Month: January 2021

Quiet, smug anniversary

You would hardly notice the great day today: the first anniversary of Brexit Day. We have been so overwhelmed by other concerns in a year that should have been a year for building. Has no one noticed the date?

It has been a very good Brexit, and in the nick of time a good deal was done, better that we expected. It was a game of chicken and played well, resulting in what we might think was a British victory, but what was actually the best result for both sides, even in the Europeans don’t realise it yet. The doomsayers were to be disappointed.

I cannot say that the doomsayers were proven wrong, as they could well have been right in some respects had the sands fallen a different way or the negotiators been less steadfast., but their proclaimed doom was averted. (They have the satisfaction at least that the deal was so close to the time that exporters could not get their paperwork straight so that it looked for a few weeks like a disaster. They’ll be happy with that.)

However, the worst predications, which Brexiteers like me dismissed, have still come to pass: the economy has indeed collapsed, unemployment has soared, the NHS has failed and social problems have multiplied. It is not because of Brexit though: it is because of the lockdown.

A year ago, on Brexit Day itself, COVID-19 was known about but was only just spreading visibly in Britain. Now it has infected even the news cycle. The collapse though in society, economy, the NHS, public credit and much else beside is not because of the disease but because of the measures taken in response to it.

Maybe this is the end of it. I would not count on it. If though the nation can be released to recover again and reap the benefit of Brexit freedom, we are well placed to be the first to come out of it. Then there will be a landscape of bankruptcy across the whole continent, the one where all our business’s customers are meant to be. Maybe there is something to be made by buying all those bankrupt businesses up, with British money and enterprise?

Maybe next year we can have our celebration

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Books

As Rome gave way to Byzantium…

As Greece gave way to Rome, so Britain would give way to the United States, so Harold Macmillan is misquoted as saying. Britain’s imperial decline after the War is not in doubt, and the Suez debacle was a psychological turning point. Suez was 65 years ago though. Time is turning and the world has been transformed.

Macmillan’s words were actually said not of Suez but during the War, when he already realised, as he could hardly fail to see, that the United States had become a military and naval power of overwhelming strength, through that country’s suddenly acquired wealth, and that we had entered the age of the American empire. He told Richard Crossman at Allied Forces HQ:

‘We, my dear Crossman, are Greeks in this American empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans – great big vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues, but also more corrupt. We must run A.F.H.Q. as the Greeks ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius.’

If Macmillan thought the Romans needed help running an empire, he was unfair to them – as Virgil says:

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(Hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem,
Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.

The Americans are not Romans – they really cannot run an empire, too fixed as they are on their own norms, which are not those of the wider world however much Hollywood the nations imbibe. They can however govern themselves well, and that is the main requirement for any nation. They are still eye-wateringly wealthy and accordingly strong.

Maybe that impression of unlimited opulence is just in the eyes of an outsider though. Here in Britain every penny of government spending is resented and for all the cutting of fat, and wails over every local budget not renewed, the government still runs deeper into debt day by day, while in America they seem to have billions of dollars to spend on military, engineering and spacefaring projects of which we cannot dream in the constraints of the government purse. The NASA budget alone this year came to £16.5 billion.

Actually though, £16.5 billion is well within the sort of budgets the British government does spend freely. It is a fraction of the total estimated HS2 budget, and that is just a single railway line (that the owners should be paying for anyway), albeit over several years. That is not to say that £16.5 billion space spending should be reproduced here, but it is perfectly able to be done. Ours is not a small, poor country. We just choose to run our government as if it were one, because elsewhere in government they are overbudgeting on touchy-feely things and spaffing it all up the wall.

Those huge marble halls and wide, sunlit spaces of the American capital contrast with the cramped streets and corridors of Westminster, but it is only show: the soaring Capitol was built when America was still a middling power, erected by toiling slaves, built big because there was unlimited space to play with. The White House is impressive, making 10 Downing Street look like a cramped flat, but it is no better than a hundred country houses in the Home Counties, or Leinster House in Dublin from which it was modelled. The Maryland sunshine hides what is actually quite ordinary.

The American Empire of the mind is still real, and that land is still the wealthiest in the world. The sickening feeling of decline is unavoidable though. The pioneers opened up the wilderness between the oceans, but their children are abandoning it. A society built on freedom, individuality and enterprise grew rich as a result, but the worm is at the root of those very qualities. The entrepreneurs still have fire in them, and the land on which to build, but the children of those who grew rich from their efforts are turning on them.

As the Greeks gave way to Rome, so the British Empire gave way to America’s dominance. If they cannot maintain it though, as in time they cannot, then there is a conclusion:

As Rome gave way to Byzantium, so America must give way to a re-emergent, international Britain. That is, if Britain can shoulder the burden and not fall prey to the fatal flaws of the Empire of Constantinople.

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Books

In praise of plagiarism

Many books, poems and art are fine, but in need of improvement by a more skilful hand, or just a different voice. Some great authors have built monuments which define style and art, but most have slips that could benefit from a brush-up or are in places a semi-tone off. Another hand could step in and make it perfect, but modern sensibilities condemn this as a cheat’s trade.

Without constructive plagiarism, we would lack several great plays by Shakespeare: Hamlet was a complete lift from Thomas Kyd’s version, which itself was from Saxo Grammaticus; the Merchant of Venice is largely swiped from Marlowe’s grim The Jew of Malta. Each was written when the original writer was barely cold in the grave, but each was turned inside out and improved immeasurably.  Bach swiped others’ tunes continually and magically transformed them into something new. A great artist need not be completely original when he can be an alchemist, performing transmutation of weak material into gold.

In the modern day though, this treatment of another’s work unless radically undone and rewritten is looked down upon as if it were a sort of theft.

We do permit radical film adaptations, because it is such a different medium. I never hear complaints against Coppola that he stole from Conrad when he made Apocalypse Now, because it is a new work of art adopted from Conrad’s work. It can be an improvement: Ray Bradbury said that the changed ending in the (original) film version of his most celebrated novel was possibly a better conclusion that the ending he wrote. (That is a curse for a writer who creates such perfect fluidity of plot – how can it end? The ending is where many great works fail.) As a book, I would count Fahrenheit 451 amongst those great works which should not be bowdlerised, of which it would otherwise be in danger because at least a shadow of it has become part of common culture, and because what was when written a work of wildly fantastical dystopian fiction is becoming, horribly, prescient. For film adaptation, changes are necessary for the medium.

Not all works deserve such reverent preservation: the books that fade out in the middle; the poems that have a couple of great lines and an idea but then turn mediocre; the film which wastes its premise; the music that find a pretty section and repeats it endlessly for want anything better – I would argue that we should be happy for an artist to improve on these.

It is part of our preconception of art and literature that it should be a single, inspired piece. That is an attractive idea, but I would say it comes more from a superstitious desire for purity than from rational consideration. As we know though, the love of purity is at odds with the creative spirit.

If a fine house is built, but the garage at the side is poorly proportioned, we do not insist that the whole house be demolished and started from the foundations:  we get a new builder to knock the poor bits down and build then better. If a good book has almost been written but goes wrong somewhere, it makes sense to let someone write it. Editors of cheap novels arrange that more than you might think: they are not daft. In the film world they understand this very well: when a film goes awry, the studio sacks the director or the scriptwriters, but keeps as much as possible of the good work they have already done. (Sometimes they get it wrong, which is why the Director’s Cut is often better than the original. There is, for a true artist, such a thing as purity of conception.)

Shakespeare did not face copyright claims, so he could do what he liked with other people’s work. Today we would need permission, and the profit of any ‘improved’ book would go mainly to the original author whose donkey-work has provided the bulk of it. That accepted, there is no other reason not to revisit works which could be improved markedly by others. I read plenty of poetry I would like to rewrite.

It is not cheating but perfecting; not dishonouring an original author, but making their hard work flower into what it deserves to be.

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Books

Justice And Injustice What

And in this law of Nature, consisteth the Fountain and Originall of JUSTICE. For where no Covenant hath preceded, there hath no Right been transferred, and every man has right to every thing; and consequently, no action can be Unjust. But when a Covenant is made, then to break it is Unjust: And the definition of INJUSTICE, is no other than The Not Performance Of Covenant. And whatsoever is not Unjust, is Just.

Justice And Propriety Begin With The Constitution of Common-wealth But because Covenants of mutuall trust, where there is a feare of not performance on either part, (as hath been said in the former Chapter,) are invalid; though the Originall of Justice be the making of Covenants; yet Injustice actually there can be none, till the cause of such feare be taken away; which while men are in the naturall condition of Warre, cannot be done.

Therefore before the names of Just, and Unjust can have place, there must be some coercive Power, to compell men equally to the performance of their Covenants, by the terrour of some punishment, greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their Covenant; and to make good that Propriety, which by mutuall Contract men acquire, in recompence of the universall Right they abandon: and such power there is none before the erection of a Common-wealth.

And this is also to be gathered out of the ordinary definition of Justice in the Schooles: For they say, that “Justice is the constant Will of giving to every man his own.” And therefore where there is no Own, that is, no Propriety, there is no Injustice; and where there is no coerceive Power erected, that is, where there is no Common-wealth, there is no Propriety; all men having Right to all things: Therefore where there is no Common-wealth, there nothing is Unjust. So that the nature of Justice, consisteth in keeping of valid Covenants: but the Validity of Covenants begins not but with the Constitution of a Civill Power, sufficient to compell men to keep them: And then it is also that Propriety begins.

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Books

A stronger President than we realise

It did not look good for him. Though the centre of a scrum of adulation amounting almost to worship, and the honeymoon period the press are determined to keep going, President Biden’s political position is in a fine balance. That counter-intuitively may make him all the stronger.

The American system is hard to get a flavour of from British preconceptions: a Prime Minister’s strength depends on the size of his majority, if any, and the relative rebelliousness of the members in their party, and he or she may be tumbled out of his office at a moment. Australian Prime Ministers are with indecent frequency. In America though the Presidency is winner-takes-all and he is emplaced ,practically immovably for four years.

Even so, the Congress cannot be ignored, and he does not control it. The Senate is teetering with Mr Biden’s party in control only by the Vice-President’s casting vote. The House of Representatives is his party’s, but not overwhelmingly, and even in that unfortunate country’s state of angry bifurcation, party discipline is not so strong, nor need it be as their behaviour does not determine the rise and fall of the President’s government.

This may be an advantage to the new President. His opposition is not just from the Republican Party: his most dangerous opposition is from his own party. In that struggle, the presence of resistance from Congress is an ally.

President Biden’s first actions are in the immediate spotlight in the way his future actions may not be, and here he sets the tone, or what he wants to appear to be the tone for the next four years. Wisely, he has struck with a string of orders overturning his predecessor’s legacy, and that has generated the headlines he wanted. The orders in question may be quite ordinary and as expected, reversing Donald Trump’s isolationism and with a good deal of symbolism laid on. This will be an important impression of himself to lay down to the voting public and also to his own party, seething at his heels.

You see, his party has become filled with radicals quite opposed to the old values of the party (and by old values I am not going back to the days when it was the party of slavery, but what it established in more recent ages) and those radicals will be disappointed if he does to impose their wild, foolish, unconstitutional visions. The accusation is waiting, hovering waiting to drop: ‘Vote Biden; Get Trump’. He must deflect that accusation before it falls; firstly by projecting himself within the halo he currently enjoys, and secondly by resisting radical action because it cannot get through Congress.

The balanced Senate is an ally in particular: as the Senate must confirm many of his important appointments, knowing they will not approve a nutcase (to use the technical term) will allow Mr Biden to appoint moderates.

The Supreme Court is another opportunity disguised as a threat. It is said now to be dominated by conservative justices, and this has infuriate radical Democrats. That is not a logical fury though: while liberal justices have been active in overturning Acts of Congress to impose their personal vision, the ideology of conservative justices is the opposite: the prevailing doctrine is to read the Constitution as it is written and not to make rules up from their own preferences. In that case, when Mr Biden gets his legislation through Congress, he wants conservative justices there who will not interfere with it.

It is the radical Democrats who have more of an interest in trying to appoint a court which overrules the democratically elected Houses of Congress – which sheds a great deal of doubt on their being entitled to be called ‘democrats’ at all.

The tensions then and the blind hatred of the extremes, making a mockery of the pleas for unity, should ensure (if handled wisely) that the moderate path in all endeavours is the surest route to follow. That may be how Joe Biden can defeat both sides and be his own man.

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