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“In the bubbled, hypocritical mind of some in Hollywood, the only reason Gervais crossed a line is because he went after them. Had he been as relentless in ripping apart Sarah Palin, her young children, Jesus Christ, or George W. Bush, today the comedian would be celebrated as “edgy” and “courageous” — because only in Hollywood is throwing red meat to a hard-left crowd considered “edgy” and “courageous.” But Gervais didn’t do that. Instead, he trained his satirical fire on Hollywood Power and today there’s serious talk about whether or not the comedian will be brought back to the Golden Globes next year as host.”
John Nolte, at the Big Hollywood blog.
I think he has a strong point in his praise of Ricky Gervais’s performance, but I have a slight reservation. Imagine if Gervais had said such insulting things about showbiz people that Mr Nolte holds dear, or causes he supports. I doubt we would get such applause. And I also note that in the Daily Mail newspaper yesterday (I quote from reading the print edition), the writer, Quentin Letts, raves on about Gervais’s rudeness as if it was a barnstorming example of high wit. No it wasn’t. I cannot imagine your average Daily Mail reader enjoying say, an attack by an American comedian on the Royal family, for example.
The sad truth is that yes, Hollywood is full of self-regarding jerks who deserve all they get. But that does not make gratuitous rudeness somehow clever, as far as I can see, and I don’t see how we are going to get better movies as a result. And this does all rather cement the idea in American’s minds that many Brits are little more than hooligans. (I’d like to know what Stateside commenters think of how this all comes across.)
Talking of good movies, has anyone yet seen The King’s Speech?
This posting is about politics in the USA. Please realise that it is a simplification, what mathematicians call a first approximation, more true than false, and sufficiently true to be worth saying so that it may perhaps then be modified and qualified towards the actual truth.
I ought also to admit that I have never set foot in the USA, and that I got the notions that follow from the Internet, and before that from watching (as I still now watch) USA television shows (mostly comedy and cop shows). We here in Britain get lots of those. I freely admit that distance, instead of lending clarity to my eye, could merely have lent and be lending bullshit to it. In fact, I do admit it. But the bullshit it has lent includes the kind of bullshit that wins and loses USA elections. First approximation truth about what is being perceived, about what big bullshit picture is being believed in, is often sufficient to win or lose an election. For as we all know, a big part of reality in politics is perception. Voters in the USA get a lot of their ideas about politics in the USA from the Internet and from television shows, or so it says on the Internet and on television.
So here goes.
In political USA now, there are now four important groups of people. There are Democrats, Old School Republicans, Tea Partiers, and Voters. Political outcomes were determined by what the Voters decided about the first two. They are now determined by what the Voters decide about the other three.
Voters used to think that Democrats were good people with bad ideas, clever, but mostly only at excusing their bad ideas. Democrats sincerely believed in bloating the government, taxing, regulating and generally screwing things up. But they applied these bad ideas to all, without fear or favour. Personally, they had blue collars and were honest hardworking folks. They did not lie or cheat. They looked you in the eye and treated you right.
Voters used to think that Old School Republicans were bad people with good ideas. Republicans believed in business success, low taxes, less regulation, and generally getting the US economy motoring along. Trouble is that they were also rich and nasty snobs, and corrupt. They used their grasp of economics mostly to get rich themselves. Politically, they applied their ideas only in ways that suited them. If a tax or a regulation happened to suit them or their huge country club network of rich and nasty and snobbish friends, then they would, on the quiet, be for it. For them, business-friendly government meant a government friendly to their own businesses. If, on the other hand, your collar was blue, they’d deregulate and tax-cut the hell out of you, for the good of all, and for the good of themselves especially.
Hard to choose, wasn’t it? No wonder it was a dead heat, decade after decade. Good but stupid idiots versus clever but sneaky bastards.
It still is a dead heat, between Democrats and Old School Republicans, but this is because things are now moving towards Voters thinking that Democrats are bad people with bad ideas, and that Old School Republicans are bad people with bad ideas. Democrats now look like (or are being revealed as always having been) greedy and malevolent bastards with the same old bad ideas as ever. Old School Republicans are the same rich and greedy snobbish bastards they always were, but are now seen to be infected by (or revealed as always having believed in) bad ideas much like those of their opponents.
Enter the Tea Party.
The Tea Partiers started out as people whom the Voters regarded as dubious people with dubious ideas, and are moving towards being people whom the Voters believe to be …
I need some way to emphasise this next bit. Pay careful attention. I know, I’ll put the next five words into the title of this posting.
… good people with good ideas. The Tea Partiers have good ideas, which they sincerely want to apply to all without fear or favour. They are good people who work or worked for their living, will look you in the eye and treat you right, no matter what colour your collar, or anything else about you.
The Tea Partiers thus threaten to destroy both the Democrats and the Old School Republicans. They threaten to destroy the Democrats by destroying them, and to destroy the Old School Republicans by replacing them with different Republicans, Tea Party Republicans.
The Democrats say that the Tea Partiers are “extreme” Republicans, Republicans who are even nastier. They wish. The Tea Partiers are indeed creating a new sort of Republican, but not an even nastier Republican. They are creating nice Republicans. Electorally, the Tea Partiers are cleansing the selfish richness and snobbishness and nastiness out of the Republican brand, leaving the ideas that the Republicans appeared once to believe in untouched, and renewed in strength and quality. If the Republican brand resists too much, the Tea Partiers will destroy it and make another.
The recent financial melt-down is, of course, crucial to all of the above. In a crisis, ideas matter. And the Internet, the new idea spreader, is also crucial. USA citizens need no longer submit to being told what they think about bad times, by the bad people with bad ideas who are to blame for these bad times. Democrats are being revealed as nasty, by the melt-down and the Internet. Old School Republicans are being revealed as stupid, by the melt-down and the Internet. The Tea Partiers are being revealed as being good people with good ideas, by the melt-down and the Internet. No melt-down and no Internet, and you are back to the old dead heat between nice idiot Democrats and sneaky bastard Old School Republicans. And the Tea Party? Without the melt-down and the Internet, there is no Tea Party. (According to television, there is, still, no Tea Party, only criminals.)
No wonder the Democrats and the Old School Republicans hate and fear the Tea Party and are trying anything and everything they can think of to make it seem like bad people with bad ideas. Trouble is, all that the critics of the Tea Party can now think of to say about the Tea Party just adds to the impression that such critics are nasty and stupid bastards.
This is a snapshot of now, not a prophecy about the next century. This is how USA politics is now and the direction that USA politics is moving in now. I don’t say that things will continue this way indefinitely. In particular, how will the Tea Partiers take to being part of the government, to having to grapple face-to-face with the melt-down? The continuing melt-down and the Internet might then turn round and reveal the Tea Partiers to be just another bunch of good idiots or nasty bastards, or just nasty idiots. But, the melt-down and the Internet are not doing that now. They are doing the exact opposite of that.
Health and safety kills off the Lear of a lifetime. Jim White writes in the Telegraph:
Earlier this week, I went with my son to see Derek Jacobi in King Lear at the Donmar Warehouse. We were so close to the action we were almost in it. It was clear that the enthusiasm expressed in Charles Spencer’s review for this paper was not misplaced: the actors delivered the poetry brilliantly, the pace crackled and fizzed.
For 50 minutes, we were entranced. Then: bang. Just as Kent had been sentenced to a spell in the stocks, the lights went out. For a moment, I thought this was a directorial ruse, and that the next scene would find him in some Tarantino-style torture chamber. But no. It was a power cut.
The house lights cranked into action, and for a minute or so, the actors carried on, the scene barely diminished by the reduced visibility. Quite right, too. As this was a show almost spartan in its freedom from special effects, there seemed no reason not to continue. The communication of the verse would have been as powerful in the gloaming.
But then a technician announced that since there had been an outage, the performance was being cancelled, for – you’ve guessed it – health and safety reasons. “Your safety,” he said, “is our number one priority.”
I struggle to know how to respond to this. Could I, perhaps, take a line or two, as suggested in my title for this post, from another of Shakespeare’s plays:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
Or could I say, begone, abominations. You are dead things that pretend to live.
Hello, what is this? BBC comedians (Armstrong and Miller, no less) making fun out of the failure of Global Warming to be … warm?
Spotted by the ever-alert Delingpole, who has the video up at his blog. It’s under a minute long and is a must-see, if you’ve not already seen it.
I wonder if it was that earlier viral video, the one in the classroom with the exploding kids, that alerted these guys to the comedic possibilities of this debate? The reaction to this latest piece of (I trust) internet virality will be interesting.
Culture is very important. That is why the government should never be allowed to have a role in it.
– NickM
Polly Toynbee in the Guardian back in July:
The return from a tiny government investment is probably greater in the cultural industries than any other – every £1 the Arts Council England puts in generates another £2 from commercial sources.
The UK Film Council, quoted in the Independent in August:
“But the UKFC doesn’t waste money, it makes it. For every pound it invests, the country gets £5 back.“
Ivan Lewis in the Guardian yesterday:
The National Campaign for the Arts estimates that every £1 of grant given to the arts brings a fifteen-fold return in investment into the county [Somerset].
Ken Loach made a good film in 1969. I gather he has made other films since. A Contemporary Case for Common Ownership, for instance, and something about a Glaswegian alcoholic.
My opinion of Loach as a human being was decided when I read this:
In Kes, probably Loach’s best-known film, which tells the tale of a boy who befriends a falcon, the actor playing the boy believed the bird used in the filming had been killed for the final scene in which he discovers its death. In fact, a dead kestrel had been substituted for the live bird.
Loach felt that the ordinary moral rules against causing someone (particularly a child) intense suffering through a cruel deception did not apply so long as his deception was carried out in the service of his art. The old Independent article I linked to above goes on:
Surprise and integrity are thus at the core of Loach’s purpose in life – as well as having a poke at authority whenever the opportunity arises.
His “pokes at authority” seem not to be incompatible with a not-very-surprising yearning to wiggle his way to a bit more power himself, the power, at least, to “do something” about all these people watching what they want instead of what is good for them. And him. And his friends. Here he is in yesterday’s Guardian:
We could start by treating cinemas like we treat theatres. They could be owned, as they are in many cases, by the municipalities, and programmed by people who care about films – the London Film Festival, for example, is full of people who care about films.
It is not quite clear from the article whether Loach is proposing that these municipal cinemas programmed by people who care should wholly replace the commercial cinemas and films that nobody cares about, except the millions who pay to watch them. Since he is a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, which describes itself as a revolutionary anti-capitalist party, it is reasonable to assume that would be his ultimate goal. He continues,
Those of us who work in television and film have a role to be critical, to be challenging, to be rude, to be disturbing, not to be part of the establishment. We need to keep our independence.
Not that having you and your protegés decide what films the taxpayer will have available in the cinema he pays for would make you part of the establishment, or in any way compromise your independence, of course.
The first I heard of it was here, where there was a piece about how this guy had been mocking this guy, guy number two being Tate Galleries boss Nicholas Serota. Serota faces cuts in state funding for The Arts, i.e. for himself and his enthusiasms, and he is not happy. He calls this “blitzkrieg”, clearly having never heard of Godwin’s Law. So, the pips are starting to squeak. Maybe this Cameron chap is not quite as bad as Perry de Havilland says.
The last time I read the Guardian very regularly was in those far off days before the internet, for its cricket coverage. Critics of pieces like Serota’s might be allowed about one or two short letters, next to three or four longer and very supportive ones, or ones claiming that the idiot argument in question wasn’t idiotic enough. How times have changed. What struck me most about this week’s Serotage was the number of commenters who weren’t impressed by his arguments.
Which can be summarised as: The Arts is (a) good, and (b) good in particular for “the economy”. But if The Arts is so good for the economy, why does The Arts seem to depend for its very survival on state subsidy. If the economy loves The Arts so much, why can it not pay for it? Cutting subsidies for The Arts would be a mere pinprick for The Arts if The Arts was economically successful, not a blitzkrieg.
Subsidised art – The Arts – does indeed depend upon a continuing flow of subsidy, but art itself is a far sturdier thing. Many commenters said how much they dislike The Arts of the sort that Serota presides over. Fair enough. I dislike Serotanism not so much because I hate The Arts as because I love art, and think that The Arts gets in the way of art far more than The Arts contributes to art, in much the same kind of way that I think subsidised car companies were bad for the British car industry, or that I think that NASA has got in the way of and continues to get in the way of space exploration. The Arts crowds out art, in other words. Serota thinks that art depends on The Arts. Well, as several of those commenters pointed out, he would, wouldn’t he?
If I understand Mr Cameron’s attitude correctly, he will be rather pleased about this particular squeaking by this particular pip. You see, he will say to the poor, in answer to their squeaks about the cuts they are now facing. Consumers of and practitioners of The Arts are also suffering. We are spreading the pain.
But will Cameron contrive any kind of economic recovery, or merely a softer-than-might-have-been landing into the swamp of permanent economic stagnation, followed by more sinking? Are these cuts really cuts as in less state money, or merely cuts as in not as much of an increase in state money as had been hoped for? My opinion about that being that the first can, for those directly involved, feel a lot like the second, as more people get sucked into the state money business and away from having productive lives. Between them, all these people do go on getting more and more, but for many an individual state money chaser, it may really be a cut. And even dashed hopes must feel a lot like genuine cuts, if you have already spent the money you had hoped to get.
A half brick. That’s about how musical I am as.
So I’m no judge of an orchestra, but Simon Heffer in the Telegraph seems to think the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra is pretty good. The unusual thing about this orchestra is that it does not receive Arts Council funding.
I have to say that the fact that it gets some of its money from the patronage of the Duchess of Cornwall means that it cannot claim to be entirely independent of the State, since I presume she gets much of her money from the Civil List. But there you go. If one has to have state subsidies for the arts it is much more in the proper style that the dosh should come from the bejewelled hands of the former mistress, now wife, of the Prince of Wales than by filling in a grants form. I rather hope she hands over a velvet bag of gold sovereigns instead of writing a cheque.
I digress right royally. Here is what Simon Heffer writes about the orchestra’s founder, John Boyden:
He has serious convictions about arts funding – in particular, he believes that the market for orchestral music is so distorted by public funding that innovation is almost impossible. Until the Arts Council’s predecessor began funding orchestras just after the war, serious music depended on ticket sales and the patronage of the wealthy. Before the late 1940s, the LSO (a company owned by its players) paid dividends. Now it receives £2,355,836 (in 2010/11) from the Arts Council alone.
Mr Boyden believes that by keeping the price of tickets artificially low, the gap between an orchestra and its audience has become a gulf. He believes that other orchestras use their Arts Council funding to undercut orchestras such as his, taking up residencies in the provinces that are only made possible by the taxpayer’s largesse. The state does not contemplate pulling the plug on these famous institutions and, as a result, everything in the orchestral world is static. Mr Boyden argues, with some justification, that the last piece of new music to seize the public imagination was Britten’s War Requiem 48 years ago – because the music now written for these orchestras is created to satisfy not the musical public, but the taste of a handful of bureaucrats.
I see that former Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker was spotted at a Georgia Tea Party protest, telling a local reporter that she is “furious about the way we are being led towards socialism.” Prefix magazine calls this “depressing” news that will “bring you down” before the weekend, because it’s incumbent upon all musicians – especially those in seminal proto-punk bands like VU – to have roughly the same, boring lefty politics.
– Michael C. Moynihan, linked to and already picked out as a nice little nugget by Instapundit, which is where I saw it. I know, I know, who gives a defecation what ex-music-celebs think? Or for that matter current actors. Well, I like it when they talk sense, if only because the people who talk nonsense get so miserable and angry about it.
“I don’t know what organically grown chickens are; I’ve never seen one.”
– Tony Curtis, one of the greats, who died this week.
You never stop learning strange things, do you? For instance, this morning, I was (still am) listening to CD Review, and the presenter Andrew McGregor suddenly starts talking about how, in the year 1612, the heir to the throne, James I’s son Prince Henry, rather foolishly went for a swim in the Thames, caught typhoid, and died. Cue an “outpouring of grief”, which included songs about the death of the young Prince (aged 18), hence the CD angle.
And who became king of England instead? Why, only Charles I, who got himself executed in 1649, in the midst of a ferocious civil war between himself and his severely angered Parliament. That I had heard about. Prince Henry was apparently, and in fascinating contrast to his younger brother, a Protestant:
Henry was quite the Protestant – when his father proposed a French marriage, he answered that he was ‘resolved that two religions should not lie in his bed’.
You can’t help wondering: What If? What if Prince Henry had not gone for that swim, and had become the King instead of Charles I? How might English history have turned out then?
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