is obvious that racists in the West (such as the BNP in Britain) are using “Muslim” as a code under which to attack minorities in ways that don’t fall foul of laws against the promotion of racial hatred. When the assorted pundits and TV comedians who complained about government plans to outlaw satire begin to take _that_ seriously, I’ll start to take them seriously. But I’d certainly support a law that could reliably catch the racists but spare the satirists, _The Satanic Verses_, _Jerry Springer the Opera_ &c. That is, I think I’m in pretty much the same space as Daniel in” comments to a post”:http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasure/2006/01/culture_strike.html over at the excellent “Blood and Treasure”:http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasure/ .

Blegging time, though I’m giving too. I’ve got to give a talk about Mozart to my German class tomorrow (learning lots of new words like Pokeninfektion!) and I’d like to play them some musical clips. It ups the entertainment value and it gives me time to think about what I’m going to say next. So I’m open to suggestions for representative short extracts. Currently I have in mind the opening to the C-major string quartet (K465), the Adagio from the C-minor piano sonata, the overture to Figaro, der Hölle Rache from Zauberflöte and maybe the Dies Irae from the Requiem. But that’s all off the top of my head. Oh, and I said I’m giving. Well I’ve been trawling the net for German-language 250th anniversary podcasts and the most entertaining I’ve found is this “30-minute interview with biographer Dorothea Leonhart”:http://www.podster.de/episode/53188 on Südwestrundfunk. Enjoy.

I watched Peter Ackroyd’s BBC programme on the “Romantic poets”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/ yesterday and was rather taken with the account of John Clare. So I was googling around trying to find out more and, via the “Wikipedia entry”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clare , happened upon the extraordinary fact that much of Clare’s work is subject to a copyright dispute. Since Clare died in 1864 I wondered how this could be so. There’s a page of links on the whole dispute at the “John Clare page”, but the in-a-nutshell version is in “a Guardian article by John Goodridge”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4042964,00.html :

bq. Under the 1842 Copyright Act which was in force at Clare’s death, in the case of published works copyright endured for 42 years after publication or seven years after the author’s death, whichever was later. Thus three of Clare’s published volumes came out of copyright in 1871, and the fourth in 1877. For unpublished works, however, copyright was a very different matter. Under common law, an author, or after his death his personal representative, retained perpetual control over his work as long as it remained unpublished. This is particularly important in Clare’s case, since his four published volumes contained only about 10% of his total output – some 300 poems out of more than 3,000 he wrote in his lifetime. This common law “perpetual” loophole for unpublished material was written into the Copyright Acts of 1911 and 1956, and finally replaced in the 1988 Act with a finite, 50-year term of protection (made potentially extendable by a further 25 years in a 1996 Act). In Clare’s case, this could extend the copyright claim well into the middle of this century ….

There’s more, including the tenuous chain by which the copyright was passed on and the more recent purchase of the rights for £1 by a US academic.

Oh dear oh dear. The last person who ought to be educating the world on the Internationale is Jane Galt who gives “a rather literal translation of the French words over at Asymmetrical Information”:http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005684.html . The first time I sang the Internationale was on Mayday 1978 in Paris when I joined the UNEF contingent on the traditional march. The last time I heard it was when a colleague’s mobile phone rang. She told me, embarrassed, that she’d spent hours programming the tune in and that it had then gone off during a meeting with top university administrators, none of whom would have recognized it but for a BBC documentary about the end of the Soviet Union on the box the night before.

One important thing to get across to an Anglophone audience is that the British and American words are different (what do Australians and Canadians sing, btw?). “Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationale has a reasonably accurate version of the British words but starts:

bq. Arise, ye workers from your slumber,
Arise, ye prisoners of want.

The version I learnt had “starvelings” for “workers”, “criminals” for “prisoners” (though I remember that being controversial) and, later in the verse, “conditions” for “tradition”.

Having picked up the the anthem by listening to my comrades, I also misunderstood the next two lines for my first year or so of singing it in English. These are are:

bq. For reason in revolt now thunders,
and at last ends the age of cant!

Yes, you’ve guessed it … I imagined this was a reference to the supersession of Kantianism by the Hegelian dialectic. “… at last ends the age of Kant!” Makes sense, doesn’t it?

A few days back Dsquared and I were involved in “a comment thread over at Stumbling and Mumbling”:http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2006/01/merle_haggard_a.html about Merle Haggard’s politics. That post had been prompted by Chris Willman’s “Rednecks and Bluenecks”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1595580174/junius-20 , and that’s also the subject of a “Jesse Walker review in Reason Online”:http://www.reason.com/links/links011606.shtml which is worth a read. I’ve been meaning to get hold of Willman’s book and this is a further spur to me doing so.

“Mad” Melanie Phillips continues to be a source of amusement. Since she’s never slow to lecture her readers on the evils of ganja, I guess it can’t be anything she’s smoking, but last week she treated us all to “a stern lecture”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles/archives/001557.html on the “tree-hugging” scientists behind the global-warming “scam” (as she calls it). It is worth reading right down to the end where the on-line text carries a correction:

bq. The version of this article published in The Daily Mail said in error that water vapour formed most of the atmosphere.

It reminded me a little of “Mr Pooter”:http://www.authorama.com/diary-of-a-nobody-13.html :

bq. I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat.