Culture
Who is Blessing-Miles Tendi? He’s a DPhil student at Oxford and he writes for various publications, including the Guardian. He reviewed the film Mugabe and the White African for the Guardian and I commented on my blog upon his review. Apparently, I “wholly misunderstood” this review, according to a response to my blog made by Blessing-Miles. This sparked a debate between us, which you can read below my original blog. I’m not sure I have ever been so publicly and strongly put down by a budding public intellectual. But, then again, I’m not sure I’ve ever come across a public intellectual with whom I disagree as much as Blessing-Miles. While I feel I have contributed as much to our debate as I feel inclined to, it has been quite an experience to lock horns with him.
Given how self-absorbed Americans are supposed to be as people and a country, it may surprise that I have heard quite a few Americans berate their fellow citizens and country. I asked the latest one what annoys him most about their country. “Bumper stickers.” I expected some kind of reflection on the American character, zeitgeist or, at least, Fox News and Republicans. Bumper stickers seem too trivial a concern to damn a whole people by. But, apparently, they “are really annoying when you are stuck in traffic”.
This intrigued me sufficiently that when I next found myself in an American car park, which was later the same day in Rehoboth, Delaware, I took the pictures below of what bumper stickers confronted me. What conclusions can be drawn? The owners of these cars have strong views on their pets, politics and country. Anything else?
Jack Bowen might think so. He’s written a book called The Philosophy of Bumper Stickers. It was recently put to him that the Peanuts creator, cartoonist Charles Schultz, once said there’s a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker, but his book seems to deny this. Why?
“I, in my mind, I sort of take that quote you just gave by our Peanuts creator and combine it with a quote that I like from Rick Shenkman, who’s a social commentarian who writes that if your thoughts can’t be portrayed on a bumper sticker, there’s very little chance they’ll ever be accepted. So I think there’s a really nice middle ground there where, clearly, if we take the – you know, the average bumper sticker being 8.1 words, which I took the time to average one afternoon, and we take these 8.1 words and combine it with this idea that you just gave from Charles Schultz that an entire philosophy cannot be contained in 8 to 10 words, we have a nice middle ground where the bumper sticker grabs our attention typically with some sort of nice rhetoric or sarcasm and then allows us to delve deeper into it.”
So, the bumper sticker is more “workers of the world, unite!” than Das Kapital. Similarly, Gideon Rachman was once advised of a book that he was planning, ”it won’t work unless you can summarise the argument in a single sentence that can fit on Twitter.” Rachman reflected upon this and concluded:
“The Communist Manifesto is often summarised by the very twitterable: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.” (Marx’s original version was less succinct.) Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would also have been a natural on Twitter. “The greatest happiness of the greatest number” is fewer than 50 characters. Kant is a bit more long-winded. But even the categorical imperative makes it under Twitter’s limbo bar: ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’, is fewer than 140 characters.”
Simplicity is not only the stuff of footballing genius, as Ron Greenwood implored his players, but the stuff of powerful ideas. And the power of ideas is often underestimated. “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air”, Lord Keynes famously told us, ”are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” Well, it seems, they are so long as the academic scribbler scribbled an idea that can be distilled to fewer than 140 characters.
Bumper stickers, like twitter, are also able to transmit the essence of complex ideas. But, as the examples below attest, a complex idea doesn’t lie behind every bumper sticker. Usually, however, some assertion of identity is to be found. And, perhaps, this does tell us something about the American character, after all.
“Theirs is to win if it kills them, but they’re just human with wives and children.”
Oddly enough, these lyrics from Race for the Prize, a brilliant song by the Flaming Lips, quite often occur to me when thinking of politicians. For example, when Andy Burnham recently described his selection as the Labour candidate in Leigh to Labour Uncut:
“I represent my home seat of Leigh. That often isn’t what people associate with a career politician. I went to Leigh when Laurence Cunliffe resigned. I lived back at home with my mum and dad, and basically worked on it for a year. It was pretty much a year where I campaigned solidly every weekend to win the nomination for Leigh.
“So nobody parachuted me in. Nobody gave me a ‘oh well, I’ll speak to this person, speak to that, all these doors will open’; none of that happened. I went up there, based myself there, knocked on every door of every member and won the Leigh nomination through grassroots campaigning. In many ways as a parallel to what I’m doing now in this leadership election. The establishment isn’t necessarily helping me; the media establishment, the union establishment. Even the Labour establishment. My connection is with the grassroots, ordinary members.”
Ok, Labour Uncut later filled in some details about his selection, as well as those of other Labour leadership contenders. But the sense of a quite lonely race for the prize for himself and for his community, from windy doorstep to windy doorstep, is evident in Burnham’s words; a sense that invariably seems absent from how politician’s are usually thought of. While this sense reflects the reality of many of the experiences of politicians, it is lost in the public perception amidst the dodgy expense claims, broken promises and general disillusionment with politicians and politics.
Hopefully, Labour’s next leader can address this disillusionment. Someone who certainly has is Ed Rendell. ”The most stunning turnaround in recent urban history” was how The New York Times characterised Rendell’s achievements as Mayor of Philadelphia. Yet, it wasn’t always like this for Rendell.
Buzz Bissinger’s A Prayer for the City, an insider account of Rendell’s first term as Mayor, discusses the position in which Rendell found himself after the disastrous failure of his first attempt to become Mayor in 1987, which had followed a 7 year spell as District Attorney of Philadelphia.
“Those who knew him and saw the law firm that he worked at, Mesirov Gelman Jaffe Cramer and Jamieson, or saw him socially after work, could feel the anxiousness that still welled inside him, the bolts of energy still running through him, but with no place to go. He held court. He gave opinions, but fewer and fewer people were inclined to listen. It was hard not to feel sorry for him, hard not to think of him as one of those baseball players who after that great rookie season just fade away because the timing of the swing has gone sour.”
This baseball parallel brings to mind – in my mind, at least - Morrissey’s Little Man, What Now? ”A star at eighteen and then – suddenly gone.” While Rendell may not be physically small, he must have felt small after his 1987 failure. It required great reserves of courage and single-mindedness – more important preconditions for his success, it would seem to me, than any talents - to raise himself from the rock bottom he was in to achieve what he eventually achieved for Philadelphia.
The race for the prize is tough, but Rendell is just human and he has a wife and child.
Michael Foot’s death is an immense loss. His principled manner and passionate oratory characterise a kind of politics that many would like to see more of today. He was defiantly un-spun, unknown to the airbrush and never minced his words, unlike so many politicians of today. He often had a tough time from the media, which younger politicians may have reflected upon and turned, as a result, to the kind of modern political tactics that were so alien to Foot. Yet these tactics can choke off the things that made Foot so endearing: a preference for reasoned argument, rather than pithy sound-bite; a strong fidelity to his beliefs, not endless hedging of them; a great optimism about the capacities of the better angels our nature, not a capitulation to the lowest common denominator. We politicians are held in low regard today. If we wish to recover our standing, we could do far worse than to take some lessons from Michael Foot.
His political legacy is vast, as is his contribution to Westmorland and Lonsdale. He was a great supporter of the Wordsworth Trust, serving as a Trustee for fifteen years, and lecturing regularly at the Wordsworth Summer Conference in Grasmere. He also donated important manuscripts and books to the Trust. He will be greatly missed.
Ok, I’ve been to dinner parties. But not in Islington. Though, I probably am in the “chattering classes”. Still, I’ve never been at dinner parties where “innate and uninformed” prejudices against London comprehensives have been expressed, the superior virtues of Harriet Harman to Peter Mandelson have been extolled or Polly Toynbee, Greg Pope, Barry Sheerman and Charles Clarke – aka Mistletoe & Whiner according to John Prescott - have been lavishly praised. In the past day or so, I’ve noticed, without trying, that all of these things have been said to occur at the dinner parties of the chattering classes.
I can only wonder at what horrors would be alleged to occur at these parties – if that is the right word – if I made my observations more dedicated and maintained them for a longer stretch. Thankfully I have better things to do.
Nonetheless, I have to ask: What is going on? Can the honour of non-chattering class status be bestowed on me? I do hope so. Or, alternatively, is all of this chattering classes stuff just a term of lazy journalism and thinking?
If the clattering classes do exist, perhaps, we’d all be better off if they could take out their frustrations at “murder cafes”, rather than having their frenzied wrongs spill out at their so-called ”dinner parties” (Is food even served? Aren’t parties meant to be fun?) The “murder cafes” concept is explained 5 minutes 20 seconds into the video below, which also contains many ideas that David Cameron might want to take up as he takes forward the promised beefing up of his policy platform in the new year.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE5sxADDhew]
