Fog in Channel, Continent cut off

There are some interesting figures from a new poll on attitudes to the European Union in four different countries (Germany, France, Poland and UK).

The survey of more than 2,000 people in the UK and over 1,000 in each of Germany, France and Poland, shows a clear parting of the ways. Just 26% of Britons think the EU is, overall, a "good thing" compared with 62% of Poles, 55% of Germans and 36% of French.

Accompanying this anti-EU feeling is an ingrained cultural resistance to the European ideal and the very idea of being European. Just 14% of UK people polled say they regard themselves as European, compared with 48% of Poles, 39% of Germans and 34% of French. Whereas most people in Germany, France and Poland name a fellow European country as their closest ally, the British name fellow English-speaking nations: 33% named the US, 31% Australia and 23% Canada.

Equally striking, in the context of Cameron's attempts to negotiate a new deal for the UK, attitudes to British membership are pretty negative among our partners, who will have to sign off on any future special terms of membership we may want to agree. When asked whether the UK is a positive force in the EU, just 9% of Germans, 15% of French and 33% of Poles say it is. Opposition to giving the UK special membership terms is strongest in Germany, where 44% are against and 16% in favour, with 26% of the French in favour and 36% against. In Poland there is more support, with 38% in favour and 23% against.

While the article in which these number are offered emphasises the apparently growing 'gulf' between the attitudes of Britons and those of their continental neighbours, arguably the most surprising result is the low level of French support for the EU and self-identification as 'European'.

The French also seem more positively disposed toward the British (at least with regard to questions related to the EU) than the Germans are. 

I wouldn't have expected that.

Continental flavour

Run across in a search for information on, of all things, an execution (click for larger image):

The Times, 17 December 1959, p. 4.

I'm too young to remember such days, but was it ever that easy to be so effortlessly cool?

I have my doubts.

For you trivia fans: Wikipedia tells us that 'Noilly Prat' was the name that T.S. Eliot gave to his cat.

I feel I have done my educational duty for the day.

'Something is better than nothing'

While watching last night's second leaders' debate (in all its digital wide-screen glory, as the house where I stay when in London is appropriately decked-out for this telly-obsessed culture), I was reminded of an essay that I had coincidentally read earlier this week.

I'd found a sharply reduced copy of Tony Judt's book Reappraisals (at the browseworthy Waterstone's on Gower Street....a cheap paperback is also available, I noticed today, at the also wonderful Judd Books) which appealed to me immediately, as I'm working my way (slowly) through his excellent Postwar.

The first essay that caught my eye (because I'm interested in this kind of issue) was entitled 'The Good Society: Europe vs. America', a review (originally published in the NY Review of Books) of books by Jeremy Rifkin, T.R. Reid and Timothy Garton Ash on the European Union.

It's a nicely balanced examination of 'Europe' in the sense of the -- alternatively inspiring and exasperating -- supra-national political entity that has emerged over the last half century (and it presages themes picked up on by Judt more recently).

I thought of it last night because of the apparent perception that Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg faces a problem for being a bit too Europhile.

(Not that the EU is uncomplicatedly or wildly popular in other European countries, but in Britain opposition to it takes on a special quality.)

Judt is clearly positively disposed toward the EU, but one of the things I liked about his review was his sober scepticism towards the more high-flown claims for the EU's potential, especially Rifkin's description of Europe as 'a giant freewheeling experimental laboratory for rethinking the human condition....':

These claims are absurd. The European Union is what it is: the largely unintended product of decades of negotiations by Western European politicians seeking to uphold and advance their national and sectoral interests. That's part of its problem: It is a compromise on a continental scale, designed by literally hundreds of committees.

Actually this makes the EU more interesting and in some ways more impressive than if it merely incarnated some uncontentious utopian blueprint. In the same vein, it seems silly to write, as Rifkin does, about the awfulness of American mediocrity without acknowledging Europe's own eyesores. This is a man who has never stared upon the urban brutalism of Sarcelles, a postwar dormitory town north of Paris; who has not died a little in Milton Keynes; who has avoided the outer suburbs of Modern Milan.

Having spent nearly a decade seeing both some of the highs and lows of my adopted home-continent -- and having 'died a little in Milton Keynes' on a regular basis -- I can appreciate Judt's point here.

Nonetheless, Judt expresses eloquently why -- for all its occasional frustrations and absurdities -- the EU is far more worthwhile than it is often perceived to be, explaining why, if it can manage to 'speak with a single voice in international affairs, the EU will wield a lot of power':

The reason is not that the EU will be rich or big -- though it already is both. The U.S. is rich and big. And one day China may be richer and bigger. Europe will matter because of the cross-border template upon which contemporary Europe is being constructed. ... Globalization is about the disappearance of boundaries -- cultural and economic boundaries, physical boundaries, linguistic boundaries -- and the challenge of organizing our world in their absence. In the words of Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the UN's director of peacekeeping operations: 'Having lost the comfort of our geographical boundaries, we must in effect rediscover what creates the bond between humans that constitute a community.'

To their own surprise and occasional consternation, Europeans have begun to do this: to create a bond between human beings that transcends older boundaries and to make out of these new institutional forms something that really is a community. They don't always do it very well, and there is still considerable nostalgia in certain quarters for those old frontiers. But something is better than nothing; and nothing is just what we shall be left with if the fragile international accords, treaties, agencies, laws and institutions that we have erected since 1945 are allowed to rot and decline -- or, worse, are deliberately brought low. As things now stand, boundary breaking and community making are something that Europeans are doing better than anyone else.

Heavy thoughts, perhaps, for a Friday night in a hotel bar in central London.

But I'm looking forward to crossing some frontiers tomorrow on a train that will take me through four countries (and languages) to a home that I'm missing very much at the moment.

And not, primarily, for political reasons.

Following the herd down to Greece...

And now, a brief word from Konstantinos Lagoudakis, mayor of Malia on the island of Crete:

'They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit.'

Who might 'they' be?

Bet you'd never guess...

On not broadening your mind

In around 1584, the Elizabethan statesman William Cecil, Lord Burghley, had some sound advice to give to his son regarding travel on the European continent:

Suffer not thy sons to pass the Alps, for they shall learn nothing but pride, blasphemy, and atheism.

Oh glory days when foreign travel was still deemed hazardous enough to incite such heart-felt paternal admonitions! Were Cecil - her Majesty's Secretary of State and Lord High Treasurer - to be transported to the 21st century, he would be a happier man forsooth. For in 2008, journeying abroad seems to have exactly the opposite effect than the psychological metamorphosis feared by the Renaissance politician. You need a workout for your petty nationalism and naive xenophobia (aside from some serious exercise for your liver)? Go travel - the further afield the better.

The evidence: Rebecca Adlington, a broad-shouldered lass from marvellous Mansfield, who recently was whisked away to China to win a few gold medals for the UK.

This is what the buxom blonde has to say about Team GB (the term's synecdochic significance is of course unmissable) and its intrinsic superiority to the rest of the world:

For me being British is about politeness, kindness and fair play. You see it in the athletes’ village: people from other countries can be quite aggressive, pushing in queues and not treating each other with respect – but our lot are the complete opposite and I love that.

Er, do the names Tom Daley and Blake Aldridge ring a bell, Miss Adlington, and their rather embarrassing (and far from respectful) post-botched-competition squabbles?

And this in the week that brought us the splendiferous news that the King of London has a German background! Ethnic hybridity, here we come - only not to Mansfield, apparently.

I think I might have to take back my facetious comments from earlier this year and hereby predict that soon more people in Germany will know who Boris Johnson is.

Though we won't take him back, whatever he offers!

Suggestive journalism

Just the title ... just the frigging title!

UPDATE: John (who currently is in Blighty on a secret mission but keeps checking what's going on at the homefront) just informs me that the Mail has changed the headline that had enraged me a trifle. The original version can still be found on their homepage, however:

"Father and Daughter, 8, killed in holiday jeep crash after '4x4 driver is blinded by German during water pistol fight."

"Blinded by German", you see. Not "by a German tourist" or just "blinded during water pistol fight". We want to be right specific here, don't we, just to make sure that the bleeding finest hour will never come to an end (even if we have to defend it with ... water pistols!).

Rose Tremain's The Road Home

Well, I’ve just finished The Road Home – Rose Tremain's prize-winning novel about the fortunes of an East European migrant in contemporary Britain. And a seductive little page turner it is.

The book is also a great instruction manual for writers who aspire to become prize-winning authors. Rule number one if you want to win one of the commercial literary awards: make your book like a song by Meatloaf. Put everything in.

The Road Home seems to want to achieve exactly this and, in doing so, is not unlike a certain type of contemporary American novel ranted about in the past at this very blog. Granted, it is exactly because of its behemothian comprehensiveness that Tremain's novel seems to work (even for me): the encounter with this colourful pageant of human suffering and joy makes you feel oddly elated - but this sense of elation is short-lived. What remains is a stale, sugary aftertaste of ... what? I can’t seem to put my finger on it.

I think the one thing that bothers me most about the novel is its staunchly multicultural message, which clearly could do with a dose of Žižek (who, incidentally, has fewer facial ticks than some people claim).

It is multicultural Britain that initially helps Tremain's protagonist, middle-aged widower Lev, to find his bearings in a country so strange it might be on another planet. There's the Indian proprietor of a B&B where he spends his first night, the Arab kebab shop owner for whom he distributes leaflets, the Irish self-employed workman whose digs he shares, various members of the Russian diaspora, all of whom contribute in their own small ways to Lev's survival in London - be it by providing information, material support and/or solace when he is feeling low.

Tremain's benevolent view of this diasporic microcosm is not without its absurdities, however: In what is probably the novel's most puzzling scene, Lev, sozzled beyond sanity, is "comforted" by the gay Chinese couple with whom he shares a caravan at the farm where they all work as vegetable pickers. That this "sexual healing" momentarily seems to do the trick does not make the scene any less silly.

This generous netherworld of exotic others is almost completely separate from the white and wealthy Britain that its representatives wait on - a grotesque caricature that might have been lifted from the pages of papers like The Daily Mail. Britain is a greedy, ruthless and superficial country inhabited by fat people. The police are a Gestapo-type money-spinning programme. English women are tattooed sluts in turquoise thongs who like to do it doggy-style and milk their guys for every penny they own after they have dumped them. The British cultural scene consists of shallow drama queens feeding the punters sensationalist rubbish disguised as radicalism. For instance, in a somewhat stilted episode, Lev disses a pretentious In-Yer-Face play he had seen with his his lover Sophie and is duly excoriated for doubting the cultural superiority of Royal Court cool.

Tremain's assessment that Cool Britannia is merely the sleek flip side of a parochial narrow-mindedness always on the brink of morphing into full-blown racism is astute. However, her insistence that this culture is doomed because of its inability to appreciate the beneficial influence of its migrant population comes across as patronising. Where would Britain be without the honest, hard-working ambition and natural intelligence of the foreigners willing to slave for the minimum wage your average yob would sneer at, Tremain asks. But she is so at pains to assert that migrant workers bring out the best in Britons of all ages and classes that she instrumentalises them. Hence Lev is portrayed as a sounding-board for the English psyche, a lay psychotherapist for a disturbed culture. It is in his presence (calm when he's not gripped by alcohol-induced bouts of violent rage) that Britain is able to live up to its own ingrained goodness and decency.

This seems to be one message to be gleaned from The Road Home. That's what migrant workers are good for. To make us feel better.

At the same time, the novel is an unashamedly blunt rags-to-riches story. If you want to, the novel pontificates without a hint of irony, you can make it in this world. You just need to be canny, keep your eyes open, learn from others, and, most importantly, work double shifts and forget about sleeping. Lev's willingness and ability to do precisely this is part of this character's attractiveness; it also pulls the reader along on his journey. The depiction of his progress is compelling, any set-back painful - we want him to reach the goals set by his new world, we desperately desire him to embody virtues we like to associate with ourselves.

Just where this journey leads him, however, is a more difficult question, to which Tremain offers mainly literary (or metaliterary) answers. For The Road Home, as behooves a prize-winning novel, is full of intertextual allusions that provide a running commentary on the plot. Hamlet is the novel's most concrete literary point of reference, introducing themes such as guilt, obligation and the power of the past over the present. There are also faint echoes of Lem’s Solaris, especially in the vivid memories of his dead wife that haunt Lev. Generically, The Road Home can be seen as a picaresque novel, complete with a clownish Sancho Panza figure: Lev’s friend Rudi, whose comic views, communicated via mobile phone, put some of Lev's hurtful London experiences in perspective.

Above all, however, the novel is a Bildungsroman, endorsing principles like growth, learning and development. Tremain seems to suggest that this learning process is both collective and individual: just like Lev, Britain has a lot to learn. Yet while Lev's development is obvious and tangible, the country's learning process remains somewhat uncertain. For Lev, by contrast, Britain is a catalyst for his own ambition, uncovering secret dreams and desires that eventually drive him back to his homeland.

And it is this aspect of this novel (as well as any other Bildungsroman), the return to the point of departure, that is probably its most bothersome feature. Because The Road Home, as the title states clearly, is about returning to the place where you came from. Lev is, to introduce a German term typically frowned upon by British multiculturalists, a Gastarbeiter - expected from the novel's outset not to settle in the UK for good.

The point of departure to which he returns is a homeland that is in the process of radical, possibly detrimental change (symbolised by the building of a dam that will lead to the flooding of his village and the relocation of his family to another town). Although the return of this prodigal son turns out to be a success story - back home, Lev opens a restaurant with the money earned and the skills developed in London - this achievement is accompanied by this very physical blotting out of a part of his past.

What is most irritating about this idea, however, is not the underlying notion of change, or the weird eastward translatio imperii that Lev's journey home entails, but rather the sense of relief that the reader is invited to feel at the turn the novel takes at the end. Unwittingly, perhaps, but in a way that seems typical of the way migrant workers are depicted in some parts of the public debate in Britain today, Tremain entices her readers to wish her protagonist well - as long as his well-being takes place elsewhere.

No fun in the sun

Sweet Jesus, please - not another "honest British holiday-makers denied access to superior facilities in blatantly pro-German Greek holiday resort" story.

Rhetorically, the article in the world's second greatest newspaper is a complete muddle and full of incomprehensible references to what appear to be (I wouldn't know) typical features of all-inclusive package holidays.

Such as: "Mr and Mrs B. were even told they had to pay for their own armbands, even though they were free for the German children."

Which frigging armbands? Like the Kabbalah one Madonna is wearing? The unidentified "Daily Mail Reporter" responsible for this sublimely intransparent piece does not seem to see the need to explain this apparently significant item of evidence to those of us unfamiliar with this kind of holiday.

What exactly happened on the (similarly) unidentified Greek island remains in the dark. The ins and outs of the alleged "segregation" between the unassuming (and ripped off) Brits and the (genetically, surely) expansionist Huns privileged by an unfair plot are never explained. For instance, mightn't it just be possible that the use of certain facilities had less to do with the users' nationality (which is the way the article presents it) than with the deal that people signed up to (and paid for)?

Not that the "Brazilian football club, superstar stage school [whatever that means] and family entertainment" that apparently lured the British family in question into booking this holiday from hell would tempt this here holiday maker to part with her dosh - no matter how free the drinks.

The following passage from the article would come in handy in a seminar on "Language and Ideology", however:

While German children enjoyed a sheltered play area, air-conditioned indoor facility and had their own toilets in a securely gated compound, British children were left to play in a hot, wooden hut with no gate, according to the family.

Sob, sob, sobbity sob. Apt essay topic on the basis of this article: "Constructing cultural otherness through language: Discuss."

Greek to Mr Barnish

Quaint little tale at the Mail (ooh, it rhymes, too) -- with kind of an ambiguous headline ("Fascist German Bastards Spoiled Honest Brit's Happy Holiday Fun By Doing Yoga in Hun").

No comment, just headshaking bewilderment. How about Butlin's in Skegness next year, sir?

Beware of the Hypocrite!

The Guardian has a teaser article by David Runciman, whose book Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond is to be published later this month. I admit that I'm unfamilar with Runciman's work and have no prejudices against the man. From what I can glean from the article, he defends hypocrisy as a bulwark of privacy and personal resistance – an intriguing hypothesis (I'm not joking), and probably well-worth pondering.

However, since hypocrisy is a pet hate of ours over here at Obscene Desserts, and something we both have a hard time taking as a positive character trait, I feel the need to comment.

Runciman begins by drawing attention to these pathologically confessional times of ours (which have recently reached their carnivalesque nadir with the publication of Cherie Blair’s tell-all blah-blah). Our problem with Gordon Brown, he suggests, is that he does not fit the bill of showbiz politicians like George W., Obama and our Tone, with their insufferable populist pseudo-honesty (after all, who knows whether they're not just being drama queens?).

In this climate, a person like Gordon Brown can but fail. The PM's voluntary exposure in the confessional media circus tends to result in embarrassing clumsiness, which one can either despise or read as a sign of his hypocrisy (i.e. he’s not genuine, he has something to hide). Runciman, by contrast, construes Brown’s blatantly unmediagenic style as a positive symptom of unease about contemporary political culture, which in turn betokens the secret – "the deep" – Gordon behind the public mask.

Fair enough. I too am sick to death of public personae forcing intimate details of their sorry lives upon me (from the texture of their bodily fluids to the kinky stuff they like to do in their spare time – it’s spare time, so would you please keep it private?). I really don’t care about “what happened at Balmoral” and whether Cherie favours banana-flavoured jiffies – but after my daily online dose of the British press (and I don’t mean the tabloids) one can’t help not knowing. My brain-cup overfloweth with the Snowdon of bullshit which “respectable papers” heap up as “valuable” information these days.

Runciman’s critical overture is followed by a longish discussion of George Orwell, whom he is at pains to co-opt to his defence of hypocrisy. Orwell according to Runciman was “an anti-hypocrite for whom there were worse things than hypocrisy.” Obviously, this defiant rejection of the popular image of Orwell as the incarnation of absolute moral honesty and plain speech is meant as a stab at people who endorse this view, such as Christopher Hitchens, whom Runciman doesn't seem to find all that cuddly.

Fair enough, too. We all know (or should know) how difficult it is to uphold one’s high moral standards as an instinct-driven animal surrounded by other, equally instinct-driven animals and there is no reason to believe that Eric Arthur B. was an exception to this rule of animal urges.

Nevertheless, I can’t help finding Runciman’s argument … dodgy, to say the least. So let's look at it a little more closely.

Given Orwell’s first-hand experience with British Imperialism (in which the imperial police officer in Burma was hopelessly – albeit critically – entangled), Runciman goes on to explain, Orwell not only accepted a certain, “sustainable” form of hypocrisy as an unavoidable trait of liberal democracy, he also thought that such a strategic hypocrisy is infinitely preferable to its radical opposite – absolute sincerity. Compared to this terrible sincerity, hypocrisy is not only the lesser evil, one might in fact take it positively, as a quasi-heroic act of resistance (these are ot Runciman's terms, but this seems to me to be the gist of his article).

Consider fascism, Runciman says, which, in ruthlessly promoting an all-engulfing ideology that infiltrates every nook and cranny of private life, eliminates the possibility of hypocrisy (in the Runciman sense of self-determined action).

To elaborate on this point, Runciman quotes from Orwell’s novel 1939 Coming Up For Air (nice touch: I love this sadly underrated book). The passage he refers to is one where the protagonist, George Bowling, attends an anti-fascist lecture. Having listened to a barrage of ideological claptrap in a half-empty auditorium, Bowling comments on the speaker:

Interesting to know a chap like that in private life. But does he have a private life? Or does he only go round from platform to platform, working up hatred? Perhaps even his dreams are slogans.

Which leads Runciman to make a big leap from this lesser known novel by Orwell to (arguably) his most famous one:

The scene from Coming Up for Air also foreshadows a theme of [1984], which is what it might mean not to have a private life, not to have anything held back or reserved, but simply to be the slogans that one is forced to spout through and through. In such a world, hypocrisy would not simply be valuable, it would in a sense represent the ultimate value, because its precondition is having something to hide. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a description of a world in which hypocrisy has become impossible.

Two points need to be made here. First of all, wherever did Runciman get the stupid idea from that fascism destroys hypocrisy? Granted, total transparency might have be an officially-desired by-product of Nazi Gleichschaltung (as indeed of any utopian-totalitarian system), but how encompassing was this desired transparency in Nazi Germany really? Runciman here seems to confuse Nazi propaganda with real life in Nazi Germany, in a way that seems entirely typical of the British obsession with this historical period.

But just because Joe Bloggs thinks that German life between 1933 and 1945 was completely suffused with Nazi ideology (in fact there seem to be quite a few Joe Bloggs around who believe that German life in 2008 continues to be suffused with Nazi ideology), does not mean that academics should also have licence to do so.

All the more so, as this conflation comes at a price. Runciman here seems to overlook Nazism’s distinct ability to foster and exploit the human capacity for hypocrisy: from the averted eye in the face of everyday violence to stockpiling spoils from confiscated Jewish property for personal gain – not to mention the hypocritical official line of the two Christian denominations (For a complex analysis of the position of the Church in Nazi Germany see Chapter 3 of Richard J. Evans’s The Third Reich in Power).

Secondly (and here’s the literary scholar speaking, who hates it when people plunder literary texts to illustrate their non-literary arguments): I really think that Runciman misreads Coming Up for Air, or at least that he doesn't read it fully. It is true, the notion of “keeping things private” expresses Bowling’s own guiding principle in life, but the novel also points out that it is precisely this attitude that gets him into trouble, especially with his forever nagging wife Hilda. The whole novel hinges on Bowling's clandestine trip - in a bout of middle-age nostalgia and with the aid of money won on a horse (without the wife knowing, of course) - to his childhood village of Lower Binfield. The frustrations of his journey down memory lane herald the domestic catastrophe to come.

When he is found out, Bowling briefly tries to explain, but Hilda’s stubborn refusal to listen to him leads him to back down and choose “the line of least resistance” instead. The novel ends with him listing the three options available to him in this situation:

A. To tell her what I’d really been doing and somehow make her believe
me.
B. To pull the old gag about losing my memory.
C. To let her go on thinking it was a woman, and take my medicine.
But, damn it! I knew which it would have to be.

From Runciman’s perspective, Orwell would have to favour option C.: Keeping one’s peace by remaining silent, even when the need to explain oneself is urgent (along the lines of: "Screw Hilda, I know what’s the truth, and that’ll do me"). The open end of Orwell’s novel potentially affirms this interpretation.

But there is a deeper undertone to Bowling's concluding post-adolescent sulk. For what might work in Bowling’s private life is a different thing in reality. Written on the eve of WWII, Coming Up For Air is an alarm cry against the protagonist’s complacency, which may be read allegorically, as the embodiment of a particularly British attitude or even Britain itself (George Bowling - "GB" - know what I mean?). In the particular historical context in which the novel is written and set, taking the line of least resistance means accepting the possibility of global catastrophe.

Moreover, as we say in Eng Lit: never conflate author and narrator! Clearly, Bowling does not ventriloquise Orwell's view when he seeks refuge in his own mediocrity:

And what’ll happen to chaps like me when we get Fascism in England? The truth is it probably won’t make the slightest difference. As for the lecturer and those four Communists in the audience, yes, it’ll make plenty of difference to them. They’ll be smashing faces, or having their own smashed, according to who’s winning. But the ordinary middling chaps like me will be carrying on just as usual.

This statement would seem to be a full endorsement of Runciman’s idea of hypocrisy. But “George Bowling Hero” is certainly not the message of Orwell’s book. Instead of a latter-day St. George, he is a very British Everyman ready to put up with anything as long as his little life remains intact: “Who’d bother about a chap like me? I’m too fat to be a political suspect.”

Only Bowling’s latent anxieties give reason for hope. Only his fears suggest that he might muster some kind of courage if push comes to shove:

And yet it frightens me. The barbed wire! The slogans! The enormous faces! The cork-lined cellars where the executioner plugs you from behind!

The novel is clear about this: in order to prevent such things from happening, one must be ready to act – and in all honesty. In a world of cork-lined execution chambers, there is no space for hypocrisy.

But, come to think of it, there isn't any in an environment of mollycoddled post-capitalism either.