Sunday shouldn't be like every day

Oh yes, I remember the days when I too wandered about town in an oversized coat and a scowl:



But today - aged beyond recognition and living a life when every day (including Sunday) is decidedly unlike Sunday - I have begun to appreciate the quiet days when towns are sleepy and shops are shut.

As they are still, mostly, on a Sunday in Germany (which Anglo-American friends and family have tended to find puzzling, if not a violation of one of their inalienable rights).

And so I was immensely pleased by the recent ruling by the German Federal Constitutional Court that the liberal pre-Christmas Sunday opening hours in Berlin are unconstitutional. Atheist or not, I think people deserve a rest from getting or spending, to be free to do ... nothing in particular. That is a pastime we should earnestly cultivate.

And on that note I'm off to ... do nothing in particular. Toodlepip.

Das Urteil der Paris

I have, in the past, been scolded by textual purists for turning the random associations that typically cavort in my mind into blog text for public consumption.

To defend this charming feminine skill of mine against the masculine wit of some of our virile readers, I would like to point out the cognitive benefits of my little bouts of lateral thinking. Just remember those illuminating moments in the past couple of years when I merrily married vicious dogs and boring contemporary fiction, Jacques Derrida and a well-known Swedish furniture outlet and Jacques Demy and Charles Darwin. You did enjoy those, didn't you?

Not to mention the never published post on "Gordon Brown, the fifth seventh Python."

Yes, he does look a little like Terry Jones's long lost fraternal twin.

And since I'm clearly not the only one who violently yokes random ideas together on a regular basis, I refuse point blank to kick this habit of mine.

For instance, in his fetid rant space in the miasmic depths of tabloid Britain, Peter Hitchens elegantly hopped from private loss - the recent death of David Cameron's handicapped son Ivan at the age of six - to death in action - three British soldiers killed in Afghanistan the week before - in order to gripe about the government's lack of patriotism. Because, you know, whinge, whinge, the Commons cancelled Prime Minister's Question Time out of respect for the former, but didn't do so for the latter.

While in London, we watched Channel 4's mildly interesting programme about the crazy cold snap that paralysed Albion earlier this year, Britain's Big Freeze. The show compared, with Tourettish regularity, the heroism displayed by ordinary British bus drivers, alchemists and stock market analysts in the face of A FEW DAYS OF SNOW with that of ordinary milkmen, pantry boys and market gardeners during ... wait for it ... you sure won't guess what's coming next .... The Blitz.

Why is it that whenever the UK has to paper over embarrassing facts - such as that the country only owns three rusty snowploughs and a couple of bags of kitty litter for grit - with references to their glory days?

Meanwhile, in Germany, Walter Mixa, bishop of the Bavarian city of Augsburg, has reiterated the Catholic oldie-but-goldie that abortion is like the Holocaust.

And today’s Guardian is shocked at the proposed use of Berlin's Tempelhof airfield for a rock concert. Undertaking one of those great mental leaps so beloved by the Great British Press, Sean Michaels opens his piece not with a whimper, but - hey - with one hell of a bang: "If 2009 is to have a Summer of Love, the season's biggest event may take place at a former Nazi airfield."

Well folks, if you want a Nazi analogy, how about taking on Paris "Valium" Hilton? During our sojourn in London I had the dubious pleasure to watch a couple of instalments of that perfectly useless waste of time called Paris Hilton's Best British Friend - a show in which a bunch of fake-baked wannabes are bundled together in a claustrophobic space to compete for the privilege to "chill out in LA" with a dim anorexic heiress (wearing what seem to be whole minks for fake eyelashes) by a strategic combination of obsequious arse-licking, devious backstabbing and voluntary auto-humiliation.

Life's all smiles, "sweethearts" and touchy-feely camaraderie in the house until the next symbolic liquidation. The Big Brother banality is regularly broken up by show trials that inevitably lead to the "eviction" of members of the group for failing to "click" with The Führer Paris, or not seeming "real" enough. Usually, the choice is made not by La Duchessa, but by her weekly favourite (aka "the pet").

And you know what: They all dig the psychological cruelty of and absolute submission to their passive-aggressive, all-American dominatrix.

Yes, it would take a brave cultural analyst to discover the underlying totalitarian structures of this show, investigate their subtle fascism and then elucidate what this all tells us about contemporary Britain.

Feel-good tragedy

Already some time ago, Norm Geras took issue with attempts to make evaluative distinctions between types or grades of tragedy. This is what he wrote in response to the suggestion that the known identity of the perpetrator of a terrorist attack makes such an event more tragic than, say, a natural catastrophe:

We differentiate between situations in which someone is to blame and those in which no one is to blame, that's all. If we didn't do that, we'd either have to blame the elements or excuse deliberate wrong-doing. Well, both of these things are sometimes done, but only in the way of obscuring how the world works.

Whilst I too find the differentiation in question flawed and potentially dangerous, I wish that at other times – and the topic of "tragedy" is an excellent instance – we were a little more rather than less differentiated.

For instance, I wonder whether the term "tragedy" ought to be used for the examples discussed by Norm at all. These days, unfortunately, the term tragedy has become the default descriptor for most aspects of human experience, from genocide to teenage obesity, and I believe that this is part of the problem addressed here.

I think it's about time we refined our own lackadaisical use of the concept of tragedy, for instance by returning to its roots in classical theatre.

In Aristotle's theory of tragedy, few plots and topics are truly tragic. Natural disasters, for instance, don't come under the headword "tragedy", as they are the result of an overriding force - call it contingency, call it fate - beyond the reach of the individual. Terrorist attacks differ from this kind of disaster only in so far that they are historical, man-made and somewhat more selective.

Otherwise, both types of catastrophes are similar in their indifference and their effect: they are reminders of the terrible coincidences that determine human existence: the frightening fact that for as long as we live we are always potentially in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This is terrible indeed, but it is clearly not tragic in the strict sense of the term, nor are the victims of this terrible contingency tragic heroes. The tragic hero in Aristotle's theory - always an exceptional human being, but morally a mutt (neither entirely bad nor completely good) - is the victim of his/her own misguided actions of which he/she is crucially unaware. His/her destruction is brought on by the tragic flaw that marks his/her character, be that blindness or hubris or a mixture of both.

Can we say this of the people who die in a natural catastrophe? Is this true of people who unknowingly board a plane/train/bus with a person who has a belt of explosives strapped around her or his waist? And what do we gain by calling these events and their victims "tragic"? What do their victims (or their loved ones) gain from this label?

As far as the victims of such events go, nothing. Quite to the contrary, by labelling their deaths "tragic" and lifting them onto a level of transcendent significance, we only deny what makes death - theirs and ours - so terrible in the eyes of the living: its meaningless immensity.

The winners of this discourse are those who live to apply the label. Like all euphemisms, the term tragedy is ahistorical, providing a cover for sanctimonious displays of extreme emotion that allow us to deny life's murky realities and ignore the true terror of human existence - in other words: make us feel great.