Chris Bertram

The blogosphere ecosystem just lost a bit of its biodiversity with John Band’s decision to shut down “Shot by Both Sides”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/ . I’ve alternately enjoyed and been infuriated by John’s blog and he’s certainly been a major irritant to the decent smug and self-satisfied former left and the samizdatistas. Both Daniel and I were regular commenters on John’s site and I’ll miss the mix of friendly repartee and ill-tempered invective there. Still, there’s an upside: John says he’ll be writing more at the excellent “Sharpener”:http://thesharpener.net/ . Go to read him there.

Maria’s “post about America”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/04/myths-about-america/ got me thinking about issues to do with social mobility. Here I want to offer some completely data free speculations, to float a hypothesis for commenters to shoot down if they want to. That hypothesis is that there’s far too much higher education in Western societies and that it constitutes a real barrier to social mobility (and is probably bad for demographics too). To put it in a nutshell: strategies for improving social mobility by getting a broader swathe of the population into higher ed are bound to fail because it is too easy for the middle classes to maintain their grip on access to education. A better strategy would be to take that card out of middle class hands by abandoning the insistence on credentials that aren’t materially relevant to the job at hand.

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Two trade unionists and paramedics from California who found themselves trapped in New Orleans have “written an account of their experiences”:http://www.emsnetwork.org/artman/publish/article_18337.shtml . (“Alternative link”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/sfsocialists/ ) A sample:

bq. By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the “officials” told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the City’s primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. The guards further told us that the City’s only other shelter, the Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, “If we can’t go to the only 2 shelters in the City, what was our alternative?” The guards told us that that was our problem, and no they did not have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile “law enforcement”.

(via “Bitch PhD”:http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/ – who has possibly the best background graphic in the blogosphere.)

OK, I know that there are people who think that we shouldn’t lower ourselves to engage with the likes of Mark Steyn, but I did post a few days ago about “his previously-expressed”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/02/what-they-said-or-social-disasters-iii/ view that “natural” disasters reveal the shortcomings of the societies and political institutions they happen to. So I’ve been looking out for his reponse to Katrina and “in today’s Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/09/06/do0602.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/09/06/ixopinion.html he lets us have it. Sure there’s a lot of Bushite spin about how the local politicians are really the ones to blame. But Steyn finally distills the essence of his view:

bq. Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it’s bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.

So there we have it. The lavish benefits showered on the poor of Louisiana (how the Dutch, French and Germans must envy them!) have eroded their resourcefulness.

Listening to “Bob Harris Country”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/bobharriscountry/playlist.shtml last Thursday, I was really captivated by “Tom Russell”:http://www.tomrussell.com/ talking about Charles Bukowski. I didn’t know anything about Bukowski, except having a vague idea that he might be something to do with the beat poets. Anyway, I was intruiged enough to go out and buy “Post Office”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0876850867/junius-20 , Bukowski’s grittily written account of working for the US post office as a relief postman and then as a clerk whilst being almost permanently drunk, gambling and womanizing.

bq. It began as a mistake.

A great opening line to hook you in, reminiscent of Hammett or Chandler, except this isn’t a crime story. Brilliant muscular writing about snagging with petty authority figures, trudging around delivering letters to lunatics in the pouring rain, mean and manipulative men and women, making money at the track, routine, boredom, cheating the system.

One of the best things I’ve read in a while, I don’t mind saying. Completely non-boring. I’ve now gone out and bought “Ham on Rye”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0876855575/junius-20 , which I’m really looking forward to, as well as a book of poems: “You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0876856830/junius-20 . Comments to further remedy my Bukowski-related ignorance (or my Tom Russell-related ignorance for that matter) would be most welcome.

Via “Radley Balko”:http://www.theagitator.com/, a “rather nice BBC article”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4200056.stm about the crappy statistics behind the claim that the British are engaging in more binge drinking.

In comments to Kieran’s last post Daniel has catalogued “some”:http://www.pardonmyenglish.com/archives/2003/08/yeah_so.html “of”:http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110003888 “the”:http://timblair.spleenville.com/archives/004000.php “things”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=9574 that the right-wing blogosphere said about the French heatwave of 2003. We could add op-eds like Denis Prager’s “Socialism Kills”:http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34372 to the roster, but pride of place should surely go to — who else? — Mark Steyn. Steyn makes the following observation in his “‘Events’ don’t just happen”:http://www.middleeastinfo.org/article3822.html :

bq. One of the most tediously over-venerated bits of political wisdom comes from the late British prime minister Harold MacMillan. It was his characteristically laconic Edwardian response as to what he feared most in the months ahead: “Events, dear boy, events.” It turns up in a gazillion books of quotations and 1,000 Fleet Street columns as if it’s some brilliant insight. It’s not. It’s an urbane banality. Even events come, so to speak, politically predetermined. If, for example, you have powerful public sector unions, you will be at the mercy of potentially crippling strikes. The quasi-Eastern European Britain of the 1970s was brought to a halt by a miners’ strike in a way that would have been impossible in the United States. A strike, of course, is man-made. But the best test of the political character of “events” is supposedly natural phenomena.

He draws the following conclusion about earthquakes in Iran, SARS in China, and the French heatwave (having paused to kick the Canadian welfare state along the way) :

bq. By the standards of the world, Iran, China and France are all wealthy societies. They’re vulnerable to “events” because of their organizational principles – a primitive theocracy which disdains modernity; a modified totalitarianism which thinks you can reap the benefits of capitalism without the institutions of liberty; and a cradle-to-grave welfare state that has so enfeebled its citizens’ ability to act as responsible adults that even your dead mum is just one more inconvenience the government should do something about.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Wow! Just had my first “Google Talk”:http://www.google.com/talk/ conversation. I’m sure most of you are old hands at this voice-over-internet stuff but it was my first time. Set it up, invited some friends and then up pops a mate from Novosibirsk (equipped with headset) for a chat, as if he was just down the road. It works, it’s simple and easy to use. Fantastic.

The NYT has a great story on “how Western-style reality tv is spreading to Iraq”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/international/middleeast/28television.html?ex=1282881600&en=b3af8927364796d4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss .

bq. Reality TV could turn out to be the most durable Western import in Iraq. It has taken root with considerably greater ease than American-style democracy. Since spring 2004, when “Materials and Labor” made its debut, a constellation of reality shows has burst onto TV screens across Iraq. True to the genre, “Materials and Labor” has a simple conceit at its heart – Al Sharqiya, an Iraqi satellite network, offers Baghdad residents the chance to have homes that were destroyed by the war rebuilt at no cost to them.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Don’t miss the “Guardian’s profile of evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1556482,00.html . A nervous breakdown after reading too much Wittgenstein, friendship with Huey Newton of the Black Panthers and the following priceless comment on Richard Dawkins: “My first wife, a wonderful woman, used to refer to Dick as the Selfish Gene, just because of the way he acts. ” Definitely worth a look.

I’m back from a few days in Munich, which I’d recommend as excellent value to visit. (I suspect there’s an oversupply of hotel rooms in advance of next summer’s world cup.) It rained nearly the whole time I was there, but that didn’t stop me from visiting some excellent art galleries: the wonderful “Alte Pinakothek”:http://www.pinakothek.de/alte-pinakothek/ , the goodish “Neue Pinakotek”:http://www.pinakothek.de/neue-pinakothek/ and the sinister and intruiging “Villa Stuck”:http://www.villastuck.de/ . Of course I also managed to consume a large number of excellent sausages and quantities of “Dunkles Weißbier”:http://www.xs4all.nl/~patto1ro/munibrew.htm ! All of which brings me on to a less flattering observation on Germany and the Germans, namely, that the Germans may well be the worst dressed of the major industrial nations. Admittedly, the competition is stiff from us British and from the Americans, but I think the Germans may win on grounds of sheer uniformity. It is possible to sit and watch a string of people of all ages and sizes walk past all dressed as follows: dark denim jeans, dark denim jacket, trainers (sneakers). The monotony is hardly broken by the occasional deviant who leaves the denim jacket behind for a regulation black leather one. Since “Jamie Oliver’s Naked Chef”:http://www.jamieoliver.com/ is now dubbed into German — so much for Chirac joking with Schroeder about British cuisine — I can’t help wondering whether the Germans aren’t in line for some British or American clothing-and-lifestlye fascism TV: “Trinny and Susannah”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/lifestyle/tv_and_radio/what_not_to_wear/index.shtml or “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0358332/ perhaps. But perhaps they already get those shows and are showing a laudable determination to resist.

[For Alex: here’s a link to a picture of Gabriel Cornelius von Max’s “Monkeys as Judges of Art”:http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Gabriel_Cornelius_von_Max%2C_1840-1915%2C_Monkeys_as_Judges_of_Art%2C_1889.jpg from the Neue Pinakothek.]

How fitting that the greatest sporting moment (so far) of the 21st century, and one of the greatest comebacks of all time, should be commemorated “thus”:http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0500liverpoolfc/0100news/tm_objectid=15870300%26method=full%26siteid=50061%26headline=night%2dof%2dtriumph%2dcaptured%2din%2dlego%2d-name_page.html :

bq. WITH a triumphant look on his face, Steven Gerrard can be seen standing next to the Champions League Trophy flanked by his manager, Rafael Benitez.

bq. But look again. For this is not an image from the historic final between Liverpool and AC Milan in Turkey earlier this year – it is a re-creation of the scene made entirely from Lego.

bq. Artists Darren Neave and John Cake – who are known as The Little Artists – have built the work from the toy bricks and it will go on display at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery later this week.

So “we now know”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4157892.stm that the young Brazilian electrician gunned down by police as a suspected suicide bomber was not wearing a heavy jacket, paused to pick up a newspaper on his way to the tube, used his travelcard to pass the barrier, did not run from the police, who did not warn him, found a seat and was restrained before being shot. This, in addition to having been allowed to board a bus earlier.

What did Sir Ian Blair know when “he said that”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1707509,00.html the Metropolitan Police were “playing out of their socks” ? If he knew at that stage that this was an disastrous catalogue of incompetence then he surely ought to resign. And who told the papers, and with what authority “that”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1707779,00.html de Menezes

bq. decided to run away from police, vaulting the ticket barrier and running down to the platform. ?

They ought be identified and made to resign too.

Not being an American, I’ve followed the whole Cindy Sheehan thing from afar. I’d been noting, with growing disgust, the whole slime-and-defend operation mounted by O’Reilly, FrontPageMag, Michele Malkin and points rightwards. Now I see that Christopher Hitchens “has joined in”:http://www.slate.com/id/2124500/fr/nl/ and that his invective against Sheehan has been “endorsed by Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/08/ventriloquizing.html . I guess there are two views on this kind of thing. There’s the view that citizens, whatever their background, are fair game for personal attack as soon as they open their mouths and should be treated in the same hardball manner as any machine politican or professional pundit. And there’s the view that grieving mothers should should be shown consideration, kindness and respect. Geras and Hitchens clearly take the first of these views.

Just over a year ago “I posted”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/26/katharina-blum/ about Schlondorff’s film of “The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073858/ and commented:

bq. What is different today, of course, is the way that the blogosphere serves as an Insta-echo-chamber for tabloid coverage of such stories. One imagines the “Heh”s and “Readthewholethings” that would accompany posts linking to a contemporary Die Zeitung’s online coverage of events.

[There’s good coverage of earlier episodes of the anti-Sheehan slime campaign at the Media Matters site: “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508100009 , “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508110002 and “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508120006 . ]