A heady blend of musings, ramblings and rants, straight from Madrid to your computer screens. That´s technology for you.
Just to let you know that I have now moved to www.vaughanology.com/matt so if you want to keep checking my various ramblings, rants and assorted witticisms, that is the place to go. I´ve been blogging on Blogger for about a year now and it´s been a crazy rollercoaster ride of emotion, discovery and.....other stuff. Or something like that. Anyway, it´s all over now, and this is the last entry I will make here. Try not to cry.
Oh baby. I´ve been looking forward to this one.
I shall attempt to steer clear of the stereotypical view of Bush (namely, that he is a clueless twit with virtually no knowledge of the English language who would probably have trouble organising a snowball fight in a blizzard, let alone organising the most powerful country in the world) because it is a bit unfair. Very funny, but a bit unfair. Instead I shall attempt to analyse the war in Iraq and his administration´s policy in the Middle East.
Marvin Gaye once sang that "war is not the answer". Well, he´s wrong. A lot of the time war is the only answer; the Nazis, for example, weren´t much into negotiations, and neither was Napoleon. Sometimes war is the only way to ensure peace in the world; that´s one of the many paradoxes (paradoces?) of the world. However, the war in Iraq was not a necessary one. This was true before the war and it is even more clear afterwards. The "intelligence" (surely ironically named) that formed the basis for this jaunt was as flawed as it has been in the past (bombing a paracetamol factory in Sudan was a high point, I think). It is quite clear that there were no weapons, that sanctions were working, and that the main reason for the war was false. Bush is attempting to convince people that there was evidence of intent on Hussein´s part to damage the USA. Well, duh. Furthermore, by attempting to justify the war retrospectively, Bush is guilty of an almost Orwellian level of deception: it reminds me of the bit in 1984 when Big Brother retrospectively changes the targets of the 5 year plans to show that they have been met. But this is really happening in the real world. That scares me.
Bringing democracy to the Middle East and winning the war on terror are worthy goals, but doing it by lobbing large quantities of rather nasty weaponry at countries is emphatically not the way to go. To win the war on terror (if it can be won at all) we need to educate people, to demonstrate that our intentions are honourable, to dispel the myth that America is "The Great Satan", and to bring a workable peace in Israel. None of these are easy, but they are made considerably harder by shooting Arab civilians, torturing them in Cuba and Iraq, and winning hearts and minds by chucking bombs at people. Doing this will only recruit more people to the fundamentalist cause.
In many ways the war in Iraq turned me into a liberal. For the first time that I can remember the extent of human suffering and the reality of modern warfare have been made abundantly clear to me, and my views on the necessity of warfare have been hardened. You can´t turn the Middle East, with its countless centuries of antiquity and ancient civilisations, into a suburb of Nowheresville, USA. There are some places in the world that aren´t suited to the McDonald´s, Starbuck´s and Burger King ethic of "civilisation". Bringing democracy to oppressed people cannot be achieved by blowing them up; I really can´t stress this enough. Bush, with his sabre rattling and his cultural imperialism, is doing more damage to the image of the West (at least as perceived by Arab eyes) than has probably been done for years. That makes me worried: four more years of this gormless pillock. Hmm.
Feel free to accuse me of being old fashioned, but I think that art should either be aesthetically beautiful or should have some kind of subtext, some semi-hidden meaning, that has an important message. Furthermore, I think that art should require at least some basic level of skill on the part of the artist. All of the artists over the centuries have been skilled at either painting, drawing, sculpting, or some other branch of the visual arts. Sadly, skill is no longer an essential part of the process. To be a successful artist these days all you have to do is throw together something suitably puerile and attention-seeking (plastinated human bodies, unmade beds, pickled farm animals, etc etc), appear on TV in a semi-coherent, vodka-induced stupor, and say something suitably "profound" about the emotional reaction you hope to induce in your viewers. Well, pish and tosh to that. My first reaction to Emin, Hirst, Rothko et al is to say that any similarly retarded, skill-less moron could paint a canvas red and black and charge a fiver to view it. I mean, I could do that. Their response is always "Ah, but you didn´t, did you?" with a repulsively supercilious air, as if they were the first person to break new ground with this daring and groundbreaking insight into contemporary culture. Well, you can take that opinion and cram it where the pickled sharks won´t fit. Any muppet could put a bed in a room or write swear words in pink neon and call it art. In fact, a lot of muppets do do that. So how is it art? The only emotional response it gets out of me is a faint feeling of bemusement that people are stupid enough to give it the time of day.
I long for a return to the days when being an artist actually required someone to be able to paint or draw or sculpt well, when art was beautiful or important or had something to say, when paintings and sculptures excited human beings to rise about the humdrum, to excel themselves, to create works of beauty and importance. All this pathetic, childish trash is just embarrassing. So, Messrs Rothko, Warhol, Emin, Hirst, Chapman etc etc, a message (if you´re still alive; I´m sure a couple of them have stiffed it by now): if you have issues, go to a therapist. If you need money that badly, go to an employment agency. If you want to retain some kind of dignity, don´t make any more "art". Stop wasting our time. Thanks.
(Sorry for the delay with this one. I was in Galicia over the weekend and couldn´t find an internet café. The final rant will appear tomorrow (and I´ve been looking forward to it, believe me) after which I will be moving to www.vaughanology.com. Thanks for your time).
Ooh, this is a nasty little rag. The English tabloids are famous the world over for being salacious, voyeuristic, seedy snotrags aimed directly at the working class; promising a diet of monosyllabic words, topless girls from Essex and more pictures than prose, they are the highest selling papers in Britain. The Daily Mail, however, is worse. This is mainly because of its repulsive pretentiousness: it seems convinced that its opinions and prose are of a considerably higher quality than that of its competitors (not true) and that its readers are intelligent commentators on contemporary affairs and culture (ditto). Somehow this disgusting delusion of grandeur makes it repulsive.
The Daily Mail is an unpleasant little bogsheet full of semi-racist articles about how asylum seekers are scrounging off the benefits system and poorly worded opinion articles from their in-house battery of nincompoops trying to convince their readers that Britain is somehow still great, that Britannia somehow still rules the waves, and that the only flies in this nationalist ointment are immigrants, political correctness, and Blair. It is taxi driver politics for the semi-educated: racist, extremist, and infused with some noxious notion of our country´s supposed brilliance. Frankly, it repulses me entirely, and represents one of the reasons why leaving England wasn´t entirely painless. I wouldn´t be surprised if it made bad toilet paper. In fact, that gives me an idea....
There is a clear difference between patriotism and nationalism. Patriots love their country but are willing to admit that it has faults, whereas nationalists adore their country, ignore (or deny the existence of) its faults, and, crucially, assume that it is superior to every other country. The latter is the attitude I want to discuss.
It is scary when people are unwilling to admit that the country they are from has any faults at all. It is also incorrect. This world being what it is, no country is perfect and all have successes and failings which need to be examined with a view to rectifying them. Believing that your country is perfect and that all other ones are inherently flawed by comparison is a dangerous attitude to take, because it can easily lead to racism and imperialism. I am drawn, inevitably, to make two case studies here: firstly, imperial Britain, and secondly, contemporary America. The noxious imperialist attitude that exuded from our green isles at the zenith of the British Empire led to a lot of repulsive actions from soldiers and politicans which we are still feeling the effects of today; go to Delhi and find out about the aftermath of the 1857 mutiny, for example, or the creation of the Israeli state in the British Palestine. People still feel bad about these events today and they were caused by people thinking that as Britain was so eminently superior to all other countries, it followed that we had some kind of divine right to waltz around the world jumping on peoples´ faces. The parallels with contemporary USA are manifold and obvious. Nationalism is a terrifying force which, in the latter case, has led to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, the flouting en masse of basic human rights declarations, and the killing of untold thousands of civilians; as I write there is no evidence that the situation will improve any time soon.
I think it was Louis de Bernieres who said (via one of his characters in the excellent "Captain Corelli´s Mandolin") that as soon as people value intangible ideals above human lives things like Nazism and Fascism arrive and people like Hitler start making speeches. Parallels between the Nazis and George Bush are offensive and inaccurate and I don´t want to make them, but a diluted version of the nationalist ethos is what I think is responsible for much of the world´s problems at the moment, in the Middle East, in Zimbabwe, in Burma, and in more countries than I would care to name. Self-criticism is an essential part of politics and when people are unwilling to admit to their own failings you´re in trouble.
I should make a distinction here between people who think that testing cosmetics on animals is wrong - which I agree with, since cosmetics are essentially an unnecessary part of society - and people who think that testing medicines on animals is also wrong. Medicines that could save a human life sometimes need to be tested on animals to ensure that they work; this is an important part of the process. Yet some people think that this is wrong and that fluffy little bunnies should be allowed to run free in the open air while half of the population dies of preventable diseases. There is simply no way that the value of an animal´s life is even remotely comparable to the value of a human´s. Human beings can think, write, create art and philosophise, whereas animals simply hang around munching grass or other animals and look sweet. If one human life can be saved by killing a hundred bunnies, then they should be killed. Simple.
I´d like to meet some of these hardcore, tree hugging hippies. If one of their parents was dying of an illness that could be prevented by testing a medicine on a cat would they allow it to happen? Or would they allow their mother or father to slip into a painful death, knowing that they could have prevented it all along? And how about testing products on cockroaches? Would they be so opposed to that? Or do they only complain if people test products on animals that are cute and can be kept in a cage and fed carrots for the benefit of their children? Somehow I think the perceived attractiveness of the animal concerned is more of a factor than they would like to admit.
Attempting to prevent people from testing valuable medicinal products on animals is effectively saying that a puppy or a kitten is worth more than a human. Er, wrong. Sorry. And some of the tactics these fundamentalists are using are staggering: digging up the graves of deceased relatives of people who work in guinea pig farms? Issuing death threats? Alleging that their targets are paedophiles in an attempt to turn the local communities against them? Are those tactics justifiable in any way at all? Well, you know what I think....
I´d really love to know why some people think that football is such a big deal. All that rubbish about football being much more important than life and death is just a complete load of tosh. Football consists of twenty two men (unless Robbie Savage or Craig Bellamy are playing, in which case it will soon become twenty one) kicking an inflated synthetic sphere around a field for an hour and a half and attempting to propel it into a net and one end of the pitch. That´s it. Yet some people treat this puerile form of entertainment as if it were more crucial than Third World debt, more important than the Middle East peace process, and more worthy of debate than US foreign policy. I have one word for these people: perspective.
Even worse are the people for whom a specific football team and their retinue of lagered-up fans serves as a substitute family group. People actually fight each other to determine which of their teams is the better, and sometimes people even get killed. The sight of football hooligans (usually, but not exclusively, British) smashing up the historic centre of some foreign town is utterly repulsive. Frankly, such is the damage done by these morons to the good(ish) name of Britain (not to mention the damage done to the faces of the local police force, the poor buggers) that it even tempts me to lobby for the return of capital punishment in specific cases. Supporting a football team to that degree is rather daft but probably understandable, but actually causing someone else physical pain in a pathetic attempt to give your meaningless, humdrum life some sort of shape and meaning is just unforgiveable. And I haven´t even started on the ludicrous salaries of the players yet. Grrr.....
I´m tall, English, and currently lost in Spain. Er, that´s about it.
