Articles for July 2006

In Memoriam

Timothy Garton Ash has a thoughtful post and accompanying comment thread in today’s Grauniad “Comment Is Free’ section that addresses the differences between US and British attitudes to the alleged ‘war on terror’, viewed in the light of the nation’s muted reaction to the anniversary of last year’s July 7 suicide bombings.

I can’t believe it’s almost July 7 again already. This time last year, the weather was equally hot and glorious and my younger son and I were in our new flat decorating the week before we were due to move in, sweating copiously amongst a chaos of plaster dust, floorboards and paint. There was no cable and no phone yet and hence no internet – though the bloody company had managed to turn it off at the other end already- and a huge local tunnel project was interfering with the radio reception, so all we could get was a horribly crackly Radio 5 live and occasional blurry, distant bits of the World Service.

So we’re sitting there doing the traditional builders’ thing on arriving at any project – having a nice sit down and a cup of tea – when the first reports of the suicide bombings on the Underground started trickling in. At first it was just an ‘incident’ at one station, then two, then three … no more work was done that day as we sat riveted, listening horrified as the enormity of what had happened unfolded. Somehow only getting brief audio glimpses of what was happening made it seem so much worse.

Now a year has gone by already. It seems incredible. I know the only real certainty is that time goes on but the swiftness of it still astonishes.

I’m old enough to remember some of the most shocking tragedies there’ve been in the UK – the Birmingham pub bombings, the attack on the cavalry in the Mall, the Canary wharf bombing, the assassination of Lord Mountbatten, the blowing up of a coach full of soldiers and their families on the motorway, and many others – and my childhood and adolescence is punctuated by these landmarks in time. But I was never scared. Why should I have been? It’s not as though I had been strafed running for the shelter, as my mother had been, or survived direct blitz bombing as most of both my parents’ families did. A few bombs here and there are nothing ( and I qualify that – obviously they weren’t nothing to the victims and their families) in comparison to the suffering caused by WWII or Beirut or any other war you care to name.

I mean really, what is there to be scared of? If someone takes it into their head to make a violent statement because of some idiotic religious or political belief there’s little any of us can do about it. If it happens it happens – there’s bugger- all we can do , so why be scared?

Most of our neighbours are Moslem and some Moslems are terrorists – should we be scared of them? Hell no, no more than I should be scared of my Catholic neighbours because the IRA was Catholic. To think that way leads to paranoia and stupidities like the Birmingham 6 trials and the recent raids in Forest Gate.

I admit I was scared for a while after the 7 July bombings – after all, we live right across from and regularly use a mainline station and metro system and you can’t help comparing, but you can’t live your life in fear of so nebulous a threat. The likelihood of bombings is no more now than it was in the seventies and eighties.

This is what makes American war hysteria so difficult to comprehend for the British. War? What war? We’ve seen war, and this isn’t it.

What happened this time last year was an horrendous crime. Because of the nature of it no-one has been brought to justice. But to the victims and their families it matters little whether it was an act of war or a crime. They still have to live with their pain and grief and anger. All we can wish them is that time will heal.

[NB: This is posted a day in advance as I intend to be away from the pc all day tomorrow]

The arrogant stupidity of David Brooks

Tom Tomorrow reminded me of David “Bobo” Brooks, the world’s most
annoying stupid columnist. Just as dumb and willfully ignorant, he lacks the profound kookiness and hence entertainment value of your true wingnut, having adoppted a persona that is part third rate Seinfeldian comedian, part bemused
sociology professor. He shot to fame through his “observations” of everyday American life, categorising people based on
their consuming habits. He affects the habits of a scholar, but is too lazy to do more than repeat the superficial impressions of the standup comedian: “red staters like NASCAR, but blue staters don’t. What’s up with that?”

Now that sort of observational comedy is quite justified in standup, though it can get old fast, but in allegedly serious
articles that supposedly take the pulse of the nation it’s out of place. Especially when these observations are more false than right, as Sasha Issenberg showed. Once she had proved many of Brooks’ observations are wrong, she went to the trouble of interviewing him about this. It is there where
Bobo Brooks shos how arrogantly stupid he really is:

Satire has its purpose, but assuming it?s on the mark, Brooks should be able to adduce real-world examples that are true. I asked him how I was supposed to tell what was comedy and what was sociology. “Generally, I rely on intelligent readers to know?and I think that at the Atlantic Monthly, every intelligent reader can tell what the difference is,” he replied. “I tried to describe the mainstream of Montgomery County and the mainstream of Franklin County. They?re both diverse places, and any generalization is going to have exceptions. But I was trying to capture the difference between the two places,” he said. “You?ve obviously come at this from a perspective. I don?t think if you went to the two places you wouldn?t detect a cultural difference.”

I asked him about Blue America as a bastion of illegal immigrants. “This is dishonest research. You?re not approaching the piece in the spirit of an honest reporter,” he said. “Is this how you?re going to start your career? I mean, really, doing this sort of piece? I used to do ?em, I know ?em, how one starts, but it?s just something you?ll mature beyond.”

Yes, he really does think it’s “dishonest research” to check whether or not his claim that Blue states have more illegal migrants than Red states!

But really, all this is so much nitpicking compared to his greatest fallacy, his assumption that a) there are such things
as Red and Blue states and b) that they differ hugely from each other. But look at the map of voter results by district and you’ll find most states are purple rather than Red or Blue…

Read more about:
David Brooks,
Red states,
Blue states

Ken Lay Dead

Allegedly of a heart attack.

Yeah, right. There’re some who might think he was just too shit-scared to go to jail and offed himself instead.

I couldn’t possibly comment.

World Cup News: Rooney Forgives Ronaldo

Pic courtesy commenter baba at Steve Gilliard

Godwination Is Dead & Gone

It’s all just a little bit of history repeating…

There’s a fascinating diary at Daily Kos (Ker-ching! That’ll be fifty bucks please Markos), translated from the French by Lupin:

War and occupation through the eyes of a child

by Lupin

Mon Jul 03, 2006 at 08:43:16 AM PDT

The mother of a dear friend of mine, here, in the South of France, was six and living in Bordeaux when the Germans invaded that part of France.

She very recently wrote a moving testimony of her experiences as a child, during the German occupation and the liberation of France.

I translated it in English because, frankly, my first impression upon reading it was: “Is this how we are perceived in Iraq?” and the answer, which breaks my heart, is all too likely, “Yes, it is.”

And now, Eve Viaud’s account under the fold:

[…]

“A few days after the arrival of the German soldiers, I began to really understand the meaning of war: One of my Mom’s uncles rode by our house on his bicycle. He was going to work and waves at us as he went by. At the street corner, helmeted German soldiers, wearing visors, boots and long gray green coats, shouted: “Halt!” Unfortunately, my uncle was born deaf and continued on his way. The punishment was swift: a burst of machine-gun fire laid him down on the ground. I remained horrified in front of his lifeless body. A large pool of bloodstain appeared around him. I wanted to shout, but my mother put her hand on my mouth for me to stop me. She held me very tightly in her arms and pushed me inside the house, while murmuring: “What a tragedy! Poor France! Poor us!” My grandmother, behind the window, between two sobs, cursed God to allow such a infamy. “

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