Unquestionably Necessary

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The prime minister's enterprise adviser has apologised after saying most Britons had "never had it so good" despite the "so-called recession".

Any balance between the correct and incorrect assumptions in Lord Young’s statement is lost in the sweeping, smug and triumphalist overtones that are always easy to hear - whether they are there or not - in a Tory’s lexicon. It is also the latest in quite a few unfortunate quotes (I’ve got a Porsche, raa) that have come from that part of the political spectrum. In February Sir Nicholas Winterton voiced his concerns about the different sort of person found in standard class carriages on the train – quite unlike the quiet working environment he had and needed in first class.

Tough, untouched Tories, and they are in government making those cuts. While most dominant voices in the party offer the expected PR to accompany the shock, divisive statements like those above are often imagined to represent what the Conservatives really think. These cuts aren’t the unfortunate inheritance of a new government that is loath to cut anything. Rather, they are made with relish by people who won’t be affected by them, or perhaps may benefit from them. No more uppity hoodies moving next door, please.

It’s not that the Conservative Party can’t sound sincere in its claim to be making tough choices for the nation’s benefit. Their qualified election win this year certainly suggests that they can convince. But for many people the Conservatives will never sound sincere, and for those people Conservative cuts are always to be expected, budget deficit or no. The Liberal Democrats' role in the cuts represents more of a sea change. Despite this, it was the mean old Conservative Party HQ that took a kicking in the student protests on the 10^th. The student-forsaking Liberal Democrats - they who reneged on their promise to vote against lifting the cap on tuition fees - had a more easily dispersed group gather on their doorstep, and a solitary smashed car window. The Lib Dem HQ might be targeted on the 24^th though.

The marchers who stayed on the planned route accused both Cameron and Clegg over fees, and made their way from Whitehall to Millbank for the rally and speeches. In the aftermath it was the glaziers’ new best friends who stole the narrative, though. No concerned/dismayed party could get away from them. Those who attacked the protest cited the smashed windows, those who praised the protest cited the smashed windows and those who attacked those who praised the protest cited the smashed windows.

Out of 50,000 people or more, about 2,000 broke windows and injured the police (and each other) – that’s a news story for the sizable minority. I can grab hold of that as a news consumer. Broken windows, violence and hurt police? I can judge that to be right or wrong, magnificent or disgusting. 48,000 + students protesting over fee changes I don’t understand and can’t contextualise? I can’t form any judgement from that. I can’t be angry or pleased about it. I don’t know what the sum total of all these little news stories about cuts here, department closures there, and staff/student campus protests everywhere else means. We’ve all got to cut back a little haven’t we? Even students? More harshly: especially students, in those elitist universities, where they teach them stupid so called ‘subjects’ and all the students go on a three year booze – ah, the mixed, self-answering/defeating critique.

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Of course, we are being rationalised into the idea, correct or incorrect, that cuts are unquestionably necessary and that almost everyone - every sector, government department, local government, public service, private business and many aspects of daily life - will have to accept their share of them. This allows people like the Guardian’s Julian Glover to say things like:

Keep calm and carry on has become a cliche, but it is good advice for a government. Stay pragmatic and keep explaining, firmly, in moderate language and with courtesy. The left will howl at budget cuts that their own economic legacy makes necessary, just as the right will howl against political reform.

The coalition must rise above the bile of the left. While the left may only be offering an accusatory ‘JUDAS!’ level of criticism, praising the coalition’s pragmatism assumes them to be in the right - that the cuts are imperative and that the government is undertaking the difficult and thankless task of fixing the mess. Essentially, if the ‘booo, hiss, cuts, Judas’ argument is presented by the moronic leftovers of New Labour (and it certainly is, and they certainly cut plenty of things themselves) then the argument against cuts must be moronic. If those who are against an increase in tuition fees go about smashing windows, injuring riot police and each other, then opposing the fee changes must be the stance of idiot extremists.

All the while we are leaning, if not wholeheartedly, towards the line of thought that the cuts are imperative, we will get very carefully worded (perhaps tepid) media reportage, limited to what each cut means and how much will be saved by it. It is analysis that accepts the news story – the traditional ‘who, what, where, when and how’ are present, but not ‘why.’ This is a conspicuous absence in a media elsewhere obsessed with ‘was this preventable’ features. Of course, presenting the cuts as death and taxes inevitable also affects how we read protests. Are they valid criticisms, or stupid/self indulgent?

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President Obama has increased higher education funding in the States. The belief is that investment in education = boost in new recruits to business = more earning potential = produce/earn your way out of economic downturn. In Britain we must cut, and if you don’t accept that…well it doesn’t matter because the majority do accept it.

Investment rather than cuts is just an alternative. It’s not necessarily better or the correct solution but then neither is cutting. The important thing to note is that both are viable, even if we don’t think it a good idea to have it up for discussion in the current climate, or whatever catchphrase of ease you’d prefer. I’ll leave you with the words of an ex-tutor of mine. He was reacting to Labour’s cuts earlier this year - in particular the effects of cuts as they filtered down to the specific, and King’s College London shut down its American Studies department:

Lacking the balls to raise taxes for education every political party in power seeks to reduce public spending. The British public now losing their houses and jobs in abundance, and every responsible economist I have talked to thinks the worst is come, will probably vote for the one who actually says he will cut more. It's known as a masochist style of political response. Unfortunately Vice Chancellors seem to imitate the mood. Not for them the long-term restructuring of debt, for which their assets would perhaps serve as collaterals to save what's valuable, Immediate cuts now is the order of the day. It's the political mood and they simply reflect it. Obama has upped education support in real financial support by 39% across America. Try telling that to Gordon Brown or David Cameron.

 

Republican Sense

Russia has agreed to return to the war in Afghanistan at the request of the Western states which helped the mujahedin to drive its forces out of the country 21 years ago.

That tongue twister that the Independent came up with will be a future aside for historians to put in books about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s and the 2001 plus war in Afghanistan. Alongside the statistics and contexts of the two conflicts, they will note how the opposing forces and allies all later swapped about, with opposing forces of the first conflict becoming allies and previous allies coming to oppose each other. The players have changed though, and even if we allow the USSR and contemporary Russia to stand as similar entities, and America’s involvement in the 1980s to compare with the US forces in Afghanistan now, there are a lot of problems with declaring these to be old enemies turned allies.

Since 2009 Russia has provided US forces with a route into Afghanistan (airspace wise), supplied aircraft to Poland and could well provide NATO with helicopters, training and a route for arms. If Russia is going to aid NATO then the Obama administration is not necessarily happy with all of this as an ally. America is said to be concerned that Europe is dealing with Russia on its own, discussing foreign policy and security matters away from America and NATO. The New York Times has a senior US official saying: “Since when, I wonder, is European security no longer an issue of American concern, but something for Europe and Russia to resolve? After being at the center of European security for 70 years, it’s strange to hear that it’s no longer a matter of U.S. concern.”

Since when? According to the New York Times it’s since President Obama has been perceived as being disinterested in Europe [1]. All of this, and the airspace dependency on Russia, adds to the narrative of failure Barack Obama is currently presented in. After he appeared on the Daily Show on Wednesday night to discuss things in a comedy news way, everybody jumped on the ‘yes we can…but’ laughter. Certainly the British media are touchingly concerned, or revelling, in the liberal disappointment of his presidency suddenly revealed by those four words.

There is some idea that the people who raved about Obama were duped. Unfortunately for Obama the media raved about him (eventually), and when the media feels duped they feel stupid, resent it, and then bury their embarrassing previous take on a story with aggressive coverage of another angle. So, folks, Barack Obama’s America is now a limp liberal disaster. The recession and downturn turned out to be impervious to his inspiring new politics, healthcare reform was timid and brought no public option, his dislike of the war on drugs has had a few inconsistencies, and while America might be able to elect a black president, it still opens its newspapers to see teenagers and an 11-year-old committing suicide in the face of bullying and homophobic abuse.

On top of this state of affairs, or perceived state of affairs, America has its mid term elections on Tuesday. President Obama’s approval rating is around 43%, about the same as Bill Clinton’s when the Republicans took control of the House and the Senate in the mid terms of 1994. While this can’t tell pundits much about Obama’s chances in 2012, it does mean that the Republicans are commonly expected to become the majority in the House and to equal the Democrats in the Senate [2]. Supposedly this is because voters are either responding to Obama’s failure to bring change, or because he has brought too much change - in economics ($750 billion in stimulating the economy) or healthcare for example. Obama has done, and failed to do, many worrying things, and Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson offers a good list of both (Though Dickson actually offsets this list with the more general, and positive, ‘sweep’ of the presidency). The supposed ‘liberal lion’:

has surged 50,000 troops into Afghanistan — not to take the battle to Al Qaeda, but to prop up the corrupt and incompetent regime of Hamid Karzai. The prison at Guantánamo? Still open for business nearly a year after it was to have been shuttered. Uglier still: Obama has asserted the authority to assassinate American terror suspects abroad and has tried to block court challenges of that authority by invoking "state secrets."

On the economic front, Obama has surrounded himself with the same free marketeers who led Bill Clinton's calamitous deregulation of big banks, restoring Wall Street to obscene profits even as one American in seven has been engulfed by a rising tide of poverty.

These things are genuinely troubling of course, but then I seem to remember the guy before doing a few worrying things. We’ve yet to get the full spectrum of Barack Obama’s presidency (or George Bush Jr’s for that matter – give it a few more years, and books). While there are other things from the last two years to be considered when viewing President Obama’s record, people from both the right and left are focusing on the items from the FAIL list, ostensibly agreeing with each other. This is only a cosmetic agreement – more of that shortly – but one that is very damaging for Obama and the Democrats, and perhaps unfairly so. It’s led, in places, to a vocabulary of disenchantment, of repairs being needed, as well as a necessary return to sanity. CNN’s William Bennett points out, for example, that ‘hardened liberalism has been unleashed in power and in office from the White House to the U.S. Senate to the House of Representatives’ And now? ‘The common sense antibodies of the American people are kicking back in.’ Common sense, Republican sense - just to offer a healthy check to the liberals of course. The hippy’s popular, more reliable older brother comes to clean up the mess. Either that or the brothers will fight like siblings.

As for the critique offered from the political left, Dickinson’s article quotes Jane Hamsher, the film producer and writer who established the progressive blog Firedoglake. In September she tweeted: ‘Fortunately, liberals and conservatives hate the health care bill for the same reason […]: it sucks.’ What Twitter word counts don’t allow for is the important caveat that liberals and conservatives have polar opposite reasons for thinking the bill sucks. For liberals the bill sucks because it didn’t go far enough, and showed the Obama administration to be timid. For conservatives it went far too far – no suggestion of timidity there. If the two sides were to listen to each others’ criticisms of Obama they might start to appreciate the bravery (that’s for the liberals to see) and conciliatory skill (that’s for the conservatives to see) of the legislation his presidency has produced so far – not to drop to their knees in awe, but to see it in context.

Mind you, if the left and right (both supporters and parties) listened to each other more anyway then politics would be more interesting/inspiring. Viewing everything a party or government does through vague and exaggerated notions of socialist liberals or ‘fuck you, neighbour’ conservatives doesn’t offer us very much. It may be better to pay attention to either side, and then understand what a party is specifically trying to achieve in its individual policies and legislation. Then voters, citizens and politicians could criticise their opponent party (or indeed their ‘own’ party) by attacking the flaws in the party’s method, or its erroneous choice of political goals. The most resonant, lasting attacks are those that call a party or politicians up on such in context failings – failings by their own (or at least hitherto) standards.

Such criticisms would be better than attacking parties with those easy accusations - attacks that deny that parties and political figures often have to make difficult, pragmatic and - forgive me - ‘off message’ choices. Coming back to the UK for a final moment, Labour’s Harriet Harman calling Lib Dem Danny Alexander a ginger rodent certainly isn’t helping, for instance.

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[1] John Vinocur, ‘Will the U.S. Lose Europe to Russia?,’ New York Times, 25 October 2010 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/world/europe/26iht-politicus.html?scp=1&sq=afghanistan%20russia&st=cse>

[2] Rupert Cornwell ‘Yes we can, Obama said. But can he?’ The Independent, 29 October 2010 <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/yes-we-can-obama-said-but-can-he-2119585.html>

The crazy junkies just want their hedonism fix

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If you’re going to gatecrash, do it with some style. Pick the White House, and have a TV crew and make up artist on hand as you get out of the car for the gathered press to see. You will of course know Michaele and Tareq Salahi for gracing President Obama's first state dinner on Tuesday without actually being on the guest list. The couple have also had cable channel Bravo following and filming them over the autumn. This is because Michaele Salahi is being considered for a show called The Real Housewives of D.C..

Unlike all the other Watergate wannabes we’ve had since the 1970s I rather like Crashgate; it is an inspired use of the suffix. However, through the couple's publicist Mahogany Jones we now know that Paul W. Gardner (the Salahis' counsel) maintains that they did not ‘crash’ the event.[1] I’m not going to argue when there are dictionaries that can do it so much better.

Michaele and Tareq spent some time at the party, getting photographed with President Obama, Vice President Biden and Rahm Emanuel (White House Chief of Staff) as well as some Marines. They left before dinner was served and later the photos taken of them went up on Facebook. Michaele would really rather like to get on TV. She reportedly has 4,000 friends (and counting) on her profile, on which she has also put a suggestion for a new host (herself) for Live with Regis and Kelly and/or The Today show. The White House event might possibly put her in the good books with the Real Housewives production team.

Whatever happens now, the Salahis are scheduled for Larry King Live on Monday. It would be a bit of a shame if Michaele does get to be on reality TV when so many others have not been so lucky. There was Aaron Barschak, the comedy terrorist who—in the guise of Osama bin Laden in drag—gatecrashed Prince William's 21^st in 2003. He would have loved the opportunity to get a TV show going. Instead his comedy career remains somewhat frustrated despite his best efforts. Of course, the Heene family have ended up with the mother and father pleading guilty to misdemeanour and felony charges related to the “balloon boy” affair. Court documents from the case have revealed that the stunt and attempted deception were meant to “make the Heene family more marketable for future media interests.”[2]

What is it about reality shows? We all share the world with a great many other people, but do you ever get the feeling that some individuals—despite us all being wonderfully unique—cannot accept it when their claim to be different or ‘the crazy one’ is undermined by the sheer volume of people acting uncannily like them? You’re outgoing, crazy in the funny way…well, so is half the street. Go to a club or a gig and everyone is crazy, equal to or more than you. So you act madder and more extreme, and there are still people outdoing you.

It really must be hell for people that worry about this. It’s getting to the stage where they just can’t compete with mere legal antics. There are thousands of people trying to make sure they have the personality with the most personality. Perhaps if this situation were left laissez faire it would become a sort of adventure-lifestyle capitalism, and the benefits of competition would push everyone to live as extrovertly as they are capable of. We’d eradicate shyness and poverty—those two great social ills—in one go. As it is, getting a place on reality TV is one of the few benchmarks for the crazy junkie that tells them definitively that they have made it. Their life is so crazy it got shown on TV. They are more interesting than any other extreme personalities around.

In this world Michaele Salahi is more important than the president she met. Michaele worked hard to get where she is; she honed her personality, she made friends, lived the life, got the networks interested and entertainingly mishap-ed her way to fame. Barack Obama took the easy option—he just studied and worked and campaigned. His job makes him famous; any strait-laced bore can do that. Unlike so many other lazy, spoilt stars, Michaele can’t leech off of her talent, career or back catalogue of work. She has to generate her celebrity by making her whole life fame itself. Incredibly, her rise to fame is fame. In some sort of paradox she was filmed outside the White House in case she later became famous.

I know crazy junkies—people whose lives deliberately compete with the misadventures of the famous. I’ve been with them in their successes and failures. I’ve seen them hold court with everyone in the room as they acrobat their way to applause and permanent drink stains on someone else’s carpet. I’ve also been with them when someone else has outdone them, when they swear into their beer, pat me on the back and tell me I’m all right. They are the people Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker had a good handle on when they wrote Nathan Barley. Crazy junkies can be just a little infectious, I know, but it doesn’t last.

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[1] Helene Cooper and Brian Stelter, ‘Obamas’ Uninvited Guests Prompt an Inquiry,’ New York Times.com, <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/us/politics/27party.html?_r=1> 26 November 2009.

[2] ‘“Balloon Boy” Parents Plead Guilty,’ CNN.com, <http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/11/13/balloon.boy.heene/index.html> 13 November 2009.