Porter’s Pensées

OK, we all hate parking attendants. But Sweden has some of the worst. We parked outside a Co-op store in Enskede yesterday, in a bay that was marked as free for an hour’s parking; were away – shopping – for perhaps 20 minutes; only to return and find a ticket on our windscreen demanding 900 kronor – that’s nearly £100 in imperial money – for an entirely legal and very short stay. Apparently we should have put one of those cardboard clock things behind the windscreen indicating when we had arrived. We – or rather Kajsa; I just stood there swearing – remonstrated with the parking attendant, but she wouldn’t give way. So we’re going to be £100 down not for breaking the law, but for not proving that we’d not broken it. There’s no appeal. We’re determined not to pay; but in that case they apparently put it into the hands of a debt collecting agency, who can come round to our house and seize ‘property to the value of…’, and put a stop on our bank accounts. 

The land we parked on was apparently not the Co-op’s property, but privately owned. It was the owner who was using an organisation called ‘Aimo Park’ to squeeze money from it, at – as we found to our literal cost – exorbitant rates. I must say it looks like an ideal way to make loadsamoney: find a bit of land near a shop, don’t bother to add any ‘value’ to it, and charge people through the noses for merely stopping on it. Quite apart from the size of the fine demanded: whatever happened to the rule of law and the ‘presumption of innocence’? Or don’t they have that in Sweden?

And how can this be allowed in ‘social democratic’ Sweden? Shouldn’t parking be a public responsibility? Even if municipalities are allowed to farm it out to private capitalists, shouldn’t there be limits to the amount the latter can fine people; and some sort of appeal process to protect the innocent?

Yes, trivial, I know. But — FFS – SEK 900 for not breaking the law! – Well, at least it provided a momentary distraction from all the far worse things going on in the world today. To which I hope to return…

From what I can gather from over here in the land of snow and ice – we had our first flurry of sleet this morning – Boris may be heading for a fall quite soon, with his craven incompetence plain for all to see, and Spitting Image gearing up to wield the final satirical blow.

It has occurred to me that perhaps he won’t mind all that much. He’s achieved his life’s ambition, after all, which was simply to become prime minister, not to do anything in the role; knows that he has thereby established his name in the history books; and so needn’t bother with the hard effort of it any longer. The policy-wonk behind him, Dominic Cummings, would get on just as well under Michael Gove, who will probably succeed Boris as PM, and who would certainly take Cummings on. If all you want in life is fame, then notoriety as the worst Premier in British history is as good as anything, and maybe even better if it means he doesn’t have to work for it.

After all, everyone’s heard of Ed Wood. (If not, look him up.)

You’ve got to hand it to Jacinda Ardern – haven’t you? A thumping victory for her Labor Party in the recent General Election; the best record in the world when it comes to the Coronavirus – only 25 deaths, compared with the UK’s 4,000 and the US’s 200,000; a much admired response to a deadly terrorist attack; and all this while pregnant, giving birth, and presumably nurturing the baby while still in office as PM. And all without the benefit of an Eton education!

Of course there are other factors involved. NZ is a small island country, 1400 miles from the nearest landmass. That must make controlling the virus easier. Its cities are smaller, and so far as we know the virus can’t be spread by sheep. There may be other things to be said against Jacinda: I’ve read, for example, that she’s ‘not socialist enough’. But she has had to rule as part of a coalition up to now. Now that Labor is on its own, we might see more progressive policies. And in the meantime she’s a hero to all of us, and a poke in the eye to all those who held that women couldn’t rule in a womanly way.

(By the way: is it ‘Labor’ or ‘Labour’ in New Zealand? Australia has Americanized the spelling; I’m hoping NZ hasn’t.)

Well, we’re in conspiracy-theory season again, if it has ever gone away in America; with Trump refusing to distance himself from the ludicrous ‘QAnon’ version of current events – Democrats as Satanic paedophile abusers and blood-suckers, and the like. How many Americans genuinely believe that? Never mind, it’s probably worth a few votes to the Republicans, with Trump presented as sent by God to purify the land again. (Wasn’t it cunning of God to choose such an unlikely angel for the job?) 

Luckily we don’t have anything quite so gross in Britain, beyond David Icke and his ‘Prince Philip as an alien reptile shape-shifter’ theory (look it up); with the most ludicrous ‘conspiracy’ being alleged against the Labour party in our recent election being the relatively mild – albeit damaging – one that the party was ‘anti-semitic’. But it may come. I’ve noticed that the new Labour leader Keir Starmer’s allegedly lenient treatment of Jimmy Saville when he was head of the Crown Prosecution Service is cropping up occasionally in the blogosphere. The Tories are probably saving that one up.

Conspiracy theories are of course a bane of politics, dangerous in at least three ways. The first is that they may be believed and acted on, with damaging results (Nazi Germany). The second is that even if they are disbelieved they may undermine trust in politics, with no-one being certain which versions of events to believe, and so doubt being cast on everyone, including those who are telling the truth; thus producing cynicism and apathy in the electorate. 

The third is that they undermine trust in conspiracy theories; which may not all be as wrong as QAnon’s and Icke’s obviously are. A little thought should convince anyone that people do conspire, even in everyday life, for good – planning a surprise party, for example – or for ill – robbing a bank. It shouldn’t be surprising that politicians and others in public life do so too. To take just a couple of recent examples: it is surely undeniable that there was a conspiracy, or a number of them, involving wealthy newspaper owners and right-wing ideologues – and possibly the Russians – to bring about Brexit in 2016, and – with the addition of what can be called an ‘Israel lobby’ – to discredit Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. That is emphatically not to say that these conspiracies were responsible for the outcomes of those events, even when – as in these cases – the results were what the plotters had wanted. We need to examine other factors too. But they existed.

The problem is that when anyone raises this possibility he or she is immediately accused of being a ‘conspiracy theorist’, with all that phrase’s crazy Ickean baggage attached to it. That in fact is the best defence that genuine conspirators have against being found out: just label your discoverer a ‘conspiracy nutcase’ and you’ve won half the battle. Academics for long avoided this area for fear of being tarred with this brush. I was nervous of it when writing my own history of the British secret domestic intelligence agencies; and even when it came to publishing it I felt I had to include the word ‘Paranoia’ in the title. And yet covert plots and counter-plots are clearly important in every country’s history.

The answer to these problems probably lies in education: teaching children to question what they’re told, certainly, but not to doubt or dismiss everything; to know when they’re being indoctrinated rather than educated; to think critically but also rationally; and to weigh up what they read in the popular press and on Facebook. It would be helpful, too, if the print press could be taken out of the hands of wealthy right-wingers – later it could be left-wingers – and policed more effectively than it is at present to prevent the sort of downright lies we saw employed against Labour last year. But that’s a sticky subject, involving as it does the idea of a ‘free press’, which the worst conspiracy-mongers can always hide behind.

Besides, maybe Hilary Clinton was involved in a child sex ring acting out of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C in the 1990s. We shouldn’t dismiss even the craziest conspiracy theory entirely out of hand. Otherwise it might be embarrassing for us when the alien shape-shifters take over. I’m allowing for an 0.1% chance of that.

In the midst of two extreme national crises – Coronavirus and Brexit – we have a Prime Minister in Britain who is quite clearly not up to the job, and is almost universally despised and ridiculed on account of this. A few days ago John Macdonnell, Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Chancellor – and what a good real Chancellor he would probably have made! – suggested that unhappy Conservative MPs, of whom there are many, join with Opposition members to find a way of removing Johnson; and maybe of installing a truly ‘national’ government in place of his. The historical precedent for this, of course, was May 1940, when the House of Commons rose up under Leo Amery against Neville Chamberlain – ‘In the name of God, go!’ – in the cross-party rebellion which installed Winston Churchill as Premier for the duration of the War. Something like that would not go amiss now.

One problem, of course, would be finding someone acceptable by both sides to replace Johnson – another Churchill, in effect. The trouble today is that most of the best Conservative choices were brutally ousted by Johnson before the General Election of December 2019, to be replaced by the weak-minded Brexit-loyal toadies he has in his cabinet today. The new leader would have to be a Tory, as he was in 1940, in order to carry the Conservative party. But whom of the present bunch would any Labour MP trust; with the obvious candidate – Ken Clark – no longer a Member?

Boris Johnson famously admires Churchill, and wants to be seen in his mould. It will be deeply ironic – but for me rather satisfying – if instead he is cast by future historians as the new Neville Chamberlain. He won’t like that. (Although, to be fair, Neville Chamberlain has been unfairly traduced.)

I’ve just spent a pleasant weekend literally centuries away from the gloom and corruption of our own times, preparing a talk for the Elgar Society on his early oratorio, Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf.  Not that Olaf’s times were any less gloomy or corrupt than today’s, but distance lends enchantment to what would have depressed me mightily if I’d lived in tenth-century Norway. And some of the music’s pretty good, if a bit shouty. 

I’ve had great fun with it, pointing out how extraordinary it was that the devout – or devoutish – Christian Edward Elgar should have gone for this subject. Olaf Trygvason was a monster, who set ravenous wolves on his enemies, locked the doors and burned them alive in their dining halls, heaped burning coals on the stomach of one of his captives so that it ‘burst asunder’, and put a lugworm into the mouth of another to eat him up from the inside. All this in order to convert them to Christianity – he’s celebrated in Norway as the one who brought them to the one true faith. ‘Embrace Jesus or we’ll slit your throat.’ It all sounds a bit Talibanish to me. But there we are – different times, different ways. Who are we to judge?

Elgar certainly didn’t; but then he didn’t know the full story, only a bowdlerised version that he got from Longfellow. I went back to the original source: one of the old Norse sagas, Heimskringla (in translation, of course). I’d come across this earlier in connexion with my research into the 19^thcentury Orcadian Samuel Laing, who made the first English version of it. (An article on him will appear in my next book, of mainly old essays, entitled Britain Before Brexit. Reserve your copy now.) And my more recent interest in all things Scandinavian – what with living there with a Scandi woman – gave me, I thought, a special expertise; together with my historical knowledge of the late 19^thcentury British literary context of Elgar’s piece. That will form the main subject of my talk, not the music. I’m nervous of discussing music with (mostly) musicians. I can’t even read a score.

I also discovered an unfinished opera on the same subject by Edvard Grieg – well worth listening to (on the Erato label). That’s a bit shouty, too.

But not as shouty as I feel about the British scene just now. I’m so glad to be here in Sweden! And relieved that Sweden – or ‘Swithiod’, as it was in Olaf’s time – has left its Nordic noir phase behind.

(My problem now is finding out how to ‘Zoom’ my talk, and the audiovisual Powerpoint presentation that accompanies it, from the Swedish fastness in which I’m living. But we do have WiFi. Any advice, technocrats?)

Well, at least he was honest about it. A leading Republican Senator, Mike Lee, has admitted that ‘democracy isn’t the objective’ of the American political system. Apparently this has ‘sparked widespread outrage’ in the USA. (See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/08/republican-us-senator-mike-lee-democracy?fbclid=IwAR3fp49y4LdzjcoNTPp483TGmidy5AS7zOoUiYcvHWAlQg30kUDYP7KPGIg.) 

But why? Isn’t it self-evidently true? Not only as an indictment of the overwhelming flaws in American politics, which is how it has been taken by Democrats, but as a statement of what any political system ought to be? ‘Democracy’ – the expression of the will of the majority – is not a good in itself, but merely a means to certain ends. The ends that Mike Lee has in view are ‘liberty, peace, prosperity’, and the ‘flourishing of the human condition’. Who can quarrel with that? Of course we need to know how the Senator would conceive of all these desiderata; but that in principle they all outscore ‘democracy’ alone is a reasonable position to take. And he is obviously right to argue that ‘rank democracy’ – however ‘rank’ is defined – can, on occasion, ‘thwart’ these ends. Multiple examples from history, together with recent developments in both the USA and Britain, bear that out.

Those with more faith in democracy – Lee’s ‘rank’ democrats, perhaps – counter this by maintaining that the expressed will of the majority of people is the best way of achieving these ‘higher’ ends. The alternative is rule by kings, priesthoods, aristocrats, dictators, career politicians or self-selecting ‘establishments’ of various kinds, against the people’s will, and consequently – it is inferred – against their interests  too. It is this last inference that is in doubt. Whether people will vote in their own self-interest, let alone in that of the society they are part of, is moot. The problem lies, of course, in the degree of their political education, and in the part that ‘propaganda’ plays in manipulating them. It is possible – just – to envisage a situation in which most people are educated to the extent that they can make truly rational decisions when it comes to the polls, and in which the political propaganda urging them to vote one way or another at those polls is at least reasonably honest and fair. That’s something we might hope for. But it is obviously not here – in Britain (with its tabloid press) or America (with Fox and Friends), or both with their peculiar electoral systems – yet.

In the meantime it is not unreasonable – certainly not ‘outrageous’ – to be aware of the way that ‘democracy’ can currently be manipulated; and for good, as we might conceive it, as well as for ill. Our problem just now (from a ‘Left’ point of view) is that it’s the Right – notably Dominic Cummings – who have grasped this most fully, and are consequently using it in pursuit of what they  conceive of as the ‘good’. (I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt here; obviously many Rightists will have more selfish and nefarious motives.) The point is, however, that it’s not the denial of ‘democracy’ that is either questionable or necessarily reprehensible, but the use that is made of it. Mike Lee should be spared our ‘outrage’, for pointing out the obvious. 

Apparently the good Senator has just caught the coronavirus off his President: https://news.sky.com/video/us-coronavirus-republican-senator-with-covid-19-hugs-guests-12088593. So we should perhaps lay off him anyhow.

Had some shocking news yesterday. Went to my Swedish doctor – Sara, a very young woman, looked about 17, but I imagine she must be properly trained – to be told that I am perfectly well (for my age), all life signs normal, heart, pulse, bloods etc., apart from a bit of excess glucose in my blood; and that I haven’t got Lyme Disease. You can imagine the blow that was to me. I desperately wanted a diagnosis that would justify my laziness – ‘poor old bugger, he’s got xxxxxx, you know’ – and of course some PILLS. Instead all I got was a recommendation to take more exercise, which was the last thing I wanted to hear, especially with Kajsa in the room with us. But what does Sara know? She’s only an expert after all, and we know what we think of ‘experts’, don’t we, Michael Gove?

If present-day American politics is scripted by Hollywood – see my last post – who’s responsible for our British stage show? My guess would be Brian Rix (hon. MA, Hull University), if he were still alive; a great comic actor ever associated with the ‘Whitehall Farces’ (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_farce) – a glorious series of low comedies staged in the 1950s and ’60s at the Whitehall Theatre in London, in every one of which Rix’s trousers had to fall down at some point.

(If son Ben is reading this: do you remember being his pageboy at the honorary degree ceremony? The degree was given for his sterling work in support of mental health, rather than the trousers.) 

I’m an American politics addict. I stay up all night watching the presidential election results – for several nights during the first George W Bush one (all those ‘hanging chads’); try and catch the rallies – exhausting in Trump’s case; and follow as much of the commentary as I can from over here in Sweden. I enjoy it all thoroughly, albeit guiltily. One reason may be that I virtually ‘majored’ in US history as an undergraduate – three courses out of eight; another is that I have lived in America for a significant number of years. So I know the rules. Of course I follow British politics just as avidly, but far less pleasurably. That’s because I have more invested in them. I’m also affected by Swedish politics; but I’m afraid I find those rather dull. They’re much politer and more reasonable than either the Americans’ or the Brits’. Even their neo-Fascists look harmless, even if they really aren’t. 

Maybe it’s this that really explains my obsession with American elections. As well as affecting me less – less immediately at any rate – they are far more vivid than ours. In fact they are stranger and more spectacular than most fiction. I’ve often wondered whether they’re not, in fact, scripted by Hollywood film writers. Watching the elections on TV is better than watching a movie; even a movie featuring American politics. I can’t wait to get my first shot on the night of November 3, lying on our sofa with a beer and some wholesome American food within arm’s reach – hamburgers, grits, toasted marshmallows, and the shrivelled up streaks of fat they call bacon. The perfect evening; so long as one isn’t an American.

But now I don’t need to wait until then. The scriptwriters have been brilliant in conjuring up unlikely pre-election scenarios for us: Hitler-type rallies, conspiracy theories to satisfy even the craziest tin foil hat wearer, a presidential ‘debate’ that resembled an infantile spat, lies and ‘fake news’, and of course the continual nonsense pouring from ‘Christian’ conservatives, white racists, neo-Nazis and of course Trump himself, in the run-up.

And now this! Which Hollywood screen-writer was it that came up with idea of striking the President down with a potentially fatal disease that he had always played down – ‘hoist him with his own petard’, you might say – just a month before the election? Give that person an Oscar!

But first let’s see how it plays out. Already the op-ed writers are at work predicting the effect on both sides in the election, of Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis, whether he dies (who will take over, as President and as candidate?), or survives it heroically, like Boris did. Following closely in their tracks there are the sceptics, tin-hatted or not, wondering – just wondering – if this isn’t all a conspiracy, a trick to gain sympathy and martyr-status for Trump; or, alternatively, a Democratic plot to put him out of the race. 

I’m afraid my undergraduate expertise and personal experience of that great but deeply troubled nation can’t provide any answers to that; or even an inspired guess. That’s frustrating; but it makes the ‘thriller’ aspect of the whole drama far more exciting: a ‘cliff-hanger’ in the best Hollywood tradition. I’ll be hogging that couch in front of the TV – or, more likely, my computer, for American news sources, like the New York Times, the Washington Post and of course the Onion – for another month at least. (More if a beaten Trump refuses to let go.) 

So, my American friends and followers: send me over some grits. We can’t get them here. (I’m not altogether surprised.)