Month: October 2022

A Vast Carelessness

It looks as though we might be reaching that point in the electoral cycle where the Tory party collapses under the weight of its scandals/ mismanagement/ corruption/ cluelessness (delete as appropriate)

It’s a feature of the process that, up until the collapse, and even as the misdeeds mount, Tories will continue to be presented as the natural party of government until, quite suddenly they aren’t. This is the point at which the Labour Party is allowed to win an election. *

Please Give Me One More Chance!

The next step in the cycle is for the Tories to retire for a while leaving Labour to restore some order to public services, national finances and international relations before re-emerging as ‘the natural party of government’.

I keep thinking about Fitzgerald’s description of the rich in The Great Gatsby. ‘They smashed up things and creatures’, he says,

They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

From The Great Gatsby

The saddest part of it all is that Labour always feels obliged to trim its policies and ambitions to look electable (i.e. to look like the Tories) and then feed their unpopularity by taking all the difficult decisions ducked by the outgoing Tories. This becomes “Labour incompetence. ” It’s hard to escape the notion that – as Harold Wilson might have said back in the 1960s, ‘And in future cut out the cracks about 13 years of ‘Tory misrule’ – the country apparently preferred it!”

*I should say, I’m not counting my chickens yet. It remains to be seen whether Starmer is the Blair or the Kinnock de nos jours, especially as Braverman et al seem determined to play the populist/ nationalist/ xenophobe card for all its worth – catnip to large sections of the media.

Sobriété Énergétique

Very much here for the phrase the French are using for energy saving – ‘sobriété énergétique’. Apparently the French understand it means looking chic in turtle neck jumpers. As a lapsed Methodist all I can see is an image of John Wesley, temperate and enthusiastic, off on one of his preaching tours again.

Not Emmanuel Macron
Not John Wesley

Quinquiremes of Nineveh

There aren’t many texts that can be conjured by a word. One, for me, might be ‘incarnadine’ which, read or heard, immediately summons Macbeth’s great cry:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red’

Quinquireme is another. It has to be the first word of Masefield’s poem, Cargoes:

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amythysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

Hopelessly old fashioned of course but, for me at least deeply charming and evocative still.

Masefield’s ‘Dirty British coasters’ came to mind more prosaically on a recent visit to the old harbour at Lydford on the Severn Estuary. There, cooped up behind high lock gates, afloat in grey, almost unmoving water was a line of unkempt and grubby boats. Not British Coasters it’s true, but they were certainly kin:

A prophet in our midst

I’ve never read any of Andrea Dworkin’s books. I suppose I only really know her name because of a general memory of seeing it alongside other feminist speakers and writers from the 70s and 80s each advancing their own critique of patriarchal social structures.

They were all abused for their efforts, but Dworkin, whose focus was the centrality of male violence – particularly sexual violence – towards women as the ‘beating heart’ of the patriarchy seemed to be the focus of particularly virulent attacks: she was an extremist, a man hater and, god help us, because she was – in the critics eyes at least – ugly.

Her strand of feminism was also pushed to one side for a long time as being out of touch with generations of women who were encouraged to enjoy sex as a man might – as equals, free participants, unthreatened and unencumbered.

I’ve thought about this today because of a review by Amisa Srinivasan in the LRB of a new documentary about Dworkin’s life and thought called, My name is Andrea.

Srinivasan suggests that the film is part of a new wave of interest in Dworkin triggered by ‘the rise of Trump and MeToo, and in the context of a broader disenchantment with the ‘sex positive’ feminism that was in the ascendancy by the end of the 1980s.’

Reading even a little of what Dworkin said, I can only think it’s not a moment too soon. Our world today is one where misogyny thrives and multiplies as almost never before and where every medium conspires to amplify and give credence to the voices of misogynists.

Dworkin’s prophetic voice deserves to be heard again. Here she is – as described by Srinivasan – talking to the privileged men of the Cambridge Union in 1992:

Early on, in one of the film’s most remarkable moments, we see Dworkin in 1992, debating at the Cambridge Union on the topic of ‘political correctness’. She opens by paraphrasing James Baldwin on the way European immigrants, however ‘despised’ they had been in the old country, were endowed, on arrival in the US, with whiteness: ‘They immediately had a leg up because the bottom was fixed and the bottom was Black.’ The only equality the American founding fathers cared about, Dworkin tells the assembled students – mostly male and many of them in dinner jackets – was ‘an equality among rich white men’. This left out most people: white women, men and women of colour, and ‘the survivors of that slaughter of the Indigenous peoples’. It constituted an assault on their ‘freedom, legal and social rights, self-determination, self-sovereignty’. And, what’s more:

Leaving out most people also meant that the society did not use or acknowledge or respect the creativity of most people, the intelligence of most people, the life experience of most people, the inventiveness, the originality, the perspective, the purpose, the insight of most people.

‘Do you hear the silence?’ Dworkin bellows to the students, as if truly longing for a reply. ‘Do you understand the loss that I am talking about? Can you feel what is missing, what is not there?’