Small Portions

The Little Blighters

[Lightbulb burns brightly behind my head] Lets legalise drugs.

No more drugs-related crime [cheer]. An opportunity for taxation [cheer]. The tax will alleviate the negative societal impact of the blighters. [cheer]. No more broken Britain [cheer]. Our brilliant little children (so cute) will be safe from buying a contaminated product [cheer]. Everything is gonna be all right [sigh of relief]

There is a problem. Its not ideological. Its not with the possible values of legalising drugs. Its not even with the lack of any clear causality between legalisation and social improvement. Its much simpler than that, but nobody seems to have thought about it. Its with the physical nature of hard drugs: they are small, discreet, often powders or pills, and extremely powerful for their size.

Why does this matter for legalisation? Well simply that if my brother carelessly spills a bit of his powder on my kitchen table and I make my sandwich on it, not really noticing that its there, I could be in for quite a traumatic midday experience. Of course this is a perfect possibility when drugs are illegal, but I think that with the legalisation of a product comes a carelessness as it mingles with our everyday affairs. Theoretically this could take place anywhere. I put my hand on a bar laced with cocaine and rub my eyes, nose or mouth. I take a pill from the cupboard thinking its a painkiller, only its not.

The simple point is that if drugs are legal they will be carried around and stored like any other legal product, and sometimes people make mistakes with these things. Drugs are so powerful, however, that the effects of these mistakes will be amplified to the point of the absurd. The accidental ingestion of a class A drug can’t be a nice experience and it seems common sense that this is bound to happen.

I don’t really believe that we can legalise drugs, simply because as they integrate with our normal lives in the same way as other legal drugs - in our purses, in our pockets, on the kitchen side, in our cabinets, in our bars, cafes, clubs etc. - mistakes will happen. And with something so small and powerful, the residue of which could find its way onto almost anything, the effects could be devastating.

INTO INTERNETERNITY

When The Metro said that half a billion people have Facebook accounts, did they take into account the fact that at least 8 of these accounts are people pretending to be Jerry Seinfeld? 8 is excessive. We need 3. One for Jerry Seinfeld the actual person, one for the fictional character, and one for the extra-fictional character presented in the ‘show within a show‘.

Kottke, the cuddly home of the hypertext, directed me to a pleasantly up-my-ass article which defends the rights of the dinnertime texter, the mid-conversation tweeter, and the funereal IM. The argument goes like this; snubbing an elderly relative to e-piss all over the new Liz Phair album is contributing a great deal more than paying attention to Grandma’s wrinkly holiday pics. It’s just that the e-contribution reaches a different society, one filled with fictional Seinfelds.

The article uses this as justification for a New Etiquette. One where the best, most entertaining source deserves my attention. Sounds like a fair competition, but it’s not.

The hinterland of the internet is packed out with amethyst and dung. And one man’s dung is another man’s amethyst. You see, the net simultaneously breeds and gangbangs The Arts, Money and Life-As-We-Know-It, in a way that cannot fail to be interesting to at least one Seinfeld impersonator. It is the sheer weight of numbers contributing their smart-ass specialisms that makes my niche possible and distracts me from the Skeggy snaps. The same is true of all those contacts inside my phone. All of them are alive, and all of them can share: one of them is bound to divert me eventually.

So really it’s super unfair to make Grandma compete with hordes of dudes who already agree with me about Exile in Guyville. Long live reality - I’m gonna give the old girl a little more of my time.

- Horst

 

 

A Question of Roughage

All the best things in life come in polystyrene containers: stereos, laptops, fast food, diskettes, and Philip Schofield (via semen). I had that profound realisation after I ate the contents of a squeaky white box that I got from a weird thing called a ‘fish bar’. What a fish bar is, and how it earned that cool ‘hangin out’ type name, is not really clear. (Unusually, Wiki has no answers) But one thing that IS simple enough is the food: I ate three things out of that greazy polymer; potato, fat and salt.

The salt tasted great. You know, how salt does. The fat gave me that satisfying sheen of slippery guilt across my teeth and lips, at once oiling up my appetite and warmly frenching me. The potato was a modest enough vehicle for those vices.

Now, I know that gobbling a crate of chips after 20 pints of lager is frowned upon. But come on, let me live a little - it was somebody else’s pay day and we just had to celebrate. Plus, I follow all the food rules that you have to follow as a not-obese human to remain a not-obese human:

- eat five fruit and/or vegetables every day. Leap years inclusive.
- ingest some form of pro-biotic yoghurt every 3 months
- find out about cod’s livers and then use their juices to improve brain activity.
- find something you don’t like and be ‘allergic’ to it. Then avoid it with verve.
- drink liquid (well…. Duh).

- exercise enough

IMO once I have completed these tasks, particularly the last one, I can ”have fries with that“.

Over the next few years, our government will be encouraging us to eat healthily and avoid fatty foods. This is a good thing, a worthy thing, but I really hope they remind us to do our squatthrusts and 5km of wheezing as well. Because to my mind it’s the exercise that validates my order at the fish bar.

- Horst


 

More Concrete

I read on a weblog that Primavera Sound Festival is just ‘ATP kids on holiday‘. If that’s true, then Dirty Projectors’ gig at the Barbican was ‘ATP kids on a school trip‘.

D Pros didn’t manage to pull a massive crowd, partly because they don’t get as much exposure as the LSO, partly because they don’t play ‘hits’ like the LSO do, and partly because they wanted to play a simulacrum version of their music concrete (and quite sloppy) album ‘The Getty Address’ in full. For all these reasons, the audience was made up of only about 100 clever hipsters (and me). We wandered around the building like tiny school kids (on average we were around 30 years younger than the usual Barbican audience), gawping at the singular brilliance of the design, then getting lost trying to find the t-shirt guy.

In comparison with all those grotty O2 academies and cellar venues, the building took on the air of a lofty museum and in doing so it became part of ‘the event’ in a way that gig venues normally can’t - there were long and fast walks between doors, provocative colours, warm lighting, surprising layouts, and expansive vistas. My date pointed out that as modernist law dictates, all decoration was achieved through function, which meant the music still had plenty of room and plenty of attention.

Most good-hearted lefties would assume that anything as valuable, democratic, and public as The Barbican Centre must be a product of good government. Nope. It was paid for by The City of London Corporation (read: ‘greedy bankers’) as a gift to us common folk. Given the lingering terror of the 'credit crunch' (remember that?), maybe they could build us another one? This time in Bristol please.

- Horst Feldman

Curry Night

‘Curry night’ at Asian Spicy is something of a non-event. That is not to say that it’s not excellent - it’s just that having a ‘Curry night’ at a curry house seems to force the point a little. Anyhow, some sort of reward structure was erected which resulted in my ownership of about 15 chapatis, which, after a hot gallon of Madras, was about 14 chapatis too many.

Having settled the bill, I patiently nodded along to the waiters’ inevitable speech on Bangladeshi welfare policies, and then left Asian Spicy with a doggy bag 14 chapatis strong.

Outside the grand snug of the restaurant, the rain was washing memories from the pavement and rinsing the filthy tramps. One such fraudster was camping outside the dry cleaners, and when I approached him, out came his arm and out poured his plea. He wanted food.

“Can I have some money for food – I’m starving”
“Here, I have some chapati in my bag – do you want that?”
“Is it Ok?”
“Yes it’s fine” [I then actually eat some in front of him to prove that it’s not tainted]
“Is there nothing in it? It looks dry man”
“No there’s nothing in it”
“Then no thanks, i’ll get something else”

I successfully fought off the urge to say “beggars can’t be choosers”, and walked on home.

Since this event I’ve become convinced that food snobbery in the UK has gotten so violent that it has the power to trickle down and attack the starving from the inside out. As a society we may have lost sight of the point of food. Gastro-dressage should be considered secondary to food’s true function, to fill.

Do we really need to know how Jamie Oliver cooks trout? Why does celeriac exist? Is £3.50 too much to spend on tin foil? Does anyone shop at Fortnum and Mason? Is brown bread a hoax? Has anyone ever ‘sent back’ a Big Mac? Is food just ‘shit waiting to happen’?

- Horst

 

Crufts: The 'Am Appy' Rescue Package

So much has been written about the decline of American Apparel. There have been accusations, recriminations, and a few tears shed along the way, but ultimately we’re all now united around the desire to see more girls looking like Taylor Swift’s bedroom 'geek' character in ‘You Belong with Me’.
Can Am Appy really survive? We (idiots with nothing better to write/think about) think they can. 3 things inspire hope:

1. Avey Tare got interviewed by NME. This gives British children permission to move away from the vampire-scarecrow look, and follow the animal bands into the wake of electro-naturalism, via corduroy.

2. Am Appy media is shifting emphasis back onto ‘safe ground’ such as gay-rights and large, fully-dressed bosoms. This means that American moralists can achieve a sense of wellbeing when they buy ‘Legalize Gay’ [litigious] t-shirts, by implicitly attacking law they don’t fully understand. This is sort of like the sensation that you are ‘Saving Sri Lanka’ when you download an M.I.A mp3.

3. The Crufts Experience:
In 2008 the BBC fell out of love with Crufts for allowing breed standards, judging standards and breeding practices to encourage the existence of skinny dogs. Crufts reacted badly, arguing that the BBC does not understand the complexities of the bizarre world of organised dog-fucking. But you can’t win a fight with the BBC because their website is really popular and because celebrities on a par with Woody Allen dedicate their whole life to it. So Crufts relented, and for the good of its brand, it started giving fat dogs higher scores.

The parallels between the Crufts Crisis 2K8 and American Apparel 2K10 are obvious enough. Fingers crossed, both the Derby hipsters and the Am Appy marketing men can complete the Crufts Model and do a Burkean climb-down from first principals, and maybe liberate a few homosexuals in the process.

- Horst Feldman

 

Mutton Dressed as Lamb

Why is Israel intent on sabotaging its own credibility? First the Lebanon War in 2006 and the brutal display in Gaza 2008-09, then all the nonsense of building settlements in east al-Quds, and now the barbaric treatment of activists delivering aid to a suffering population. Netanyahu came to power with a campaign promising a tougher dimension to Israeli-Palestine relations but this latest act is just foolish.

Israel is of limited significance to us in the U.K., perhaps something of a friend of a friend, but the relationship between the U.S. and Israel is markedly different. Chomsky refers to the U.S. as Israel’s Godfather, which seems about right to me, and the close ties between the two countries gives Israel’s current senselessness more significance on the other side of the Atlantic. The Israel Lobby is a powerful force in American politics and Obama gave the Israel-Palestine issue centre stage in his foreign policy strategy. This bond gives Stephen Walt cause to claim that Israel’s blunder is not just bad for Israel but bad for the U.S. The attacks of the IDF were committed in international waters and involved a crew of activists which included a Nobel peace prize winner, a holocaust survivor, and a former U.S. ambassador. Its not a pretty picture and Walt argues that this also makes the Godfather look bad. The actions of the IDF have tarnished the image of Washington, and the only way to reverse this process is to publicly denounce the actions of Israel. Hague did this yesterday for us but the situation in America is much more complicated and Obama/Clinton risk a lot if they come out strongly against Israel.

However there seems a bit of irony in Walt’s arguments in that I don’t remember Israel condemning  U.S. foreign policy strategy after 9/11, or the illegal war in Iraq. These were equally as bad for the U.S.’s image, and following Walt’s argument, they must have been equally bad for the image of Israel. Could it be that Walt’s instructions to criticise Israel are really part of a scapegoating mechanism: the U.S. should try to deflect attention from its own murky past onto another target? I’m not really sure why Walt is worried about the U.S. suffering from some sort of negative association, since the Bush doctrine and the Iraq war have done more than enough to parade an unfavourable representation of America in front of the World. Criticising Israel now will do little to salvage the image of an ugly nation. 

- The Pilgrim

Oily Fish

The oil spill is now a huge disaster. Check out its size here.

Can we learn from Am Appy?

American Apparel (Am Appy) is in trouble. The company announced a $17.6 million loss for the first quarter of 2010, a figure that puts the company in danger of defaulting on one of its loans. All this could mean that it’ll shut down and we might have to go into Urban Outfitters a little more often. But what did they do wrong? I feel like we need to find out and then spread the word to the other chill retailers that help make us who we are. Some ideas:

On a recent misadventure I noticed that Am Appy have opened a store in Derby. Could it be that there just aren’t enough brave indie bros in the outposts it now finds itself in? Am Appy requires that its customers have a ‘strong personal brand’ which can withstand the removal of logos, band t-shirts and pretty patterns, so that a fitted simplicity can unite disparate trends across the alt demographic. Also they charge £50 for a hoodie. A lot to ask of Derby.

Just as likely is the possibility that the Am Appy name has ‘gone toxic’ a bit like the Conservative party post-Thatcher, or Interpol once they decided to tour with U2. IMO any toxicity is fully deserved – you DO NOT pick a (non physical) fight with Woody Allen and win. Randy CEO Dov Charney claimed it was a conceptual bust-up, which sounds cool enough, but it’s hard to imagine ‘concepts’ coming out of the same office that is used to sexually harass employees, and to enlist gutter-bottom porn stars to advertise tube socks etc.

Although the pro-porn evocation of nipple zips and deepthroat only really pissed off Christians and Muslims (who never would have bought the hoodies anyway) it is clear that Am Appy has put ‘sex’ so ‘front and centre’ that it’s no longer sexy. I think it was the great lover Stephen Fry who said that sexyness is the suggestion of clothes coming off . With the corportation’s competition to find, and then institutionalise, the worlds ‘best bottom’, very little is left to the imagination, save the hole. And who wants to buy clothes with an asshole in mind?

Which brings us back to Dov Charney.

- Horst Feldman

The Ethical Spectacle

Nick Cohen’s written something quasi-decent in the Observer today. It makes a number of points but its main theme is that buying goods from a China where workers rights have been discarded is morally wrong and hints at the laodicean attitude of western consumers vis-a-vis the consequences of their purchases. The prescription is ethical consumerism, the prognosis gloomy. Cohen focuses too much on agency, that is the individual actions of consumers, and negates the deep market structures which give those actions their conditions of possibility. Buying ‘ethically’ is a nice idea but it is the market structures which enable extreme profit and low cost goods which are the real source of disastrous working conditions. Structures give practices their possibility, thus change the structure and you remove the possibility of practice. This is the problem with all ‘ethical’ products - organic/fairtrade/Eco-friendly etc. - they simply police the margins of an already dysfunctional system, without changing the very fabric which breeds the problems in the first place. It is a surface level solution and one providing the spectacle of engagement and ethicality without really doing anything about anything.

- The Pilgrim

Oily, Fishy Dealings

Mike Labossiere makes a good point that the banking crisis, Toyota’s unstoppable cars, and the recent oil spill by Bp all have a common denominator: an uncomfortably close relationship between the regulators and those being regulated. Strangely though his solution is ‘regular inspections of regulators’, be it through assessing their practice or through checks on any conflicts of interest. So more regulators of the regulators. What if their relationship also becomes too cozy? Do we employ more regulators to regulate the regulators of the regulators? Its not really a viable solution. The only real way to curb corporate venality is to limit the potential gains of such behaviour by taxing rewards. Take the money out of the system. Its simple enough but I doubt that any government has the political will to take on a systemic problem of this magnitude.

- The Pilgrim

Im Fred Goodwin get me out of here

Commenting on the BA Cabin crew strikes, Ross Clark asks if the crew deserve to be paid more than nurses, and concludes that no they don’t. On the surface it seems a trivial observation, one group care for the sick and needy, the other wheel peanuts around a tin can. However, despite the obviousness of the answer it still remains debatable as to who deserves to be paid higher wages. In modern society we leave this up to the market, rather than debate the wage level we hand it over to a third party for ‘independent’ review. Theoretically this should give us what we need, a society where everyones wages are set according to the demand for their labour. The problem is that it never quite works out like this and its an endemic feature of modernity that wages become highly separated from the use we have for those being paid. In fact I would go as far as to say that wages are no longer tied to demand but free-floating, anchored to nothing except the whimsical arbitrariness of circumstance.  The BA cabin crew strikes are a neat example of my point, for though we would all agree that nurses are more valuable then flight attendants they get paid much less (See Clark’s article). The pay and bonus culture of high ranking bank staff is another example, and the pay of general practitioners another. In fact giving examples rather neglects my point since I would argue that every wage is an example of this distortion. All wages are separated from the essence that gives them meaning: the collective valuation of the usefulness of labour. This is why no one has any sympathy for the BA cabin crew, because no one values their labour at £31,000 a year. Sadly the outcome of the dispute will not be arrived at on these grounds and will reflect the success of their strategy in context rather than represent the collective will of society. This is also why it is so hard to cap the salary’s of ridiculously high earning bankers, since there is no mechanism from society’s collective will to an institutionalised pay structure. The market is supposed to provide this but it has failed. Perhaps we could have a tiered wage system where each occupation is categorised and then the public vote on where to rank the occupation on the wage scale. Stupid idea but who knows.

- The Pilgrim

Lemon Squeezy 2

If only writing a masters thesis was this easy. (Thanks to Geras for this)

Lemon Squeezy

If only writing a masters thesis was this easy.

Young Modern-Adults (YMAs) and their Movements

Where do all the YMAs go?

I see them at the meat counter. I see them holding hands in a nearby Victoriana park. I can hear them on the bus planning a doomed proto-barbeque. But then night falls and I don’t see them again. Where have they gone? They can’t all be bbqing, can they?

I’ve had many a night without even their passive company:
I’ve sat in the corner of a curry house totally alone, but for my date and her graceful chewing. I’ve been to world-class performances of best-ever Monteverdi with 90% dead audiences. I’ve had plenty of room to swing my satchel at a Hudson Mohawke gig. I’ve been to witching-hour porno screenings which were so badly attended that I probably could have released my seed without repercussion. They didn’t even show up to see Noel Coward even when it was desperately reworked to include the menopausal tomb-clunge, Kim Cattrall.

And of course I go drinkin’. They’re a bit more present in pubs and bars. But only in a diminutive, hoody-stained pre-kebab-Carling, kind of way. They’re not out in force and they don’t look like a demographic.

My friend writes a fortnightly newsletter whose aim it is to get YMAs to attend classical music events in Bristol. It is made up of chocolatey light reviews and hopeful recommendations for the coming weeks. It’s an extremely ambitious project – if you can’t get them to eat a curry in public, I’d be very surprised to see them turning up for two hours of Sibelius.

Where are they, though? I don’t know. It could just be that I’m not invited to the bbq.

- Horst

The meaning of life (uncut)

When I was studying for my A-levels a favoured maxim of mine was - if one doesn’t spend at least every third lesson in the science labs then your A-levels are a waste of time, or ‘Mickey Mouse’ as many like to say. My comments were aimed at those subjects such as drama, textiles, art, and philosophy, or any subject where I thought people sat on comfortable chairs and ate doughnuts together with smiling faces. As it were, I spent all of my lessons in the science labs and so naturally I thought of myself as an ideal of efficient and productive learning.

Although expressed at the height of my adolescent arrogance it is a view commonly held in society, and equates to something like: ‘arts’ = time misspent, ‘science’ = time well spent. Ironically for the ‘scientists’ it resembles something of a Derridean binary opposition, but I’m sure that wouldn’t really bother them much. The latest proponent of this view is Sathnam Sanghera, the Times columnist, who writes that “a bit of me dies whenever young people say that they want to study philosophy at university”, and “the truth is that philosophy is the most whimsical and self indulgent of academic pursuits, raising more questions than answers and too often being an exercise in intellectual showing off for those involved”.

Coinciding with Sanghera’s article is the news that the test-tube capitalist Craig Venter has brought a new life kicking and screaming into the world. Thankfully its not a Venter ‘mini-me’ complete with baby beard and Fisher-price evaporating dish, apparently its some sort of goat but one you can fit under a microscope. Why is this important for Sanghera’s views on philosophy? Well the first questions asked in the popular press were not about genome sequencing, or advanced scientific methodology but about what this means for how we understand life, and whether Venter is ‘playing God’ (the second question is by now almost an institution of boring). The point being that Venter’s scientific advance is not purely scientific, it is also philosophical. Neither science or philosophy occur in a vacuum. This is not to say that all scientists are philosophers or vice versa, but that they are tied together in world where both inform social practice. What will be done with Venter’s creation may well be determined by the dominant philosophy of our age, and Venter’s discovery may in turn alter the way we think about and do certain things, in other words our philosophy. Its more a dialectic than a dichotomy.

Philosophy is important, and the rapid advances of science in the last 30 years only make it more so. Sanghera’s comments are off course and at bottom tautological, since to talk of whether philosophy is a useful pursuit is itself a philosophical question. Venter’s discovery may amount to nothing more than synthetic hysteria but if it is genuinely a new category of existence then I hope that the popular press will continue to provoke and carry the philosophical debate needed to fathom what this means for us.

- The Pilgrim (back from Lourdes) 

Birdie

Ratatat made a vid for their song 'Party with Children' which is just a little bird being a little bird. Now the blogs are going wild for all things avian, so here is my attempt at getting in on the action.

- Horst

What does your Uncles’ birthday list say about your Uncle?

 

About 60 years ago my grandparents started having catholic sex. This sex resulted in children, who later on, were deemed lazy enough to go to university instead of getting a job. Once they graduated they all got careers and one by one started having regular Anglican sex with similarly fruity grown-ups. Then I suppose they set up home and wound up producing ersatz little toe rags like me. Anyway, because of the migration to different towns of learning and of industry, the family see little of each other, and lists must compiled and circulated so that likes and dislikes can be managed efficiently.

Obviously, these lists are most useful around Christmas and birthdays, so that gifts can be received without embarrassing displays of anger. But they also have the potential to tell you something about some guy you barely ever see. This is a real list, and italicised is what my uncle is really saying by choosing these items. 

 

My Uncle’s Birthday List

 

Food:

Terry’s chocolate orange - I like Terry’s chocolate orange

Le Creuset Casserole Trough - I want to host an ‘informal’ dinner in my kitchen. I’ll invite Ollie and Samantha. We can talk seriously about holidays and then put on that Portishead CD we like. I’ll have a little too much wine and then beat my wife to death with some ludicrously heavy kitchen equipment.

 

CD:

Bryter Later – Nick Drake – Mark Lawson mentioned that this is a seminal album.

Houses of the Holy – Led Zeppelin – I am a middle-aged man.

Stabat Mater – Pergolesi – I’ve sat through enough of the Arctic Monkeys in the name of relevance. Give me something genuinely fantastic.

 

DVD:

Mugabe and the White African – I’m quite interested in independent film, and not just the shit that Zach Braff tweets about.

Rumpole – I am a lawyer and I am entitled to watch television.

 

Books:

Rebuilding Budapest – Cecil Roberts – I’ve been to Budapest.

The Road to Bath: A History of the A4 – Cecil Roberts – Could this be interesting? There’s a small chance that this could be interesting. Let’s find out.

Fifi La Fleur’s Compendium of Vintage Erotica – I am a middle-aged man (with a sense of humour).

 

Misc:

Some sailing rope – I have a big boat. It takes 11 hours to prepare for sailing and once I’m out there it’s extremely cold and nauseating. But I do have a big boat.

An unbranded lanyard – If I’m going to wear something around my neck I’d prefer it not to say ‘Whitney-Gay-Price’.

Aquatic plants – Damn right.

Aquatic fish – I like the word ‘aquatic’.

 

 

- Horst

 

How come I’ve got bad teeth?

I got problems. Teeth problems. Approximately 50% of my teeth depress me. They wind me up and make me wanna vote for Rage Against the Machine. Speaking of which, I am shocked by The Sun’s endorsement of Simon Cowell’s endorsement of Lord Ashcroft’s endorsement of the Tories’ endorsement of horseshit and thrift, but not half as shocked as I am when I prod at my teeth with my tongue. They line my bottom gum too enthusiastically, jossling for space like tweens at a warm Jamie T concert. The result is a kind of enamel Hiroshima.

Growing up, I was offered the chance of a lifetime. They (the authorities) wrote to me and said I could have a brace strapped onto them if I wanted to. They said they could winch it for free and that they came in all the colours of the rainbow. I would even be given a complimentary ratchet. But I said ‘No’ – at the time I was planning on being a professional Trombone player in the Royal Navy marching band, and I thought that the brace would jar against the mouthpiece, giving my trombophinating a pronounced lisp.

If only I had anticipated the vanity I would develop later in life, I would have made the right choice and embraced the brace, instead of trying to convince old men from Dorset to let me march around playing ‘God Save the Queen’ to grieving sailors.

I think that this lack of foresight is spread widely across the nation’s teeth, and that that can be seen in our collective mouth. It is a mouth as much mutilated by apathy as it is by Kit Kats. For instance, NHS figures show that 8% of dentistry is carried out D.I.Y. To put that in perspective, professional handymen carry out 5% of shelf erections. Some commentators attribute this bizarre statistic to a reduction of V.A.T on handtools as opposed to power tools, others insist that it is the Phil and Kirsty effect. But I’m certain of one thing: we’re not made to feel ugly often enough.

- Horst Feldman

Its not what it used to be

The election has been dominating this blog, well my posts at least, Mr Feldman has delivered a valve release with some charming stories about women and Jamaicans, but now it is my turn to move the goal-posts, and where better than the territory of recurrence and repetition, the site of the coldest of cold monster’s and the place where violent passions roam unconstrained. I am talking of course about the realm of international politics.

On Monday, Stephen Walt, Professor of international affairs at Harvard, wrote about the continuing rise of China and the future implications of this ascendency. He equated China’s recent expansion of its naval forces with the behavioural logic of America in the 19th Century (‘Manifest Destiny’ and the ‘Monroe Doctrine’). Walt contends that America’s conduct during this period was driven by the desire to become a regional hegemon, a desire created by the enduring logic of international anarchy and the perpetual operations it carries along with it (a need for security, a lack of knowledge concerning the intentions of other actors in the system etc.). This is the ‘tragedy of great power politics’, to use Mearsheimer’s phrase, and given the cyclical narrative of history such a world vision implies, it is no surprise that Walt deduces a few of the things we should expect (a social ‘scientific’ prediction perhaps?) from China in a similar position.

However, there is one looming phrase, the elephant in Walt’s room, which is dying to get out, and that is - “anarchy is what states make of it”. Anarchy, so central to Walt’s comments, has no enduring logic, no perpetual causal force which motivates the actions of all states, in all places, in all times. Its essentials are just what we make of them, they are constructed from our social interactions. Anarchy today is not what it was in the 19th century, it is a radically different beast. The U.N., WTO, declaration of Human rights, countless NGO’s, and different ideas about self and other, all contribute to an international system in which John Quincy Adams would have constructed a very different doctrine. This is the place where China must take action, and this is not a system where anything goes. Actions must be legitimated, both at home and abroad, and a global market place is more than a simple amendment to the rules of the game, its a new game altogether. It is within these constraints and enablements that China will rise, and if I were pressed to predict anything about it, I would simply say that It will most definitely be different from what we have seen before.

- The Pilgrim