News management

Apparently, around 371,000 people who weren’t actually born in this country claimed work-related benefits last year. It’s estimated that 98% of these people had worked and paid taxes for long enough to be entitled to make a claim for jobseeker's allowance, income support, carer's allowance, disability living allowance, or whatever.

The Department for Work and Pensions is said to be investigating the "small number" of cases where claimants had “no lawful immigration status”. Employment Minister Chris Grayling admitted that the vast majority of the claimants were perfectly entitled to the benefits they’d claimed.

I understand all that. What I don’t understand is why this unremarkable non-story morphed into the top story on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, with Sir Andrew Green from MigrationWatch UK trying to scare Middle England witless with apocryphal stories of Bulgarian Big Issue sellers claiming to be self-employed (citation?) and Chris Grayling trying to reassure the same demographic that our ever-vigilant Government was ready crack down at the first hint of Bulgarian charity magazine-related misconduct, or similar.

It’s almost as if somebody in government is trying to divert attention from the government's own ill-thought out, failing, misleading, or just plain bonkers policies and big, bad news stories by encouraging journalists to focus on some trivial side issue that really is so tiny that the politicians can credibly claim to have it under control.

With no sign of Her Majesty's Opposition coming up with any alternative ideas the Coalition need to respond to, the Coalition will probably get away with this sort of news management.

The new mood in Britain

Ultimately, all this was about big money. Just like Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, Damien Hirst knew how exactly to tap the big, corporate market. He is probably the richest artist there has ever been, and in September 2008, just as world markets collapsed, he sold works worth
£111 million at a Sotheby’s auction.

The Telegraph's Peter Oborne comes to bury Damien Hirst and to praise David Hockney. Oborne doesn't know whether Hockney is a big C Conservative, but asserts that he's certainly a conservative painter, whilst the "progressive" Damien Hirst was the closest thing New Labour had to an officially approved ambassador for Cool Britannia.

It's  not often that I find myself thinking like Peter Oborne, but I actually found myself nodding in agreement in quite a few places. I respect the fact that Hockney has painstakingly acquired the skills of his craft, whereas Hirst seems to be all managerialist vision, subcontracting out the skills and hard work needed to actually realise that vision to anonymous artisans, then hoovering up the cash and celebrity for himself. I remember seeing some of Hirsts pencil sketches once and thinking that that this guy either couldn't draw, or just wasn't trying very hard.

And I do like the fact that Hockney respects his audience, that he takes an interest in making sure his paintings are hung high, so everybody gets a good look.

So unlike the home life of our own dear Damien, who was too busy trying to flog  pieces like Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything, that his assistants had made earlier, to gilded members of the overclass like Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton* to worry about whether the little people were getting a good view. Exclusive art for very exclusive people.

Even the concepts are exclusive. Be honest, you don't even know what Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything is about, do you? That's because Hirst's a clever multi-millionaire and you're just a peasant.

I must admit that I have the occasional twinge of regard for Hirst (there are more ways to express yourself than putting pigment on canvas and anyone who doesn't think it's jaw-droppingly awesome for an artist to actually get one of his paintings sent to Mars must be dead inside) but, on the whole, I agree with Oborne that he's an over-hyped BS merchant, the product of a society that values self-belief, self-promotion and money over the less showy attributes of skill, diligence, questioning, observation and patience, And I don't for one second buy the argument that pieces like his diamond-encrusted skull make Hirst an outsider, making an ironic critique of our shallow, materialistic society. 'I was doing it in an ironic way' is just 'the dog ate my homework', sent to art college. Hirst's definitely inside that particular tent, pissing out.

 As far as the narrow point about Hockney Vs. Hirst goes, I can't find much to disagree with. The wider lessons that Oborne draws from the comparison don't really stand up, though. The idea that all conservative, traditional art is an intrinsically Good Thing and difficult, "progressive" art is A Bad Thing doesn't stand the briefest scrutiny. For a start, half of the "great art" in our galleries was initially derided for being "difficult" modern rubbish. Even such firmly middle-of-the-road-National-Trust-notebook-cover-fodder as Monet and the Pre-Raphaelites was once thought daringly avant garde and "progressive". Not to mention the fact that the world's most notorious tyrants seem to have liked their art understandable, representational and artistically conservative - think the Stalinist school of Socialist Realism, not to mention (Godwin's Law alert) a certain frustrated artist from Austria who had major issues with progressive (or as he called it "degenerate") art.

 Oborne's political pop at New Labour has some truth in it but it's also deeply disingenuous. Yes, people like Mandelson were 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich', when they should have been intensely worried about the economy-busting pyramid schemes that were enriching the few. But in a not-too-difficult-to-imagine counter-factual world where the Conservatives were in power at the height of the boom, does anybody seriously think that the post-Thatcherite party of the free market would have behaved any differently? If it'd been the Tories in power, nobody would have even bothered to come up with the 'intensely relaxed' sound bite - everybody would have assumed that the Tories were in favour of that sort of thing anyway.

Hirst's over-priced, over-hyped art is certainly emblematic of a gilded age of excess that's crashing down around our ears, but anyone who thinks that the madness was purely the fault of the New Labour and that we're now entering a blessed era of Conservative stability and sanity is living in cloud cuckoo-land. Despite failure on a superhuman scale, the all-party neo-liberal consensus that presided over the disaster is still in place.

If ever a financial order deserved a 30s-style repudiation, this one did. Its gods were false. Its taste was bad. Its heroes were oafs and brutes and thieves and bullies. And all of them failed, even on their own stunted terms.

 Still the skull-faced God of greed glitters and grins down at us.


 *I'm not actually sure whether M. Arnault eventually acquired the Hirst he was haggling for, but with a job title like that, you can be sure he was one of the select few who could afforded the exorbitant asking price

Cool for copycats

The recognition of a new faith group caused a bit of incredulous hilarity earlier in the month:

A "church" whose central tenet is the right to file-share has been formally recognised by the Swedish government.

The Church of Kopimism claims that "kopyacting" - sharing information through copying - is akin to a religious service.

BBC

But, as Melvyn Bragg discovered in a recent edition of The Written Word, it's not an entirly novel idea. The relevant Wikipedia entry summarises a long-standing religious precedent:

In Buddhism, great merit is thought to accrue from copying and preserving texts , the fourth-century master listing the copying of scripture as the first of ten essential religious practices. The importance of perpetuating texts is set out with special force in the larger Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra which not only urges the devout to hear, learn, remember and study the text but to obtain a good copy and to preserve it. This ‘cult of the book’ led to techniques for reproducing texts in great numbers, especially the short prayers or charms known as dhāraṇī-s. Stamps were carved for printing these prayers on clay tablets from at least the seventh century, the date of the oldest surviving examples.

I'm cool with that. The ideaof Kopimists accumulating good karma through the act of digitally sharing the works of the Lady GaGa* seems no more wrong-headed or ridiculous than many long-established religious beliefs (like the doctrine of original sin).

If you're a copyright holder whose work is being ripped off, you may be a bit less relaxed with the idea. I can sympathise with that viewpoint, too. Maybe somebody should point out to the Kopimists that claiming exemption from the norms of reasonable behaviour and from criticism on the grounds that your actions are religiously motivated is a bit arrogant and rather unfair on everybody else. But not before they've pointed the same thing out to the spokespeople for Christianity, Islam and all the other major organised religions, who've been getting away with this sort of thing for centuries.

Issuing a stream of petulant demands may be counter-productive for political parties, but it doesn't seem to have done organised religion much harm - yet.


* Who's not averse to a spot of copying herself - at least according to some people.

If only

Underperforming education secretaries can be removed within a term under powers being introduced in September. 

Only kidding.

As usual, the smack of firm discipline only applies to the junior ranks. As you were.

Viva Las Vegas!

A leader writer in The Economist speaks up for the City of London, usiing a truly bizarre analogy. I love the concise put-down in the comments:

'Strangely, California doesn’t talk down Silicon Valley.'

That is because Silicon Valley produces tangible, useful things (in addition to less useful things such as Facebook). Financiers produce nothing and enrich themselves by skimming from other people’s transactions.

 The article could have been improved by using a more precise analogy:

Strangely, Nevada doesn’t talk down Las Vegas.

via

 

BS, created for you by Dave

Politically, there's not been much good news in the past year, but I'm moderately cheered to find out that nobody seems that interested in Dave's DIY Flatpack Self-Assembly Society idea:

A good thing, too. In hard times, there are few things less cheerful than listening to the enormously well-off lecturing those struggling to get by about how there's more to life than money.

But the BS is something worse just than a return to the Victorian Values of self-righteousness and hypocrisy. It's nothing less than a government sponsored job-destruction programme. It's about throwing people who do useful work to support themselves and their families onto the scrapheap, in the hope that some mug will step in to do their job for free. The BS merchants have implicitly admitted that the jobs being destroyed to make way for their fantasy volunteer army are useful ones. If those being 'let go' were the holders of useless non-jobs who never would be missed, why the urgent need for volunteers to step in and take up the slack?

What really confuses me is that all this volunteering stuff doesn't even make sense from a conservative / libertarian / free market prospective. After all, every True Believer in The Almighty Market knows that where there's a need, the Invisible Hand will surely provide. A society stuffed with do-gooding volunteers can only interfere with the smooth operation of the market and the entrepreneurial incentive to cater for every need at the right price.

Mind you, from the point of view of the practical exploitation of labour, as opposed to right-wing ideological purity, BS volunteering is right up there with unpaid internships as a way of keeping opportunity out of the proles' grubby hands and normalising the idea that people should be grateful that they're doing something rather than nothing, without aspiring to any high-flown notions of actually being paid for doing a useful job.

It might be dressed up in vague, fluffy, communitarian-sounding language, but on closer examination, Dave's BS is one of the nastiest, most divisive and most cynical initiatives the Nasty Party has ever come up with and I'll be delighted to see it fester away to nothing on the muck heap of history.

From the fury of the chicken ships deliver us, O Lord

Watching our hens fussing and bobbing about in the back garden, I've been thinking that they reminded me of something, but I couldn't, for the life of me, think what. It's just come to me, though. They've got the same proportions as old sailing ships. From the generously rounded curves of the lower hull to the upward sweep towards the jutting forecastle and the sprightly, upturned stern, the craft that kicked off the European Age of Exploration looked like nothing so much as giant sea-going chickens.

It would be really neat to say that galleons were the ships most like Gallus gallus domesticus but, sadly for alliteration fans, galleons lacked the high, ungainly forecastle of the earlier carrack, the most hen-like ship of all. Look at the top picture of Portuguese carracks off a rocky coast. Not only do these ships have the bodies of wooden chickens, but the flapping mainsail of the foreground vessel will ring a bell with anyone who's ever seen a running hen steadying itself with an outstretched wing.

Columbus, Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Vespucci and Jacques Cartier all sailed these quaint, gawky-looking carracks to to the blank spaces on the maps to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no European had gone before.

It was an exciting time, but also a brutal one. A time of trade, of discovery and of armed men being disgorged from the wooden bellies of the floating Trojan chickens, bringing conquest, disease, slavery and genocide.

There's something almost deceptive about the unthreatening, domesticated shape of these vessels. So unlike the low, spare, purposeful menace of a raiding viking dragonship: 

Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf. Danevikings, torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the collar of gold.

Death's a sly customer, who doesn't always appear in the shape we expect. Death can easily bob into your life in a disguise as absurd as a big, floating chicken. Aeschylus, they say, was unexpectedly killed by a falling tortoise. If the tortoises don't get you, the flying bears might. But whatever form your ship takes, it will come in one day:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break. 

He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to a mouth's kiss. 

So here's a late New Year's resolution - treasure every finite moment, of life, however confusing, infuriating and absurd it may seem:

Ah, my Beloved, fill the Cup that clears
TO-DAY of past Regrets and future Fears:
To-morrow—Why, To-morrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n thousand Years.

May your years be long.