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- New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
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30.3.06
Malcolm Gladwell
Here is another great blog, from the New Yorker's Malcom Gladwell. Lots of good dialogue. http://www.gladwell.typepad.com/
MODERNISM
Paradise Now
The world was in disarray, shattered by the first world war and heading into a second. Out of this chaos came the modernists - a group of utopian designers with thrilling new visions of what the future could hold. But was anyone ready for this brave new world? Robert Hughes introduces the key players of modernism - and discovers how many of their dreams still survive
Monday March 20, 2006The Guardian
'Art and design would be the tools of universal progress. If you didn't bellieve in progress, you couldn't call yourself a modernist' ... Aalva Aalto's Paimio chair
Modernism is a weasel of a word, whose meanings slip and slide. They always have. Not that one should use "modernism" and "always" in the same sentence. Nobody talked or thought about modernism in the middle ages - the idea of a battle between "new" and "established" cultural forms was not an issue then. Now it has gone completely the other way. Nobody, or nobody with brains, assigns a missionary role to culture. The work of art is just one more consumer product among others.
Article continues
Modernism is something old that we look back on, not without nostalgia. Its ashtrays and dinner sets, the chrome-tube-and-leather-strap Marcel Breuer chairs, get revived and recirculated without comment. The idea of modernism connotes some kind of ideal and even quasi-official mindset. Seen in one light, it even suggests too much solidity: think of how the innumerable descendants and clones of Mies van der Rohe created, in their high, bland cliffs of steel and glass, the face of American corporate capitalism.
That certainly wasn't the modernité Charles Baudelaire was thinking of in 1863 when, in The Painter of Modern Life, he described "modernity" as an exaltation of "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable". Nor was it what Jonathan Swift complained of in a letter to Alexander Pope - the work of English scribblers "who send us over their trash in Prose and Verse, with abominable curtailings and quaint modernisms". That was in 1737, and was the first and probably the last time that "modernism" and "quaintness" were linked in the same sentence. The essence of modernism, to the early 20th century, when its lessons really began to catch on, would be that it was anti-quaint: clear, clean, stripped as a piston, dealing only in essentials. But by "quaint" Swift meant something more like "bizarre" - he wasn't thinking of picturesqueness.
Once, movements and works that no longer seem to match up with modernism as we understand it used to call themselves modernist. In Barcelona, the modernists were architects like Josep Puig I Cadafalch, Lluís Domènech I Montaner and even Antoni Gaudi, all of whose work fairly groaned beneath the weight of its historical references, exuberant natural detail and symbolic narratives - the very opposite of what people at the Bauhaus were thinking about. Would you call a concert-house ceiling encrusted with giant polychrome pottery roses, each the size of a cabbage, "modernist"? But that was what Domenech, the star of Catalan modernism, did in his masterpiece, the Palace of Catalan Music, a building almost unimaginably remote from the products and ideas of northern modernist architects and theorists like Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, who wanted to strip all ornament from buildings and, like Euclid, "look on Beauty bare".
Adolf Loos, in Vienna, actually wrote a polemical text entitled Ornament and Crime, in which he set forth the truly demented thesis that the impulse to decorate any shape or surface was in itself degenerate, characteristic of the bestial primitive: ornament was excrement. In the imagination of such people - mercilessly satirised by Evelyn Waugh in the character of the mad modernist architect Professor Silenus (read, "Gropius") in Decline and Fall - the only worthwhile culture in the 1920s was machine culture, made of the shapes that machines could make, with no caressing handwork, every form repeatable at will. "No noodles," van de Rohe, one of the heroes of the style, used to say. In 1900 Paris, l'art moderne was not machine culture at all. It was organic, luscious and hysterically decorative - what we now call art nouveau, whose twining whiplash curves (or noodles) were the polar opposite of machine metaphors.
But gradually the meaning of "modernism" settled down to its present form, based on utopian fancies, standardisation, industrial materials like chrome and plate glass, abstraction and a vehement ambition to make a new world, not just a new art. Design - the rethinking from zero on up of everything from teapots to whole cities - was imagined as potentially all-powerful. And this is the impulse to which the forthcoming show at the V&A in London, Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-39, is dedicated.
It's no accident that the exhibition's delimiting years should be the starting dates of two catastrophic world wars, 1914 and 1939. These dates mark the span of a hectic utopian hope among Europeans, who felt - as Apollinaire wrote in his great paean to cultural renewal: "In the end, you are tired of this old world." The hope of renewal took form in the rubble of post-first world war Germany and attained something like hysteria in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution. In broad terms, it said: things can't get worse than this. You can't take the elements of pre-1914 visual culture and put them, like Humpty Dumpty, together again, just as they were before. The corpse will not rise and speak. We therefore, as intellectuals and artists, can make one of three choices.
Either we throw out the vestiges of culture, all of them, dream romantic dreams of blank slates, reject everything that makes claim to humane and rational discourse, all that our parents called "adult", and call ourselves dadaists. The name "dada" parodied a child's first utterance; it was meant to symbolise the act of beginning again from nothing, having rejected the past in all its weighty totality - a cultural impossibility, but at least a challenge for disoriented self-made radicals in 1917.
Or we put our bets on transferring fantasies about the future back into the present, make enormously inflated claims about a technological millennium that hasn't arrived and isn't likely to appear just yet, and call ourselves futurists, a rhetorical stratagem that works best among the whimsical and operatic Italians.
Or else, we say that Europe, dire as its condition is, can actually be improved. So we must invent a new environment of buildings, cities, images and tools, whose end will be to create new societies of men and women. This engineering will get a name: modernism. It will be buoyed up by an immense and irrational hope shared, as cultural movements tend to be, by a small number of like-minded people who only have the haziest notion of, and generally rather despise, what the majorities around them want.
In Russia particularly, this hope attained an absurdity worthy of the inventors' isle of Laputa, as imagined by Swift. One inventor, Georgii Krutikov, put out an idea for a "flying city", kept in the air by electrical currents - this at a time when there was hardly enough surplus wattage in all of Moscow to run an egg timer. Another, Anton Lavinskii, came up in 1923 with the notion of a "city on springs" - a not-so-remote ancestor of some of the walking-city fantasies thrown off by the Archigram designers in England in the 1960s. And Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian constructivist, dreamed up what he hoped would be an everyman's bicycle of the air, the wooden Letatlin, on which (he hoped) members of the proletariat, having slipped the surly bonds of earth, would go gliding about from People's Dormitory to People's Cultural Centre. Of course, it did not and could not fly.
Tatlin's most grandly useless conception, however, which has always been the darling of "radical" art historians, was his design for a Monument to the Third International, 1920. It was to be a gigantic open-frame ziggurat of steel, spiralling up from the middle of Petrograd and dwarfing everything on the city's skyline. It would be built on a diagonal, representing that of the earth's axis. It would contain four enormous glass halls, each containing a different ceremonial structure for the Party, all turning at different speeds. The lowest one, a cylinder, would rotate once a year. The next, a pyramid, would turn once a month; and so on to the topmost hall, another cylinder, going round once a day. But although it would have some generally designated uses, these were never thought through - they were just part of the cloudy rhetoric that served to hide the disastrous shortages the revolution produced. The whole affair would be 400 metres high but it never materialised, because it would have used up far more structural steel than the whole of Russia had. It was the unbuilt and unbuildable tower of a Babylonian socialism. Perhaps some faint ghost of it lingers in those enormous and pointless space needles later constructed in the capitalist west, in places such as Seattle and Sydney, capped with revolving restaurants serving pretentious food.
This hope of world improvement expressed itself, everywhere, in the most idealist and highfalutin language. The people who used it have become fixtures in the firmament of 20th-century art, although they did not achieve what they thought their work could do. "Art is a universal and real expression of creative energy," wrote the constructivist artists El Lissitzky (Russian), Hans Richter (German) and Theo van Doesburg (Dutch), in the early 1920s. It would "be used to organise the progress of mankind, it is the tool of universal progress". If you didn't believe in progress, you couldn't call yourself a modernist. However, being a "modernist" was not necessarily the same as being a "functionalist". The most extreme illustration of their difference was afforded by the work of the Russian Kazimir Malevich, who called himself a "suprematist" - the postwar years were a bumper season for increasingly silly-isms - and made designs for various notionally habitable structures: big ones that he called "architectons" and little ones he named "planits", with an i. Malevich, who had no scientific background, was much given to waffling and burbling about how, in the marvellous Future, people of all nations would foregather on these extraterrestrial objects, creating termitaries of peace, love and cooperation as they were carried through space.
The prime building material of progress, of the longingly desired postwar utopia, was glass. Glass had several symbolic qualities to recommend it. First, its fragility. People remembered the gaping window frames, the shattered and empty openings, left in the wake of the great war. A society with intact glass buildings, manifestly, was a society at peace. Then, not only was glass fragile: with the correct framing, it could be very strong (though not in bending) and amazing feats of structural daring could be executed in it. Nobody who had seen Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, that prodigious triumph of British engineering, could possibly doubt that. Glass was the very opposite to heavy stone and opaque brick. Light streamed through it, the light of heaven itself. This offered social redemption. Glass forms, crystalline and suggestive of weightlessness, seemed to be the stuff of transcendence. Glass carried implications of myth, of other, soon-to-be-built Crystal Palaces. "Glück ohne Glas, wie dumm ist das," began one architect's paean to the wonderful substance : "Joy without glass, what stupidity!"
The sharpest expression of this utopian rapture was demolished long ago: an all-glass pavilion, resembling a faceted Islamic dome, that had been commissioned from the architect Bruno Taut by the German glass industry, for the 1914 Werkbund industrial exhibition in Cologne. Its likeness survives today only in drawings, photos and a model or two. The building was pervaded by colour shining from a reflecting pool of violet water and, although it is not clear just what the colour sequences were, by a kaleidoscope in the dome. This pavilion was tiny, almost toy-like, but it bears a distant similarity to one of the great buildings of the early 21st century - Norman Foster's "gherkin" in London, the Swiss Re building.
Modernism left its handprints everywhere: especially in communications, in typography, and in the design of household objects from Gropius' and Mies' chairs to the lamps of Marianne Brandt, which have never dated (though they were designed 80 years ago) and remain wholly covetable. And yet, one of the strange facts about modernism is that, given its recentness and the enormous spread of its ideas, so little of it remains. This makes it extremely difficult, maybe impossible, to think one's way back into the cultural fanaticism that gripped some European modernists in the 1920s and 30s, breeding contradictory reductionist movements like viruses in a lab and leading the designer/ architect/painter Theo van Doesburg to declare: "Art should not deal with the 'useful' or the 'nice', but with the 'spiritual' and the 'sublime'. The purest art forms do not cause the decorative change of some detail from life, but the inner metamorphosis of life, the revaluation of all values." This was way too much to expect of a few blocks of workers' flats.
The hopeful rhetoric of modernism was always way, way out in front of its actual products. Modernists were always hoping that big business, big planning, big government would latch on to their designs and make them generally available to people (preferably workers) who would recognise their benefits and gratefully use them. Alas, it didn't happen that way. There was not enough demand for "radical" designs of common household things, let alone buildings or whole suburbs, to attract anything like a mass market, which is why the occasional isolated Bauhaus workshop object, a jug attributable to Johannes Itten or a prototype Gropius chair, creates excitement among collectors today. Such things never entered the vernacular. Still less did the ugly, standardised clothes some modernist designers, Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko among them, proposed for the new millennium. (Universal worker clothing, unisex, democratic and cheap, would come from the American mills of Levi Strauss, not from European or Russian avant-gardists.)
What ordinary people wanted was culture they could relax into - the middle-class comfort of the upholstered armchair, not the bracing, challenging austerities of chrome tubes and leather thongs. What modernism, whose singing school was the Bauhaus presided over by Gropius and others, proposed to them was something rather different: the virtuous but not very alluring prospect of what German ideologues called Wohnung für das Existenzminimum, "minimum-existence housing", with its bedrooms the size of closets, and closets hardly bigger than shoeboxes. This had its reformative, even its holy aspect. When Gropius in 1919 wrote a program for the first state Bauhaus, which was set up in Weimar, he invoked the images of a cathedral, a crystal edifice, a new community of faith expressing itself in craft. At the root, there was always something penitential about modernism, with its stern abjuration of the world's sensuous pleasures in the interest of higher ones. You were never left in any doubt that the monk's cell was a better place to be than the capitalist's study, let alone his wife's boudoir.
If few modernist objects remain, even less of its architecture survives. The V&A's show does what it can with drawings and photographs, but these can never suffice. The fact is, not much of it was actually built and, of what there was, so much was torn down. I didn't altogether realise this until, 25 years ago, I and a team from the BBC were engaged in making a television series, The Shock of the New. We needed to film some great, canonical building in Europe that would exemplify all that passion over form and function, the abolition of ornament, the stripping away of "superfluous" detail, the overriding myths and utopian metaphors of the machine age. And one of the first things we found was that such buildings mainly existed on paper, hardly at all in the real world. Once the designers' ideas of what society "needed" came up against the things real people seemed to want, there was a collision that often amounted to a fiasco.
The memorable example, for me, was the one building in which Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris (1887-1965), the Swiss watchmaker's son who went by the name of Le Corbusier, was able to pour out his notions of social amelioration through housing: the Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles, which began receiving its first tenants in 1952. Raised on its thick, raw concrete stilts, massive and domineering, the Unité became an instant classic of Modern architecture. Just about everyone in the profession adored it, or said they did; the only people who couldn't stand the great grimy beast were the luckless ones who lived in it. We found when we arrived there in 1979 that it was in pitiable condition. Corbu's béton brut couldn't be cleaned, the metal-framed windows were hopelessly corroded, the electricity kept shorting out, the brise-soleils or concrete sunscreens were permanently foul with pigeon shit, the "shopping street" halfway up inside was locked and shuttered because ordinary French people prefer to do their marketing on real streets (an obvious aspect of social behaviour that eluded the intellectual grasp of the formgiver, who believed that folk ought to behave in accordance with the dotty authoritarian notions of idealist philosophes like Saint-Simon and Fourier). Saddest of all was the roof, which Corbu had imagined as a sort of concrete Acropolis dedicated to the cult of the sun and of physical culture, like a Greek palaestra, complete with pools and jogging track. It was a chaos of dried slime and broken cinder-blocks. And when the concierge, who hated the place, granted us admission to his flat in the Unité, we found that he and his wife had valiantly fought back against the functionalist plainness Corbu had prescribed for the residents: it was chock-a-block with fringes, bobbles and tassels, Louis this and that, and even a department-store rococo chandelier which, due to the lowness of the ceiling, almost touched the dining-table. Here, the working class had ceased to be the abstraction Corbu fancied. It had taken its revenge on the modernist emperor. I sometimes wonder if the decor of that concierge's flat is still the same today.
The world was in disarray, shattered by the first world war and heading into a second. Out of this chaos came the modernists - a group of utopian designers with thrilling new visions of what the future could hold. But was anyone ready for this brave new world? Robert Hughes introduces the key players of modernism - and discovers how many of their dreams still survive
Monday March 20, 2006The Guardian
'Art and design would be the tools of universal progress. If you didn't bellieve in progress, you couldn't call yourself a modernist' ... Aalva Aalto's Paimio chair
Modernism is a weasel of a word, whose meanings slip and slide. They always have. Not that one should use "modernism" and "always" in the same sentence. Nobody talked or thought about modernism in the middle ages - the idea of a battle between "new" and "established" cultural forms was not an issue then. Now it has gone completely the other way. Nobody, or nobody with brains, assigns a missionary role to culture. The work of art is just one more consumer product among others.
Article continues
Modernism is something old that we look back on, not without nostalgia. Its ashtrays and dinner sets, the chrome-tube-and-leather-strap Marcel Breuer chairs, get revived and recirculated without comment. The idea of modernism connotes some kind of ideal and even quasi-official mindset. Seen in one light, it even suggests too much solidity: think of how the innumerable descendants and clones of Mies van der Rohe created, in their high, bland cliffs of steel and glass, the face of American corporate capitalism.
That certainly wasn't the modernité Charles Baudelaire was thinking of in 1863 when, in The Painter of Modern Life, he described "modernity" as an exaltation of "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable". Nor was it what Jonathan Swift complained of in a letter to Alexander Pope - the work of English scribblers "who send us over their trash in Prose and Verse, with abominable curtailings and quaint modernisms". That was in 1737, and was the first and probably the last time that "modernism" and "quaintness" were linked in the same sentence. The essence of modernism, to the early 20th century, when its lessons really began to catch on, would be that it was anti-quaint: clear, clean, stripped as a piston, dealing only in essentials. But by "quaint" Swift meant something more like "bizarre" - he wasn't thinking of picturesqueness.
Once, movements and works that no longer seem to match up with modernism as we understand it used to call themselves modernist. In Barcelona, the modernists were architects like Josep Puig I Cadafalch, Lluís Domènech I Montaner and even Antoni Gaudi, all of whose work fairly groaned beneath the weight of its historical references, exuberant natural detail and symbolic narratives - the very opposite of what people at the Bauhaus were thinking about. Would you call a concert-house ceiling encrusted with giant polychrome pottery roses, each the size of a cabbage, "modernist"? But that was what Domenech, the star of Catalan modernism, did in his masterpiece, the Palace of Catalan Music, a building almost unimaginably remote from the products and ideas of northern modernist architects and theorists like Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, who wanted to strip all ornament from buildings and, like Euclid, "look on Beauty bare".
Adolf Loos, in Vienna, actually wrote a polemical text entitled Ornament and Crime, in which he set forth the truly demented thesis that the impulse to decorate any shape or surface was in itself degenerate, characteristic of the bestial primitive: ornament was excrement. In the imagination of such people - mercilessly satirised by Evelyn Waugh in the character of the mad modernist architect Professor Silenus (read, "Gropius") in Decline and Fall - the only worthwhile culture in the 1920s was machine culture, made of the shapes that machines could make, with no caressing handwork, every form repeatable at will. "No noodles," van de Rohe, one of the heroes of the style, used to say. In 1900 Paris, l'art moderne was not machine culture at all. It was organic, luscious and hysterically decorative - what we now call art nouveau, whose twining whiplash curves (or noodles) were the polar opposite of machine metaphors.
But gradually the meaning of "modernism" settled down to its present form, based on utopian fancies, standardisation, industrial materials like chrome and plate glass, abstraction and a vehement ambition to make a new world, not just a new art. Design - the rethinking from zero on up of everything from teapots to whole cities - was imagined as potentially all-powerful. And this is the impulse to which the forthcoming show at the V&A in London, Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-39, is dedicated.
It's no accident that the exhibition's delimiting years should be the starting dates of two catastrophic world wars, 1914 and 1939. These dates mark the span of a hectic utopian hope among Europeans, who felt - as Apollinaire wrote in his great paean to cultural renewal: "In the end, you are tired of this old world." The hope of renewal took form in the rubble of post-first world war Germany and attained something like hysteria in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution. In broad terms, it said: things can't get worse than this. You can't take the elements of pre-1914 visual culture and put them, like Humpty Dumpty, together again, just as they were before. The corpse will not rise and speak. We therefore, as intellectuals and artists, can make one of three choices.
Either we throw out the vestiges of culture, all of them, dream romantic dreams of blank slates, reject everything that makes claim to humane and rational discourse, all that our parents called "adult", and call ourselves dadaists. The name "dada" parodied a child's first utterance; it was meant to symbolise the act of beginning again from nothing, having rejected the past in all its weighty totality - a cultural impossibility, but at least a challenge for disoriented self-made radicals in 1917.
Or we put our bets on transferring fantasies about the future back into the present, make enormously inflated claims about a technological millennium that hasn't arrived and isn't likely to appear just yet, and call ourselves futurists, a rhetorical stratagem that works best among the whimsical and operatic Italians.
Or else, we say that Europe, dire as its condition is, can actually be improved. So we must invent a new environment of buildings, cities, images and tools, whose end will be to create new societies of men and women. This engineering will get a name: modernism. It will be buoyed up by an immense and irrational hope shared, as cultural movements tend to be, by a small number of like-minded people who only have the haziest notion of, and generally rather despise, what the majorities around them want.
In Russia particularly, this hope attained an absurdity worthy of the inventors' isle of Laputa, as imagined by Swift. One inventor, Georgii Krutikov, put out an idea for a "flying city", kept in the air by electrical currents - this at a time when there was hardly enough surplus wattage in all of Moscow to run an egg timer. Another, Anton Lavinskii, came up in 1923 with the notion of a "city on springs" - a not-so-remote ancestor of some of the walking-city fantasies thrown off by the Archigram designers in England in the 1960s. And Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian constructivist, dreamed up what he hoped would be an everyman's bicycle of the air, the wooden Letatlin, on which (he hoped) members of the proletariat, having slipped the surly bonds of earth, would go gliding about from People's Dormitory to People's Cultural Centre. Of course, it did not and could not fly.
Tatlin's most grandly useless conception, however, which has always been the darling of "radical" art historians, was his design for a Monument to the Third International, 1920. It was to be a gigantic open-frame ziggurat of steel, spiralling up from the middle of Petrograd and dwarfing everything on the city's skyline. It would be built on a diagonal, representing that of the earth's axis. It would contain four enormous glass halls, each containing a different ceremonial structure for the Party, all turning at different speeds. The lowest one, a cylinder, would rotate once a year. The next, a pyramid, would turn once a month; and so on to the topmost hall, another cylinder, going round once a day. But although it would have some generally designated uses, these were never thought through - they were just part of the cloudy rhetoric that served to hide the disastrous shortages the revolution produced. The whole affair would be 400 metres high but it never materialised, because it would have used up far more structural steel than the whole of Russia had. It was the unbuilt and unbuildable tower of a Babylonian socialism. Perhaps some faint ghost of it lingers in those enormous and pointless space needles later constructed in the capitalist west, in places such as Seattle and Sydney, capped with revolving restaurants serving pretentious food.
This hope of world improvement expressed itself, everywhere, in the most idealist and highfalutin language. The people who used it have become fixtures in the firmament of 20th-century art, although they did not achieve what they thought their work could do. "Art is a universal and real expression of creative energy," wrote the constructivist artists El Lissitzky (Russian), Hans Richter (German) and Theo van Doesburg (Dutch), in the early 1920s. It would "be used to organise the progress of mankind, it is the tool of universal progress". If you didn't believe in progress, you couldn't call yourself a modernist. However, being a "modernist" was not necessarily the same as being a "functionalist". The most extreme illustration of their difference was afforded by the work of the Russian Kazimir Malevich, who called himself a "suprematist" - the postwar years were a bumper season for increasingly silly-isms - and made designs for various notionally habitable structures: big ones that he called "architectons" and little ones he named "planits", with an i. Malevich, who had no scientific background, was much given to waffling and burbling about how, in the marvellous Future, people of all nations would foregather on these extraterrestrial objects, creating termitaries of peace, love and cooperation as they were carried through space.
The prime building material of progress, of the longingly desired postwar utopia, was glass. Glass had several symbolic qualities to recommend it. First, its fragility. People remembered the gaping window frames, the shattered and empty openings, left in the wake of the great war. A society with intact glass buildings, manifestly, was a society at peace. Then, not only was glass fragile: with the correct framing, it could be very strong (though not in bending) and amazing feats of structural daring could be executed in it. Nobody who had seen Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, that prodigious triumph of British engineering, could possibly doubt that. Glass was the very opposite to heavy stone and opaque brick. Light streamed through it, the light of heaven itself. This offered social redemption. Glass forms, crystalline and suggestive of weightlessness, seemed to be the stuff of transcendence. Glass carried implications of myth, of other, soon-to-be-built Crystal Palaces. "Glück ohne Glas, wie dumm ist das," began one architect's paean to the wonderful substance : "Joy without glass, what stupidity!"
The sharpest expression of this utopian rapture was demolished long ago: an all-glass pavilion, resembling a faceted Islamic dome, that had been commissioned from the architect Bruno Taut by the German glass industry, for the 1914 Werkbund industrial exhibition in Cologne. Its likeness survives today only in drawings, photos and a model or two. The building was pervaded by colour shining from a reflecting pool of violet water and, although it is not clear just what the colour sequences were, by a kaleidoscope in the dome. This pavilion was tiny, almost toy-like, but it bears a distant similarity to one of the great buildings of the early 21st century - Norman Foster's "gherkin" in London, the Swiss Re building.
Modernism left its handprints everywhere: especially in communications, in typography, and in the design of household objects from Gropius' and Mies' chairs to the lamps of Marianne Brandt, which have never dated (though they were designed 80 years ago) and remain wholly covetable. And yet, one of the strange facts about modernism is that, given its recentness and the enormous spread of its ideas, so little of it remains. This makes it extremely difficult, maybe impossible, to think one's way back into the cultural fanaticism that gripped some European modernists in the 1920s and 30s, breeding contradictory reductionist movements like viruses in a lab and leading the designer/ architect/painter Theo van Doesburg to declare: "Art should not deal with the 'useful' or the 'nice', but with the 'spiritual' and the 'sublime'. The purest art forms do not cause the decorative change of some detail from life, but the inner metamorphosis of life, the revaluation of all values." This was way too much to expect of a few blocks of workers' flats.
The hopeful rhetoric of modernism was always way, way out in front of its actual products. Modernists were always hoping that big business, big planning, big government would latch on to their designs and make them generally available to people (preferably workers) who would recognise their benefits and gratefully use them. Alas, it didn't happen that way. There was not enough demand for "radical" designs of common household things, let alone buildings or whole suburbs, to attract anything like a mass market, which is why the occasional isolated Bauhaus workshop object, a jug attributable to Johannes Itten or a prototype Gropius chair, creates excitement among collectors today. Such things never entered the vernacular. Still less did the ugly, standardised clothes some modernist designers, Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko among them, proposed for the new millennium. (Universal worker clothing, unisex, democratic and cheap, would come from the American mills of Levi Strauss, not from European or Russian avant-gardists.)
What ordinary people wanted was culture they could relax into - the middle-class comfort of the upholstered armchair, not the bracing, challenging austerities of chrome tubes and leather thongs. What modernism, whose singing school was the Bauhaus presided over by Gropius and others, proposed to them was something rather different: the virtuous but not very alluring prospect of what German ideologues called Wohnung für das Existenzminimum, "minimum-existence housing", with its bedrooms the size of closets, and closets hardly bigger than shoeboxes. This had its reformative, even its holy aspect. When Gropius in 1919 wrote a program for the first state Bauhaus, which was set up in Weimar, he invoked the images of a cathedral, a crystal edifice, a new community of faith expressing itself in craft. At the root, there was always something penitential about modernism, with its stern abjuration of the world's sensuous pleasures in the interest of higher ones. You were never left in any doubt that the monk's cell was a better place to be than the capitalist's study, let alone his wife's boudoir.
If few modernist objects remain, even less of its architecture survives. The V&A's show does what it can with drawings and photographs, but these can never suffice. The fact is, not much of it was actually built and, of what there was, so much was torn down. I didn't altogether realise this until, 25 years ago, I and a team from the BBC were engaged in making a television series, The Shock of the New. We needed to film some great, canonical building in Europe that would exemplify all that passion over form and function, the abolition of ornament, the stripping away of "superfluous" detail, the overriding myths and utopian metaphors of the machine age. And one of the first things we found was that such buildings mainly existed on paper, hardly at all in the real world. Once the designers' ideas of what society "needed" came up against the things real people seemed to want, there was a collision that often amounted to a fiasco.
The memorable example, for me, was the one building in which Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris (1887-1965), the Swiss watchmaker's son who went by the name of Le Corbusier, was able to pour out his notions of social amelioration through housing: the Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles, which began receiving its first tenants in 1952. Raised on its thick, raw concrete stilts, massive and domineering, the Unité became an instant classic of Modern architecture. Just about everyone in the profession adored it, or said they did; the only people who couldn't stand the great grimy beast were the luckless ones who lived in it. We found when we arrived there in 1979 that it was in pitiable condition. Corbu's béton brut couldn't be cleaned, the metal-framed windows were hopelessly corroded, the electricity kept shorting out, the brise-soleils or concrete sunscreens were permanently foul with pigeon shit, the "shopping street" halfway up inside was locked and shuttered because ordinary French people prefer to do their marketing on real streets (an obvious aspect of social behaviour that eluded the intellectual grasp of the formgiver, who believed that folk ought to behave in accordance with the dotty authoritarian notions of idealist philosophes like Saint-Simon and Fourier). Saddest of all was the roof, which Corbu had imagined as a sort of concrete Acropolis dedicated to the cult of the sun and of physical culture, like a Greek palaestra, complete with pools and jogging track. It was a chaos of dried slime and broken cinder-blocks. And when the concierge, who hated the place, granted us admission to his flat in the Unité, we found that he and his wife had valiantly fought back against the functionalist plainness Corbu had prescribed for the residents: it was chock-a-block with fringes, bobbles and tassels, Louis this and that, and even a department-store rococo chandelier which, due to the lowness of the ceiling, almost touched the dining-table. Here, the working class had ceased to be the abstraction Corbu fancied. It had taken its revenge on the modernist emperor. I sometimes wonder if the decor of that concierge's flat is still the same today.
FREAKONOMICS
By all means check out this blog. It is as good as the book, which is saying something. http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/
25.3.06
CHINA
Some quite interesting thoughts on China from the ECONOMIST.
IN 1940, nine years before his Communist Party seized power, Mao Zedong set out his plans for a “new China”. The republic would, he said, “take certain necessary steps” to confiscate land from rural landlords. Under the principle of “land to the tiller”, it would then “turn the land over to the private ownership of the peasants.” If only things had turned out this way.
The “necessary steps” involved widespread slaughter. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of landowning rural residents and their families were executed or beaten to death by fellow villagers. The peasants got their small parcels of land, but not for long. By the late 1950s, private land ownership had been eliminated and peasants had become property-less members of “People's Communes”. It was an upheaval that, along with bad weather and a frenzied attempt to catch up with American levels of industrial production, contributed to millions more deaths in a nationwide famine.
As our survey describes, China has yet to undo the damage. A few years after Mao's death in 1976, the People's Communes were dismantled. Under Deng Xiaoping, agricultural production soared as for the first time in 30 years peasants were allocated (but not given full ownership of) plots of land to farm independently. This marked the start of the economic transformation that today holds the world spellbound. But it is the prosperity of urban China that mesmerises foreign businesses. Since its boom in the early 1980s, the countryside has lagged ever further behind.
This time, a genuine great leap forward
Deng kept in place two pillars of the Maoist rural order: collective land ownership and an apartheid system that barred rural residents from moving to the cities. The latter has begun to erode, due to the need for cheap labour to sustain a manufacturing boom. But the former remains firmly in place.
Now is the time to revive Mao's vision of a new landowning order. This would ease rural strife, fuel growth and help develop the genuine market economy the leadership claims to want. Giving peasants marketable ownership rights, and developing a legal system to protect them, would bring huge economic benefits. If peasants could mortgage their land, they could raise money to boost its productivity. Ownership would give them an incentive to do so. And if peasants could sell their land, they could acquire sufficient capital to start life anew in urban areas. This would boost urban consumption and encourage the migration of unproductive rural labour into the cities. For China to sustain its impressive growth rate and reduce inequalities, getting the many tens of millions of underemployed peasants off the land and into wealth-creating jobs is essential. The exodus would help those left behind to expand their land holdings and use them more efficiently.
No government, least of all the control freaks who run China, would embark on such a momentous exercise lightly. Communist Party ideologues are all too aware that a failure to handle rural issues properly can be destabilising. They worry that allowing peasants to sell their land could restore a rural landowning class, and that peasants would sell up in huge numbers and descend upon ill-prepared cities, throwing up shanty towns and pushing up crime.
Some officials also see collective ownership of rural land as one of the few remaining badges of China's professed “socialism”, and fear the explosion of divisive political debate if this bit of constitutional dogma is changed. In China's case, however, it is the absence of reform that is proving destabilising, as peasants protest violently against land seizures by local governments keen to exploit the land themselves. Though materially better off than they were in 1949, many peasants say that local bureaucrats have in effect become the landlords, sometimes using mafia-type gangs to push them off their fields.
A few opponents of land reform in the countryside say they are acting in the rural population's own interests. They point to the lack of social-security provisions for peasants. Though peasants have limited control over the land they farm, in most cases it can at least help to feed them.
The weakness of this argument is that forced appropriations by local governments have already deprived as many as 40m peasants of some or all of their land since the early 1990s, with little or no compensation. Besides, the best way to secure the welfare of the peasants is not to keep them trapped on underworked land but to spend more directly on services for the poor. With strong revenue growth, a low budget deficit and a booming economy, China can afford this. Compensating peasants for appropriated land on the basis of market values, not just minimal agricultural ones, would help too. And introducing a value-based property tax would persuade local governments to worry less about losing the one-off revenues they now enjoy from the sale of land rights.
It would be disingenuous to deny that land reform will loosen party control in the long run. A decade ago almost all urban housing was owned by the state. In one of the most dramatically successful economic reforms of the past quarter century in China, most is now privately owned. This has fostered the growth of a middle class that wants guarantees that its new assets are safe from the party's whims. Property owners are electing their own landlord committees—independent of the party—to protect their rights. A new breed of lawyers, not party stooges as most once were, is emerging to defend those whose properties are threatened by the state. Property owners want a clean environment around their homes. Green activism, which hardly existed in China a decade ago, is spurring the development of a civil society.
Even so, China's Communist Party has shown that it will take big risks if economic development demands them. Hence the widespread closure and privatisation of state-owned enterprises in the past decade, with the loss of millions of jobs. The leadership knows that China's history has been one of recurring bloody upheavals by landless peasants; it is caught between wanting to retain control and wanting to avoid another upheaval. This is the moment to complete the unfinished business of rural reform.
IN 1940, nine years before his Communist Party seized power, Mao Zedong set out his plans for a “new China”. The republic would, he said, “take certain necessary steps” to confiscate land from rural landlords. Under the principle of “land to the tiller”, it would then “turn the land over to the private ownership of the peasants.” If only things had turned out this way.
The “necessary steps” involved widespread slaughter. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of landowning rural residents and their families were executed or beaten to death by fellow villagers. The peasants got their small parcels of land, but not for long. By the late 1950s, private land ownership had been eliminated and peasants had become property-less members of “People's Communes”. It was an upheaval that, along with bad weather and a frenzied attempt to catch up with American levels of industrial production, contributed to millions more deaths in a nationwide famine.
As our survey describes, China has yet to undo the damage. A few years after Mao's death in 1976, the People's Communes were dismantled. Under Deng Xiaoping, agricultural production soared as for the first time in 30 years peasants were allocated (but not given full ownership of) plots of land to farm independently. This marked the start of the economic transformation that today holds the world spellbound. But it is the prosperity of urban China that mesmerises foreign businesses. Since its boom in the early 1980s, the countryside has lagged ever further behind.
This time, a genuine great leap forward
Deng kept in place two pillars of the Maoist rural order: collective land ownership and an apartheid system that barred rural residents from moving to the cities. The latter has begun to erode, due to the need for cheap labour to sustain a manufacturing boom. But the former remains firmly in place.
Now is the time to revive Mao's vision of a new landowning order. This would ease rural strife, fuel growth and help develop the genuine market economy the leadership claims to want. Giving peasants marketable ownership rights, and developing a legal system to protect them, would bring huge economic benefits. If peasants could mortgage their land, they could raise money to boost its productivity. Ownership would give them an incentive to do so. And if peasants could sell their land, they could acquire sufficient capital to start life anew in urban areas. This would boost urban consumption and encourage the migration of unproductive rural labour into the cities. For China to sustain its impressive growth rate and reduce inequalities, getting the many tens of millions of underemployed peasants off the land and into wealth-creating jobs is essential. The exodus would help those left behind to expand their land holdings and use them more efficiently.
No government, least of all the control freaks who run China, would embark on such a momentous exercise lightly. Communist Party ideologues are all too aware that a failure to handle rural issues properly can be destabilising. They worry that allowing peasants to sell their land could restore a rural landowning class, and that peasants would sell up in huge numbers and descend upon ill-prepared cities, throwing up shanty towns and pushing up crime.
Some officials also see collective ownership of rural land as one of the few remaining badges of China's professed “socialism”, and fear the explosion of divisive political debate if this bit of constitutional dogma is changed. In China's case, however, it is the absence of reform that is proving destabilising, as peasants protest violently against land seizures by local governments keen to exploit the land themselves. Though materially better off than they were in 1949, many peasants say that local bureaucrats have in effect become the landlords, sometimes using mafia-type gangs to push them off their fields.
A few opponents of land reform in the countryside say they are acting in the rural population's own interests. They point to the lack of social-security provisions for peasants. Though peasants have limited control over the land they farm, in most cases it can at least help to feed them.
The weakness of this argument is that forced appropriations by local governments have already deprived as many as 40m peasants of some or all of their land since the early 1990s, with little or no compensation. Besides, the best way to secure the welfare of the peasants is not to keep them trapped on underworked land but to spend more directly on services for the poor. With strong revenue growth, a low budget deficit and a booming economy, China can afford this. Compensating peasants for appropriated land on the basis of market values, not just minimal agricultural ones, would help too. And introducing a value-based property tax would persuade local governments to worry less about losing the one-off revenues they now enjoy from the sale of land rights.
It would be disingenuous to deny that land reform will loosen party control in the long run. A decade ago almost all urban housing was owned by the state. In one of the most dramatically successful economic reforms of the past quarter century in China, most is now privately owned. This has fostered the growth of a middle class that wants guarantees that its new assets are safe from the party's whims. Property owners are electing their own landlord committees—independent of the party—to protect their rights. A new breed of lawyers, not party stooges as most once were, is emerging to defend those whose properties are threatened by the state. Property owners want a clean environment around their homes. Green activism, which hardly existed in China a decade ago, is spurring the development of a civil society.
Even so, China's Communist Party has shown that it will take big risks if economic development demands them. Hence the widespread closure and privatisation of state-owned enterprises in the past decade, with the loss of millions of jobs. The leadership knows that China's history has been one of recurring bloody upheavals by landless peasants; it is caught between wanting to retain control and wanting to avoid another upheaval. This is the moment to complete the unfinished business of rural reform.
LA BELLE
Hello patient readers.
Apologies for my absence. Spring has come. And my first posting is a rather lighthearted look at the French and style. Glad to be back.
Having just got back from the Paris fashion shows, I’m once again contemplating the many marvels embedded within the tenets of French style. There is seeing Jack Lang, erstwhile Minister of Culture, arriving in all solemnity to watch an Yves Saint Laurent show. In France haute fashion is emphatically haute culture, not the misunderstood burlesque joke it is here. There is the marvel of sitting next to the editor of Le Point (a political magazine) at a dinner and being able to engage in an informed discussion about the new designer at Rochas. There is the marvel of knowing that one’s first lady, Mme Chirac, will never embarrass her nation by turning up in a shalwar kameez or experimenting with white leggings that make her bum look the size of Algiers.
And there is the marvel of limping into a French pharmacy, as I once did, having spent a week on a boat turning the skin on my feet into something resembling a 20-year-old camembert casing and thinking “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they stocked something as specific as Cream for Extra Dry Feet?”, only to discover that, naturellement, they had 20, alongside the obligatory 400 treatments for cellulite. Of course they do. This is the nation that invented style — or the nation with the good sense to bother claiming to have invented style. The English language hasn’t even got a word for chic. So the greatest marvel of all is why the nation as a whole exhibits so little of either.
NI_MPU('middle');
The French love irony, but might not be amused by this instance because style, along with smoking and feeling pity for Americans, is at the core of their identity. France gave us Chanel (who looked to the British aristocracy and its sporting clothes for much of her inspiration), the New Look (which Dior borrowed from Winterhalter) and those adorable truncated fringes that look good only on a certain kind of French woman (actually, one French woman: Audrey Tautou). It is a nation where self-respect and feeling bien dans sa peau are intertwined: at once a duty, a birthright and a way of living that is tied up with a mature awareness of the effects on others of one’s appearance (France may be unique in its medical assessments of female toddlers, which take their grace into account). Being bien dans sa peau, a gift handed down from mother to daughter, is not the haphazard thing that, say, British quirkiness is. More a science than an art, it is bound up with knowing where to buy those industrial-strength knickers that hold your stomach in yet don’t show through your slim knee-length skirt, how many suppositories one needs to keep one’s weight below 9st (57kg) and the best way to care for cashmere. It is, frankly, something from which the Brits could benefit. But it does not, on its own, amount to stylishness.
I’m not being hasty. Like all English women (probably women everywhere) I was raised with the certainty that French women were the most stylish, and that if I could only get them to stop scowling at me, they would share the secret. At 16 I fell madly in love with Paris, and on the basis that even the concièrges would look like Audrey Hepburn in Charade went to live there three years later. Big mistake. The concièrges did not look like Audrey Hepburn in Charade. In fact, no one looked like Audrey Hepburn in Charade. This is probably because Hepburn was a woman of Dutch/Anglo-Irish heritage working in America. The real French looked like Japanese tourists with bad Burberry habits. I realise now, of course, that upping sticks to Paris at 19 was as misconceived a plan as entering Celebrity Big Brother to disseminate one’s political beliefs about Saddam Hussein. No one should take up residence in Paris before the age of 40 — it is such an innately bourgeois city that you cannot truly appreciate it (nor it you) until you are sufficiently established and well heeled to acquire your own Burberry habit, plus an Hermès Birkin, after which le snottiness extraordinaire, which all the best Parisian sales assistants go to sales-assistant school to master, becomes easier to quell.
Burberry has been reborn as a very chic commodity. French dress sense has not. Like so much in France, it dwells in a glorious past. It still consists, as it did 25 years ago, of sensible skirts, sensible, air-hostess shoes, bulky jackets, chunky unattractive gold jewellery, numerous “tasteful” standbys such as a tan leather belt, a silk scarf knotted at the throat, a black trouser suit that doesn’t waste its time being shapely and (ye gods) the padded velvet hair band, plus any number of “serviceable” objects such as the quilted shapeless jacket and those nasty nylon handbags that the rest of us moved on from long ago. For the rich there are also bulky fur coats and helmet hair. When even Claire Chazal, a newsreader and French insititution, features so highly on the fashion radar, you know this is a nation with risk issues.
Am I missing something? Not for want of trying. I’ve scoured streets for girls who look like Amélie, with her chic bob and slightly off-centre, faux-prim style and general je ne sais quoi, which was how I thought French women should look. As it turns out, not even Amélie (or rather Audrey Tautou, who played her) looks like Amélie. Too busy growing out her bob and wearing Zac Posen.
I’ve listened captivated to Kristin Scott Thomas and tried to see only the good in le style français. A staunch (and spectacularly beautiful, stylish) Francophile, Scott Thomas has nothing but praise for her adopted homeland’s dress sense. According to her, French women have infinitely more flair than the Brits, infinitely better tailoring and infinitely more wisdom in that they would never (and I quote) “wear pearly-pink lipstick. It simply doesn’t exist in France. Or maybe it does, but women don’t wear great swaths of it, like they do in England. That’s the very height of vulgarity.” Hmm, until that last point, I was with Kristin, but as I write, Bourjois, that emblem of savvy, French chic, is advertising the ghastliest of frosted pink lipsticks on prime time UK TV. Don’t tell me it’s not marketing this merde in France, too. And by the way, a cool, youthful brand called Bourjois? I rest my case.
Evidence suggests that it is this bourgeois DNA, combined with a willingness to elevate style to the very highest cultural plateaux, that suffocates style on a national level. French women may have more underwear shops per capita than anyone else on the planet. They may triumph when it comes to sourcing the “perfect” trench, the “perfect” court shoes (yes, they’re still wearing them) and the ultimate Birkin rip-off (French fashion is all about perfection and getting something on the cheap). And all right, they don’t get that fat. They’re among the few people on Earth who can wear Balenciaga drainpipes. But they don’t, bar a dozen or so fashion editrixes who look as if they’ve just stepped off a Helmut Newton set. Lou Doillon, the daughter of Jane Birkin and Jacques Doillon, is the other Parisian everyone invokes when they want to cite someone who embodies hip French style.
It is surely one of life’s great ironies, and utter wastes, that the cradle of fashion, and magnet for the world’s top designers, is a city in which you can’t find anyone prepared to wear the stuff. It’s as if their ability to intellectualise fashion and discuss it in the abstract — taxi drivers in Paris can give you an up-to-date resumé of Karl Lagerfeld or hold forth on the relative merits of Gaultier or McQueen — excuses them from actually having to follow anything as foolish and Anglo-Saxon as a trend. Fashion is distinct from style, of course, but without change there is stagnancy, and stagnancy is not stylish. It is stultifying and dull and leads to a nation that dresses less like Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour and more like timid, provincial town hall employees. I’ve seen more verve in Ann Widdecombe’s little finger — especially when she’s just had a manicure.
One fashion consultant who represents up-and-coming designers and lives in Paris during the week believes that this risk aversion is part of a general crisis of confidence. “Paris is the hardest city in the world for a new designer to crack. The French like very old, established and, in the main, French labels. It’s seen as cultural arrogance, but the reverse is probably true.” It’s also true that apart from Zara (a Spanish import), the French don ’t have a high street anything like as vibrant as Britain’s. Instead it has chains such as Gerard Darel and Et Vous: goldmines for yet more perfect trenches and decently cut (inexpensive) trousers and tops, but deserts when it comes to the directional, up-to-the-minute catwalk interpretations you see in Topshop, River Island, New Look, Dorothy Perkins and — now — Wallis and Principles. Obviously this spares them the more arresting sights one sees blotting the British landscape, a list of which would be both invidious and time-consuming, but it also equals staid predictability. And don’t think that predictability precludes tackiness: the French are as conflicted about, and influenced by, their trashy celebrities as we are. Since this is the land where trends never die, the influence is, arguably, that bit more pernicious.
Of course, there are exceptions: Carole Bouquet, Inès de La Fressange, Camille Miceli (the scarily stylish PR at Louis Vuitton) or Ségolène Royal, the dark, gamin bright light of the Socialist Party; when they get it right, it’s perfect. But en masse the French are not as individual as the British, as groomed as the Americans or as affluently dressed as the Russians. Yet even before Marie Antoinette (and look where being stylish got her), France’s reputation of superiority in matters of style was entrenched. By the 19th century, when Paris was the world’s literary and artistic centre, wealthy foreign women flocked there for their clothes (though Frederick Worth, the leading “Parisian” couturier of the time, hailed from Lincolnshire). After the Second World War, when shabby Britain was gripped by austerity, we gazed even more hungrily across the Channel for signs of civilised luxury, spurred by Robert Doisneau’s romantic images of Paris and its chic inhabitants.
Perhaps the notion of French style was always a bit mythic, something we needed to believe in when life here was so humdrum. In 1949 Nancy Mitford, another avid Francophile living in Paris, wrote: “English visitors here often complain to me that there are no well-dressed women in Paris.” Her explanation was that les elegants, “of whom there are dozens . . .never actually set foot in the street”. How ineffably French. Yet four years later she noted that “the English have a touching, if often misplaced, faith in the excellence of French taste”.
But Hollywood has done more than anything to mythologise the idea of French style. An American in Paris, with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron; Paris when it Sizzles, with Audrey Hepburn; Gigi; Cole Porter’s I love Paris; Henry James, Edith Wharton . . . there is a venerable tradition of Americans sexing up all things French. The Americans in Paris exhibition now on at the National Gallery and featuring rose-tinted views of the city, and of Americans in the city by, among others, Whistler and John Singer Sergeant, suggests that they’ve been doing it since at least 1860. That’s an irony the French should enjoy.
‘In France, women are obsessed with good taste’
Apart from a handful of super-stylish actresses, celebrities or chic Parisians, it is fair to say that the average Frenchwoman dresses in a classic, conservative and safe way. This approach of choosing rather dull colours and dowdy shapes can be attributed largely to the emerging bourgeois classes of the 19th century — the days of Maupassant and Zola, which are actually not so long ago. It’s this enduring legacy of 19th-century social diktats, of dressing with substance, integrity and not trying to appear too showy (very nouveau riche) that makes Ségolène Royal (a politician), Bernadette Chirac and Claire Chazal such aspirational icons. (Indeed, Chazal is promoted as being perfect daughter-in-law material). Frenchwomen are not educated to spend a lot of money on their appearance.
The average English woman is a little more adventurous. But then, she also has a very fashion-forward high street to play with. She references different eras and looks at things with more confidence. It doesn’t always boil down to how tasteful you look: in England, it’s about having that energy or flair. In France, women are obsessed with good taste and not stepping outside the boundaries of what is sartorially acceptable.
Parisians, though, are another story. They are a little more “undone”. Their hair isn’t always perfect, they aren’t 110 per cent groomed — but that is a lot sexier.
Apologies for my absence. Spring has come. And my first posting is a rather lighthearted look at the French and style. Glad to be back.
Having just got back from the Paris fashion shows, I’m once again contemplating the many marvels embedded within the tenets of French style. There is seeing Jack Lang, erstwhile Minister of Culture, arriving in all solemnity to watch an Yves Saint Laurent show. In France haute fashion is emphatically haute culture, not the misunderstood burlesque joke it is here. There is the marvel of sitting next to the editor of Le Point (a political magazine) at a dinner and being able to engage in an informed discussion about the new designer at Rochas. There is the marvel of knowing that one’s first lady, Mme Chirac, will never embarrass her nation by turning up in a shalwar kameez or experimenting with white leggings that make her bum look the size of Algiers.
And there is the marvel of limping into a French pharmacy, as I once did, having spent a week on a boat turning the skin on my feet into something resembling a 20-year-old camembert casing and thinking “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they stocked something as specific as Cream for Extra Dry Feet?”, only to discover that, naturellement, they had 20, alongside the obligatory 400 treatments for cellulite. Of course they do. This is the nation that invented style — or the nation with the good sense to bother claiming to have invented style. The English language hasn’t even got a word for chic. So the greatest marvel of all is why the nation as a whole exhibits so little of either.
NI_MPU('middle');
The French love irony, but might not be amused by this instance because style, along with smoking and feeling pity for Americans, is at the core of their identity. France gave us Chanel (who looked to the British aristocracy and its sporting clothes for much of her inspiration), the New Look (which Dior borrowed from Winterhalter) and those adorable truncated fringes that look good only on a certain kind of French woman (actually, one French woman: Audrey Tautou). It is a nation where self-respect and feeling bien dans sa peau are intertwined: at once a duty, a birthright and a way of living that is tied up with a mature awareness of the effects on others of one’s appearance (France may be unique in its medical assessments of female toddlers, which take their grace into account). Being bien dans sa peau, a gift handed down from mother to daughter, is not the haphazard thing that, say, British quirkiness is. More a science than an art, it is bound up with knowing where to buy those industrial-strength knickers that hold your stomach in yet don’t show through your slim knee-length skirt, how many suppositories one needs to keep one’s weight below 9st (57kg) and the best way to care for cashmere. It is, frankly, something from which the Brits could benefit. But it does not, on its own, amount to stylishness.
I’m not being hasty. Like all English women (probably women everywhere) I was raised with the certainty that French women were the most stylish, and that if I could only get them to stop scowling at me, they would share the secret. At 16 I fell madly in love with Paris, and on the basis that even the concièrges would look like Audrey Hepburn in Charade went to live there three years later. Big mistake. The concièrges did not look like Audrey Hepburn in Charade. In fact, no one looked like Audrey Hepburn in Charade. This is probably because Hepburn was a woman of Dutch/Anglo-Irish heritage working in America. The real French looked like Japanese tourists with bad Burberry habits. I realise now, of course, that upping sticks to Paris at 19 was as misconceived a plan as entering Celebrity Big Brother to disseminate one’s political beliefs about Saddam Hussein. No one should take up residence in Paris before the age of 40 — it is such an innately bourgeois city that you cannot truly appreciate it (nor it you) until you are sufficiently established and well heeled to acquire your own Burberry habit, plus an Hermès Birkin, after which le snottiness extraordinaire, which all the best Parisian sales assistants go to sales-assistant school to master, becomes easier to quell.
Burberry has been reborn as a very chic commodity. French dress sense has not. Like so much in France, it dwells in a glorious past. It still consists, as it did 25 years ago, of sensible skirts, sensible, air-hostess shoes, bulky jackets, chunky unattractive gold jewellery, numerous “tasteful” standbys such as a tan leather belt, a silk scarf knotted at the throat, a black trouser suit that doesn’t waste its time being shapely and (ye gods) the padded velvet hair band, plus any number of “serviceable” objects such as the quilted shapeless jacket and those nasty nylon handbags that the rest of us moved on from long ago. For the rich there are also bulky fur coats and helmet hair. When even Claire Chazal, a newsreader and French insititution, features so highly on the fashion radar, you know this is a nation with risk issues.
Am I missing something? Not for want of trying. I’ve scoured streets for girls who look like Amélie, with her chic bob and slightly off-centre, faux-prim style and general je ne sais quoi, which was how I thought French women should look. As it turns out, not even Amélie (or rather Audrey Tautou, who played her) looks like Amélie. Too busy growing out her bob and wearing Zac Posen.
I’ve listened captivated to Kristin Scott Thomas and tried to see only the good in le style français. A staunch (and spectacularly beautiful, stylish) Francophile, Scott Thomas has nothing but praise for her adopted homeland’s dress sense. According to her, French women have infinitely more flair than the Brits, infinitely better tailoring and infinitely more wisdom in that they would never (and I quote) “wear pearly-pink lipstick. It simply doesn’t exist in France. Or maybe it does, but women don’t wear great swaths of it, like they do in England. That’s the very height of vulgarity.” Hmm, until that last point, I was with Kristin, but as I write, Bourjois, that emblem of savvy, French chic, is advertising the ghastliest of frosted pink lipsticks on prime time UK TV. Don’t tell me it’s not marketing this merde in France, too. And by the way, a cool, youthful brand called Bourjois? I rest my case.
Evidence suggests that it is this bourgeois DNA, combined with a willingness to elevate style to the very highest cultural plateaux, that suffocates style on a national level. French women may have more underwear shops per capita than anyone else on the planet. They may triumph when it comes to sourcing the “perfect” trench, the “perfect” court shoes (yes, they’re still wearing them) and the ultimate Birkin rip-off (French fashion is all about perfection and getting something on the cheap). And all right, they don’t get that fat. They’re among the few people on Earth who can wear Balenciaga drainpipes. But they don’t, bar a dozen or so fashion editrixes who look as if they’ve just stepped off a Helmut Newton set. Lou Doillon, the daughter of Jane Birkin and Jacques Doillon, is the other Parisian everyone invokes when they want to cite someone who embodies hip French style.
It is surely one of life’s great ironies, and utter wastes, that the cradle of fashion, and magnet for the world’s top designers, is a city in which you can’t find anyone prepared to wear the stuff. It’s as if their ability to intellectualise fashion and discuss it in the abstract — taxi drivers in Paris can give you an up-to-date resumé of Karl Lagerfeld or hold forth on the relative merits of Gaultier or McQueen — excuses them from actually having to follow anything as foolish and Anglo-Saxon as a trend. Fashion is distinct from style, of course, but without change there is stagnancy, and stagnancy is not stylish. It is stultifying and dull and leads to a nation that dresses less like Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour and more like timid, provincial town hall employees. I’ve seen more verve in Ann Widdecombe’s little finger — especially when she’s just had a manicure.
One fashion consultant who represents up-and-coming designers and lives in Paris during the week believes that this risk aversion is part of a general crisis of confidence. “Paris is the hardest city in the world for a new designer to crack. The French like very old, established and, in the main, French labels. It’s seen as cultural arrogance, but the reverse is probably true.” It’s also true that apart from Zara (a Spanish import), the French don ’t have a high street anything like as vibrant as Britain’s. Instead it has chains such as Gerard Darel and Et Vous: goldmines for yet more perfect trenches and decently cut (inexpensive) trousers and tops, but deserts when it comes to the directional, up-to-the-minute catwalk interpretations you see in Topshop, River Island, New Look, Dorothy Perkins and — now — Wallis and Principles. Obviously this spares them the more arresting sights one sees blotting the British landscape, a list of which would be both invidious and time-consuming, but it also equals staid predictability. And don’t think that predictability precludes tackiness: the French are as conflicted about, and influenced by, their trashy celebrities as we are. Since this is the land where trends never die, the influence is, arguably, that bit more pernicious.
Of course, there are exceptions: Carole Bouquet, Inès de La Fressange, Camille Miceli (the scarily stylish PR at Louis Vuitton) or Ségolène Royal, the dark, gamin bright light of the Socialist Party; when they get it right, it’s perfect. But en masse the French are not as individual as the British, as groomed as the Americans or as affluently dressed as the Russians. Yet even before Marie Antoinette (and look where being stylish got her), France’s reputation of superiority in matters of style was entrenched. By the 19th century, when Paris was the world’s literary and artistic centre, wealthy foreign women flocked there for their clothes (though Frederick Worth, the leading “Parisian” couturier of the time, hailed from Lincolnshire). After the Second World War, when shabby Britain was gripped by austerity, we gazed even more hungrily across the Channel for signs of civilised luxury, spurred by Robert Doisneau’s romantic images of Paris and its chic inhabitants.
Perhaps the notion of French style was always a bit mythic, something we needed to believe in when life here was so humdrum. In 1949 Nancy Mitford, another avid Francophile living in Paris, wrote: “English visitors here often complain to me that there are no well-dressed women in Paris.” Her explanation was that les elegants, “of whom there are dozens . . .never actually set foot in the street”. How ineffably French. Yet four years later she noted that “the English have a touching, if often misplaced, faith in the excellence of French taste”.
But Hollywood has done more than anything to mythologise the idea of French style. An American in Paris, with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron; Paris when it Sizzles, with Audrey Hepburn; Gigi; Cole Porter’s I love Paris; Henry James, Edith Wharton . . . there is a venerable tradition of Americans sexing up all things French. The Americans in Paris exhibition now on at the National Gallery and featuring rose-tinted views of the city, and of Americans in the city by, among others, Whistler and John Singer Sergeant, suggests that they’ve been doing it since at least 1860. That’s an irony the French should enjoy.
‘In France, women are obsessed with good taste’
Apart from a handful of super-stylish actresses, celebrities or chic Parisians, it is fair to say that the average Frenchwoman dresses in a classic, conservative and safe way. This approach of choosing rather dull colours and dowdy shapes can be attributed largely to the emerging bourgeois classes of the 19th century — the days of Maupassant and Zola, which are actually not so long ago. It’s this enduring legacy of 19th-century social diktats, of dressing with substance, integrity and not trying to appear too showy (very nouveau riche) that makes Ségolène Royal (a politician), Bernadette Chirac and Claire Chazal such aspirational icons. (Indeed, Chazal is promoted as being perfect daughter-in-law material). Frenchwomen are not educated to spend a lot of money on their appearance.
The average English woman is a little more adventurous. But then, she also has a very fashion-forward high street to play with. She references different eras and looks at things with more confidence. It doesn’t always boil down to how tasteful you look: in England, it’s about having that energy or flair. In France, women are obsessed with good taste and not stepping outside the boundaries of what is sartorially acceptable.
Parisians, though, are another story. They are a little more “undone”. Their hair isn’t always perfect, they aren’t 110 per cent groomed — but that is a lot sexier.
17.3.06
MISSING IN ACTION
I am quite sorry to have missed posting this past fortnight. I shall be up and back running in about a week.
cheers to all
cheers to all
3.3.06
AMERICA ILL AT EASE
Hollywood in trouble
The Oscar nominations reveal an America that's ill at ease with itself and its place in the world, says Andrew Gumbel
Published: 03 March 2006
The 5,000 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the ones responsible for picking the winners in this Sunday's Oscars, are hardly representative of life. They are, for the most part, well-heeled and residing in Beverly Hills.
It's become something of an annual sport to deride them for being too conservative or simply too enamoured of spectacle for spectacle's sake to recognise the more understated, more subversive sides of cinematic endeavour. And yet, the Academy's choices often end up saying a surprising amount about the times we live in. Take, for example, the year 2001, which turned out to be a geopolitical turning point. There were a lot of remarkable movies that year, among them Traffic, Steven Soderbergh's take on the drugs trade, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee's breathtakingly poetic martial-arts epic.
Both of those films were nominated for Best Picture, but were shunned in favour of Gladiator. Cinematically speaking, the choice might have been dubious, but in other ways it now looks oddly prescient. A fat and happy America had just allowed George Bush to become President under less than transparent circumstances, presaging a new era of global fear and paranoia; here, meanwhile, was a film about a tyrant who lays wrongful claim to the Roman Empire and keeps the people so gorged on bread and circuses that they barely notice his infamy.
Chicago, in 2003, was clearly the Academy's bid for musical escapism in the midst of the invasion of Iraq, while The Lord of the Rings, which hit it big with its third instalment in 2004, was an epic expressing all of America's high-minded ideals - the noble motives and heroic actions in a battle between good and evil - that the ugly realities of the Iraq conflict were in the process of destroying.
This year's crop of Oscar movies is perhaps richer still in determining the flow of political and social currents in the United States. America once again finds itself at a crossroads. The Bush administration is at its lowest ebb in popularity, and the country is still groping its way towards a decision on what it yearns for next. The world seems a lot more frightening than it did five years ago, while America as a country appears appalled by how polarised it has become, socially and politically.
Some critics have looked at the success of films such as Brokeback Mountain, Capote and Transamerica and declared this to be the year of homosexuality in Hollywood. Others have bracketed Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck together and suggested that what we are seeing is, rather, a flowering of hard-hitting movies with overtly political themes. I don't think either of those categorisations is quite right, because inherent in both is the assumption that a liberal agenda is being promoted to an unsuspecting conservative heartland. I think these films are symptoms of a much broader American malaise.
A film like Brokeback Mountain doesn't break any new ground in terms of depicting homosexuality in an Oscar-nominated picture. That job was performed 13 years ago by Philadelphia. What makes Brokeback Mountain seem new is the context; its protagonists are not big-city lawyers but rather farm hands in the rural West, the sort of people brought up to believe that the very notion of homosexuality is abhorrent. And that, in turn, has made the film seem like some sort of beacon of hope for rational discourse in a country woefully short on it. Who can say, as Republicans are inclined to, that homosexuality is an abomination when the characters in Brokeback Mountain are so obviously human? The film opens at least the possibility of civilised conversation on this question.
The thinking on this year's overtly political films is, likewise, perhaps a touch over-simplistic. Political films come and go regularly - think, for example, of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. What is striking about this year's Oscar nominees is the way they betoken a sudden lack of confidence in politics, and in political and public discourse. Good Night, and Good Luck is a film that encourages audiences to question what they learn about the world from a corrupted and complacent media; it is set in the McCarthy era, but it is also obviously about the state of journalistic bravery in today's world too. Steven Spielberg's Munich may ostensibly be about a crisis of conscience that besets a Mossad hit squad, but clearly it is also, more allegorically, about the corrosion of America's moral standing as it lashes out in retaliation for September 11.
This theme of uncertainty and questioning oozes out of another nominated film this year, Crash, which takes a scalpel to the happy-go-lucky surface of modern Los Angeles and finds it gravely infected with hostility and racism.
The America that emerges from these films is far from a happy place. It is one that is not only losing faith in its place in the world, but is also losing faith in its ability to comprehend the nature of its own decline, its own capacity for intolerance, bigotry and violence, and the betrayal of its own high-minded principles.
The Oscar nominations reveal an America that's ill at ease with itself and its place in the world, says Andrew Gumbel
Published: 03 March 2006
The 5,000 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the ones responsible for picking the winners in this Sunday's Oscars, are hardly representative of life. They are, for the most part, well-heeled and residing in Beverly Hills.
It's become something of an annual sport to deride them for being too conservative or simply too enamoured of spectacle for spectacle's sake to recognise the more understated, more subversive sides of cinematic endeavour. And yet, the Academy's choices often end up saying a surprising amount about the times we live in. Take, for example, the year 2001, which turned out to be a geopolitical turning point. There were a lot of remarkable movies that year, among them Traffic, Steven Soderbergh's take on the drugs trade, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee's breathtakingly poetic martial-arts epic.
Both of those films were nominated for Best Picture, but were shunned in favour of Gladiator. Cinematically speaking, the choice might have been dubious, but in other ways it now looks oddly prescient. A fat and happy America had just allowed George Bush to become President under less than transparent circumstances, presaging a new era of global fear and paranoia; here, meanwhile, was a film about a tyrant who lays wrongful claim to the Roman Empire and keeps the people so gorged on bread and circuses that they barely notice his infamy.
Chicago, in 2003, was clearly the Academy's bid for musical escapism in the midst of the invasion of Iraq, while The Lord of the Rings, which hit it big with its third instalment in 2004, was an epic expressing all of America's high-minded ideals - the noble motives and heroic actions in a battle between good and evil - that the ugly realities of the Iraq conflict were in the process of destroying.
This year's crop of Oscar movies is perhaps richer still in determining the flow of political and social currents in the United States. America once again finds itself at a crossroads. The Bush administration is at its lowest ebb in popularity, and the country is still groping its way towards a decision on what it yearns for next. The world seems a lot more frightening than it did five years ago, while America as a country appears appalled by how polarised it has become, socially and politically.
Some critics have looked at the success of films such as Brokeback Mountain, Capote and Transamerica and declared this to be the year of homosexuality in Hollywood. Others have bracketed Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck together and suggested that what we are seeing is, rather, a flowering of hard-hitting movies with overtly political themes. I don't think either of those categorisations is quite right, because inherent in both is the assumption that a liberal agenda is being promoted to an unsuspecting conservative heartland. I think these films are symptoms of a much broader American malaise.
A film like Brokeback Mountain doesn't break any new ground in terms of depicting homosexuality in an Oscar-nominated picture. That job was performed 13 years ago by Philadelphia. What makes Brokeback Mountain seem new is the context; its protagonists are not big-city lawyers but rather farm hands in the rural West, the sort of people brought up to believe that the very notion of homosexuality is abhorrent. And that, in turn, has made the film seem like some sort of beacon of hope for rational discourse in a country woefully short on it. Who can say, as Republicans are inclined to, that homosexuality is an abomination when the characters in Brokeback Mountain are so obviously human? The film opens at least the possibility of civilised conversation on this question.
The thinking on this year's overtly political films is, likewise, perhaps a touch over-simplistic. Political films come and go regularly - think, for example, of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. What is striking about this year's Oscar nominees is the way they betoken a sudden lack of confidence in politics, and in political and public discourse. Good Night, and Good Luck is a film that encourages audiences to question what they learn about the world from a corrupted and complacent media; it is set in the McCarthy era, but it is also obviously about the state of journalistic bravery in today's world too. Steven Spielberg's Munich may ostensibly be about a crisis of conscience that besets a Mossad hit squad, but clearly it is also, more allegorically, about the corrosion of America's moral standing as it lashes out in retaliation for September 11.
This theme of uncertainty and questioning oozes out of another nominated film this year, Crash, which takes a scalpel to the happy-go-lucky surface of modern Los Angeles and finds it gravely infected with hostility and racism.
The America that emerges from these films is far from a happy place. It is one that is not only losing faith in its place in the world, but is also losing faith in its ability to comprehend the nature of its own decline, its own capacity for intolerance, bigotry and violence, and the betrayal of its own high-minded principles.
"The Ice Is Melting Incredibly Fast"
Nowhere is climate change as dramatic as in the Arctic. The German explorer Arved Fuchs has undertaken a number of expeditions up north. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, he explains why time is running out.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: You have led quite a number of exhibitions to the Arctic since 1979. In your lectures you stress how much the region has changed in the last few years, and put this down to climate change. Many scientists say this is not a credible position -- don't they have a point? Fuchs: No. The information we are collecting agrees with what all the climate models and satellite data are showing. The Arctic is warming up quickly and the ice is melting incredibly fast. In previous expeditions, there were three occasions in a row when the Northeast Passage was so frozen over that it prevented us from getting through. But then in 2002 we had no problems sailing from the North Pole along the Siberian coast all the way to Alaska.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: And you believe that is without doubt a consequence of global warming? Fuchs: In 2002 experts said the thawing of the Northeast Passage was simply the result of a natural extreme in weather conditions. Today we know that this wasn't an exception. Everywhere on our travels, we have seen melting permafrost. It is a terrible feeling to see how fast the Arctic is changing. SPIEGEL ONLINE: A lot of scientists are reluctant to connect individual observations in climate change with global warming. Do you work together with scientists?Fuchs: We have been out in the field with oceanographers to measure deep-sea temperatures for the BSH, the German government's organization for shipping. In other cases the main point is to gather and store data. That is a service I always offer because it makes sense to use our resources that way. But some scientists are scared of being involved. SPIEGEL ONLINE: How do they make these feelings known? Fuchs: I am often described as an adventurer and so a lot of scientists view me as not competent enough. But that is not always the case. Young scientists in particular are generally not so arrogant. SPIEGEL ONLINE: What are you able to do that high-tech research ships can't?Fuchs: Research ships, such as the "Polarstern" are very expensive and have to complete a tight program on their missions as quickly as possible. For us that is not the case at all. We are based in the Arctic and can do things differently there. We can observe developments over a longer time period. That's why I do think that we have a meaningful contribution to make. But scientific research is not the only aim of our expeditions. SPIEGEL ONLINE: What drives you to repeatedly head out into the ice?
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Fuchs: I have always been very inquisitive and have always had fun living out in the wilds. We also want to document what is happening. By doing this we can give a human dimension to the changes taking place in the Arctic. We don't only show columns of figures, although they are important too. This way allows us to tell people about the effects of climate change. SPIEGEL ONLINE: You say that you didn't like Roland Emmerich's Hollywood film "The Day After Tomorrow," because it was too lurid for your tastes. By emotionalizing the topic of climate change, aren't you guilty of doing the same thing?Fuchs: I wouldn't say so. We simply document what is happening. We are not making feature films. We don't make up scenes or build something which doesn't exist in the natural world. We try to reflect fairly the complexity of the topic -- of course you also have to make the issue universally intelligible. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Many industrialized countries, first and foremost the USA, aren't doing enough to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Other countries, with huge populations, have yet to really address CO2 emissions. Do you think that climate change can actually be stopped before the catastrophe hits us? Fuchs: I am very pessimistic. Many scientists have finally readjusted their predictions -- towards more threatening scenarios. It is simply sickening that the USA, which has 5 percent of the global population, emits 25 percent of the world's CO2. And I don't think a change in mentality will happen quickly in the USA -- especially not with the present administration in charge. SPIEGEL ONLINE: In 1989 you were the first German to reach the North Pole on foot. In a few years people will probably need boats instead of boots to get there. Are you glad that you weren't born 30 years later?Fuchs: Very often I am asked the opposite question -- whether I didn't wish I lived at the beginning of the 20th century, at the same time as the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, when there was still new land to be discovered. I think that we are now living in an amazingly exciting time. But at the same time you are right: the North Pole expeditions that I have made will probably not be possible in a few years time.
Interview conducted by Markus Becker
SPIEGEL ONLINE: You have led quite a number of exhibitions to the Arctic since 1979. In your lectures you stress how much the region has changed in the last few years, and put this down to climate change. Many scientists say this is not a credible position -- don't they have a point? Fuchs: No. The information we are collecting agrees with what all the climate models and satellite data are showing. The Arctic is warming up quickly and the ice is melting incredibly fast. In previous expeditions, there were three occasions in a row when the Northeast Passage was so frozen over that it prevented us from getting through. But then in 2002 we had no problems sailing from the North Pole along the Siberian coast all the way to Alaska.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: And you believe that is without doubt a consequence of global warming? Fuchs: In 2002 experts said the thawing of the Northeast Passage was simply the result of a natural extreme in weather conditions. Today we know that this wasn't an exception. Everywhere on our travels, we have seen melting permafrost. It is a terrible feeling to see how fast the Arctic is changing. SPIEGEL ONLINE: A lot of scientists are reluctant to connect individual observations in climate change with global warming. Do you work together with scientists?Fuchs: We have been out in the field with oceanographers to measure deep-sea temperatures for the BSH, the German government's organization for shipping. In other cases the main point is to gather and store data. That is a service I always offer because it makes sense to use our resources that way. But some scientists are scared of being involved. SPIEGEL ONLINE: How do they make these feelings known? Fuchs: I am often described as an adventurer and so a lot of scientists view me as not competent enough. But that is not always the case. Young scientists in particular are generally not so arrogant. SPIEGEL ONLINE: What are you able to do that high-tech research ships can't?Fuchs: Research ships, such as the "Polarstern" are very expensive and have to complete a tight program on their missions as quickly as possible. For us that is not the case at all. We are based in the Arctic and can do things differently there. We can observe developments over a longer time period. That's why I do think that we have a meaningful contribution to make. But scientific research is not the only aim of our expeditions. SPIEGEL ONLINE: What drives you to repeatedly head out into the ice?
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Fuchs: I have always been very inquisitive and have always had fun living out in the wilds. We also want to document what is happening. By doing this we can give a human dimension to the changes taking place in the Arctic. We don't only show columns of figures, although they are important too. This way allows us to tell people about the effects of climate change. SPIEGEL ONLINE: You say that you didn't like Roland Emmerich's Hollywood film "The Day After Tomorrow," because it was too lurid for your tastes. By emotionalizing the topic of climate change, aren't you guilty of doing the same thing?Fuchs: I wouldn't say so. We simply document what is happening. We are not making feature films. We don't make up scenes or build something which doesn't exist in the natural world. We try to reflect fairly the complexity of the topic -- of course you also have to make the issue universally intelligible. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Many industrialized countries, first and foremost the USA, aren't doing enough to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Other countries, with huge populations, have yet to really address CO2 emissions. Do you think that climate change can actually be stopped before the catastrophe hits us? Fuchs: I am very pessimistic. Many scientists have finally readjusted their predictions -- towards more threatening scenarios. It is simply sickening that the USA, which has 5 percent of the global population, emits 25 percent of the world's CO2. And I don't think a change in mentality will happen quickly in the USA -- especially not with the present administration in charge. SPIEGEL ONLINE: In 1989 you were the first German to reach the North Pole on foot. In a few years people will probably need boats instead of boots to get there. Are you glad that you weren't born 30 years later?Fuchs: Very often I am asked the opposite question -- whether I didn't wish I lived at the beginning of the 20th century, at the same time as the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, when there was still new land to be discovered. I think that we are now living in an amazingly exciting time. But at the same time you are right: the North Pole expeditions that I have made will probably not be possible in a few years time.
Interview conducted by Markus Becker
Rejecting the Bad: A Muslim Manifesto
A Muslim ManifestoBy Mustafa Akyol and Zeyno Baran
"Who are the moderate Muslims, and why do they not speak up?" After being asked theis question over and over again since 9/11, particularly after the Danish cartoon crisis, Muslim intellectuals Akyol and Baran have proposed this Muslim Manifesto.
Zeyno Baran and Mustafa Akyol.Recently, the disrespectful cartoons about Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) published in Jyllands-Posten resulted in an extreme reaction among many Muslims worldwide. While we understand the feelings of our co-religionists, we strongly urge them to refrain from rage and violence.A zeal for Allah is rightful only when it is expressed in an enlightened manner, since Allah himself has ordained a restrained response. When the early Muslims were mocked by their pagan contemporaries, the Koran ordered not a violent backlash, but rather a civilized disapproval: "When you hear Allah's verses being rejected and mocked at by people, you must not sit with them till they start talking of other things." (Koran 4:140) The Koran also describes Muslims as "those who control their rage and pardon other people, [because] Allah loves the good-doers." (3:134) Therefore all demonstrations against the mockery of Islam should be peaceful. All critiques of Islam should be countered not by threats and violence, but by rational counter-argument. We also believe that terrorist acts can never be justified or excused. None of the challenges Muslims face, such as oppression or military occupation, can justify attacks against non-combatants. In the Holy Koran, Allah orders Muslims to "never let hatred of anyone lead you into the sin of deviating from justice." (5:8) The true Islamic sense of justice is well-established in the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh); even in time of war - let alone peace - Muslim soldiers should never "kill the old, the infant, the child, or the woman." Those who do so are not martyrs, but cold-blooded murderers.Supported by the Koran's affirmation that "there is no compulsion in religion" (2:256), we cherish religious liberty. Every human has the right to believe or not to believe in Islam or in any other religion All Muslims furthermore have the right to reject and change their religion if desired. No state, community or individual has a right to impose Islam on others. People should accept and practice Islam not because they are forced to do so, but because they believe in its teachings. We support and cherish democracy - not because we reject the sovereignty of the Almighty over people, but because we believe that this sovereignty is manifested in the general will of people in a democratic and pluralistic society. We do not accept theocratic rule-not because we do not wish to obey Allah, but because theocratic rule inevitably becomes rule by fallible (and sometimes corrupt and misguided) humans in the name of the infallible God. We accept the legitimacy of the secular state and the secular law. Islamic law, or sharia, was developed at a time when Muslims were living in homogenous communities. In the modern world, virtually all societies are pluralistic, consisting of different faiths and of different perceptions of each faith, including Islam. In this pluralistic setting, a legal system based on a particular version of a single religion cannot be imposed on all citizens. Thus, a single secular law, open to all religions but based on none, is strongly needed. We believe that women have the same inalienable rights as men. We strongly denounce laws and attitudes in some Islamic societies that exclude women from society by denying them the rights of education, political participation and the individual pursuit of happiness. Like men, women should have the right to decide how they will live, dress, travel, marry and divorce; if they do not enjoy these rights, they are clearly second-class citizens.We believe that there is no contradiction between religious and national identities. Any Muslim should be able to embrace the citizenship of any modern secular state while maintaining feelings of spiritual solidarity with the umma, the global Muslim community.
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We regard Christianity and Judaism as sister faiths in the common family of Abrahamic monotheism. We strongly denounce anti-Semitism, which has been alien to Islam for many centuries but which unfortunately has gained popularity among some Muslims in recent decades. We accept Israel's right to exist, as well as the justified aspiration of the Palestinian people for a sovereign state and hope that a just two-state solution in Israel/Palestine will bring peace to the Holy Land. In short, we strongly disagree with and condemn those who promote or practice tyranny and violence in the name of Islam. We hope that their misguided deeds will not blacken our noble religion - which is indeed a path to God and a call for peace.Mustafa Akyol is a writer and journalist based in Turkey; Zeyno Baran is director of International Security and Energy Programs at The Nixon Center. In February 2006, she was a "Distinguished Visitor" to the American Academy in Berlin.
The Muslim Manifesto was originally published on the Web site of the National Review Online and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the authors. The authors would like Muslim political, social, community and business leaders to sign the Manifesto, which can be accessed via the National Review Online Web site.
"Who are the moderate Muslims, and why do they not speak up?" After being asked theis question over and over again since 9/11, particularly after the Danish cartoon crisis, Muslim intellectuals Akyol and Baran have proposed this Muslim Manifesto.
Zeyno Baran and Mustafa Akyol.Recently, the disrespectful cartoons about Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) published in Jyllands-Posten resulted in an extreme reaction among many Muslims worldwide. While we understand the feelings of our co-religionists, we strongly urge them to refrain from rage and violence.A zeal for Allah is rightful only when it is expressed in an enlightened manner, since Allah himself has ordained a restrained response. When the early Muslims were mocked by their pagan contemporaries, the Koran ordered not a violent backlash, but rather a civilized disapproval: "When you hear Allah's verses being rejected and mocked at by people, you must not sit with them till they start talking of other things." (Koran 4:140) The Koran also describes Muslims as "those who control their rage and pardon other people, [because] Allah loves the good-doers." (3:134) Therefore all demonstrations against the mockery of Islam should be peaceful. All critiques of Islam should be countered not by threats and violence, but by rational counter-argument. We also believe that terrorist acts can never be justified or excused. None of the challenges Muslims face, such as oppression or military occupation, can justify attacks against non-combatants. In the Holy Koran, Allah orders Muslims to "never let hatred of anyone lead you into the sin of deviating from justice." (5:8) The true Islamic sense of justice is well-established in the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh); even in time of war - let alone peace - Muslim soldiers should never "kill the old, the infant, the child, or the woman." Those who do so are not martyrs, but cold-blooded murderers.Supported by the Koran's affirmation that "there is no compulsion in religion" (2:256), we cherish religious liberty. Every human has the right to believe or not to believe in Islam or in any other religion All Muslims furthermore have the right to reject and change their religion if desired. No state, community or individual has a right to impose Islam on others. People should accept and practice Islam not because they are forced to do so, but because they believe in its teachings. We support and cherish democracy - not because we reject the sovereignty of the Almighty over people, but because we believe that this sovereignty is manifested in the general will of people in a democratic and pluralistic society. We do not accept theocratic rule-not because we do not wish to obey Allah, but because theocratic rule inevitably becomes rule by fallible (and sometimes corrupt and misguided) humans in the name of the infallible God. We accept the legitimacy of the secular state and the secular law. Islamic law, or sharia, was developed at a time when Muslims were living in homogenous communities. In the modern world, virtually all societies are pluralistic, consisting of different faiths and of different perceptions of each faith, including Islam. In this pluralistic setting, a legal system based on a particular version of a single religion cannot be imposed on all citizens. Thus, a single secular law, open to all religions but based on none, is strongly needed. We believe that women have the same inalienable rights as men. We strongly denounce laws and attitudes in some Islamic societies that exclude women from society by denying them the rights of education, political participation and the individual pursuit of happiness. Like men, women should have the right to decide how they will live, dress, travel, marry and divorce; if they do not enjoy these rights, they are clearly second-class citizens.We believe that there is no contradiction between religious and national identities. Any Muslim should be able to embrace the citizenship of any modern secular state while maintaining feelings of spiritual solidarity with the umma, the global Muslim community.
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We regard Christianity and Judaism as sister faiths in the common family of Abrahamic monotheism. We strongly denounce anti-Semitism, which has been alien to Islam for many centuries but which unfortunately has gained popularity among some Muslims in recent decades. We accept Israel's right to exist, as well as the justified aspiration of the Palestinian people for a sovereign state and hope that a just two-state solution in Israel/Palestine will bring peace to the Holy Land. In short, we strongly disagree with and condemn those who promote or practice tyranny and violence in the name of Islam. We hope that their misguided deeds will not blacken our noble religion - which is indeed a path to God and a call for peace.Mustafa Akyol is a writer and journalist based in Turkey; Zeyno Baran is director of International Security and Energy Programs at The Nixon Center. In February 2006, she was a "Distinguished Visitor" to the American Academy in Berlin.
The Muslim Manifesto was originally published on the Web site of the National Review Online and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the authors. The authors would like Muslim political, social, community and business leaders to sign the Manifesto, which can be accessed via the National Review Online Web site.
Brokeback Mountain
The sermon on the mountainspiked-film: Artistically, Brokeback Mountain is quite a good film. Socially, it sucks.
by Brendan O'Neill (from SPIKED)
I know, SPIKED has already reviewed Brokeback Mountain, the film about two cowboys who fall for each other while herding sheep in Wyoming in the 1960s. Nancy McDermott gave it the thumbs-up in an article published here. But since then, and in the run-up to Sunday's Oscars - where it is nominated for Best Actor, Supporting Actor, Director and Film - we have been told again and again that Brokeback Mountain is as much a social comment as it is a piece of art. Picking up his BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor last month, Jake Gyllenhaal (who plays Jack Twist) declared that the film 'means more to me socially than it does artistically' (1). So here's a follow-up review, of Brokeback's social rather than artistic qualities. And on this front, it gets a thumbs-down.
What do Gyllenhaal and others mean when they say the film is important socially? They're not talking about its depiction of US society in the 60s and 70s, which is fleeting and narrow. Most of the action takes place in the Mid-West and the love affair unfolds in isolation on and around the desolate Brokeback Mountain; in many ways, the film is set outside of society. Rather, they are talking about its social impact now, and their hopes that the movie will change 'social attitudes' among the apparently gay-unfriendly or even homophobic masses. Singing the praises of Brokeback Mountain has become a shortcut to demonstrating your superiority over a certain class of people. What they really mean is that this film means more to them as an effort in social engineering than it does as an artistic endeavour.
In the San Francisco Chronicle, one columnist has started using the phrase 'Brokeback phobia', rather than homophobia, to describe straight men who are refusing to see the film. He says many of America's straight men, even the 'progressive' ones who 'support same-sex marriage and invite their gay co-workers to parties', cannot seem to 'get over their insecurities and take those last few steps to see this landmark film'. Apparently they are 'under a spell, reinforced by years of conflicting televised gay stereotypes and manly cowboy imagery' (although, 'considering that most of us were brought up in an era of intolerance [and] fearmongering, it's miraculous that you guys aren't even more screwed up in the head', he says, generously). He reckons that seeing Brokeback Mountain might sort the straights out. 'Your skittishness over this movie has a lot to do with the degree to which society has failed you. But there is still some good in your heart…. [S]eeing a movie about two gay men could make you feel like an even bigger man.' (2)
Notice how an individual's 'progressiveness' is judged by his attitudes to gay marriage and gay co-workers, and how his unwillingness to see Brokeback Mountain is put down to some kind of brainwashing. This captures an inherent snobbery in much of the discussion about Brokeback Mountain: if you're a good, nice, sensitive liberal you will see the movie (as Sunday Times columnist Andrew Sullivan says, 'Blue state liberals felt it some kind of social duty to see the film'); if you're a bad, insensitive, probably Bush-supporting conservative you will fail to see the movie. Brokeback-philes are depicted as open-minded and possessed of free will; Brokeback-phobes are said to be regimented in their thought processes ('under a spell') and unwilling to try new experiences.
This echoes the snobbish discussion about Bush-supporters during and after the Presidential elections in 2004, when one well-known Democrat-leaning commentator declared that 'thanks to the Bush campaign's unremitting fear-mongering, millions of voters are reacting not with their linear and logical left brain but with their lizard brain and their more emotional right brain…' (3). Now, some of these same liberals seem to hoped that Brokeback Mountain will snap these lizards out of their narrow thought patterns. I don't know what is more sad: their depiction of their fellow Americans as animal-like automatons, or their current reliance on what is essentially a date movie to do their dirty work for them. Probably the latter.
It was widely assumed - by both liberal and conservative commentators - that Brokeback Mountain would bomb in America's generally Republican 'red states'. A couple of months ago Charles Krauthammer, a columnist with the Washington Post, predicted that, come Oscar night, 'Brokeback Mountain will have been seen in the theatres by 18 people - but the right 18 - and will win the Academy Award' (4). A journalist on one liberal website said: 'I'm highly sceptical that a movie about gay cowboys, however good, will find a large mainstream audience. I'll go see it….' (5) So even before it was properly released there were predictions that the film would expose the fault lines between America's progressives and backwards - ie, between those who are gay-friendly and those who are less so.
In fact, the film has been a box-office success, including in those apparently homophobic red states. Of all the Oscar nominees for Best Film it has made the biggest domestic grosses (partly because, as has been widely commented on, the five nominees this year are all small 'issues'-based movies), and according to Variety magazine some of Brokeback's strongest audiences have been in Tulsa, Oklahoma, El Paso, Texas, Des Moines, Iowa and Lubbock, Texas (6).
Having had their predictions of failure down South confounded, some now hope that Brokeback will get inside the brains of those red state-dwellers and alter them for the better. A columnist for the online magazine Slate writes about the 'Brokeback breakout meme' - the idea that the film is breaking through in southern states and actually affecting the 'meme' and changing how people think and behave (7). As one writer points out, '"Meme" refers to a cultural copying unit that hops from brain to brain without much thought or any at all' (8) - in short, it's hope that Brokeback's message will spread, virus-like, through the red states. Writing under the headline 'Why I believe in the Brokeback breakout meme', a New York writer living in a rural red state, where he watched Brokeback Mountain, described how he was 'overcome with pride as I looked around at those Red State strangers who are now my neighbours and friends and realised the audience had been won over' (9). Inhabitants of the red states are discussed as if they are from another planet, slowly but surely being tuned into to 'our' (ie, Democrat-supporting liberal's) way of thinking courtesy of the power of Brokeback Mountain.
Other commentators see the success of the film, both at the box office and in terms of awards nominations, as some kind of sweet revenge on the Bush administration and those who voted for it. In the Guardian, Bush critic and film writer John Patterson said: 'After the most homophobic Presidential elections in US history, it warms the heart to note that we're about to get the Gayest Oscars Ever.' Bush might have won the White House, but at least liberal cinema-goers can watch as Brokeback Mountain wins (perhaps) the Best Film Oscar. 'What's most amusing', says Patterson, 'is that the gay-themed movie actually [takes] homosexuality directly into the red states….' (10)
The discussion of Brokeback Mountain, its social rather than artistic impact, shows how accusations of homophobia are used to bash the masses these days for what are presumed to be their incorrect attitudes. The movie is praised by liberal commentators as some kind of public education film that can change minds and behaviour, kind of like those old black-and-white films about sexual intercourse that showed in US movie-houses in the 1940s and 50s. Get a grip. It's only a film, and not even a great one (a good one, yes, but not Ang Lee's finest). If Brokeback Mountain wins Best Film on Sunday, it is likely to be for its presumed social impact (the fact that it made Bush-battered liberals feel good about themselves) more than for its artistic merit.
by Brendan O'Neill (from SPIKED)
I know, SPIKED has already reviewed Brokeback Mountain, the film about two cowboys who fall for each other while herding sheep in Wyoming in the 1960s. Nancy McDermott gave it the thumbs-up in an article published here. But since then, and in the run-up to Sunday's Oscars - where it is nominated for Best Actor, Supporting Actor, Director and Film - we have been told again and again that Brokeback Mountain is as much a social comment as it is a piece of art. Picking up his BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor last month, Jake Gyllenhaal (who plays Jack Twist) declared that the film 'means more to me socially than it does artistically' (1). So here's a follow-up review, of Brokeback's social rather than artistic qualities. And on this front, it gets a thumbs-down.
What do Gyllenhaal and others mean when they say the film is important socially? They're not talking about its depiction of US society in the 60s and 70s, which is fleeting and narrow. Most of the action takes place in the Mid-West and the love affair unfolds in isolation on and around the desolate Brokeback Mountain; in many ways, the film is set outside of society. Rather, they are talking about its social impact now, and their hopes that the movie will change 'social attitudes' among the apparently gay-unfriendly or even homophobic masses. Singing the praises of Brokeback Mountain has become a shortcut to demonstrating your superiority over a certain class of people. What they really mean is that this film means more to them as an effort in social engineering than it does as an artistic endeavour.
In the San Francisco Chronicle, one columnist has started using the phrase 'Brokeback phobia', rather than homophobia, to describe straight men who are refusing to see the film. He says many of America's straight men, even the 'progressive' ones who 'support same-sex marriage and invite their gay co-workers to parties', cannot seem to 'get over their insecurities and take those last few steps to see this landmark film'. Apparently they are 'under a spell, reinforced by years of conflicting televised gay stereotypes and manly cowboy imagery' (although, 'considering that most of us were brought up in an era of intolerance [and] fearmongering, it's miraculous that you guys aren't even more screwed up in the head', he says, generously). He reckons that seeing Brokeback Mountain might sort the straights out. 'Your skittishness over this movie has a lot to do with the degree to which society has failed you. But there is still some good in your heart…. [S]eeing a movie about two gay men could make you feel like an even bigger man.' (2)
Notice how an individual's 'progressiveness' is judged by his attitudes to gay marriage and gay co-workers, and how his unwillingness to see Brokeback Mountain is put down to some kind of brainwashing. This captures an inherent snobbery in much of the discussion about Brokeback Mountain: if you're a good, nice, sensitive liberal you will see the movie (as Sunday Times columnist Andrew Sullivan says, 'Blue state liberals felt it some kind of social duty to see the film'); if you're a bad, insensitive, probably Bush-supporting conservative you will fail to see the movie. Brokeback-philes are depicted as open-minded and possessed of free will; Brokeback-phobes are said to be regimented in their thought processes ('under a spell') and unwilling to try new experiences.
This echoes the snobbish discussion about Bush-supporters during and after the Presidential elections in 2004, when one well-known Democrat-leaning commentator declared that 'thanks to the Bush campaign's unremitting fear-mongering, millions of voters are reacting not with their linear and logical left brain but with their lizard brain and their more emotional right brain…' (3). Now, some of these same liberals seem to hoped that Brokeback Mountain will snap these lizards out of their narrow thought patterns. I don't know what is more sad: their depiction of their fellow Americans as animal-like automatons, or their current reliance on what is essentially a date movie to do their dirty work for them. Probably the latter.
It was widely assumed - by both liberal and conservative commentators - that Brokeback Mountain would bomb in America's generally Republican 'red states'. A couple of months ago Charles Krauthammer, a columnist with the Washington Post, predicted that, come Oscar night, 'Brokeback Mountain will have been seen in the theatres by 18 people - but the right 18 - and will win the Academy Award' (4). A journalist on one liberal website said: 'I'm highly sceptical that a movie about gay cowboys, however good, will find a large mainstream audience. I'll go see it….' (5) So even before it was properly released there were predictions that the film would expose the fault lines between America's progressives and backwards - ie, between those who are gay-friendly and those who are less so.
In fact, the film has been a box-office success, including in those apparently homophobic red states. Of all the Oscar nominees for Best Film it has made the biggest domestic grosses (partly because, as has been widely commented on, the five nominees this year are all small 'issues'-based movies), and according to Variety magazine some of Brokeback's strongest audiences have been in Tulsa, Oklahoma, El Paso, Texas, Des Moines, Iowa and Lubbock, Texas (6).
Having had their predictions of failure down South confounded, some now hope that Brokeback will get inside the brains of those red state-dwellers and alter them for the better. A columnist for the online magazine Slate writes about the 'Brokeback breakout meme' - the idea that the film is breaking through in southern states and actually affecting the 'meme' and changing how people think and behave (7). As one writer points out, '"Meme" refers to a cultural copying unit that hops from brain to brain without much thought or any at all' (8) - in short, it's hope that Brokeback's message will spread, virus-like, through the red states. Writing under the headline 'Why I believe in the Brokeback breakout meme', a New York writer living in a rural red state, where he watched Brokeback Mountain, described how he was 'overcome with pride as I looked around at those Red State strangers who are now my neighbours and friends and realised the audience had been won over' (9). Inhabitants of the red states are discussed as if they are from another planet, slowly but surely being tuned into to 'our' (ie, Democrat-supporting liberal's) way of thinking courtesy of the power of Brokeback Mountain.
Other commentators see the success of the film, both at the box office and in terms of awards nominations, as some kind of sweet revenge on the Bush administration and those who voted for it. In the Guardian, Bush critic and film writer John Patterson said: 'After the most homophobic Presidential elections in US history, it warms the heart to note that we're about to get the Gayest Oscars Ever.' Bush might have won the White House, but at least liberal cinema-goers can watch as Brokeback Mountain wins (perhaps) the Best Film Oscar. 'What's most amusing', says Patterson, 'is that the gay-themed movie actually [takes] homosexuality directly into the red states….' (10)
The discussion of Brokeback Mountain, its social rather than artistic impact, shows how accusations of homophobia are used to bash the masses these days for what are presumed to be their incorrect attitudes. The movie is praised by liberal commentators as some kind of public education film that can change minds and behaviour, kind of like those old black-and-white films about sexual intercourse that showed in US movie-houses in the 1940s and 50s. Get a grip. It's only a film, and not even a great one (a good one, yes, but not Ang Lee's finest). If Brokeback Mountain wins Best Film on Sunday, it is likely to be for its presumed social impact (the fact that it made Bush-battered liberals feel good about themselves) more than for its artistic merit.
1.3.06
Impeach Bush
Impeach Bush
The man was lost and then he was found and now he's more lost than ever -- and he's taking us into the darkness with him. It's time to remove him.
By Garrison Keillor
Mar. 01, 2006
These are troubling times for all of us who love this country, as surely we all do, even the satirists. You may poke fun at your mother, but if she is belittled by others it burns your bacon. A blowhard French journalist writes a book about America that is full of arrogant stupidity, and you want to let the air out of him and mail him home flat. You hear young people talk about America as if it's all over, and you trust that this is only them talking tough. And then you read the paper and realize the country is led by a man who isn't paying attention, and you hope that somebody will poke him. Or put a sign on his desk that says, "Try Much Harder."
Do we need to impeach him to bring some focus to this man's life? The man was lost and then he was found and now he's more lost than ever, plus being blind.
The Feb. 27 issue of the New Yorker carries an article by Jane Mayer about a loyal conservative Republican and U.S. Navy lawyer, Albert Mora, and his resistance to the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. From within the Pentagon bureaucracy, he did battle against Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo at the Justice Department and shadowy figures taking orders from Dick (Gunner) Cheney, arguing America had ratified the Geneva Convention that forbids cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners, and so it has the force of law. They seemed to be arguing that the president has the right to order prisoners to be tortured.
One such prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was held naked in isolation under bright lights for months, threatened by dogs, subjected to unbearable noise volumes, and otherwise abused, so that he begged to be allowed to kill himself. When the Senate approved the Torture Convention in 1994, it defined torture as an act "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." Is the law a law or is it a piece of toast?
Wiretap surveillance of Americans without a warrant? Great. Go for it. How about turning over American ports to a country more closely tied to 9/11 than Saddam Hussein was? Fine by me. No problem. And what about the war in Iraq? Hey, you're doing a heck of a job, Brownie. No need to tweak a thing. And your blue button-down shirt -- it's you.
But torture is something else. When Americans start pulling people's fingernails out with pliers and poking lighted cigarettes into their palms, then we need to come back to basic values. Most people agree with this, and in a democracy that puts the torturers in a delicate position. They must make sure to destroy their e-mails and have subordinates who will take the fall. Because it is impossible to keep torture secret. It goes against the American grain and it eats at the conscience of even the most disciplined, and in the end the truth will come out. It is coming out now.
According to the leaders of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, our country is practically as vulnerable today as it was on 9/10. Our seaports are wide open, our airspace is not secure except for the nation's capital, and little has been done about securing the nuclear bomb materials lying around in the world. They give the administration D's and F's in most categories of defending against terrorist attack.
Our adventure in Iraq, at a cost of trillions, has brought that country to the verge of civil war while earning us more enemies than ever before. And tax money earmarked for security is being dumped into pork barrel projects anywhere somebody wants their own SWAT team. Detonation of a nuclear bomb within our borders -- pick any big city -- is a real possibility, as much so now as five years ago. Meanwhile, many Democrats have conceded the very subject of security and positioned themselves as Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of Waifs and Owls, neglecting the most basic job of government, which is to defend this country. We might rather be comedians or daddies or tattoo artists or flamenco dancers, but we must attend to first things.
The peaceful lagoon that is the White House is designed for the comfort of a vulnerable man. Perfectly understandable, but not what is needed now. The U.S. Constitution provides a simple ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes and the failure to attend to the country's defense. Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
The man was lost and then he was found and now he's more lost than ever -- and he's taking us into the darkness with him. It's time to remove him.
By Garrison Keillor
Mar. 01, 2006
These are troubling times for all of us who love this country, as surely we all do, even the satirists. You may poke fun at your mother, but if she is belittled by others it burns your bacon. A blowhard French journalist writes a book about America that is full of arrogant stupidity, and you want to let the air out of him and mail him home flat. You hear young people talk about America as if it's all over, and you trust that this is only them talking tough. And then you read the paper and realize the country is led by a man who isn't paying attention, and you hope that somebody will poke him. Or put a sign on his desk that says, "Try Much Harder."
Do we need to impeach him to bring some focus to this man's life? The man was lost and then he was found and now he's more lost than ever, plus being blind.
The Feb. 27 issue of the New Yorker carries an article by Jane Mayer about a loyal conservative Republican and U.S. Navy lawyer, Albert Mora, and his resistance to the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. From within the Pentagon bureaucracy, he did battle against Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo at the Justice Department and shadowy figures taking orders from Dick (Gunner) Cheney, arguing America had ratified the Geneva Convention that forbids cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners, and so it has the force of law. They seemed to be arguing that the president has the right to order prisoners to be tortured.
One such prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was held naked in isolation under bright lights for months, threatened by dogs, subjected to unbearable noise volumes, and otherwise abused, so that he begged to be allowed to kill himself. When the Senate approved the Torture Convention in 1994, it defined torture as an act "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." Is the law a law or is it a piece of toast?
Wiretap surveillance of Americans without a warrant? Great. Go for it. How about turning over American ports to a country more closely tied to 9/11 than Saddam Hussein was? Fine by me. No problem. And what about the war in Iraq? Hey, you're doing a heck of a job, Brownie. No need to tweak a thing. And your blue button-down shirt -- it's you.
But torture is something else. When Americans start pulling people's fingernails out with pliers and poking lighted cigarettes into their palms, then we need to come back to basic values. Most people agree with this, and in a democracy that puts the torturers in a delicate position. They must make sure to destroy their e-mails and have subordinates who will take the fall. Because it is impossible to keep torture secret. It goes against the American grain and it eats at the conscience of even the most disciplined, and in the end the truth will come out. It is coming out now.
According to the leaders of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, our country is practically as vulnerable today as it was on 9/10. Our seaports are wide open, our airspace is not secure except for the nation's capital, and little has been done about securing the nuclear bomb materials lying around in the world. They give the administration D's and F's in most categories of defending against terrorist attack.
Our adventure in Iraq, at a cost of trillions, has brought that country to the verge of civil war while earning us more enemies than ever before. And tax money earmarked for security is being dumped into pork barrel projects anywhere somebody wants their own SWAT team. Detonation of a nuclear bomb within our borders -- pick any big city -- is a real possibility, as much so now as five years ago. Meanwhile, many Democrats have conceded the very subject of security and positioned themselves as Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of Waifs and Owls, neglecting the most basic job of government, which is to defend this country. We might rather be comedians or daddies or tattoo artists or flamenco dancers, but we must attend to first things.
The peaceful lagoon that is the White House is designed for the comfort of a vulnerable man. Perfectly understandable, but not what is needed now. The U.S. Constitution provides a simple ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes and the failure to attend to the country's defense. Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
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