Porter’s Pensées

Yesterday a friend reminded me of a story I’ve been telling for years, but not yet on this blog, I think; about an incident at O’Hare Airport in Chicago some time ago, when I came off a plane, only to trip over a kerb in the tunnel you walk through to disembark, and hurt my ankle. I writhed there in agony.

Immediately an Airport employee came running up to me. Her first question was: ‘Can I get you a lawyer?’ Only afterwards did she offer to call a doctor. – ‘OK’, I thought. ‘I must be in America’.

I turned down her offer of a lawyer: ‘My own silly fault’, I said. ‘I should have looked where I was going.’ She looked surprised and relieved. The ankle turned out to be broken (it still gives me arthritic pain), and had to be set and plastered; which gave me some interesting experience (mainly good) of American hospitals, and a talking point at the conference I was attending, now on crutches. Everyone there said I should have sued the airport. ‘You could have won a million dollars.’ I was just grateful for the free treatment (on my travel insurance). But then, I’m British.

Some people don’t believe that. But I swear it’s true.

For those frustrated and even frightened by the West’s current unseemly rush back to the supposed comforts of nationalism and tribalism, and for those who, like me, don’t wish to restrict ourselves to single identities, national or otherwise, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent re-orientation of Canada as a ‘postnational’ society offers some hope, and even joy (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/04/the-canada-experiment-is-this-the-worlds-first-postnational-country?). Theresa May wouldn’t like it, of course: ‘if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere’; as neither would the Ukippers, who have just stolen the European part of our identity away from us; or most of Trudeau’s neighbours south of the 49^th parallel. But for us cultural hybrids it’s like a breath of reason and enlightenment, and a glimpse of a better world.

Canada is rapidly becoming the other, ‘good’, side of the American coin; the shiny obverse to the US’s rusted reverse; the Dr Jekyll to the latter’s Mr Hyde. (Here’s something I wrote on it earlier: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/11/boring-canada/.) Which must vindicate all those American ‘loyalists’ who rejected independence in 1776, stuck with the Empire, and made their homes in ‘British North America’, as it was then. It illustrates what the United States might have become if they had remained under the British colonial yoke – which was gentle enough, after all – to develop culturally and politically in more British ways. (Only joking.) (Well, in part.)

Thanks to my postnational friend Marie Clausén for putting me on to this; and for her own excellent and moving FB commentary on it:

“Is this the world’s first ‘postnational’ country?” Oh, I do hope so.

It would mean that even people like me would finally be given the chance to belong somewhere without that nagging sense of imposture that we have come to know all too well. People like me with parents from different countries; people born in one country, but raised in three others; people who on growing up feel the need to move to a fifth country and after that to a sixth country, where they live with passports (and a driver’s licence) from countries they no longer reside in, and reside in a country in which they don’t have citizenship (or a driver’s licence); people whose most meaningful affiliations continue to be situated in a country they neither reside in nor have citizenship in; people who in spite of these complications do not subscribe to the notion of being multicultural, since they perceive themselves as complete, single, whole individuals and not bowls of broken-off, jumbled bits of various (presumably national) “cultures” maladroitly stuck together.

The more the nations of the world pull up their drawbridges and insist on making a Big Thing out of ethnicity and nationality and heritage and “where, oh where, are you FROM?” the more people like me, the root-weak internationalists, the cosmopolitans, the in-betweeners, the “third-culture kids,” who just want to get on with living our lives, such as they are, will be left out in the cold.

So, well done, Canada and Justin Trudeau, for embracing the possibility at least of acknowledging that there are other ways of thinking about, seeing, and organizing us human earthlings than by “national” “identity/ies.”

Amen.

Talking of conspiracy theories: it was good to see another bucketful of icy water being poured over the heads of the Bard deniers in the Observer today. I’ve always believed – to misquote Theresa May – that ‘Shakespeare means Shakespeare’. He wasn’t really Francis Bacon, or the Earl of Essex, or Christopher Marlowe, or perhaps a reptilian shape-shifter, in a clever disguise. Recently the American James Shapiro published a brilliant book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010), which put the cap on this. His conclusions, which seem to me obvious, are now corroborated a little further by some painstaking work done among the archives by ‘willowy, bright-eyed manuscript scholar’ Dr Heather Wolfe, reported here: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jan/08/sherlock-holmes-of-the-library-cracks-shakespeare-identity. Of course it doesn’t ‘prove’ Shakespeare’s authorship. Nothing will. But in the absence of any evidence at all that any of his rivals penned his plays, it should be good enough for any but the most irredeemable conspiracy nutters.

Of course, the reason why those nutters, and even distinguished non-nutters like Derek Jacobi and (in the past) Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud, held to the belief that Will Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon couldn’t have written Hamlet and all the rest of the plays (we’ll make an exception for the co-written ones), was that he was too common. How on earth could the lower-middle class son of a glove-maker, living out in the sticks, have possibly known enough about royal courts and classical history and Italy to have been able to re-create them so convincingly? – Well, there were books (remember them?): Holinshed for the history plays and Lear, for a start. Stratford wasn’t such a dump then, and its grammar school certainly taught Latin. People travelled abroad and talked about it. Shakespeare will have got to know about Denmark from his actors, who were members of a troup that toured there, and probably performed in Elsinore. Of course the inquisitive young Will of Warwickshire had access to all the materials he needed to stage his plays; plus the genius and imagination to make something brilliant of them.

Above all, he was lower-middle class. That wasn’t a handicap (just as being a woman wasn’t a handicap if you wanted to be a novelist in the 19^th century), but an advantage. Moreover, he was an aspirational lower-middle. (Heather Wolfe’s researches have mainly been into his efforts to achieve the status of ‘gentleman’ by getting a coat of arms.) Contemporaries made fun of this: ‘an upstart crow beautified with our feathers’ (Robert Greene). But it was what made him what he was; just as a similarly uncomfortable or aspirational lower-middle class status enormously helped just about all Britain’s greatest artistic geniuses in history: Shakespeare, Turner, Dickens, Elgar: lower-middle max, every one of them; resulting in their being similarly mocked for it by their ‘betters’. How many world-class British artists or writers or composers have been fathered or mothered by bankers? Or gone to Eton? Or spoken posh? There must be a few (Parry? no, he was good, but second-rank); but in general genius and creativity – in many fields, not only artistic – are grown and nurtured in ‘lower’ soils. You can only hold on to the belief that Shakespeare must have been an aristo, or have been to Cambridge (like Marlowe: my college, as it happens, so I’d be rooting for him if anyone), if you’re entirely blind to social context, and – probably – a snob.

Of course I might be biased by my own lower-middle class origins. But I’d be interested to hear of any significant exceptions to my generalization. Naturally, it’s up to me to judge their significance.

This alleged Russian conspiracy behind Trump is fascinating. I can see where Trump is coming from in denying it, or at least in insisting that it made no difference to the result of the election. If his victory was influenced by Russian hackers it must devalue it, if not delegitimise it. It’s what a ‘bad loser’ would be bound to claim, whether it were true or not: although I’ve not noticed Clinton, who seems to have been the Russians’ main target, openly blaming Putin (yet). The secret services who are the source of the story, in common with most of the Washington establishment, hugely distrust Trump, and so might be motivated to try to destabilise him with stories of this kind. And we all know, don’t we, that you can’t ever trust ‘spooks’ generally: recruited as they are for their ability to lie and dissemble, and shown to have misled and even worked against their own governments in times gone by. That at any rate was my conclusion from the researches I did into the British secret security agencies in the last two centuries (Plots and Paranoia, 1989). Not that they always mislead, or that they don’t often do a good and essential job in protecting us; but that it is easier for them than it is for most other agencies to get up to dirty tricks if they feel it’s for the ‘security of the state’ as they conceive it. So, in this instance, I don’t blame Trump for being sceptical.

There are four questions at issue here. Firstly, was Clinton’s campaign deliberately destabilised by these means: hacking, embarrassing revelations, black propaganda (now known as ‘false news’)? Secondly, was any of this directed from the outside? Thirdly, was the Russian state complicit in it? The answers to these seem to be: certainly, probably, and possibly, in that order. But I obviously can’t know the answers to any of these questions; if indeed anyone outside the dastardly Russkis and the slippery spooks knows, or ever will.

Which leaves us with the fourth and final question: which has to do with the effects of plots and conspiracies, like the ones the Russians are supposed to have been responsible for last year, on ‘democratic’ politics. This is the one that defeated me when I was working on, for example, the ‘Zinoviev affair’ and the ‘Wilson plot’ – both anti-Labour conspiracies by right-wingers including members or ex-members of MI5 – whose objectives appear to have been successful, with a Labour election defeat and the resignation of Harold Wilson following shortly afterwards, but not necessarily as a result of these plots, with other factors clearly pertinent as well. There can be no conclusive proof in either of these cases, or in Trump’s. Post hoc does not always mean propter hoc, as history teachers are always warning their pupils (or should be). It depends on, as well as ‘evidence’, one’s general assessment of the vulnerability of people – voters – to ‘false news’ and other forms of black propaganda. It may be that most are only deceived by the propaganda that reflects views formed by other – for example material – circumstances. This is a much bigger and more complex question.

Most democrats would prefer not to believe that people’s ideas can be manipulated in this way. So would most historians; who in general, when it comes to questions of causation, would prefer great events (like Trump’s election) to be effected by greater, more general and rational causes, than the machinations of small cabals of Machiavellis, Goebbelses, Breibarts, Farages, or ex-KGB. That tends to make better books, with thick strong historical themes. And it prevents their authors being lumped in with the tribe of ‘Prince Philip as a reptilian shape-shifter’ ‘conspiracy theorists’; which would be ruination for any academic historian’s career.

But – whisper it – this doesn’t mean that conspiracy versions of some historical events, like Trump’s election, might not be true….

I’m puzzled by why I don’t feel more gutted after West Ham’s ignominious defeat by Manchester City in the third round of the FA cup last night. Well, not all that puzzled. It wasn’t as if ‘we woz robbed’, like in last week’s game against Man United. (A man wrongly sent off in the 13^th minute, his red card later rescinded by the FA, but by that time, of course, it was too late: 10 vs. 11. Plus a clearly offside Ibrahimovich goal.) Yes, there was a dodgy penalty in last night’s game, but WH could and should have bounced back from that. Man City were better. One bad penalty can’t explain a 5-0 defeat. And at home.

Except it’s not really home to them, or to the fans. That’s what everyone’s saying. Last year West Ham were pulled out of their original and natural home, the Boleyn Ground in the genuine East End of London: a ground that only accommodated 35,000 spectators, but with a tremendous intimacy – the front rows only an arms-length away from the players – and in an environment full of East End atmosphere – mean narrow streets, pie and eel stalls, the vibrant multi-cultural population that it has always had, as the first stopping-over point for waves of immigrants to Britain from the Huguenots onwards; to be plonked down in a huge stadium not built for football, and unsuited to it, and which feels empty and soulless, in just about everybody’s opinion (I’ve not been yet), and certainly not a ‘home’ in the way I remember the old Upton Park to have been. I’ve bored you about this before – https://bernardjporter.com/2016/05/11/goodbye-to-boleyn/ – so I won’t go on about it any more. Whether the move can account for the team’s poor performances so far this season, as many have suggested, can’t be known. But it explains why I no longer feel as deeply – as ‘gutted’ – about those performances as I used to.

And of course there are far more serious things going on in the world just now to gut one. Syria, for one. The state of the NHS. (I’m about to have an op for a hernia – my belly-button looks like a ripe plum – but, I’m thinking, should I waste their hard-pressed doctors’ time with such trivialities just now?) Then there’s Trump. And Brexit. One could – and perhaps should – go on. Football is only a game, after all.

But aren’t all these problems, even including football’s present condition, part and parcel of the same thing? They’re all the effects of neo-liberal globalisation (or globalising neo-liberalism), whereby rich capitalists – one of West Ham’s owners is an ex-porn king, another is a wealthy Tory Dame – take over the people’s assets, with no regard for the cultures they were nurtured in, in order to turn them into financial assets, in a market which is worldwide, and ruled only by profit. Our economies and societies are subject to the same seemingly irrepressible force. Hence the many variegated protests that are going on now against ‘globalisation’ (or what I prefer to call ‘late-stage capitalism’); from Trump’s dodgy victory in the USA, to nativist and nationalist movements in Britain and Europe; to the left-wing movements against privatisation (and hence globalisation) of the NHS; to this: the widespread discontent at the reduction of our once great ‘People’s Game’ (to take the title of Jim Walvin’s fine 1975 history of it) to a plaything or investment opportunity for the rich, manned by foreign mercenaries. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2015/01/09/mercenaries-in-football/.) If only people could see the connexion. It might be a political as well as a footballing education for them.

My recent TLS piece about 1956 has given rise to some critical letters in the subsequent issue, two of which homed in on my suggestion that it was mainly men who benefitted from the period, while women – not yet inspired by feminism – were left behind. Here they are.

(No. 1)  Sir,

Your reviewer is mistaken when he says that ‘women [were] essentially unliberated in 1956. We had the vote, married women could own and dispose of their property as spinsters and widows had long been able to do, we were educated as boys were in the state system, we could get degrees at Oxford and Cambridge, all the professions, except the Church, were open to us, we could sit in Parliament and work in executive positions in business and commerce. I was twenty-two at the time, an assistant buyer in United Africa Company, part of Unilever, doing the same job as many male contemporaries – admittedly paid less than they were but not paying for myself when we went to the cinema. We had vacuum cleaners, electric irons and refrigerators. Our marriages were, on average, no less happy or unhappy than marriages and partnerships to-day, as far as I can see.

If this sounds class-orientated I can confirm from observation how much was added to family incomes in the 1950s by wives who took in washing, minded children and worked in the fields. The Second World War, as many have written,  proved  that women could work and that they might and should. There were many men in menial jobs at that time.

Twenty-first century feminists are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, not always grateful enough to the  giants who strove and campaigned in the nineteenth and early twentieth century for changes in law and society which I have listed  (I am sure that my list is not exhaustive) and for the inventors who applied their talents to developing  domestic machinery. Bachelors have benefited from the latter also.

Antonia Southern,

Yew Trees House,

Bratton,

Westbury, Wiltshire  BA13 4RQ.

(No. 2)  Sir,

I write to comment on the review by Bernard Porter of the book : “1956 The year that changed Britain” by Francis Beckett and Tony Russell. He says he found the 1950s rather exciting, but adds a caveat: “of course I’m only one person and a pretty lucky one at that. I’m not a woman for a start”

Well, I am a woman and I remember the 1950s with the same enthusiasm. In many ways our lives and that of our mothers was getting better: rationing finally ended in the early ‘50s: new foods arrived: avocados, aubergines, together with a swathe of books by Elizabeth David. Dior’s New Look brought glamour into our lives. We had a new monarch, young and a woman.   Home-making became progressively easier with the arrival of washing machines, fridges, spin dryers, promising freedom from drudgery that would liberate women to work outside the home.

I, like Bernard Porter, was lucky. I was one of a generation of young women who, the first in their families’ history, went to university at the state’s expense. We graduated into a world with plenty of jobs and steady full time employment. In my first months at the BBC at the age of 22, we discussed my pension arrangements. Of course women earned less than men…..but that hasn’t changed!.

The cultural scene was beginning its great post-war flourishing: The Arts Council founded in 1948, the Edinburgh Festival in 1947, the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948.   In BBC radio, where I worked with producers such as Louis MacNeice, there was a golden age of new drama: Pinter, Beckett, Wesker, Mortimer, This reflected the theatre scene: John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was merely the most famous of what was called ‘kitchen sink drama:”   Delaney, Wesker, Barstow. The talented working class moved in on stage and films: David Mercer, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Edward Bond.   The air was thick with hopes and ideas.   And women enjoyed it as much as men.

Joan Bakewell

House of Lords

Gosh, the great Joan Bakewell! I’m flattered. I also take all the points in her letter, and some of those in Antonia Southern’s, which indeed strengthen the main theme of my article, which was that the 1950s were a far more exciting and (mainly) hopeful time than they have been painted in post-Thatcherian retrospect; while still however maintaining that this was a weak time for feminism, and that the material advances made by or on behalf of women still left an awful lot more for their successors to do. It’s not a very serious point, perhaps: but I wonder if the common soubriquet attached to Dame Joan at the time – she must remember it – of ‘the thinking man’s bit of crumpet’, doesn’t illustrate the advances that needed to be made after then, and have been. Only a Nigel Farage could come out with such an essentially sexist comment today. And she was almost the only intelligent woman allowed on the telly then.

I made these points about women in the original article firstly because I realised that, as a man, my situation in the 1950s was a privileged one; and secondly, because I wanted to preclude letters to the TLS that would have pointed that out. I’ve little doubt that they would have flooded in. ‘It was all right for him, but – like most men – he neglects the other half of humanity.’ On the whole I prefer Dame Joan’s gentle chiding.

So I won’t be responding in the TLS; only here.

PS. I’ve just remembered I posted another piece about 1956 on this blog, which you can access if you can’t get into the TLS article. I was originally commissioned to write the latter a year ago by the LRB, which said they liked it but in the end couldn’t find room for it – it was probably all the Brexit pieces coming in – but still paid me for it, generously, and allowed me to pass it on to the good old TLS. Here’s the blog version, which elaborates on the TLS piece:  https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/28/1956/.

My prediction for the new year. President Trump is assassinated, by his own Secret Service, which however manages to blame it on the Russians. If it happens, remember where you read it first. If not, forget it.

Gott nytt År!

My chosen field of ‘imperialism’ must be one of the most worthwhile areas of historical study, as it features an aspect of what appears to be a fundamental human attribute, which is to expand. Humans have always done this: sought new areas of the world to explore, settle or conquer. If they hadn’t, as I’ve written somewhere else, we would all still be living today in the Rift valley of modern-day Kenya, where it is all supposed to have started. When it involves settling in new countries, it’s called ‘colonization’; when this is done at the expense of other peoples, it’s called ‘imperialism’; when it is done merely to satisfy humankind’s curiosity, it’s called ‘exploration’. Usually all three phenomena are mixed, albeit unequally, which can blur the boundaries and lead cynics to attribute what they regard as ‘imperialistic’ motives – meaning, by this understanding of the word, aggressive and acquisitive motives – to all of them.

My studies have suggested that this is a gross libel on colonisers and explorers. Many of them simply wished to know, and to experience. ‘Discovering’ new parts of the world was little different from broadening one’s mind in other ways, like culturally, or scientifically. ‘Expansion’ can be a curse, when it manifests itself in what can properly be called ‘imperialism’, for example, or the excesses of capitalism. But it is also a basic human instinct, distinguishing our species from all others – at least, insofar as it is done consciously; and may – to leap ahead a little, conceptually and topographically – turn out to be the salvation of our human race.

I’m referring here, of course, to space exploration, which is certainly the only way to secure our very long-term future, even if we don’t mess up our planet before its natural end. There are many things about the human race that probably don’t deserve to survive during the aeons to come; but I for one would be sorry to think that Mozart, say, could ever be snuffed out, and so ultimately pointless.

Which is why we should welcome China’s recent announcement, that it is about to resume the task that the USA pioneered but then left unfinished several decades ago, to fly humans to the other side of the moon, then on to Mars, and then – who knows? (http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/china-space-mission-moon-mars-2020-1.3913423.) Whatever the motives behind it – they could be bellicose, or merely nationalistic – it’s the best piece of news for humanity – perhaps the only bit of good news – to come up this year.

‘To boldly go…’ I wonder what the Chinese is for that? And whether they split their infinitives too?

What is happening just now is so obviously an existential crisis of capitalism, such as Marx foretold though not in quite the way he envisaged it – who in the nineteenth century could possibly have foreseen clowns like Trump and Farage? – that I’m surprised everyone can’t see it. Whatever the immediate causes of our current woes and idiocies, underneath them all lie the uncontrolled development and expansion of capitalism, its logic and its ideals; a system of economics which is of immeasurable value to humanity so long as it is carefully disciplined and subordinated to the latter’s other and more basic needs, but is bound to become destructive, and indeed self-destructive, when given the run of the park.

That two such stereotypical exemplars of modern capitalism as the property developer Trump and the hedge-fund investor Farage should be the agents of this destruction was unexpected, and is worrying in many ways – it would have been better if a couple of socialists, like Bernie and Jeremy, had been at the helm at the time – but is not entirely incongruous. Trump and Farage both stand against international trade arrangements which they feel to be detrimental to their own countries, and which are, objectively speaking, undemocratic: allowing commercial considerations to override the will of the people (e.g. TTIP). ‘Globalisation’, which is the neutral- and internationalist-sounding name given to this today (it used to be ‘imperialism’), is, as Lenin argued a century ago, the ‘last stage’ of capitalism, keeping it alive and moving when otherwise it might have collapsed under ‘the weight of its own contradictions’ earlier. Capitalism, that is, as an unfettered, self-powering engine allowed to ride roughshod. Capitalism as a tool is different. Most so-called and even self-styled ‘anti-capitalists’ understand that.

So, what is to come? Marx’s prediction, of the working classes taking over and building socialism, looks unlikely in the light of the recent weakening of working-class agency, for example the emasculation of the trade unions; and the bad odour attaching to ‘socialism’ – unfairly – as a result of its hi-jacking by the tyrannical USSR. Some form of Keynesian solution might be the ideal one. Either of these is, in my view, preferable to the third alternative, which is the right-wing one: nativism, nationalism, fascism, call it what you will. That it is reactionaries like Trump and Farage who have responded most successfully to and benefitted so spectacularly from the current crisis of capitalism fills me with foreboding. Marx might have been right about capitalism’s self-destructive propensities; but we can’t depend on his analysis of the ‘next stage’ to make it all right.

Still: Happy Boxing Day.

Great news for all real friends of Israel that the US is no longer voting against the UN’s Security Council resolution against further Jewish settlements on the West Bank. As an imperial historian I can imagine nothing more obviously and literally ‘imperialistic’ than the latter. And nothing more likely to further incite the Arabs.

Obama is doing a lot of good things now that he is no longer answerable to special interests and lobbies. His ban on oil drilling in the Arctic was another. It shows what he might have done, and the president he could have been, if he had not been beholden to what is laughably called American ‘democracy’.

Trump will try to row back on these, I imagine. Will he have the power?

Assange’s recent comments on Clinton and Trump (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/dec/24/julian-assange-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-interview) are unsettling for his supporters (like me), but should be considered seriously. He’s right about Clinton: a poor ‘establishment’ candidate, in my view, though it has been difficult for male pro-feminists to say so. She would probably have continued America’s interventionist mistakes in the Middle East. Trump might not; probably for the wrong reasons, and in harness with worse policies in other areas, e.g. nuclear; but at least he may change the game plan, in ways that could open up other opportunities. Yes, it pains me to write this, too.

Could Wikileaks have been responsible for Hillary’s failure? If so, it would be the most incredible act of revenge in history, since Mrs Bobbit (?) cut her husband’s balls off for cheating on her.