TERRORISM ON ALL SIDES: CULTURE'S VENGEANCE? [ONE LAST GIGA-RANT BEFORE AN EXTENDED HIATUS]
Gary Sauer-Thompson has been making some very good yards of late. Running off half-backs like Don Watson and John Ralston-Saul helps, of course, but good on him. His mention of ol' Max Weber's idea of 'the iron cage of bureaucratic rationality' has kick-started some blogorrhoeaic musings about all this dyingthat's been going on.
In the 911 days since 911, my telly gave to me (again and again) - three thousand deaths in Manhattan, - then a couple of hundred in Bali, - a few more thousand in Afghanistan, - a few tens of thousands in Iraq, - a few dozens in places like Morocco, - Saudi Arabia, - Russia, - Turkey, - and now another couple of hundred in Madrid.
That impressive list of human devastation represents by no means the bulk of orchestrated murder perpetrated in that time (Congo and Sudan come to mind, for instance), but I submit it's enough to give a body pause. Something is going on that should not be going on, and we need to find out what it is if we're not to help it along.
Tariq Ali called his book of essays on what ails us The Clash of Fundamentalisms, a title that instantly impressed this bemused unbeliever as he recalled the murderous piety that spewed from the mouths of the chief protagonists after 911. These were experienced propagandists and agitators, their dark talents forged in decades of politics and its 'extension by other means'. If there existed large audiences for their nonsense, I mused, violence might beget itself as never before.
But whence came these audiences? Well, David Malouf's recent essay on 'The Civil Tongue' suggests one possibility.
Americans are, by and large, a godlier people than ever. More so than the British, Spanish and Australians who joined America in its bloody romp through the Middle East. Perhaps that's because our history hangs on harder than we know; that the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Malouf implies as much when he links differences in political discourse between America and Australia with the moment of their initial westernisation.
"The American colonies, founded in the first decade of the previous century, inherited a different English altogether. Passionately evangelical and utopian, deeply imbued with the religious fanaticism and radical violence of the time, this was the language of the Diggers, Levellers, English Separatists and other religious dissenters of the early 17th century who left England to found a new society that would be free, as they saw it, of authoritarian government by church or crown. It was far removed from the cool, dispassionate English in which, 180 years later, in the 1780s, a parliamentary committee argued the pros and cons of a new colony in the Pacific. This was the language of the English and Scottish Enlightenment: sober, unemphatic, good-humoured; a very sociable and moderate language, modern in a way that even we would recognise, and supremely rational and down-to-earth."
There may be something in that, but it's not enough to explain the rest of the world's rush to arms. While the rush to evangelical Christian fundamentalism has been strongest in America, there is no doubt that 'revivalists' are doing good business in Australia, too. And while many have marched to what they fondly take to be the certainties of better days (even if they be the end of days), as many others have marched elsewhere. If Jesus ain't your bag, there's always Queen and Country, a host of separatists, new-ageists, deep ecologists, Lucasian Forceists and a phalanx of others - all promising a world for mere passionate allegianc.
I've some sympathy, mind. Life does grow dull hard and lonely among the glittering detritus of our plentitudinous age. This from Lindsay Tanner's Crowded Lives:
"To buy all these things that save time we have to work more. We've created a vicious circle of time consumption, where the cost is borne by our relationships. We spend less time with our families and friends in order to earn the money which will enable us to buy things like microwave ovens, which will eliminate the need to do certain things together … we have less time available, and less reason to spend that time doing things together."
As John Lennon said, life's what happens to you while you're making other plans.
And if you know something's missing, but you don't know quite what, revel in these prescient words, written by one RP Blackmur in 1956:
"The crisis of our culture rises from the false belief that our society requires only enough mind to create and tend the machines together with enough of the new illiteracy for other machines - those of our mass media - to exploit"
The more our mass media 'develop', the more we may be said to live in a media scape, a second-order universe that offers more in the moment than the primary version, but nothing beyond the moment where spectacle trumps significance. As Christopher Lasch noted in 1979, that a surfeit of spectacles must engender cynicism, awareness of illusion, desensitisation, and an associated diminution of 'reality':
"Overexposure to manufactured illusions soon destroys their representational power. The illusion of reality dissolves, not in a heightened sense of reality as we might expect, but in a remarkable indifference to reality … This indifference betrays the erosion of the capacity to take any interest in anything outside the self."
But such a self does not fill the whole of an essentially social being. It can't. Eventually that being seeks something beyond itself - anything that promises to feel real, to offer meaning, to confirm our self as one recognised as a self by at least some other selves. In short, we're ripe for the plucking - desperate for belonging and purpose; ignorant about the world and its relationship with us. Recruitment ads for the military appeal to this product of our times. So does the embrace of the street gang. And the trouble with identities thus constructed is that they are built with ways in which we are unlike, preferably the very opposite of, others. We are good and they are bad.
This can hurt societies from within, as Edward Luttwak, of the ever-so-sensible Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, argued in 1996. Ed thought the richest economies in the world were bent on more abundance at the price of more fragmentation and instability. He thinks it might be worth swapping a little of the former to keep the latter in check.
But who'd do the swapping, Ed?
You see, Jurgen Habermas reckons capitalist modernity is all about there being no identifiable morally accountable being in charge. It's the system, man. And this system is awfully reminiscent of Weber's iron cage. What's worse is that this disenchanting complex of economic and administrative logic has begun to colonise the realm of 'taken-for-granted' meanings within which we experience the world. Which wouldn't be so bad if it didn't ensure it had an answer for everything by disallowing those questions it couldn't understand.
As far as we westies are concerned, it's been going on for centuries, of course, but to many in today's world, it's all happening at once. And it's an awful lot for one generation to take. So much so that the destruction of the world within, can lead to a very belligerent disposition to the world without. This is how Marx once described the process by which feudal certainties dissolve in the acid bath of capitalist modernity:
"The spoliation of the church's property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made the soil part and parcel of capital and created for the town industries the necessary supply of a 'free' and outlawed proletariat."
I mean, just as the inhabitants of these cultures are freeing themselves from the unfreedoms of traditional worldviews, along comes a technocratic and universalising logic whose imperatives rob them of the capacity to negotiate the replacement of lost values and meanings. Where lay the possibility of steering social actions by communicative interaction, now exist 'the anonymous demands of an autonomous system'.
For Habermas, this process has produced a resistence within modernity. He explains as follows:
"Today economic and administrative imperatives are encroaching upon territory that the lifeworld can no longer relinquish … This went well as long as it only touched on functions of material reproduction that need not necessarily be organised communicatively … however, it seems that system imperatives are encroaching on areas which are demonstrably unable to perform their tasks if they are removed from communicatively structured domains of action. This is true of tasks such as cultural reproduction, social integration and socialisation."
In other words, that which we must negotiate and determine as necessarily-social-beings-necessarily-sharing-a-world (oh, and as citizens, if you're one who thinks s/he lives in a democracy) is on the verge of being taken out of the public sphere and into the autonomous and unaccountable dynamics of market forces.
In short, 'the economic has taken on a generalised function of regulating the totality of human existence'.
Fellow Frankfurter Herbert Marcuse and currently cool social commentator Cornelius Castoriadis theorise that, once you live in a system-dominated lifeworld, you've already lost the vocabulary and communicative habits to explore or critique your plight. You merely try to fill the emptiness with more, shinier, quicker acquisitions and the very idea that 'the good life' might be a matter for social deliberation is anathema. This spectre of unwitting unmeaning loneliness is precisely what drove Lasch to write his Culture of Narcissism, of course.
But those blokes are gloomier than Habermas, who sees resistance as a definitive aspect of modernity-gone-wild. For him, our new social movements are the inevitable face of resistance to the system's colonisation of the lifeworld. Our 'fragmented consciousness' is not able to construct satisfying rational narratives of social meaning, and we're not having it.
Processes of global integration inevitably and definitively bring with them also processes of disintegration (International Communications theorist Tom McPhail has modestly dubbed this 'the McPhail Paradox').
This disintegration of the world one knew, indeed of the self one thought one knew, brings to mind Schumpeter's fabled phrase, 'gales of creative destruction'. On the criterion of culture, not all that is destroyed is replaced, and beware the masses looking to fill the gaps. Beware, too, the demagogue bearing identities and the scapegoats that go with 'em. Before you know it, you could have Osama appealing to the suddenly worldless of the east and George to the spiritually gutted ennuiacs of the west. Allies in their self-identifying, meaning-reclaiming, purpose-inventing psychopathic enmity, they fill the system-gouged holes with life-affirming corpses, that we may be made whole again.
Which brings to mind John Maynard Keynes's own fabled phrase - the one about us all being dead in the long run. It's no good assuming the suddenly worldless or gradually gutted will behave sensibly while the system tears them apart on the off-chance of putting them back together later. They'll find alternatives that offer material and spiritual sustenance in the now. And all the saviours, tendentiously warped histories, blood-soaked affirmations, marginalised scapegoats and cathartic vengeance that they so often entail.
The problem is in the now and the solution must be in the now.
Part of that solution is defining 'globalisation' as something more than an economic trajectory (Keynes either thought too much of economics or too much of the discipline's practitioners), polities as more than markets, citizens as more than consumers, our time as more than commodity, audiences as more than commodities or consumers, culture as more than programming, and society as more than an aggregate of individuals. If 'the system' can't relent, culture will avenge itself, and if its life-affirming aspects aren't given sway, its death-dealing side will prevail.
Is prevailing.
To perceive a spiral of evisceration, pulverisation, incineration, disintegration, maiming, famine, desiccation and bereavement is one thing. To realise our fear of empty anchorlessness has led us to subscribe to logics and adhere to institutions part and parcel to this grand obscenity - that the system that destroyed our inner world and foreclosed our capacity to negotiate a new one is now deploying our ensuing angst to make us complicit in the destruction of everything else - well, at least it'd mean we're not as hopelessly committed to our own doom as messrs Marcuse and Lasch thought we were.
It'd prove Habermas had a point.
That we still want to be free.
And that we'll take the responsibility that comes with freedom.
Apparently because he couldn't flee the guns of the US marines sent to take him, his democratic legitimacy, his distrust of US plans for the region, and his insistence on a minimum wage for Haitian workers out of the picture.
And much blaryngitis still to come, I fear. All manner of ugly imposts mock me from my immediate future and they must be confronted now, lest they promote themselves to regrets, which mock forever.
Ere scrofulous blogorrhoea lapses grudgingly into fitful hiatus, I should take this opportunity to:
- suggest to those of you who dress to the left that a visit to DailyNewsOnline might make for excellent foreplay to an evening's torrid bloggery;
- publicly resolve to blog as redoubtably, regularly, readably and relevantly (I can already do ruefully) as my hero when I grow up. Nulla dies sine linea.
Our thought for today comes to us from Arnold Bennett: "Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism."
Half of Ozplogistan is chattering about the 'Free' 'Trade' 'Agreement', so I guess I should, too. It won't take me long because we don't know what the real document's 500 pages actually hold, and to speak in detail of a deal whose details are denied us would be silly.
So please allow me to shed some general darkness on proceedings. This I will do by way of itemising the sort of suspicions that assail the blogorrhoeaic mind:
a) I believe this is what Australia's complicity in the invasion of Iraq was actually all about. That's what I take Howard to be saying when he calls this deal a once-in-a-generation opportunity (for only once per generation have we had the chance dutifully to join Uncle Sam in one of His excellent adventures). As with any person who gives himself so completely to the pursuit of power as actually to attain it, Howard has always been muchly concerned with his place in history, and he has always left pride of place in the trophy room for a trade deal with the world's biggest economy. This Washington knew in 2001, hasn't forgotten, and continues to exploit.
b) An accomplished student of power like Howard must always have known what could and couldn't be done. He is as aware as Shrubya himself as to what the administration owes to whom, especially in an election year. He is also aware, as Washington is, that the agreement can only be promulgated after the Queensland election, that he desperately needs to wrest the front pages off Latham as parliament reconvenes, that the agreement should be promulgated as long before the cockies go the federal polls as possible, and in plenty of time to get the thing ratified before any possible change of government. Yesterday, in other words. Whatever were the terms of the agreement as at the weekend, those would be the ones Howard would accept if he was to have his place in history.
c) If I know anything about the role of small print in the wielding of big power, the pharmaceutical benefits scheme has been mortally wounded with malice aforethought. To kill it quickly would have spelled electoral suicide for Howard, to leave it be would have contradicted all the corporate constituency of the US Trade Representative is about. So that constituency (the US IP sector in general and Big Pharmaceuticals in particular) has arrogated unto itself direct input into what does and does not get listed for public support. The PBS's bottom line can not survive these 'improvements', as the ultimate interest of Big Pharmaceuticals is to sell as much and as many of its lines as possible, at patients' private cost if necessary, but at Australians' public cost if possible
d) An independent PBS may look like a price-distorting body, but its capture or extermination will prove to be even more 'price distorting'. This is because the role of the 'hidden hand' as ultimate arbiter of price and allocation makes absolutely no sense in the realm of information in general and IP in particular. IP regimes are not a function of markets, they are a function of politics, and politics is the polite word we use for the play of power and interests. A patent confers and sustains a monopoly, pure and simple. The longer a corporate entity (upon which the law confers the ridiculous status of natural individual) manages to keep its monopoly, the more powerful it demonstrably is, and the less does 'the market' have anything to do with 'competition', approximating theoretically optimal price levels or achieving optimal allocation.
e) As Australia is about to adopt directly the US IP regime, it gives up all rights to control the duration of patents and copyright. So it gives up the last vestige of democratic control over the distribution of information in general and the price of medicines in particular.
f) Australia has also given up any chance it had of treating each new communications technology in the moment and according to its particular and unfolding merits. This doesn't matter if you're an economist, but it does matter if you live in a world where not all ends are capable of economic expression or calculation. If 'culture' means anything, it means the way particular people in particular places with particular histories produce meanings, practices and artefacts in responding to the questions put to them by their particular material and symbolic conditions. If it means anything like that, every particular people needs the room and the channels through which to express, reproduce and transform its culture according to local conditions. Reasoning of this sort has culminated in phenomena like public service broadcasting (the ABC and the SBS), publicly controlled telecommunications monopoly (the old Telecom), local content provisions and subsidised film and broadcasting schools. The Office of the US Trade Representative tells its constituency that Howard's Legacy affords them 'important and unprecedented market access for US film and television'. This it does because Australia has given up the right to regulate all communications technologies beyond traditional free-to-air broadcasting on criteria of cultural concern. Which is fine if you believe we need more US content here, or if you believe Australians prefer US programming. Australians don't prefer US programming at all. It simply costs the Australian economy several times as much to produce programming as to import it from the US, where said programming has already paid for itself in that giant market and may now be 'dumped' overseas at will and for what the market will pay, we get more US programming. 'Dumping' used to be a Bad Thing. And it won't mean we prefer US programming, either. In the spendthrift mini-series-mad eighties, all the Australian productions (eg 'Bangkok Hilton') outrated all the lush US productions of the time (eg 'Roots', 'North and South' etc). The new regime may not destroy Australian production, but it will compromise its cultural value, as the local market can't justify product of only local value, and only scripts and casts shorn of local significance need apply. The more significant new media become, the less mass media (eg subscription broadcasting and AV streaming) will fulfill the cultural role we used to think so important.
g) Where no formal mechanism for protection exists, the non-tariff barrier inevitably becomes the new battle-ground. The US TR document says Australia has committed itself to 'resolve sanitary and phylosanitary barriers to agricultural trade'. What does that mean? Who gets to decide whether we're genuinely protecting our apples from the diseases that infest US apples (and, let's not forget, cattle) and our salmon from the toxins that reside in US salmon or whether we're engaging in disguised protectionism? Clearly, it won't be a third party (eg the formally independent WTO). Nope, it'll be an issue we have to 'resolve' toe-to-toe with US interests. The small print is really going to matter on this one. If it's not VERY specific and unambiguous, we risk giving up much of what makes our foodstuffs marketable overseas.
h) To what degree do our agriculturalists face unfair competition under this arrangement? We already know we got nowhere on sugar (or beef ... eighteen years! Sheesh.) And we already know US agriculturalists get 100-per-cent access to our markets in return for giving Australians access to 66 per cent of their (admittedly much larger) market. What doesn't rate a mention is the significant advantage much of the US sector derives from the particularly exploitative wages and conditions that pertain where the labour is 'foreign'. Shrubya is set to legitimate this almost feudal relationship (under the guise of doing the right thing by economic refugees, natch) and there's not a word on how Australian farm workers might avoid a race to the bottom in this respect. The US is committed to 'further cooperation on labor matters ... to advance common objectives', but that means nothing where the problem is not explicitly itemised in the agreement, for mine.
i) The Australian government promises US corporations access to all government procurement. It will 'eliminate local content and manufacturing as a condition of contracts'. Which effectively means we will 'outsource' much political, administrative, strategic, financial and private information about ourselves, our businesses and our institutions to foreign concerns, whose own links with their government and other entities will be unknown to us. Conceivably, they will know more about ourselves than we do, and know it earlier, when it matters most. Potentially enormous economic and political sovereignty is consequently given up.
Erstwhile head of the nuclear, chemical and biological branch of the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), Brian Jones has looked into the future and seen a big pile of poo coming at him.
He knows that when the going gets tough, power has a brutal way of distancing itself from responsibility.
And if the 'wmd' schemozzle isn't going to be the fault of messrs Blair, Campbell, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, well, it'll have to be sheeted home to 'the intelligence community'.
And if it's going to be the fault of that noble few, Jones is determined it won't be that of the DIS.
So look out, MIs 5 and 6. And look out, John Scarlett.
As Blogorrhoea's last post shoes, Jones was a pretty forthright witness before the Hutton Inquiry. Like eleventeen million others, he's not altogether convinced Hutton quite grasped the import of that evidence. So he's unloaded all over the front page of The Independent.: "In my view, the expert intelligence analysts of the DIS were overruled in the preparation of the dossier in September 2002, resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities."
This just in from Jim Lobe of the Asia Times (February 4 2004)
"Did the intelligence shape policy, or did the policy shape intelligence?" asked Melvin Goodman, a top Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Soviet expert during the Cold War who currently teaches at the National War College ... Goodman says that Kay's assertions that the administration did not pressure analysts are simply "wrong". "I've talked with analysts at CIA and DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], and they all claim there was tremendous pressure put on them." Goodman said ... The fact, according to Goodman, that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld created an Office of Special Plans (OSP) outside the formal intelligence channels with the specific mandate to reassess raw intelligence in order to find alleged links between Saddam and al-Qaeda suggests that the administration was applying that pressure in unconventional ways. "When Rumsfeld couldn't get what he wanted, he created his OSP," Goodman said. "That really gives away the whole game right there."
" ... barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks ... With the intelligence all pointing toward bin Laden, Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on strike plans. And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H." – meaning Saddam Hussein – "at same time. Not only UBL" – the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden ... Now, nearly one year later, there is still very little evidence Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. But if these notes are accurate, that didn't matter to Rumsfeld. "Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
Thus did Tony Blair (try to) sell the war to the House of Commons on 24 September 2002.
Following the publication of the Hutton Report, BBC Chairman Gavyn Davies has resigned on the following grounds:
" ... whatever the outcome, I have been brought up to believe that you cannot choose your own referee, and that the referee's decision is final. There is an honourable tradition in British public life that those charged with authority at the top of an organisation should accept responsibility for what happens in that organisation. I am therefore writing to the Prime Minister today to tender my resignation as Chairman of the BBC, with immediate effect."
So here the boss is taking the responsibility not only for the essence of every one of the Beeb's Andrew Gilligan's 19 reports on the WoMD issue, but for every single sentence, for only in one unscripted sentence did Gilligan suggest Number Ten might have known the notorious 45-minute claim was unsubstantiated and doubtful (which is not to say Number Ten did not know, just that Gilligan hasn't been able to prove it). In short, the governors did not cross-check every unscripted sentence uttered by their staff, and the executive has consequently had to assume full responsibility.
So the Prime Minister did not ask for everything in the JIC Report to be substantiated or cross-checked, and, on the most generous reading possible, publicly made a claim that turned out to be incorrect. On the strength of this and other incorrect claims, he took Britain into an illegal and bloody invasion which killed (what I infer to be) tens of thousands of Iraqis and not a few Brits. But not for him "the honourable tradition ... that those charged with authority at the top of an organisation should accept responsibility for what happens in that organisation." On the best possible inference, Blair's own organisation got their facts horribly wrong. But honourable traditions are for lesser beings (we'll find out soon if Joint Intelligence Chiefs are sufficiently lesser). Instead Blair claims vindication and demands an apology.
"Mr Alastair Campbell made it clear to Mr Scarlett on behalf of the Prime Minister that 10 Downing Street wanted the dossier to be worded to make as strong a case as possible in relation to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's WMD, and 10 Downing Street made written suggestions to Mr Scarlett as to changes in the wording of the draft dossier which would strengthen it ...
... I consider that the possibility cannot be completely ruled out that the desire of the Prime Minister to have a dossier which, whilst consistent with the available intelligence, was as strong as possible in relation to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's WMD, may have subconsciously influenced Mr Scarlett and the other members of the JIC to make the wording of the dossier somewhat stronger than it would have been if it had been contained in a normal JIC assessment ...
... it could be said that the Government "sexed-up" the dossier."
Okay, so nothing in the dossier was known to be untrue. But it had been changed, by Scarlett, at the behest of Alistair Campbell, on behalf of the Prime Minister (Hutton's own words), to suggest a stronger case than the intelligence community thought was tenable. When Hutton argues none of the changes to the document were meant to mislead - merely to strengthen - he is drawing lines so fine as to be invisible. Not to know something is wrong is not in itself to judge it to be right. Might the reasonable citizen not infer from Hutton's own words, that what was merely not known to be wrong was indeed deliberately presented as expertly judged to be right? They bloody well might were they to read those words:
By the way, what I haven't found in Hutton's findings, but have found in the records of the Inquiry, is direct reference to the evidence presented to him by the Beeb's Susan Watts, who actually had the ill-fated Dr Kelly's voice on tape. And on that tape he admits many in the intelligence community were openly voicing their reservations concerning the 45-minute claim throughout the week leading up to the PM's use of said claim to justify the war he was about to add to Britain's CV.
Oh, and why would Number Ten be so intent on sexing up the JIC Report in the first place? May the reasonable citizen not infer that the maligned Gilligan's fateful throwaway line constituted a rather more tenable inference than those festooning the final draft of the JIC Report? May the reasonable citizen not also infer the Prime Minister was committed to the war before the JIC dossier ever got to that final form?
In short, I'm with National Union of Journalists president Jeremy Dear, who sez it all:
Gilligan was substantially right, and to the degree he was wrong, if wrong he was (and we still do not know that he was wrong), this may have contributed to a tragic but unforeseeable death.
Blair was substantially wrong, and this drew Britain into contributing to a number of tragic and wholly foreseeable deaths the obscene magnitude of which is (a) being officially and studiously ignored and (b) still mounting.
The Mac is sick and the blogger is busy. The prospect of a shiny new Mac and a blogger with the time to blog on it doth nick the horizon, but horizons are far in this wide brown land. Until then, I'll just have to phone 'em in as opportunity and technology allow. Here's what I've been reading of late. All well written, all in stark contradiction to what we're invited to think, and all thoroughly productive of dismarrhoea both acute and chronic. Trific.
Conspiracies do happen - enormous and expensive institutions exist primarily to conspire, and history is full of exposed conspiracies - so one is not necessarily bonkers to suspect conspiracies are afoot. Nevertheless, you'd have to be wall-biting mad to believe the conspiracy theory underpinning our everyday mainstream news.
As petrol prices rise, those economists who feel human behaviour and concerns are actually relevant to their discipline - both of 'em - will again find that either they're not really economists or that homo sapien and homo economicus go together like truth and state-of-the-union speeches.
All those stuffed suits who tell you you gotta be in the stock market to guarantee a worry-free retirement of ease and luxury because, in the long term, stock appreciation will make you rich, are wrong.
29 February 1667: Up betimes, and to the exchange, there to take a pot beyond thirst with those most happily circumstanced by the victory. Great store these worthy gentlemen set by burnt Dutch ships, and great indeed was their mirth. To luncheon, and after luncheon many cups more, to a worth of twelve and twenty shillings. Happy to be held in such high esteem by fellows of interest, and warmed to the loins by grape and hop, I took but an hour's leave to march upon the Bagwell house there to be alone avec elle je tentoy a faire ce que je voudrais, et contre sa force je le faisoy, bien que pas a mon contentment. Hardly was I returned among my jovial hosts ere came the accounts, whereupon reckoned Mr Ponsonby, able at his sums if no more to walk, my portion to be four shillings and six pence. Caught much surprised, I gave vexed answer that my purse matched not my appetites and voiced hope my credit might exceed both, whereupon a loan was fixed atop some small interest and all stumbled mightily satisfied to their homes, and me through Moorefields, mindful of my smell no more than a six shilling debt to gamballing pissbladders hundreds of guineas to the good that very day, ere even the last office be done by those fallen to secure them their profit. The collique had me ere I made my bed, where did I wonder at what joy doth lie in a banker's preferment.
Smoking is the only addiction for which my ridiculous lifestyle (ie that of an Australian middle class employed parent circa 2004) affords the time (yes, I know it squares the ledger eventually, but you know what I mean). I know I'd excel at a host of others and, in the unlikely event I outlive the economic need to deny myself, the list of things in which I'd repetitively and excessively indulge would be, well, unsurprising.
One of the things I've marked down for my stay at the Betty Ford Clinic is working my way through this modest collection. I love historical fiction. As with pizzas, old Dr Who episodes, cigarettes, sex and coffee I am perfectly content when what's on offer is bad and wordlessly, gratefully ecstatic when it is good. If memory serves, I may already have mentioned The Aubreiad in passing (in which wondrous sweep the ancien regime and nascent modernity ride the waves of The Age Of Reason and its offshoot, The Age Of Revolution, together with edifying congeniality). I might also make mention of Harry Flashman, who takes us under his manly arm to share with us a career as brilliant and honourable as that of the empire for which he nearly fought on occasion. Who meticulously fills in for us that troublesome gap between Tom Brown's Schooldays and Sherlock Holmes. And who takes the trouble to describe with an artist's eye the opulent bed-chambers of the many important ladies in whose wanton persons circumstance so often obliged him to instal himself.
I am just this minute returned from a campaign that has taken me from Northern Greece to Egypt, and thence to India and back as far as Babylon. I did not apprehend my ever-changing-though-ever-less-strange surroundings and acquaintances as might an historian, a politico or a gossip (though I love 'em all), but as heroic visionary, loving eunuch and, come the inevitable, dispassionate chronicler of decay and disintegration. I've just finished reading Mary Renault's *Alexander Trilogy* (*Fire From Heaven*, *The Persian Boy* and *Funeral Games*) and must confess to having been wordlessly, gratefully ecstatic throughout. Aye, and gratefully ecstatic still.
That'll be my last book reviewlette until next summer - for obvious and poignant reasons - so it's a good thing Danny Yee is about.
